Little Shop of Knowledge

The I of the Vortex -

Phi - A Voyage from the Brain to the Soul –

 

The mind is a self-organizing republic of scenarios that individually germinate, grow, evolve, disappear, and oc- casionally linger to spawn additional thought and physical activity.

 

Why are we conscious and what maintains it?

“We didn’t decide to become conscious”

“Individual purposes drive an economy, but what’s the intentions of everyone?”

Everything’s chemical?

-What about freedom and free will?

-“How can you have criteria to decide between one brian state and another?”

 

 

Mabe:   Bottom of page 129   “AN OLD IMPASSE nonetheless remains: Ifthe mind is bound by the laws of physics, and if it can conceivably be read like calligraphy, how can there be free will? I do not mean free will in the trivial sense, the ability to choose one's thoughts and behavior free of the will of others and the rest of the world all around. I mean, instead, freedom from the constraints imposed by the physiochemical states of one's own body and mind. In the naturalistic view, free will in this deeper sense is the outcome of competition among the scenarios that compose the con- scious mind. The dominant scenarios are those that rouse the emotion circuits and engage them to greatest effect during reverie. They ener- gize and focus the mind as a whole and direct the body in particular courses of action. The self is the entity that seems to make such choices. But what is the self?

The self is not an ineffable being living apart within the brain. Rather, it is the key dramatic character of the scenarios.”

Alejo: Page 131 “So there can be no simple determinism of human thought, at least not in obedience to causation in the way physical laws describe the motion of bodies and the atomic assembly of molecules. Because the individual mind cannot be fully known and predicted, the self can go on passionately believing in its own free will. And that is a fortunate circumstance. Confidence in free will is biologically adaptive. With- out it the mind, imprisoned by fatalism, would slow and deteriorate.

Thus in organismic time and space, in every operational sense that ap-

plies to the knowable self, the mind does have free will.”

Bert: Page 130  “The hidden preparation of mental activity gives the illusion of free will. We make decisions for reasons we often sense only vaguely, and

seldom if ever understand fully. Ignorance of this kind is conceived by the conscious mind as uncertainty to be resolved; hence freedom of choice is ensured.”

The human being will never understand itself. “Only “superior” beings can understand inferior ones.” Up to the point where a being cannot understand what it is.

Pg. 132  “Mortimer Adler, the American philosopher and educa- tor, proposed essentially the same criterion in order to challenge not just the feasibility of humanoids but also the entire philosophy of ma- terialism. We cannot accept a thoroughly material basis for human ex- istence, he said, until such an artificial being is created. Turing thought the humanoid could be built within a few years. Adler, a de- vout Christian, arrived at the same conclusion as Descartes: No such machine will ever be possible.”

The functional obstacle is the overwhelming complexity of inputs of information to and through the human mind. Rational thought emerges from continuous exchanges between body and brain through nerve discharges and blood-borne flow of hormones, influenced in turn by emotional controls that regulate mental set, attention, and the selection of goals. In order to duplicate the mind in a machine, it will not be nearly enough to perfect the brain sciences and AI technology, because the simulation pioneers must also invent and install an en- tirely new form of computation—artificial emotion, or AE.

The second, or evolutionary, obstacle to the creation of a hu- manoid mind is the unique genetic history of the human species. Generic human nature—the psychic unity of mankind—is the prod- uct of millions of years of evolution in environments now mostly for- gotten. Without detailed attention to the hereditary blueprint of human nature, the simulated mind might be awesome in power, but it would be more nearly that of some alien visitor, not of a human.

To be human, the artificial mind must imitate that of an individual person, with its memory banks filled by a lifetime's experience—visual, auditory, chemoreceptive, tactile, and kinesthetic, all freighted with nuances of emotion.

“Matter has self organized to create beings that are afraid to realize that they’re only material”.

 

Memory –

 Life Without memory

What are the limits to human action without memory?

Memory gives us a sense of reality.

Art is the means by which people of similar cognition reach out to others in order to transmit feeling.

But how can we know for sure that art communicates this way with accuracy, that people really, truly feel the same in the presence of art? We know it intuitively by the sheer weight of our cumulative responses through the many media of art. We know it by detailed verbal descriptions of emotion, by critical analyses, and in fact through data from all the vast, nuanced, and interlocking armamentaria of the humanities. That vital role in the sharing of culture is what the humanities are all about. Nevertheless, fundamental new information will come from science by studying the dynamic patterns of the sensory and brain systems during epi- sodes when commonly shared feelings are evoked and experienced through art.

But incapacity is not the point. The distinction that illuminates subjective experience lies elsewhere, in the respective roles of science and art. Science perceives who can feel blue and other sensations and who cannot feel them, and explains why that difference exists. Art in contrast transmits feelings among persons of the same capacity. In other words, science explains feeling, while art transmits it.

Complexity is what interests scientists in the end, not simplicity. Reductionism is the way to understand it. The love of complexity without reductionism makes art; the love of complexity with reductionism makes science.