How could your experience help you in a situation when the outcomes of options are not clear? — MoK

Because we're evolved beings and the evolution of our consciousness requires a logical reason for why it is as it is. That logic is not coming from nature just flipping a switch that let's it think about itself. It evolved an evolutionary trait; the ability to adapt to changing circumstances. The entire process we experience is setting us up with better and better capability to handle unknown situations. The more experience the better we survive. The more situations, the better we adapt. A totally unknown or uncalculated situation creates a fear; the fear of the unknown, which is probably the deepest emotional response we have outside sexuality. Why? Because it's our prediction not being able to handle a situation it has no clear generated model scenario for.

But even beyond that explanation, you don't even have to go into those details about our biology to find the simple psychological logic that it doesn't help us. Have you not seen enough examples in the real world of people who make extremely stupid decisions in face of an unknown situation? Our experiences are ALWAYS trying to navigate us through "a maze", it's how our consciousness works. Our decisions doesn't just stop being influenced by our past experiences because the choice is unknown. In the best case it's so unknown that our inadequate ability to decide in such situations makes us choose the correct path out of pure luck.

But let's say there's three such path choices and at the third choice there's a trap under the left path. If the person have no information prior to this and chooses left the first time. His brain will start to form all kinds of biases with that choice. So when he comes to the second choice he might choose left "because it seems that left is the safe choice" or choose right "because it can't be left over and over, it could switch between them" only to end up choosing left at the third choice going into the trap. We see this behavior in "game theory" all the time.

And that leads to a simple question: if the other two choices are influenced by that first choice, by the biases it creates in our decision making, then why would the first choice not be influenced by other biases prior to that point? It is illogical to view that choice as existing in a vacuum.

The problem is that your argument attribute a cognitive ability to process the world around you to something that doesn't have support in psychology or neurology. You need to ask yourself, where do choices come from? How do we, humans, make choices? If you can't incorporate all the science that's been done so far on the human brain and consciousness when trying to answer that question, you're creating a large gap in your argument that relies on a bad or incomplete interpretation of how we humans function.

Our choices do not appear out of nowhere. If so, how do you scientifically or logically explain that? As well as hold that idea up to all the scientific research so far?

I agree, I don't understand how so many people are calling Harris a winner at this stage. There's nothing that really points towards it. Remember that there's a lot of Trump voters who don't want to be open about it.

And usually, authoritarian people gain power when the world is in turmoil. People are gullible and believe that someone will come in and just "fix things" without any negative consequences.

So at the moment I think people need to come back down to earth and don't get the hopes up too much.

It’s amazing that when listening to Trump voters who are actually trying to make a rational case for their vote, most of them vote because of the economy. They blame Biden and Kamala for the increased prices. No one seems to understand why inflation spiked, why gas prices spiked and prices went up and no one seems to understand that Biden helped mitigate the effects of inflation and that the central bank is acting independently from the government to adjust the economy.

:shade:

I don't think Trump will win. — Manuel

People seems to forget that everyone said the same in 2016.

The lesson they’ll take away from this is that... — Mikie

People do not learn lessons on a sociological scale. Individuals learn lessons, if the population is inclined and willing to listen to those who learned lessons about past events, they can change. If they reject these lessons, they will repeat history.

Society didn't learn any lessons from WWII, individuals did and their lessons were taught to the rest. Fortunately those lessons shook enough to form a consensus on where history should go.

Today, however, people do not seem to listen to individuals who want to teach. People are so called, "fed up with experts". They will only listen when they, themselves, face the consequences that would gives the lessons the experts already learned.

For something like climate change, this is what will happen. People won't want any change until storms and catastrophes absolutely destroy their lives. When the heatwaves, hurricanes, floods and stuff keeps coming and don't stop. When relatives and friends die because of this, then they will start to learn the lessons. And when the rest of us have said "we told you so" and they finally agree, only then will change come into play... far too late to make a difference.

And seen as more and more individuals who learned lessons from WWII disappear, there's no wonder that the mechanics of what enabled WWII to happen will start to appear again.

The fundamental stupidity of humanity as a whole and over history is staring back at you.

They do not vote wishing their lives would be fixed but saved. The political slogans have mottos such as 'democracy is in danger' 'save America', 'Israel or Palestine existence' and the delicate topic of abortion and pro-life. One side of the voters thinks that if their opponents win, their lives are at risk. So do the others otherwise. — javi2541997

Doesn't matter. The principle I described is the same. Swing voters goes back and forth expecting change, but their lives do not change. All they're doing is lowering the propaganda narratives down to even further polarized language.

People don't know what they want in life, or what they need, people just dream nightmares or utopias and fall into the narratives of those who can scare or give them hope.

My point is that democracy isn't in danger... it's in some ways already dead. And people need to realize this in order to rebuild it.

I have a bad feeling people are just redoing the same mistake as 2016. I'm seeing a lot of "Trump is screwed" kind of material that just comes off as denial. As far as I can see, I'm seeing a lot of this day leaning in favor of Trump. So I'm already setting my expectations for a Trump victory. I'm not even sure I can end it with "if I'm wrong that's a nice surprise", which feels like a cop out. I can only hope that this time around, the Trump voters will suffer enough to understand that Trump doesn't give a shit about anyone but himself. The christian evangelists won't care, they're zealots, but he's not winning because of them, he's winning because of people who fall for propaganda narratives.

Actually, why does anyone ever think that their elected president is going to fix their life? So far, elections over decades just show how society swings back and forth. It's usually just about people having hope of change and getting disappointed. So they swing back and forth, without a thought in their head that their lives are unimportant to any president. That they're just meat to be herded.

The problem is direction, vision. There are no visions. True visions. There are just scam narratives. A true visionary president who has a real plan for making society better and people agreeing to that vision not out of propaganda, but out of a will to work for a change that is properly thought through. That will change things to the better.

But the system is set up to rewards scammers and narcissists, because those people knows how to play around with people's emotions rather than being forced to confront their intellect through systemic guardrails.

How I'd wish democracy was in actual serious trouble. To the point of people seeing that danger head on, not in some abstract analysis by experts, but in society. That way people would want to change the system because they would realize what the current system can lead to.

People are too comfortable at the moment.

Please just stop. Your constant attempts to rewrite things into Trump's favor borders on plain desinformation. I'm amazed that you haven't been banned yet because of this constant bs spamming, but I guess it's the lounge so anything kind of goes. But just so you know, outside of this, I'm not engaging with your posts. So you know you're wasting time with replying to me.

I don't think Trump is viewing himself as a fascist, I think fascism is the result of his views.

I don't understand women who would vote for him. Is it brainwashing? — RogueAI

Echo chambers, conspiracy narratives, christian evangelism, low education and so on.

The general human condition is that we are always prone to bias and avoid complex thought. It takes effort to stay educated and informed, to think and be vigilant.

Everyone is like this, which means that the general public are inclined to follow the herd, follow what emotionally feels right, and with the right narrative, truth and reality does not matter. It is relative.

To generalize... everyone is basically stupid and populists and demagogues take advantage of this by both constructing false narratives, appeal to emotion and flood elections with so much conflicting information that truth doesn't matter anymore.

It's why it's impossible to use rational arguments with these people. Within these groups, truth has eroded so much and been replaced by emotional chanting that it basically is a fundamentalist religion. If you listen to his crowds, they're chanting as a cult. Meaning, they don't even seem to understand what they're chanting, what the implications are of the words they say. They blindly follow him.

It's the same mechanics that transformed morally good people in Germany to follow Hitler into death.

And with online social media, the speed at which this stupidity spreads, there's no wonder we've seen an uprising of this type of mindless cult behavior in many countries around the world.

If you are a person with power and you reach out your hand to stupid people and tell them that they are the best people in the world, you're giving them dreams and hopes they have never felt. They don't understand world politics, they don't understand economics or the justice system, they are fundamentally lost in their existential struggles and then this powerful figure, who's name is on many things in society, who's up there at the top, but behaves just like them, reaches out a hand... it's like a divine experience to them.

It's the SAME mechanisms as cults. Someone with power who "sees you" and tells you that you are chosen to be the new elite and that everyone who called you stupid in your past will be punished. Every family member who cut ties with you will return back and tell you they're sorry for not believing you. You're part of the promised people, the kings and queens in the new world order.

I have no problem understanding why people follow Trump, regardless of his behavior. People are more stupid than they think and it demands effort to always be vigil of your own biases. These people have no such abilities and thus are open to a total annihilation of their inner agency, making them into zealots and drones.

That is a peculiar way to use the concept of prediction.  From my idea, prediction is always for the unknown future.  You don't predict how a cup of coffee will look like, when you are seeing a cup of coffee.   The cup of coffee is sending you a vivid and forceful image to your eyes.   You are perceiving it with certainty and realistic assurance for its existence.  Why do you have to predict it?   It is just a logical flaw and nonsense. — Corvus

You are literally calling predictive coding theory logically flawed and nonsense while I've already shared you some research papers and links to the actual science behind it. You're just getting lost in word definitions and use a simplified idea of what perception is. The neurological process that handles our consciousness is what makes perception happen. This process is a form of prediction algorithm in its function. Generating an internal concept of outside reality in which our sense information stabilizes it into accurate correlation with the outside world.

You are just saying that "we perceive the cup of coffee", that it's sending a "vivid and forceful image to our eyes". And how do you think our brain process that information? What happens with the photons that our receptors register? What happens to the nerve signals from our eyes? How does the visual cortex see anything?

Before you call actual scientific theories nonsense I think you need to engage with the material some more. You're looking at perception in the most simplified way, without taking into account how the brain process perception. And it's this process that predictive coding theory is about.

Without fully understanding what I'm actually talking about here it breaks apart further reasoning.
Repeating the most basic information again: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predictive_coding

OK you say, you are using the concept of prediction differently to describe how you structure the images in your perception, and it is Scientific research.  But why would you do that?  Why do you have to change the meaning of the concept prediction in order to describe the perceptual process in that context? — Corvus

There's no changing the meaning of "prediction", you are misunderstanding how the term is used in this context and theory.

If you are seeing a cup of coffee from your memory, then logically you cannot fail to recall the factual past content of your memory when you are seeing it. If you are seeing an image from your memory, it wouldn't be just the object of the image, you would also see the background, material detail of the cup, the type of the coffee and where it was lying on etc etc. — Corvus

You aren't seeing anything. The internal image you "see" is a generated construct, a remix of different memories.

It's the reason why witnesses in court cases are considered very unreliable. Because the memory they recall is filled with errors, changing colors of jackets, changing clothes entirely, sometimes even environmental differences to the real place. It's why the legal process sometimes take witnesses back to the scene of the crime, trying to ground their memory in current sensory information.

