Yes, but I was going for a little bit more than just oppourtuinistic defences. — TheWillowOfDarkness

Ah, sorry, I didn't read your posts in thread. I just saw the same old shit from @NOS4A2 (also shit I used to say in this context) and wanted to chime in with the argument that convinced me to stop being an ass and start seeing things structurally.

That I can use what you've written, with word substitutions and minor edits to preserve grammar, to defend calling people racial slurs if you feel like it should probably disturb you.

Do you believe the same or would you refer to him as the n-word to others? — NOS4A2

Besides being ugly, the hubbub over the (censorship of the) n-word is not the use of it, but the demand for it, that people must conform to your language even if they know it to be untrue...

Besides being ugly, the hubbub over gender pronouns is not the use of these terms, but the demand for them, that people must conform to your language even if they know them to be untrue. — NOS4A2

I take offence to your use of that term. Do I demand you speak otherwise? No. — NOS4A2

They can demand anything they want. By the same token I can refuse. None of this involves casting aspersions or denying anyone’s existence.

, it's very dangerous to do — aporiap

Which is part of why it's frustrating that people find it "so obvious". There's a whole theory of perception required just to look at what the "features" of our experience really are, and where they come from.

Edit: so just for an example. There's change blindness, like in the door study. Something that phenomenal character usually has associated with it is that we are aware of the phenomenal character or that it is somehow accessible within the experiential state. Whatever makes the guy giving directions in the door study not notice (not be aware) that the person he's giving directions to changes shows that what perceptual features are accessible; those which partake strongly in the phenomenal character of experience; are strongly context sensitive. The context down-weights the relevance of visual feature changes in the guy giving directions' environmental model because of what he's currently doing and how he's doing it. Even then, the result would not hold (probably) if the people looked sufficiently different.

So, we can't even go from "visual processing" to "phenomenal character of vision" without auxilliary contextual information. With the right context, say classifying images for presence of red, even "red quale" might make sense!

single phenomenal fabric prior to incorporation into a unified conscious experience. — aporiap

Yeah! I don't think perceptual features (motion detection, colour sensitivity) are generated as a unified whole. What I want is for people to pay more attention to the generating mechanisms for perceptual features, and not to do so a-priori like with "red quale". I care where the distinctions come from because I want the accounts to be right.

there are separable elements — aporiap

Definitely. So my desire is to see accounts which look like: (stimulus information types/distinctions) <=> (perceptual feature types/distinction) <=> (information processing system types/distinctions) <=> (first person experience types/distinctions); systematic inter relations between these phenomena, studied. Not:

(a priori conceptions of experience types) = > (first person experience types/distinctions)

And I certainly wouldn't like (a priori conceptions of experience types) => [ (stimulus information types/distinctions) <=> (perceptual feature types/distinction) <=> (information processing system types/distinctions) <=> (first person experience types/distinctions)]. That's such a lazy waste.

Regarding qualia, wouldn't you say experiences involve perceptions that are distinct from whatever causes those perceptions 'out there'. I mean you can stimulate a part of the brain and shut off or induce a color of blue, or the sight of a number etc even when there isn't one. So empirically it looks like what you see is not exactly the same as what's in front of you. Doesn't that provide unambiguous evidence for first person qualia [i.e. percepts]? — aporiap

I never wanted to deny that there is a phenomenal character of experience. What I picked a bone with, to my reckoning, was the way people split up experiences using the word. If you are quite happy to label facets of phenomenal character "qualia", for some suitable sense of "facet", this is fine with me.

What is not fine with me, say, is an arbitrary division between "colour qualia" and "shape qualia", say, without some account of why the division makes sense. In that example, we do perceive colours and shapes differently; colourblind people can agree with non-colourblind people on the shape of objects perceived differently; but I don't think it is warranted to go from this to thinking of "colour quales" and "shape quales" as distinct facets of phenomenal character; the colourblind person and the non-colourblind people still don't see the object's colours without its shape or its shape without colours.

So, the mechanism that contrasts the two cases is based off of bodily differences in how people process visual information (which is sensible), but why would that distinction immediately propagate into (be relevant for) distinctions in lived experience of each agent between colour experience types and shape experience types?

I'm picking a bone with an inference (style of inference, really) tacitly drawn when using the phrase. It has presumptions that are worth challenging.

We're tracking something, but any and all descriptions of that something are themselves just models, and there's only one player in that game. — Isaac

I think it's very easy to forget that modelling is relational. It's a two term thing. The model might be embedded or represented in some fashion; instantiated somehow; but it being implemented in us distinct from it losing its relational character. It doesn't cease to be a relation because it's instantiated, no more than "X is in a loving relationship with Y" (X R Y) is reducible to "X is (in love with Y)" (P(X)) and "Y is (in love with X)" (Q(Y)).