The reason memories change like this is because they're not a solid stored information, they're a mental generative construct of reality. The more vivid the sensory inputs at the time we form memories, the more accurate those memories become. The cup of coffee you got on a wonderful vacation, staring out into the sunset as your loved one smiles next to you, with the smell of newly baked sweets at the café you were at can significantly ground your memory to that location, making it easier to recall. But if I ask you to remember a cup of coffee from a Thursday three weeks ago, it might be impossible for you to remember it and even if you remember it, you cannot be sure how other similar days of drinking coffee is affecting that internal image.

You are therefore never "seeing" anything in memory, everything is a construct, a hallucination. With deliberate recall we are hallucinating with the grounding of stored sensory memories, which are never as accurate as current real time sensory information in the present. But even in the present we are experiencing this construct of reality. The whole concept of optical illusions is based around how our mind is using predictive coding to form our perception.

Therefore you cannot see both at the same time:

As I said, the OP is not about how we form and see images from some scientific research. It is about how we see non existing images sometimes, and what is the nature of non existing objects. I have asked a few questions on the nature of non existing objects and perceiving non existing objects in my previous posts, but you have not answered any of them, but just kept going on about the prediction and hallucination. — Corvus

No, I've answered them. You are ignoring how perception actually works and keeps trying to get answers that aren't there. Like if the scientific research into the concept of perception isn't giving you the right answers. You are literally ignoring actual research here because you simply don't understand what it means.

You're stuck in wanting your questions to lead somewhere else, but the science of perception is right there pointing our that the problem is in your question, the premise of seeing non-existing images is not correct. We never see anything in our brain. Why are you stuck in this loop of thinking? Your question relies on a false premise.

You must be aware of the fact that scientific research explanations and theories are not all eternal and infallible truths. When new research and experiments prove otherwise, the present scientific theories and principles are destined to collapse. That is the way scientific explanations work, and you have to be always open minded on the scientific explanations and answers on the abstract topics. — Corvus

But predictive coding theory has empirical evidence and experiments behind it. I don't know why you aren't actually engaging with the material provided? This is just a cognitive bias in which you try to argue against the concept of science itself because it threatens your line of thinking.

Being "open minded" does not equal ignoring the science that oppose the ideas you have, it is about the opposite of that. Being open minded is to understand that new information expose flaws in your thinking and ideas, and when you need to gather more information about a subject before continuing. I've provided tons of information here, including links for further reading and you just put on the blinders and regurgitating the initial question over and over, demanding answers that aren't there.

Philosophy is not about accepting and adopting the scientific explanations into their inquiries without analysis, logical and critical reflections. — Corvus

Where did you get that idea? You think philosophy does not rely on facts?

Sorry, but what you're doing now is grasping at straws trying to justify your originally flawed question. You're trying to redefine how science, facts and philosophy functions because what's being said here doesn't align with your question and the answers that you want.

I recommend you to sit down and read up on the science of perception and cognition. Take time in studying and be open to abandon ideas that does not work.

Otherwise you are not doing philosophy at all, you're just trying to fight for a fundamental belief you already have. Accept the cognitive dissonance you experience and let it guide you to study further.

Otherwise you're going to get stuck and never evolve intellectually.

I used the maze example to ensure our past experiences cannot affect the decision. — MoK

Doesn't matter, being human means having past experiences and even if those past experiences seemingly have nothing to do with the choice at hand, as I described, there are always factors that pull towards a choice. Even if the line of causality is quantifiable, the mechanisms of how we choose are far more elaborate and complex behind what we're conscious of.

The example can be used as an analogy for a philosophical concept, but it can't be applied to human choice in reality as everything in our past affects our choices. And the feeling of doubt is seemingly pointing to a lack of, or contractionary memories enough to form a cognitive dissonance between the two paths, stalling the predictive function that underpins our cognitive functions. It can lead to people using seemingly nonsense reasons to choose a path, even if they're not aware of it. A headache on the right side of the head, choosing the left path; a smear of different shade of the stone on the walls of the right, choosing that one. None of it really conscious, but becoming the only correlation we have to what's stored in our memories and in such doubt lead to our instincts choosing whatever have some correlation, even if that connection is absolutely irrational. Therefor we cannot really make internalized coin tosses for choices as everything we do that we think comes out of random choice is never random for us. And none of this is a conscious process we are truly aware of while acting and navigating reality around us.

Or does some internal neural mechanism in your subconscious "toss a coin"? — jgill

I think MoK is saying here that if you know the outcomes of a decision, you can form reasons for acting in a certain way. This means the act is not free in the sense that reasons impel us to act in one way or another - the brain is deterministic, and the reasons arise from the brain.

Alternatively, when you are ignorant and have doubt, you can choose freely because reasons do not impel you to act in a certain way. However, since the brain is deterministic, this free act must arise from a mind that can freely choose. — ToothyMaw

Exactly right. :100: :up: — MoK

Coming from another discussion about perception in which I went into the up to date research on consciousness with "predictive coding". If our mind creates a mental representation with generative means for the purpose of prediction, then our mind will always strive for predicting the best outcome.

A person with a certain irrational belief might have their brains predict, even on an unconscious level, that "left is always the right choice", regardless of the random nature they're presented with. Imagine if there were two forks and the first reaffirmed that left was true, such a person would choice left without a doubt, even if it's wrong.

The issue with the doubtfully ignorant choosing freely is that a choice which we cannot find reasons for, even a random internally manifested coin toss, is never actually random. We always choose out of bias and this bias is always a sum of our prior experiences forming a present predictive function for our navigational actions. Therefore, we always make an "informed choice", even when we don't have enough information or an experience of making such choice out of information.

So doubt can be described as our predictive functions having to decide between choices too close to each other in nature, forming a fear response as the decision takes longer than other choices. However, we are always deterministic regardless of what is happening and we're always leaning towards some path based on the sum of prior experiences.

Predictions are overtly conscious and intentional on the events, movements of objects or functional processes which are uncertain in their results. It sounds illogical and unsound to suggest that our brain keeps making predictions just because it is their nature to do so. — Corvus

I think you are severely misunderstanding how this works. I suggest that you engage with the scientific material surrounding predictive coding theory.

The best way to describe it is through a comparison to how the AI models operate today. People saying they just collage together other images do not know how these neural network models work. They essentially "dream" up images based on their training data. Constructing something never seen out of the decoding of massive amounts of data through a prediction process. Predicting based on a construct concept of what such an image should be looking like. Effectively hallucinating forward an image by predicting every single part that makes up the image.

This AI has never seen a white tiger. Yet here it is in front of predicting what badly drawn tigers should look like.



Increasing this complexity to function real time in which a constant feedback of sensory data grounds this process and does it over time forms the perception of seeing the world. If the AI model is grounded by the prompt that's written, the sensory data grounds each moment in time for the hallucinated constructed concept of the world around us.

What you are describing is the mental deliberate predictive action of us as individuals, not the fundamental process of how we function. Those are two very different forms of predictions. What you are describing is more akin to what I described as how we are able to tap into this process when using our imagination, but at its core it is also the foundation of all perception and thinking.

Prior to your seeing something from your memory, you must be conscious of the content of your memory. You cannot see something from your memory, if you cannot remember what they were.
Seeing hallucinatory images from one's past memories is what is happening in one's dreams doesn't quite assuredly explain the nonexistent objects appearing in dreams, if the dreamer has never seen, encountered or experienced the object in his / her life ever. — Corvus

Here you are also looking at the concept of "hallucination" in the textbook description of it, not as what it means as a mental process. Our entire experience is a hallucination that our brain is constructing, it is perception itself. The hallucination of dreams and psychedelics is only the version of that hallucination that isn't grounded by our real time sensory data grounding it through correlation.

And you are never seeing anything original, ever. Everything in our dreams is a construct, a collage and combination of concepts and previous memories flowing together through a predictive process that is lacking grounding.

Saying that you are seeing something truly original is just believing in the illusion that you do. There are no original things within us, there are only remixes.

The problem with your argument is that it relies on a false premise of our mind being able to construct something that has never been. But everything we perceive as deliberate imagination or dreams is always just a remix of our memories.

If I imagine a shortnecked giraff, my brain is using its predictive generative ability to generate an internal image that is based on my memories of a giraff and my memory of spatial relations in 3D space. It then predicts this scenario within me and I see something that doesn't exist in the real world. But it's all drawing from memory. And it's drawing from memories of other animals or objects that aren't long, that have a different form, a dog doesn't have a long neck; fusing together a prediction of what a giraff with a short neck like other animals having short necks.




And it extends to other memories as well. Not everything is constructed of visual memory. We have memory of tastes, sounds, we have memory of previous constructs as well. When we imagine something, we add that to our memory as well.

Everything is a constant stream of updating parameters that is the foundation of our brain's hallucinated perception of life as a whole.

You say, that your explanations are from the scientific research on the topic, but it seems to have basic logical flaws in the arguments. Blindly reading up the scientific explanations on the topics, and accepting them without basic logical reflections on their validity appears to be unwise and unhelpful for finding out more logical explanations and come to better understanding on the subject. — Corvus

What are you actually saying here? Are you saying it's a logical flaw that I create an argument that has roots in actual research? Even providing links to that research?

That reasoning is an ironic fallacy. You basically call the correct argumentative process of forming premises out of actual facts and research "blind", while at the same time provide arguments that even admits to be blind to how things work:

I am not too sure on the details of technicality of hallucination on why and how it occurs. But that is my idea on it. — Corvus

The validity of what I say is rooted in the research, facts and empirical tests that has been done on consciousness and how our mind works. It's the research itself that forms the validation.

Where else do we find validation for the premises of an argument in this? I fail to understand the logic of what you say here. It mostly seems like you attack the scientific research because it comes into conflict with how you think and engage with the subject. But, sorry to say, you have to.

Because if you ask these questions and the research provides you with the latest answers out of the research that's been going on for over a hundred years on the subject, then what do you have to support the skepticism against those findings?

You have a lot of research you can read up on, I'm pointing towards the body of evidence, so what's your counter argument against all that? I'm not blindly accepting these research findings. I understand their implications and that's what I'm drawing on to make my argument.

I've answered your questions many times over now, but it seems like you simply don't like the answers and it seems like you rely on the answers being something else and want to force forward answers that does not conflict with the implications of your initial questions.

If that's the case, it's impossible to engage with the question without you rejecting everything that doesn't support a satisfying conclusion you already seem to have.

Basically, we do not form original, novel images in our mind, deliberately or unconsciously. It's all a remix under the illusion of us being free in thought. We are not free, we are pushed by causes that forms these remixes and nothing is truly original. Your question is therefor faulty in what it asks for as it relies on an assumption that isn't true. You are looking for an answer to a faulty question and the only thing anyone can do is to answer the real question; how these imagined concepts form within us, which I have answered to the best of my ability out of the entire scientific field that researches this very question.

Predictions usually happen when the result of some events, movements of objects or processes are unknown to the predictor. But in visual perception of a cup of coffee, result of the perception is irrelevant with the unknown-ness or uncertainty. This tells us prediction is not relevant in most daily visual perceptions. — Corvus

The example with the coffee cup is an extremely simplified version of what the prediction function is in order to explain the process.

The prediction function is a constant flow, it has nothing to do with the known or unknown state of something. Studies on infants show how the mental models of their surroundings are incomplete, but quickly forms into rudimentary predictive navigation as they grow into young children. Every human start out in this extremely basic state in which our brain is gathering enough neural paths to conduct basic spatial and social navigation through predicting future states in time. But as we grow older, it forms an exponentially growing complexity not only to navigate spatially and behaviorally, but conceptually. We begin to form a sort of rudimentary control over the prediction process in the form of imagination, helping us to test scenarios for navigation through unknown territory. However, this imagination is built on previous knowledge and correlations between previously mental models of scenarios and objects.

The prediction function is not a detached function of our brain like the visual cortex, it is the fundamental function of the entire brain. It fundamentally is our brain.

I recommend that you read more about it because I don't think you grasped the concept fully yet. It's not a part of our cognition... it is our cognition.

The OP is also about "non-existing objects" and existing objects. How do we perceive non-existing objects, and what are the nature of non-existing objects? How are they different from existing objects? — Corvus

I don't see how this isn't answered? How we perceive non-existing objects has already been answered. It's a hallucinatory flow of predictions detached from sensory inputs and composed by a collage of previous experiences and concepts of objects that we have stored in memory. The nature of them is that they are hallucinations detached from sensory information or minorly influenced by it while imagining or hallucinating in an awaken state. Internally they differentiate to existing objects in that they are pure memory information formed into prediction calculations by the brain that detaches from sensory grounding, transforming memory representations of real objects into a malleable conceptualized mental model that can be reshaped internally. During dreaming, this process happens without our ability to control it, since the flow of this collage of memories flowing together is influenced by the brain's process of fusing long term memory with the new short term memories.

You are essentially asking for a summery of the entire field of perception and cognition and I'm trying to make a short simplified description, but you have to engage with the material fully to understand the answers to your questions.

I'm not sure what else you're asking for, because with this field of science in mind, the answers are somewhat clear or at least rationally explained enough by the current understanding of our consciousness and how we function.

Do you mean that we never see a real cup of coffee, but images of constant steam of information from your memory, which is a hallucinatory state of predictions?

I recall debating on this topic before. The direct realists would say, you are seeing a cup of coffee in front of you, and indirect realist would say, you are seeing a sense data of a cup of coffee which seems sounding similar to your suggestion. — Corvus

Both speak of two sides of the same coin, neither is correct in just their single concept. And the third part is the prediction function which they don't even include.

We need to see the system as a whole of different parts. We do have a real sensory, raw data flowing from our registration of photons and molecules, this is as real as a still camera registering signals ont he CMOS sensor into raw data.

Then we have a visual cortex and parts of the brain directly processing visual sensory data .

However, that is not enough on its own. In order for our brain to make sense of this sensory data it needs to correlate it with something it already knows, so it correlates it with memories of cups of coffee, every map of neurons possible for that concept in order to verify that it is a cup of coffee. The map of neurons firing out of the sensory data is essentially being correlated with the map of neurons firing out of memory.

If it marches up, it transforms into an internal image that is basically an hallucination of all our stored memories of cups of coffee being hold into place by the raw sensory data creating a bias towards the specifics of that real time current stream of sensory data.

In essence, if the cup is blue and it steams in the rays of window sun, this data produces a bias towards similar concepts in our mind forming an interplay between memory and raw sensory data that generates this internal image.

And over time our mind uses this interplay to predict the next moments in time by constantly using our memory of cups of coffee as a foundation for that prediction and rooting a bias of that prediction with the sensory data and possible scenarios of the future for that cup of coffee, forming an illusion of motion ideas of navigation going forward.

This process seems simplistic, but if you expand and include every single object, every single memory, everything that makes up the internally formed memory and possible predictions about everything around us, it starts to form a basic structure of how humans navigate with their consciousness.

On top of that, the very act of this interaction with this blue cup is in itself adding new memory data for future events. Meaning that every single second we are gathering extreme amounts of memory into our short term memory.

This is then sifted through and organized during sleep, with similarities in situations being shaped as stronger biases for better prediction functions in similar situations. Meaning, if you work as a barista and handle cups of coffee all day long for many years, your mind is essentially an expert on anything related to the concept of navigating "cups of coffee" around you as you have formed so much memory about cups that almost any scenario can be predicted by your brain.

It's why we can experience things like "flow", or automatic behaviors like juggling. Because the training has supercharged our predictions about those specific objects around us, giving us the ability to function beyond having to think about them in the moment.

And when we sleep, our mind is essentially cutting off the sensory data and starts to "play around" with predictions based on primarily the new memory data we gathered during the day. A form of testing ground to compare the new data to old data with a free form trial and error of prediction actions onto these memories. Which finds support in how dreams behave; usually forming around recent events, but at the same time lifting out old memories or people from long past because our mind is trying to categorize a new memory to what it things is a close match in the neural mapping between the old and new memory.

You say it is a scientific facts, but is it tested, and proven fact? Or would it be just another hypotheses how seeing works? — Corvus

It's based on the most recent research on how our consciousness works. It's not a single fact, it's consistent of a number of facts with a number of observations and hypotheses. There are a lot of tests done on our cognition, both neurologically, behaviorally and sociologically that form specific areas of proven concepts that are then put into a holistic hypothesis and new research.

When I say it's the latest research in science it's what's the most up to date. And it is the least speculative of all speculations surrounding our consciousness and how our perception, experience and how dreams work.

I'm just drawing up an extremely simple description of all this with predictive coding at the center, but it's a concept that gathers many fields into one holistic form. If you want to check out the underlying idea more here's some more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predictive_coding
And there's more to go from there, check the hyperlinks etc. And there are many research papers on the subject if you search for it and then follow citation hyperlinks for further papers.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-022-01516-2
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10339-016-0765-6
https://arxiv.org/abs/2107.12979
To mention just a few.

But there's a large body of research, empirical tests as well as theoretical concepts out there about this.

But scientists can be wrong, so skepticism isn't necessarily a bad thing. — frank

Skepticism without grounding in unbiased reasoning and having an insight into what the science means... is meaningless.

People only express skepticism because it doesn't fit into their invented narrative.

It's like if someone who's never stepped on a large ship suddenly starts to command around and inserting themselves into the crew's chain of command giving out orders that have no grounding in the knowledge of how to actually manage such a ship. Then demanding the crew listens to them, just because they have some fantasy idea about how to run a ship their way, as some foundation for why they're skeptical of how the ship is run. And then for some stupid reason, the shipping company puts people like that in charge while the crew tries to explain why this is a bad idea.

The problem with using "scientists can be wrong" as a premise is that it implies that uneducated amateurs knows any better when a theory or hypothesis is proven false. No, science doesn't work like that. Research is a process trying to use every method possible to reach an objective fact about something. Being "wrong" is what the uneducated people calls it when a theory is proved false, but that doesn't mean that the overarching scientific process hit a wall and that everything is thrown out the window, NO, it means that a part of the large body of theories have been chipped down a bit, closing in on what the objective fact really is.

Unscientific people simply don't understand how science actually works and so when a certain hypothesis or theory is proven "wrong", they interpret that as the scientists not knowing what they're doing, trying to insert themselves and their bullshit into the mix as some alternate answer or simply concluding that "because that theory was wrong, I am right".

I'm simply sick and tired of the type of "skepticism" that the majority of uneducated people are vomiting all over topics like climate change science. People simply don't know what they're talking about, but demand the right to be heard as someone with a valid input without caring for the need to actually understand it first.

There are no sides here, there's the side of the science, the facts and the people who understand the correct path forward... and then the side of the uneducated self-indulging delusions of people who seek attention by trying to paint themselves as being on par with the experts. It's absolutely pathetic.

Climate science is one of the most grounded, proven fields out there. Why in the world should we listen to amateurs vomiting out dislocated concepts and counter arguments towards that research? Especially since these people cannot be reasoned with as they simply don't understand the basics of scientific research.

We've seen numerous times how even pointing at certain research papers and conclusions doesn't even matter because they don't even have basic understanding of how to read stuff like that.

The anti-climate science people simply do it to validate themselves as more important than they are. Under the banner of being "fed up with experts". It's just plain populist stupidity without any actual grounding in the science, with nothing to support alternative theories other than delusions of grandeur in these people. Or they're simply following influential people and when they vomit the same bullshit they shout "hail the influencer!"

It's impossible to not see how all these right winger narratives are the same across the entire globe. It's the same narratives everywhere. Using certain topics to gather disgruntled zealots under them and using the anti-establishment narrative as a core point of control.

And part of this narrative has been climate change. It could have been any moronic narrative really, but since there's a lot of industries that rely on things staying the same, they start to flood money into pushing these anti-climate change narratives and so it spirals out of control and into the overarching narrative of these populist leaders and influencers.

Imagine if they incorporated cancer research into their populist bs. Pointing out "wrong" theories there, pushing for lowering the amount of government, private and charity funding that such research gets. Effectively stifling it to the point that it stagnates and slows down, leading to a lot of cancer treatments not coming into reality and people unnecessarily dying. It's the same kind of scenario.

I mean, we see the same in anti-vaccer ideologies. How the anti-vaccer movement managed to enable previously almost snuffed out diseases to spread out again. Imagine being the parent of a child who dies because some anti-vaccer morons took their non-vaccinated sick child to a place with younger children who weren't at the age of vaccination yet.

There are deadly consequences to this type of anti-establishment stupidity among uneducated people who believe to know better than the experts.

The extreme focus on individualism in recent decades have shaped people into absolute bloated egos. Thinking they are the main protagonists of the world. It's an appalling situation we're in where experts are treated the way they are and politicians playing off people's stupid sense of pseudo-importance.

Rather, this world needs to grow the fuck up. People need to realize that they are a part of something bigger. They need to respect other people's knowledge and expertise and work together. The plumber should not discuss "simulated ocean current data" and form a conclusion about climate change. They should fix the damn pipes and be damn good at their job. Just as a climate change scientist shouldn't try to explain the best way to fix the pipe or risk flooding the entire office themselves because they believed they could handle it themselves.

A stable world that learns to fix major global problems needs to have people being good at their profession, not try and interfere in other people's profession.

If people have skepticism about some scientific discovery, then take that skepticism to another scientist in that field, discussing it until they understand it.

There are no sides in this other than the right one and the wrong one and I'm not going to pretend there are on some delusional idea of neutrality in respect of some spoiled behavior from people who think that they, without any education in the field, can place themselves on the same level as these scientists.

And there's a difference between non-scientists who engage with scientific research on grounds of curiosity and who always present their amateur ideas in reference to current scientific understanding and that their own ideas are probably highly speculative... and the ones being skeptical against actual scientists through the narrative of belief in their own ideas being the truth or that some influencer they like knows better than scientists. One is able to discuss without overstepping their level of knowledge, while the other don't.

Skepticism without any rational foundation, skepticism that is self-indulgent and catering to the ego of the skeptic more than the pursuit of knowledge... is meaningless and irrelevant, and It should be excluded from discussions because it's useless for the progress of ideas.

Simon expertly describes much of the background of gullible people's anti-climate science arguments in this:




It's stuff like this that really gets my blood pumping. I absolutely hate how gullible people are, how they're so easily manipulated by anti-climate science agendas. People who push their idiotic world views onto masses of easily manipulated people who know absolutely nothing about how science works, its methods and how to read actual data.

There's no debate, there's no discussion, there's only idiots raising their voices so high that it disturbs the public space to the degree that normally functioning people have to deal with it. :vomit:

Add infoatthephilosophyforumdotcom as a contact/preferred sender or to your email client's whitelist. One of those should do the trick. — Outlander

Thanks, this did do the trick. :up: Glad it wasn't a wide spread thing.

Another thing I noticed, and I sent a message to you about it but didn't get a reply, is that when I sent for changing my password I don't get an email properly for it. Not in the trash or spam folder either. So if there's ever some strike of hackers registering our passwords, it might be impossible to change for some.

Is this something to maybe look into so that people won't be locked out or unable to secure their account if the site gets hacked in the future?

Yet again, isn't Hallucination totally different way of seeing non existent objects? You see images of the objects which are existent or non-existent in the external world, but the cause of the seeing is the abnormal state of your brain due to the chemically induced condition? — Corvus

The hallucination is the only state. Your perception that is the experience through your senses aren't a 1 to 1 process. You aren't registering photons with your eyes and that is producing an image internally. The experience of seeing is your brain constructing a predicted image that is hallucinated into existence based on the interplay between the sensory information grounding the expectations rooted in memory information.

In essence, when you see a cup of coffee, it forms a constant stream of information that holds in place and time that shape and form while your memory has categorized what a cup of coffee from past experiences and the interplay between them forms a hallucinatory state of predictions about the next step in time we experience.

This way, we see a cup of coffee not as an unknown stream of information, but an unknown stream of information that is evaluated against memory categories of similar objects and producing a constant prediction process of what to expect of this experience.

Without the sensory information grounding experience, this interplay is cut off and our prediction hallucinations start to flow without grounding and forming the abstract and surreal experience that is our dreams or psychedelic trips.

Asking and discussing on seeing non-existence images in dreams and also daily life could tell us more on our perception how it works, which could allow us to explore on the way mind works. — Corvus

But you are also saying:

I am not too sure on the details of technicality of hallucination on why and how it occurs. But that is my idea on it. Anyway, it is not the OPs interest here. — Corvus

You can't ignore the actual scientific research about perception and consciousness which points directly towards explanations on how dreams work, and then say that we can understand how the mind works by discussing in the way you want.

You're asking a question about how we perceive abstractions in dreams, but you don't like the answer so you want to steer it in another direction that ignores the science.

If you think it has no more scope of discussion than talking about hallucination and making predictions, then maybe you are not interested in the topic of the workings of mind and perception. — Corvus

It's one and the same process. It just seems like you ignore what's being said here because it doesn't align with what you believe about the subject.

The images in our dreams are simply based on our past experiences, our memory and our mind forming a predictive hallucination without grounding them through sensory data. You aren't seeing anything, you are perceiving a free flowing predictive process using memory as a bucket of raw data.

Not sure what more's needed to be said to explain it? Even if the science of consciousness haven't a final objective answer on all of it, there's no point ignoring existing research and scientific theories that is as close to an explanation that is currently possible. Anything else is just arbitrary unfounded speculation and belief.

Here's some medieval paintings of animals the artist never saw. They dreamt up the visuals based on descriptions. The more "data" we have before we imagine or dream something, the more accurate those prediction hallucinations become. It's evolutionary logical for a predictive function to work this way. The more experience, the better we are at predicting accurately. You can imagine a white tiger looking just like a white tiger if you've seen tigers before. Our mind can easily switch out a color and basic attributes, but if you actually never saw a tiger you would have a major dissonance if this is what you imagined and then saw a real tiger.



Or an elephant:



Or some lions and bears:



Or this poor leopard:




In essence, those were imagined and dreamt up through descriptions of these animals or they got a glimpse in the heat of the moment on some crusade somewhere, and the emotions affected their experience. But they're all trying to form a prediction of what an animal looks like using previous visual experiences and trying to fuse them with other's descriptions. Without any prior visual information, a description will only use what's available in memory.

It's the same process as with AI models forming images. If they don't have enough data on tigers in lots of situations, they will not be able to predict an image into an accurate depiction of what a tiger looks like. The more memory data of tigers, the more accurate it makes them. Our mind works in the same way. It's the reason why we began experimenting with neural nets in computer science in the first place, because it has correlation with how neurons work and how the brain works. It's only now we're starting to form theories of why this is.

In some cases artists have very little to draw from.

Poor guy:




And this is why religion forms so easily. A lack of information and explanations lead to extremely abstract ideas that try to predict why something is happening around the individual. And why the comfort of someone spreading an explanation lessen the strain on the mind to construct accurate predictions.

It may even be the reason why we form social groups. That in order to efficiently speed up the process of prediction in cognition, a group of people spread ideas among the group rather than each individual having to learn on their own.

It's that people absolutely despise the Bluegeoisie and the destruction they've wrought on society.

They destroy livelihoods and lives, destroy bonds between family and friends, destroy any and every institution they govern.

They're tone policing, cry-bullying, joy-killing, emotionally incontinent hacks, whose attempts at imposing their "Progressive" theocracy onto the rest of us has created a society in which we're more lonely, loveless, depressed and stupid than ever, and in which our youth are more lost and hopeless than ever.

All this, while maintaining 100% confidence in their intellectual and moral supremacy over everyone else.

The support for Trump extends far beyond the man himself—it's that people want to see a peevish, arrogant, and nakedly contemptuous pseudo-aristocracy punished for its abuses, and re-electing the Orange Man is clearly THE most effective way to do it. — Chisholm

And this is their false narrative, perpetuated by pseudo-intellectuals online. It's primarily just white men who're angry that their patriarchal power has been diminished, so they construct this conspiracy narrative that all this progress is some intentional plan by some organized "enemy" on the left.

No, it's society slowly adjusting to rid itself of past injustices and some people who were favored by the old ways can't cope with this modern life. So they lash out in any direction that resembles a representation of this societal progress, slowly turning themselves into white supremacist, racist, transphobic, homophobic extremists who cluster around evangelist influencers, techno-kings and tech bros who look like them and think like them.

It's the same making of extreme ideologies as in any other time in history. Take the part of the population that are angry and showing resentment about progress and be the beacon of hope for them and using their anger to radicalize them into a cult following. With enough of them it is possible to take control and some of them will follow you into death.

This plague of Curtis Yarvin's (see above) and similar people's ideas are pure extremist ideologies. And not recognizing it and how it affects US politics is dangerous.

Trump is just a populist in the purest sense of the word. Populism is a reaction to a failed political establishment. — Tzeentch

Except the driving forces underneath is far more spread out than just Trump. And the inability to guard against these people being granted so much power risks destabilizing the entire system. Populists in other nations, like here in Sweden, are part of a parliament structure in which if they took things too far it would just prompt previously unheard of collaborations between parties in order to just snuff out their stupid ideas. It's close to impossible to push their populist ideas into reality because the parliament actually represents the democratic voice of the people. Enough people stand up against their bullshit and so enough politicians do so as well.

But in the US there's an undercurrent of white supremacy Christian fundamentalism that is infecting the halls of power more and more over time. And the people and other political figures are becoming more and more desensitized to it, slowly moving pushing the limits of what's tolerated in politics.

This is why I say that Trump is just a symptom; he's become a front figure and "mascot" of the movement. But surrounding him, supporting him and working their way into more power, are the evangelical fundamentalists together with pure capitalists, who take advantage of the uneducated masses to a point it's forming an actual cult. It's not voters anymore that are just voting within political ideas, it's a fundamentalist cult brewing underneath the capitol.

It's the kind of thing that is a joke... until it isn't.

I don't agree with that. Trump is someone who is an absolute expert at exploiting democratic systems and also financial systems for his own advantage. If there is a fault, it's that a satisfactory anti-Trump hasn't emerged - someone who is also charismatic, bombastic, and telegenic, but who has at least a core of common decency which has long died inside DJT. — Wayfarer

You can't find someone who's both equipped to do what's necessary to fix problems in a nation (which most often than not angers people affected negatively when installing changes) and one who fundamentally ignites a cult like behavior in gullible people.

Most people are easily tricked, easily manipulated. A decent person who is charismatic will always have to balance their personality with what's necessary for the good of the nation; but a manipulator can always have their cult followers stay, regardless of behavior. They are essentially protected by the delusions while the "good" person is always scrutinized.

All of this is part of the systemic problem, since one of the pillars of this problem is the fanatical focus the US population has on personality of the president over the competence as a leader.

Trump is a symptom, not the cause. And there will be more symptoms in the future.

But on top of that, when a bipartisan system becomes only one valid choice, that in itself is not a good sign for the future either.

Why are the US public so obtuse about improving the political system? This is part of the fanatical belief the US being the best nation in the world. Forming a delusion that because of that, it also has the best political system. And then pouring all personal voting effort into something that essentially functions like a sham democracy seen as there's little to no choice to be represented.

Remove the presidential power as it is now, install a proper representative democracy with a parliament that includes more parties and reduce the extreme lobbying culture, especially criminalization of lobbying money, seen as it can easily be corrupted into a form bribery, giving more people to the rich than to the people.

There are so many ways to improve a political system, but all I can see is a patchwork trying to calm everyone into a bureaucratic system that obscures the cogs.

If you mean, why is it possible that Donald Trump has come to dominate American politics, f***ed if I know. It makes zero sense. — Wayfarer

A free nation will always have bad actors popping up, fractions of society trying to install some fascist ideologies etc.

But enabling such a person to reach so high as into presidency in a nation in which the leader has almost an autocratic power; speaks to a systemic problem of how politics are handled.

Looking at the whole system, looking at the lack of actual guardrails... I think it makes a lot of sense.

The problem isn't Trump, it's a badly patched system that enables Trump to happen. The freedom of a nation does not get lost by guarding against such people, it protects it.

If our society collapsed, I doubt the population would be any better at examining and judging the individual pieces than they are at choosing leaders today. I'd expect that the situation would be more likely than ever to search for simple solutions to the complex problems. — Relativist

Post WWII the world pretty much gathered around trying to figure out a better way forward. While it can be argued to death what worked and what didn't, there were good things that came out of having a true philosophical debate out of the rubble of the war. It spawned such an extreme introspection into how things could turn so bad that much of the progress we've seen since that can be attributed to this absolute horror lurking in the back of everyone's mind.

Facing actually bad consequences for mishandling democracy is a wake up call to the sleepwalkers who just shrug at warning signs. People slowly become desensitized to it all and that's a wide open door for fascism to take hold.

The irony is that the very point people have tried to make out of WWII is to be vigil in the face of fascism, but we're collectively eroding away our ability to spot it.

And the usual counter argument to this is that, "oh what happens if a Trump win doesn't lead to actual fascism?". But there's no reason whatsoever to balance on that knives edge. There's no reason to allow society to even come close to the notion of that becoming true. It's the publics mission to force society towards a better future for all, because that's essentially what history has been moving towards for thousands of years.

Over the course of history we've seen the rise of absolute terrors, but there's little spoken about the time after such horrors. How society discourse aimed to change for it to not happen again. And while this could be a cycle over and over, if we look at the holistic history as a whole, eventually it has started to form a bettering of society. But it all requires people to recognize the bad and work for the better.

When people stop being able to differentiate we either get lucky or things collapse to form a new cycle of building a better place.

The US collapsing will not become some Mad Max scenario. I would say that it doesn't even have to be something like the Civil War movie; it could be a total collapse of how politics are run, leading to millions marching for change, to unrest and justice being demanded. But through that turmoil, the bad actors will show their faces and the people who once sleepwalked through it all would finally take up the responsibility and be part of trying to fix things.

History repeats itself for a reason, in the right circumstances, and the right amount of work, a cycle can be avoided.

So far, I see none of that behavior, all I see is apathy and good people ignoring what's necessary to change the status quo. And no, the "necessary" is not some call to violence, it's a call to restructure the politics, update the constitution to reflect the modern world and 200 years of progress in moral philosophy and separate church and state for real. Leave behind the manifest destiny cult behavior and form an actual parliament with better representative democracy. There's enough template examples in the world to build from.

There is much anti-American sentiment, on the streets and on this forum. I don't buy that 'it's all f***ed anyway, no point in either party, they're all equally bad.' The anti-democratic forces feed on that sentiment. — Wayfarer

I don't either, but when there's only one functioning party and candidate to choose from, it's important to ask the question if there's actually a democracy left? Why not ditch the bipartisan way in favor of an actual parliament in which there are actual representatives for the people? With the republicans having transformed themselves into an actual cult, where's the possibility for democracy?

It's either go with democrats or risk fascism at the hands of a cult.

They're fighting like hell. They're trying desperately to do everything possible to prevent it. — Wayfarer

Why is it even possible in the first place? There's no guardrails whatsoever to guard against the corruption and incompetence of Trump and his kin. There's no actual separation of power, there's no actual separated entities that can evaluate and block such risks. When Trump goes on a lying rampage, when his followers and senators say things that are actual fascist statements, they should be removed from power. This is the very point of protecting democracy.

If you tolerate the intolerable, the tolerating society will erode.

How is it so hard to draw the line? Are people so morally illiterate to not be able to judge if Trump is suitable as a presidential candidate or not?

People are so bad at understanding how to balance free speech in a free society, with protecting that society from bad actors.

You cannot fight against a manipulator, you cannot fight against someone who turns truth into whatever he waves it to be... it's the damn lesson learned from WWII that should have been in the back of everyone's head. Regardless of the consequences of a Trump win, it's this manipulation of truth that shouldn't happen in the first place. Such people should be blocked from political careers. It's not silencing them, they can spew whatever hate and bullshit they want, but they can't be given the keys to the nation if they're actively eroding truth and law to a point where democracy implodes.

Which is why I said in an earlier post that I think he really is actually evil. He's become like a window through which a great number of social evils are manifesting. I don't know if you heard the racist crap that was being spouted at his NY convention the other night, but he's creating a permission structure, an 'Overton window', to enable millions of people to indulge in their darkest instincts. One of the contributors on the old forum said it best: Trump is the manifestation of the American Id.

It's very clear: this election is hope vs hate.


Let's hope. — Wayfarer

I don't want to hope, I want democracy to have fail safes against that which can destroy democracy so that this dichotomy does not happen. The people, the majority of people, are unfortunately too uneducated or too stupid to realize the importance of keeping democracy healthy... every day. People just view democracy as one time election and then they don't care about it until the next one four years later.

Society shouldn't end up in a position like this, it speaks to a fundamental problem with how politics are handled.

Stop just voting for hope and start working for a better system. It doesn't matter if hope wins this time if society erodes even further into the next election.

At a certain point in the future, if the system isn't fixed into a more healthy state, there will be someone who takes things too far.

Part of the Civil War movie warns about this. It's not a warning of what happens if Trump wins or trying to paint some picture of Trump like that, but it's a warning about what eventually happens if this erosion of truth and a stable democracy tips over the knives edge.

The polarisation in the US is on part with how it was before the civil war. Having hope the next four years will not fix things, it will just postpone the eventual further until the people actually wakes up and start a movement to improve the fundamental political system and remove corruption and bad actors from its halls.

I don't agree that a total collapse of the nations is either needed or is likely. What is needed is better education. — Relativist

I agree in practice or course, but what we're seeing right now is a convoluted system that cannot heal itself. It doesn't matter if you introduce, in lack of a better term, "better people" into this system, the bad actor can take advantage of the problems in the system to take control of the system.

The protective measures that are meant to safeguard the system from hostile takeover do not work, otherwise we would have seen Trump be blocked from running for presidency. There's enough evidence that he is unsuited for the job and the protection he gets are corrupted to the point of protection being more present for him than for the system itself.

One single person in politics should never be more protected than the system of democracy. The idea behind democracy is power from the people, but if the system represents that lineage of power and one single individual gets more protection than the system, democracy is fundamentally dead.

So, education does not matter anymore as the bad actor would always be able to manipulate past it. And if the risk is that all it takes is one bad actor to take power in order to change the system further in his/her personal favor, then education is too slow to function against such events.

Trump is an opportunist, and the opportunity he takes advantage of is the disconnect between detailed policy and political rhetoric. Candidates can't win an election by presenting detailed policies; they need to dumb it down into slogans and soundbites. So the vast majority makes their decision on these soundbites, not by carefully examining the pros/cons of competing detailed policy positions. In many cases with Trump, he just has the soundbites that appeal to many - with little or no details. — Relativist

But there are plenty of functioning democracies in the world in which a single bad actor cannot screw up the nation regardless of manipulation.

On top of that, this is what does not work about democracy when it's centered around personality. The way to improve democracy is to move away from making it about personality traits. That's not democracy in my opinion, but a demagogy.

A form of state that does not represent the people or that have manipulated the people before hearing their will.

What good is a democracy if you have programmed the people into a certain opinion? It's as easy as any other form of marketing. There's a reason why marketing agencies pour money into commercials for products, because it actually works. And since it works, why not use the same methods, why not create a whole landscape simulacra that produces a consensus ideal about what a nation is and then use that as the foundation to steer the population into a the political corner that benefits your political ideas in order for them to vote for you.

Most democracies function by these principles, and so it's important to know this in order to install as many guardrails as possible to mitigate it. This is what the most healthy democracies in the world have done, and what the US entirely lacks. But it's also a fundamental problem with the concept of democracy.

In essence, how can a democracy be about actual choice when the illusion of choice is the preferable method of strategy for the people in power? In the worst case, it just becomes another form of autocracy, plutocracy or feudalism within an illusion of a free and democratic society.

This will be a learning opportunity for the American public. — Relativist

The same thing was being thrown around in 2016 and then again during Jan 6th. But the population does not learn, they do not care and they keep being shuffled around like the sheep they are. Until people prove to be better and more thoughtful than easily manipulated zombies, they will be easily manipulated zombies and they will never see a learning opportunity even if it slammed a sledge hammer in their face.

The system is so fundamentally broken that it needs to collapse so that all can examine the individual pieces, throw away the bad and rebuild with the working parts. It's too much of a patch work at the moment, it needs a reset and a new better protected democratic system needs to be built by philosophers and thinkers who knows the shit, not emotional narcissistic clowns and uneducated and manipulated sheep.

However, the OP was more interested in discussing and find out the nature of the visual images we see in our dreams, rather than how dreams work, and why we dream. — Corvus

It's in there in the post. All hallucinations in our dreams are the result of ungrounded hallucinations based on the past memories in our short term and long term memory.

But some of the images are the ones that we never came across in daily lives, or have anything to do with our experience and memories. The white tiger I have seen my dream for example, was a clear vivid image of a tiger, but I have never seen it in my entire life in real world. — Corvus

This make little sense as hallucinations are failures of prediction. If your brain tries to predict a tiger and you know that white tigers exist, the ungrounded prediction function may produce such a hallucination. It's at the core of what happens when predictions aren't verified by a flow of sensory data.

It also makes little sense by just mentioning art. Artists do this all the time. Imagination is a form of controlled manipulation of our predictions. Are you saying that you cannot possible imagine a pink elephant, even though you have never seen one?

It's just a merge of previously known concepts that you mash up internally. You know pink and you know elephants and now you can expand that hallucinatory imagination to highly detailed rendition of the pink skin on that elephant.

The difference is that dreaming and psychedelic drugs enable a much more intense experience of it since it since it dislocates you from the constant flow of sensory flow data as well as the lack of ability to take action in sync with our prediction function makes the flow of that experience very abstract and nonsensical.

It's why if people close their eyes they seem to have a better ability to imagine something. They essentially subdue the visual sensory flow of data and frees up that grounding mechanism, making it easier to imagine something.

So where does it come from? How is it different from the images we see in daily life from the real objects? Are they same type of images? Then how it does not have its real existence of the object? — Corvus

When you look at a cup of coffee, your eyes and your sense of smell constantly feeds your brain with sensory data. Your brain is processing this in relation to memory of cups, coffee, the table which it stands and so on. It uses the sensory data to verify that our internal prediction is correct so as to move our experience forward in time. If we cut of that verification data, nothing prevents our predictions to run out of control, reshaping the color of that cup as we've seen other cups with other colors, or imagine new forms of a cup since nothing grounds our categorization of what "a cup" means to us.

So the question of "where does it come from" and how it differs from real objects becomes somewhat of a nonsense question. Your experience of real life is an hallucination that is verified by the real object. That process forms memory categories that becomes the foundation of how we think about reality and the world around us.

But it's still just an hallucination stored in memory and hallucinations can take any form if nothing grounds it.

And artists create things out of their imagination all the time and these are all coming from their internal manipulation of memorized concepts. Tapping into a similar form of ungrounded hallucination.

I'm not sure where you're going with the OP question, what you are aiming for, but there's not much more to it than what I described. Our experience is an hallucination bound by a flow of sensory data. Cutting that flow makes us hallucinate freely and our memorized concepts start to merge into new forms, shapes and concepts. The combinations of concepts stored in our memory has an almost infinite amount of combinations. A white tiger included.

So where do the images come from? Does this phenomena implies that human perceptions could occur without actual existence of objects? Do human perceive things all differently?
Can humans perceive objects which don't exist? — Corvus

Human consciousness, by the latest research, revolves around our brain being a prediction machine; "predictive coding theory".

Our perception of reality is basically a controlled hallucination, with our sensory inputs grounding our hallucination so that we can navigate reality. Without that grounding, we hallucinate by the textbook sense of the word. Psychedelic drugs activate such unbound hallucinations by obscuring the flow of sensory information and increasing the brain's predictive measures and in so dislocates us from reality.

This also happens when we dream. The brain predicts without grounding, and because of it we are essentially forming a feedback loop in which we predict based on nothing but memory, that is then fed into itself as the grounding information and because of this unbounded nature, it "swells" into the abstract and surreal nature of our experience.

Like...

So it seems that our minds are not completely shut off from the world and we interpret external stimuli as part of the dream. — Harry Hindu

Is supporting this theory. Real world sensory information starts to ground the dream as we return back to normal processing.

We are, as Harry says, not dislocated from existence when we dream. We are connected through our memories as the source for our dreams, but unbound to reality in a loss of sensory grounding. Previous research theorized that dreams "manage our memories" and help us categorize and organize our functions. Since if we deprave people of sleep, they become disoriented with reality. With the recent research, it also points to our predictive ability becoming skewed and broken, since we hallucinate when depraved of sleep. Dreams may therefor be our way of "consolidating memory and categorization" while calibrating our predictive function and stream of memory information.

In essence, while sleep resets and balance chemicals in our body, it further cuts off sensory grounding in order to calibrate this link and process. The sensor data that is stored as raw data of short term memory is a very energy costly process that is a strain on our brain, like a muscle. And just like we need to let our muscles heal when pushed to the limits, we need to let the brain organize our short term memory into long term experience for the sake of purging the short term memory so that the next day we can use the previous day experience as coded data used with our prediction function and in turn store new short term memory in order to further reshape the long term coding.

It further supports why children are better at learning and have changing sleep patterns while they grow up; and why the older we get, the more stable our navigation of reality become. Less erratic, and more wise. As long as learning and experiences keep continue in our adult life.

It also supports why the continued use of our brain in old age, help keeping dementia and declining cognitive function away, since just like training our muscles in old age becomes harder, if we don't do it, we quickly deteriorate.

And it supports research into learning, how tests are clear that when we do something intensely before sleep, then the next day we have become slightly better at it.

And this is why sleep and dreaming is so important. Especially if you are feeding a lot of new experiences and information to the brain. The more you learn, experience and do things differently during a day, the more the brain needs to go through enough sleep to settle that information into predictive coding.

We use this to automate our functions and behavior. The more we do something, the more we automate it as the prediction becomes better. The reason we don't think about how we ride bikes is because the predictions are automated, we don't need to.

Getting better at something, therefor is a process of automation. Which can also have the negative effect of automating bad information into the process.

Which is a good explanation for our cognitive biases becoming more rigid the more we focus on just information that aligns with what we already know. And why broadening our knowledge is key to becoming truly wise.

Make no mistake: Democracy is on the ballot. This is not Democratic Party hyperbole. If Trump were not to loose, the USA will be managed by rich oligarchs. — Wayfarer

US democracy has been eroding for a long time now. But the people don't really care until the sledgehammer of reality hits them in the face.

Autocrats gonna autocrat, lobbyists will lobby, billionaires gonna billionaire.

The problem is always boiling down to the people ignoring society eroding into a worse state. I'm sick and tired of constantly hearing about the "bad politicians", the corruption and corporate affairs. Because the people are actually the ones to blame. Democracy requires the people to take care of it, to nurture it and heal it when it's down. A population who just ignore that, who don't care to educate themselves, who let themselves be shuffled around like stupid sheep and do deeds ordered by whoever's in power, regardless of how despicable the act is... deserves the broken society that eventually ends up on their door step.

If democrats are so sure that Trump and modern republicans have been infiltrated by fascists and that democracy is threatened, that the constitution is threatened. Then what exactly are they doing about it?

Democracy cannot win against brainwashing despots. People are less rational than they think and will be herded by those who knows how to manipulate.

Democracy cannot win against the manipulators, because it relies on honesty and truth, which is easy to get rid of with the right technology and rhetoric.

I've said this before, the US does not have any protection for its democracy. It's been a patchwork of convoluted bureaucracy for so long that no one knows how to install protections from despots and corruption.

Even when someone like Trump do things that in any other previous political era would lead to almost political and societal ostracism, it just makes him stronger. And the system just ends up unable to get rid of him for the sake of keeping democracy healthy and away from demagogical actors.

The US democracy needs to get away from this celebrity politics. It needs to focus on competence over personality. That the majority of the US population is so focused on the personality traits of a president should be all the warning signs that's needed to conclude that the US isn't a real democracy, it's a damn television show. It's reality TV, not politics.

And people in the world actually dies because of it. By the actions of presidents who are unfit. By actions that are obscured by this focus on personality over policy.

I'm starting to believe that what the US need, what the population really needs... is a sledge hammer to the face. A total collapse of the nation in which the true horrors of not caring for the health of democracy comes into view. Where the people crash right into that reality.

Because when a system is so broken that it cannot protect against potential despots, all it can do is collapse.

A broken building that is held up by pins where people just move the pins around to wherever the house starts to lean towards. It doesn't matter how many new pins are introduced, it will eventually collapse if the structure isn't replaced and improved.

Just like with alchemy, people could forge metals well and make tools, weapons and armour, but we aren't reading those antique or medieval scriptures from alchemy to get any actually insights today. Yes, you can have the attitude of an engineer who is totally satisfied if the contraption made simply works. It works, so who cares how it works. — ssu

I'd rather look at it as science was in its infancy as a proper procedure. Back then, there were many more experiments that led to theories, but now we put forth theories that we then put to test.

The foundation is the same, not everything goes from thought to manifested reality in experiment or engineering, sometime, many times it goes from "huh, that's odd" to later answers as to why.

Well, this is an site for philosophy, so people aren't satisfied if you just throw various things together and have no idea just why it works. — ssu

Even as philosophers we have to acknowledge when there's too little information and data to conclude anything with solid premises. We can speculate and we can point to what's partially experimentally validated and go from there. However, the problem I see is that most thinkers aren't really looking at the partial pieces and including them in their ideas.

As far as I see it, emergence has enough support to be relevant and predictive coding enough validity that it has to be addressed for any philosophical concept about the mind.

In essence, we have enough scientific foundation that can't be ignored when forming philosophical arguments about how our mind works.

What other way could consciousness become to exist than from emergence? I think our logical system here is one problem as we start from a definition and duality of "being conscious" and "unconscious". There's no reasoning just why something as consciousness could or should be defined in a simple on/off way. Then also materialism still has a stranglehold in the way we think about existence, hence it's very difficult for us to model consciousness. If we just think of the World as particles in movement, not easy to go from that to a scientific theory and an accurate model of consciousness. — ssu

Emergence is fundamentally a materialistic concept, but it differentiate in that you cannot simply see the cogs working towards a direct deterministic result. Instead emergence models consciousness on the same basis as everything else in nature and reality, an increase of chaos that at a certain point reach a tipping point and emergent complexity appear. All over nature, we see systems that can be categorized in defined ways up to a certain scale where they become something else that express singular behaviors. Like for instance, states of matter.

The level of how advanced a complexity is depends on underlying levels. A state of matter is not as complex as an ecosystem of different states of matter forming a new emergent system, as an example.

Fundamentally, I'm approaching this topic in the way of detaching any assumed ideas about consciousness that we've formed in culture and language, and instead look at consciousness as being part of the same natural system as everything else, without any bias towards ourselves and our human ego in experiencing it. We tend to attribute a mythical status to consciousness, tainting our ability to look at it as any other system in nature. But when we realize that consciousness is just part of the same physical reality as everything else, and really accept that "banality" of it, then it frees us up to think more clearly about what that entails.

The questions then become, why does this system produce this effect? What is it that pushed our evolution towards this ability? What was the evolutionary purpose that formed it and is the way we use consciousness part of that evolutionary drive or a byproduct of a more fundamental cognitive purpose.

My idea is the latter. Evolution has gifted us a system that was supposed to only be a highly advanced predictive "algorithm" for the purpose of navigating nature in more adaptable ways than having to wait generations in order to reprogram instinctual reactions and behaviors.

It may be that the reason why mostly mammals have shown signs of higher cognitive abilities is because it was necessary to form evolutionary functions of adaptability after the asteroid killed the dinosaurs and so in order for animals to survive, evolution leaned towards forming organisms that were able to not just adapt over generations, but adapt to day to day dangers of the post-asteroid environment. And that the evolutionary branches of these cognitive abilities continued as the more advanced these abilities to predict became, the better the species survived. Evolution formed a new bias that survivability gravitated towards.

Eventually the predictive function became so advanced that it layered many predictions on top each other, forming a foundation for advanced planning and advanced navigation for hunting, finding shelter, procreation and expanding tribes.

This spread of different levels of cognitive behaviors checks out when comparing our basic psychology with the rest of the animal kingdom. Even mushrooms show signs of rudimentary cognitive abilities so there is enough evidence to say that advanced cognitive abilities are evolutionary preferable to develop.

But the way homo sapiens have used our consciousness is a byproduct of the basic functional reason we have consciousness. The level of complexity in prediction that it formed made us able to correlate different predictions and regulate emotion around it. And so we began to conceptualize highly advanced and expanded predictive models about our surroundings, for navigation, social structures and it drove our need to understand how things function in order to predict advanced systems. Our drive to explain why something happens formed extremely complicated internalized scenarios in the form of religious beliefs that then transformed into scientific thinking as we matured as an intelligent species.

Our consciousness and how we use it is basically a fundamental system that produced highly complex consequences but that is still fundamentally basic in its function. Like any other system in the universe that is fundamentally simple, but where the results are extremely varied and systematically complex in themselves..

A form of rare emergent behavior of fundamental organic physical processes.

Therefore it's rational to reason why it's hard to model consciousness as it's not one single thing, but rather a process over different levels of emergent complexities that in turn creates byproduct results that seemingly do not directly correlate with the basic function.

So the fault might be that we view consciousness from the high level complexity down or try to materialistically view it from the bottom up to complexity, but it may require a much more holistic view of many things forming the emergent behavior as seemingly unrelated parts and systems that as a whole produce this result.

I think our (present) view of mathematics is the real problem: we focus on the computable. Yet not everything in mathematics is computable. This limited view is in my view best seen that we start as the basis for everything from the natural numbers, a number system. Thus immediately we have the problem with infinity (and the infinitely small). Hence we take infinity as an axiom and declare Cauchy sequences as the solution to our philosophical problems. Math is likely far more than this. — ssu

I don't really see the problem you describe. Mathematics function to describe nature and our reality. Infinite is even included in mathematics and is a computable part of equations. We can also see how infinity usually turns up in physical reality when spacetime essentially breaks down. So in essence our math works within the reality it is calculated, and can in some cases even expand calculations to models that deal with reality beyond our own. More often than not, the problems in computation is not due to math being incomplete, but because we don't have enough means to compute. As our minds have reached its limitation to compute, we use computers, but those are limited to their computing power. We are essentially limited by the speed of our systems, not math itself.

But the machines we've built haven't emerged as living organisms have, even if they are made from materials from nature. A notable difference. — ssu

Our machines still operate on physical laws. We build them to operate on these laws. Living organisms in comparison, formed and evolved to operate on the same physical laws. The only difference is that one grows into being, the other is calculated into existence. I see no notable difference, other than our machines being rudimentary in comparison to the organic, since we're trying to understand all parts while the other forms from a system in which all parts develop in reaction to the previous.

Actually, in engineering today it's common to use the same methods as evolution rather than trying to make things from scratch. Aerodynamics use iterative designs that forms out of the conditions rather than a human designing them. That way they reach the optimal function within their dedicated space of operation. So we are already using emergent complexity in building machines.

And with the AI models we have, we're doing it with software as well. The reason why robotics have taken a giant leap today is because of evolutionary iteration of behaviors rather than trying to program movement.

It becomes obvious that "growing" forth knowledge in evolutionary ways is much more powerful than trying to simply design something.

In doing so... aren't we transitioning into "emergent machines" as our need for complex operation increases? Much like all other systems in nature and the universe?

A big if. That if can be still an "if" like for the alchemists with their attempts to make gold, which comes down basically to mimicking that supernova nucleosynthesis (that would be less costly than conventional mining or the mining bottom of the sea or asteroids etc). — ssu

It is not impossible. Our brain isn't detached from natural processes, everything we have in our skull is a composition of matter and biased functions that produce the result that is our consciousness. If we replicated all of that perfectly, maybe even requiring us to "grow" it into existens, or simulate that growth process, we would eventually end up with a perfect replica.

The philosophical question is not if we can do it today... it's if we can do it at all. And there's nothing that says that we can't. We've already replicated much of what exists in universe, even producing matter that might be impossible to form elsewhere, just because we know how neutrons and protons and the atom works.

The only thing I see is that we attribute the mystical onto our consciousness again, attributing it to be so complex that we will never be able to see its composition and function. But we've done things with physics and nature in our modern time that is considered magic by previous generations in history.

All I see is a defense mechanism. People don't want to know how we work, because when we do, we dispel the notion of a divine soul. Just like people have existentially suffered by the loss of religious belief in favor of scientific explanations. So will they do, maybe even more, by the knowledge of how we function. So people defend against it and need the comfort of us never being able to explain our consciousness.

It is happening consciously or unconsciously, but it is a vast abyss for people and staring into it makes some go mad as it's a feedback loop of ideas. The being able to understand itself fully. That process can break it.

Exactly. It cannot do anything outside the basics of operation, as you put it. That's the problem. An entity understanding and conscious of it's operating rules, can do something else. A Turing Machine following algorithms cannot do this. — ssu

I don't think you understood how I explained algorithms. The "algorithms" are no different in what they essentially mean, to that of our own parts guiding our consciousness. As I described above about how consciousness probably formed, our consciousness is fundamentally basic, operating on basic algorithms of prediction models. Very similar to that of our current AI models, but much more advanced in how it changing during operation.

My point is that you don't need a complex system at its foundation. You need a chaotic system that is guided by simple rules and complex emergent behaviors can form out of it. How we see our consciousness today is more likely only a byproduct of these basic functions and operations, and so if an AI model operates on similar basics it may form similar emergent byproduct operations.

We do have free will. Laplacian determinism is logically false. We are part of the universe the hence idea of Laplacian determinism is wrong even if the universe is deterministic and Einstein's model of a block universe is correct. — ssu

No, we do not have free will. The properties of our universe and the non-deterministic properties of quantum mechanics do not change the operation of our consciousness. Even random pulls of quantum randomness within our brains are not enough to affect our deterministic choices. Human's have a tendency to attribute our ego more abilities than it has. We are still a rudimentary consciousness that operates on prediction operation and thus we choose based on deterministic events in nature. It is a human arrogance, akin to religious belief that drives us to attribute ourselves free will in the sense its used. The randomness we see in quantum mechanics do not counteract deterministic macro events. Everything gravitates towards deterministic outcomes in which any deviant random event in quantum mechanics ends up too weak to affect the macro. Quantum mechanics are probabilistic, but it's false to think that this probability enable novel random events outside of the most probable outcomes and the scales at which such deviant random events happen on are so small that even the slightest interaction erases it and forms a bias towards the most probable.

Our consciousness isn't "hacking" our choices beyond this probabilistic behavior and even if it were to, it would not be enough to form large scale conscious decisions that exist unrelated to any events that affect our consciousness.

Good description. Being a good prediction machine makes one fit, but being fit isn't necessarily critical to a successful AI, at least not in the short term. Should development of AI be guided by a principle of creating a better prediction machine? — noAxioms

I think the way to successful AI, or rather to an AI that is able to think for itself and experience self-reflection, requires it to "grow" into existence. We're tapping into this with our training operations, but we require more guidelines for it to follow in order to create the same feedback loop that our consciousness have to control our hallucination of experience. We essentially hallucinate reality, and in turn our senses verify and this goes on in a constant loop that grounds us. We need to replicate that in a way that is constantly updating the system.

Other than that, we are seeing seeds of consciousness as these models are operating on prediction already. It tries to predict information based on memory and training data, but it does not have any guiding principles to why it should predict something in a certain way. If we are functioning on the idea that we need to predict a possible danger on the other side of a hill when out hunting, that guides us to predict possible dangers, we use our memory and stored information to predict the likelihood of there being danger beyond the hill. The guiding principle are forces like survival driving our emotional reaction to start predicting and our experience driving the confidence in that prediction. The question is how we can give machines similar guiding principles to guide their predictions.

Right now we are the ones guiding them with our prompts and thus there's neither an internal input for that predictive reasoning or an external consequence after that predictive reasoning.

I'd say that we already have the foundation of predictive thinking built into these models. For instance, the o1 model already shows significant reasoning ability compared to previous models, but that's only because of the guiding principles it's built around. It still uses the same basic predictive model as the 4o model.

The two are not mutually exclusive. It can be both. — noAxioms

Yes. The only thing that truly separate the organic entity from the mechanical replica is how we as humans categorize. In the eye of the universe, they're the same thing.

Can this headline be answered by the word "no"?

NYEOS

or

YNEOS

Is Hinchliffe's Rule True?

Yet understanding why something works is crucial. And many times even our understanding can be false, something which modern science humbly and smartly accepts by only talking of scientific theories, not scientific laws. We being wrong about major underlying issues doesn't naturally prevent us innovative use of something.

Just look how long people believed fire being one of the basic elements, not a chemical reaction, combustion. How long have we've been able to create fire before modern chemistry? A long time. In fact, our understanding has changed so much that we've even made the separation between our modern knowledge, chemistry, from the preceding endeavor, alchemy.

Now when we have difficulties in explaining something, disagreements just what the crucial terms mean, we obviously have still more to understand that we know. When things like intelligence, consciousness or even learning are so difficult, it's obvious that there's a lot more to discover. Yet to tell just why a combustion engine works is easy and we'll not get entangled into philosophical debates. Not as easily, at least. — ssu

It's important, but not needed for creating a superintelligence. We might only need to put the initial state in place and run the operation, observing the superintelligence evolve through the system without us understanding exactly why it happens or how it happens.

As per other arguments I've made in philosophies of consciousness, I'm leaning towards emergence theories the most. That advanced features and events are consequences of chaotic processes forming emergent complexities. Why they happen is yet fully understood, but we see these behaviors everywhere in nature and physics.

The question is if the emergent behaviors arise from pure chaotic systems or if there are certain controllable conditions that can be adjusted to form certain emergent behaviors. I'm leaning towards the latter since the mathematical principles in physics, constants like the cosmological constant and things like the golden ratio seem to provide a certain tipping point for emergent behaviors to occur.

And if that's true in physics, I'd generally consider nature overall operating under similar basics, including the formation of consciousness.

Replicating that in synthetic form means trial and error on the initial states in order to find the emergent behavior that ends up being the formation of a thinking mind.

But it would not need us to fully understand why it happens.

In a similar way we could describe us human being mechanical machines as Anthropic mechanism defines us. That too works in many cases, actually. But we can see the obvious differences with us and mechanical machines. We even separate the digital machines that process data are different from mechanical machines. But it was all too natural in the 17th Century to use that insight of the present physics to describe things from the starting point of a clockwork universe. — ssu

Everything is nature. Everything operates under physical laws. What is a machine compared to an organic machine with the same function? A mechanically built simulation of an organic function that operates under the same conditions of physical forces.

If we were able to mechanically replicate the exact operation of every physical part of our brain, mind and chemistry, did we create a machine or is it indistinguishable from the real organic thing?

Where is the line drawn? It's easy to be drawn for now, but philosophically, where's the line drawn?

Arbitrarily, the spiritual ones object to the notion of us being the same as such a machine, but there's no rational line that can be drawn.

Physical reality, is shared between machines and organic beings and the closer each get to the other's operation and behavior, the less a line can be drawn to distinguish between the two.

Matter is matter.

When you just follow algorithms, you cannot create something new which isn't linked to the algorithms that you follow. What is lacking is the innovative response: first to understand that here's my algorithms, they seem not to be working so well, so I'll try something new is in my view the problem. You cannot program a computer to "do something else", it has to have guidelines/an algorithm just how to act to when ordered to "do something else". — ssu

The algorithms need to form the basics of operation, not the direction of movement. Meaning, algorithms that inform "weights" to which a behavior gravitates.

We are no different. Our genes and our chemical processes determine how we behave. A balanced person, in that physical regard, will operate within the boundaries of these "algorithms" of programming we all have. We try to fight against it, but mostly we're slaves to this programming whether we like it or believe it or not. Otherwise we would just be able to turn off our sexuality, our anxiety, our anger and sadness, but we can't. Trying to will create disturbing personalities and if the chemical balance or genes are damaged or faulty we can either get divergent minds or in the worst cases deeply disturbed minds and mental health issues that fundamentally blocks normal operation.

We are still able to operate with an illusion of free will within these boundaries. So the same goes for a synthetic intelligence. It needs to have an algorithm that guides behavior and operation, but enable free operation within those boundaries.

All physical processes, in physical reality, are only able to operate within the boundaries of something. If there were no boundaries, there would be nothing holding reality together in our dimensional soup of existence. Without boundaries, the matter of my body would just merge with the matter of everything else around me.

Freedom is only possible within a boundary that defines where that freedom can exist, and in relation to what.

I think the major problem is that our understanding is limited to the machines that we can create and the logic that we use when creating things like neural networks etc. However we assume our computers/programs are learning and not acting anymore as "ordinary computers", in the end it's controlled by program/algorithm. Living organisms haven't evolved in the same way as our machines. — ssu

But we invent things all the time that utilize properties of physics that we're not yet fully able to explain. Some of the properties and emerging effects of neural networks are unknown to us because we can't explain the causal chains that produce a certain effect as the complexity is mathematically astronomical.

To say that we can only create something that is on par with the limits of our knowledge and thinking is not true. Either by these complexities, but also how we've accidentally invented things in history and through those inventions we've formed new understandings. It's not always a causal line from theory to practice, some times we invent something that in turn informs us to form a theory.

And what we're seeing in scientific work on understanding the mind, part of the research into neural networks have been returning knowledge back into the theories of the mind. I remember that I proposed something like this back when AI started to take off, and as it happens, the research in this field of science started to form similar theories about the mind. Mainly, the most up to date theory is "predictive coding".

The concept I had and that has found support in science recently, is that our brains are mostly just prediction machines. It's basically a constantly running prediction that is, in real time, getting verifications from our senses and therefore grounds itself to a stable consistency and ability to navigate nature. We essentially just hallucinate all the time, but our senses ground that hallucination. Whenever we take something like psychedelic drugs, it severs this grounding function and our verification slips away, making us hallucinate in the sense of the word we're used to. It's also why dreams occur as they do, since the only thing that verifies our hallucinations are the memories we already have, constantly creating a feedback loop that can't be grounded. But such dreams are necessary in order to fine tune and calibrate our predictions and verification loop.

So, in essence, it might be that we are not at all that different from how these AI models operate. The missing aspect is the real time nature of the verification and adaption. What we've created with these AI models are basically a locked and frozen version of our mind, trained on material that forms a memory bank, but a memory bank that isn't updating and a lack of verification method that keeps it grounded. The verification methods we use on it is in the form of the algorithms of processing it uses. Basically, they're told how to ground their answers, which is risking hallucinations constantly.

The solution would be to solve the real time issue. These models need to have a fluid training function, enabling it to continue to train its own foundational training data as a memory function in real time, while having a sensory grounding function keeping them grounded to logical and factual outputs. With the amount of computing power needed to train models today, I'm not sure how this is supposed to be possible without a tenfold improvement in computing power or more, but if we're to create a truly human-like intelligence, it would need to be able to change itself on the fly and move away from pre-established algorithm-boundraries and locked training data foundations as well as getting a stream of reality-verified sensory data to ground them.

But if we want to experimentally verify how our own mind and brain works, it may very well be through these AI systems and how they operate. If the current predictive coding theory of the mind is correct, then it would be verified by simulating the exact nature of this process, which we pretty much have the blueprint for already.

The fact he's not in jail yet is proof of the corruption inherent in the US system. — Benkei

Corruption can be fought by enough engagement and pushback by the people. But it seems the people don't care enough either about the corruption or Trump's actions.

Where's the push back? Where's the demands? The outrage? The damn revolution?

Maybe the nation need to update the constitution to incorporate all the improvements into democracy and government that has occurred since the last 240 years in favor of protecting democracy and the competence of the government?

There are ways to do this... but the people... don't... care.

I will never criticize the people in power more than the people letting themselves be governed by such people. It's the people's responsibility to take care of a democracy for the people. Just relaxing and being lazy towards caring for it will roll out the carpet for bad actors to corrupt it over time.

And there will always be bad actors, outliers that are absolutely power hungry and unfit to be in power. So it is the responsibility of the people to organize and make sure those outliers never seize power and to do it in time before it's too late, as well as install regulations and laws that prevent the abuse of power by a small entity.

If there's any fundamental part of civilization that protect the people from abusers of power, it is the people themselves caring for that power to be handled with care.

If someone has the ability to seize such power as to absolutely put society under their boot, there had to be a long series of events that placed them in that situation. Events populated with unthinking, uninterested and complacent people rolling out the carpet for them until it's too late.

There should be at least 100 million people marching for a change of the system, against corruption and to change the system to a better one. But there isn't and won't be, until someone in power, abuses that power too far.

I am not a soul, and I am not my brain. I am a whole, conscious, physical unit. — Kurt Keefner

With all scientific research at the moment behind it... yes.

Like with the recent reconstructed fly brain in a computer that's been in the news; it seems that the only way to "upload" this consciousness or "soul" is to copy all aspects and simulate the whole entity of the fly, in order for it to be a direct copy of its consciousness. In essence, the idea of separating the conscious mind, the "soul" require to copy the "body" as well, and so we can only copy our consciousness by copying the whole.

Either mind is part of body, or body is part of mind. The point is the distinction needs to be made as to what the difference between these two are - IF it can be stated. — Manuel

I'd say that the problem essentially lies in how we linguistically differentiated between mind and body in a time of religion. The consequence of this echoes far into modern science where we still treat the two as somewhat separate. But the arguments for separation comes from the illusion of separation; the emotional sensation of our body being something other than our ethereal and abstract "inner self". And as we all know, our senses and our emotions are the worst foundation for rational reasoning.

In medicine, we've seen this separation play out to the detriment of patients. On one hand, therapists and psychologists or doctors have given them prescription medicines which alter the chemicals in the brain, but that's not enough. On the other hand they've attempted to just treat the mind through rational reasoning and therapy, ignoring the effect that the chemical system has on the mind.

Both of these sides ignoring the other have failed to fully treat people with mental illness. It's only just recently we've been handling both as a single treatment seriously. Treating the body and mind as a whole entity.

Because it's an ouroboros. The physical body influences the mind through its genetics, chemicals and substances; and the mind influences the body's functions. It's a closed loop that cannot be separated without severely altering the psychology of the being.

Imagine someone with a healed serious injury to his body. It affects his personality, his opinions, his social sphere and experience of himself. If you were to cut off his head and place it on another body (if that would work), the entirety of his consciousness will alter through this new body. All of a sudden there are functions that work that didn't before, a body shape that is different as an experience, chemicals that affect the mind based on the genetics of that body and so on. It would alter that person's mind to the point of the original consciousness not being the same anymore. We know this due to what we know about how the physical body affects the mind.

What then is the mind separated from the body, if that happens? Only an empty template; a prediction system that cannot value its predictions through chemical feedback.

And then there's this: — unenlightened

Unfortunately, that new finding has blown things out of proportion in science media. We already know that quantum mechanical processes occur in biological systems and it's nice that there's some evidence for that happening in us, but people falling into the conclusion that consciousness is definitely a quantum mechanical process missed that this is not proven yet. And seen as how neural networks simulate similar behaviors, it may just be that these quantum mechanical processes are necessary for neurons to function properly, but a single neuron function does not equal consciousness as far as we know today. We still seem to need the sum of all parts to produce consciousness.

Reminds me about the recent news of Princeton team copying a fruit fly brain. And how science influencers and media started talking about it in the form of some cyberpunk uploading of our mind into a computer. But the problem is that just a copy isn't enough, we need to understand how the chemicals that flow through the brain affect the brain, but we don't know yet what the "cocktail effect" of many different chemical compounds do with out brain so how do we simulate it enough to effectively give the full experience of a fruit fly? And if microtubules are part of the neuron function, and that quantum mechanical process isn't accounted for, the neurons might not act between each other in the way needed for accurate simulation.

Is that so? Got a manual? — Wayfarer

I'm referring to just the common psychology of how people reason. We don't start with factual cold logic, we tend to think creatively first and apply logic second. Kind of like letting go of all the animals and then building a fence around where these animals want to be, not where you want them to be. As a half-baked analogy.

I've read several arguments here on the forum where people come to logical conclusion like: "Therefore, there must exist an entity, the so-called mind, that can freely decide." or "This proves that god exists" or ”Logical proof that the hard problem of consciousness is impossible to solve"

Is it possible that with solid premises and correct logical steps, we cannot always accept the conclusion? — Carlo Roosen

Conclusions like "this proves that god exists" is not a conclusion out of a chain of logic, but a chain of logical fallacies.

What about all these discussions in metaphysics & epistemology? Could it be that these topics cannot be addressed logically? Somebody must have said a few words about this already, I guess? — Carlo Roosen

The reason why such discussions never ends in an objective and final conclusion is because they either consist of paradoxical conclusions, or we do not have enough understanding of physics or how our mind works to be able to conclude anything final, thus it becomes more a discussion around the premises and which argument has the most valid premises as they might sometime hint at the most likely probable conclusion.

And to counter-question; is there anything better than using logical reasoning for arriving at conclusions? In order to avoid biases and fallacies? If not using that, then what could possibly get closer to anything objective, classified as truth, or most probable? I tend to see these types of questioning of logical reasoning, using the fact that not everything can be summed up in a logical chain of reasoning down to a solid conclusion; to be some kind of evidence for logical reasoning not to be trusted.

In the end, it mostly looks like attempts by those who feel their opinions trumped by logic to try and dispel logic as a tool of thought and reasoning, and thereby give more validation to their illogical and just random opinions by somehow bringing down the logical arguments to some kind of pseudo-equality with the illogical ones.

o, would you consider the proper way of doing philosophy mostly conceived as with the analytic school, as philosophy proper or are we still struggling with how philosophy should be done? — Shawn

I follow the idea that philosophy is "soft science". It requires a starting point that is abstract, lacking rules and logic, creatively critical, like a stream of consciousness around a certain topic, bouncing back and forth between the specific and the holistic.

But then it needs rigor and structure. If the ideas that flow cannot flow down into a more concentrated logic and find a grounded state, then it has to be dismissed.

A problem with the analytical school or similar methods can be that it demands so much initial logic that it limits how the brain finds new paths of ideas. It's one of the reasons behind Einstein's "thought labs". A place to play with ideas before solidifying them with proof, logic and math. Philosophers who get stuck in just the analytical rarely find new paths forward in their thinking.

The problem with other methods are that they seem to feature an inherit contempt for the analytical and thus they abandon all logic and apply a kind of "anything goes", inviting all sorts of biases and fallacies.

Most debates seem to just be about the methods rather than the subject being discussed. One interlocutor criticizing the other's way of conducting philosophy based on the above problems, and no common ground is found.

I think the "method" needs to be formed around how our brains actually work. We do not come up with anything analytical from the get go. We form abstractions and wild, illogical concepts through creativity and only when we've reached a point of confusion do we apply rigorous analytical logic to test our ideas.

It's only when we let go of our analytical side that we can think freely, but it's only when we apply our analytical side we can establish concepts as closer to truth.

There are no "best schools" of thought. There's only one way our brain works and it's better to follow that and then apply the analytical tools that exist in order to present ideas to the world that has sound logic for all and not just yourself.