OK, so take light as an example. One model it's just the opposite of dark, the stuff that we see, visible light. But that's just a model-dependent division of a wider electromagnetic spectrum no reason (apart from our eyes) why 430-770THz has any external world significance — Isaac

Vision guides action. We do a lot with our eyes, just as much as stuff that reflects in that frequency range is relevant to us now, it was relevant to us in the past. We probably don't need to see in UV or IR because there weren't sufficiently strong ecological or sexual pressures driving selection in our ancestors for that. We have bright/dark in old primate ancestors - which makes sense for mostly nocturnal animals, but when we no longer were mostly active at night; there are simply more active and relevant reflectance profiles in objects around us, more light gets reflected just because there's more ambient light during the day; so if we're active in the day, greater visual environmental modelling capacity makes sense... Going from monochrome to colour? That's a lot of distinctions to act upon. We can distinguish rather a lot in our environment with our vision because it is useful for us as a population to do so.

I think it's easier to see models as relational without concerning ourselves specifically with humans, since we're ludicrously complex. A world without models being inherently relational would not have had the grass stripe the zebra, darken nocturnal predators, or make stick insects sticky!

Yes absolutely. I fear we might be talking past one another here. — Isaac

Probably!

I'm not in any sense arguing that there are not external states, nor that our internal states aren't tightly connected to them. — Isaac

Aye! Glad. Sometimes it's hard to distinguish whether someone's making epistemological or ontological claims in cases like this. I was definitely misreading you as some kind of 'external world constructivist' or something. Interpretive bias on my part.

What I'm concerned to avoid is an assumption that our phenomenal experience of our sense representations marks any natural or real division of those external states. — Isaac

I agree that it we don't track all the time, just most of the time we do as far as environmental stimuli are concerned. Keeping ourselves in touch with our body/mind and our environment is what our active perception does (ontologically), but the conceptual representations active perception generates do not thereby have a basis in reality (no epistemological guarantees from introspection or conception); there's always room for misapprehension, error, and the phenomenal character of our internal states being populated with representational entities that don't track the mechanisms that generate them (like an idea like "the will", which is sort of a conceptual feature analogous to a perceptual feature).

That defining this measure (as opposed to that) is similarly placing divisions in some general field of 'states of affairs' which are intrinsically linked to our form of life, and in this case, the biology with which we carry it out. — Isaac

The neatest way of placing divisions (incorporating or representing differences) is by using those in our environment. Like, when we see stuff, it's usually because it's there and reflecting light. Environmental stimuli typically have propensities to be perceived in the way they do; they provide the basis for features consistent with and driven by their character.

And this is not arbitrary definition. It's strongly correlated with the very somatic feedback which modulates our perceptual experience. At what angle does a very steep floor become a wall? The angle at which we can no longer walk on it without falling over. Would spiders distinguish between floors and walls? — Isaac

It's also strongly correlated with the floor's physical structure. So there's no necessary connection between the somatic component of our self model and the environmental stimulus, but in usual circumstances our actions and internal states are in strong accord with our environment.

The floor's steepness induces different features in our self model; there's positional adjustments we feel that mirror the floor gradient. We can see the composite of its topography, colour and how it distributes over space. It's definitely there, and we represent facets of it with perceptual features (and derived states of belief). We don't see our visual field, the visual field is a seeing relation between a body (and its history) and its environment.

In the neural model paper you linked me; there are external states with their own dynamics and outputs which are then integrated into ourselves, and modified by our actions. The external states are not phenomenal, nor are the effects of our actions on our environment.

We've already decided what a 'box' is prior to our investigation of its essential properties, otherwise we wouldn't know what the parameters are to our imagination. — Isaac

I guess one way to get at the distinction I'm driving at is through the relationship of a perceptual feature to an environmental stimulus. How an environmental stimulus works is different from how it inspires a perceptual feature in an agent. The first how regards the environment; represented through a procedural description of a process in it; the second how regards the relationship of an agent (or agents) to environments.

Out of the jargon, running on a road, slope steepness (environmental stimulus) is felt in body posture change (perceptual feature).

Gotta have both, surely? Can't collapse represented into representation or modelled into model or signified into signifier.

2. Program A: subconsciousness & memory -> feeds into 3. — Zelebg

5. Program B: consciousness & free will -> feeds into 6.& 2. — Zelebg

What concepts will you lean on, just how exactly do you disagree? — Zelebg

For the purposes of the intended discussion do you care about how A and B work?

I take all these to be essentially equivalent. — bert1

Fair enough!

= quale — bert1

Give me some examples?

We cannot reduce down the current experience into it's component parts without accepting that the act of such reduction is itself mediated by the very biases and preconceptions we're trying to investigate. — Isaac

It seems a tight needle to thread. There's no guarantee that our representation of our environment's structure corresponds to the structure of phenomenal character associated with it, nor that retrospection using those representations allows us even to describe what representational mechanism made that phenomenal character. But nevertheless, we don't need this guarantee as a blank cheque; we don't need non-representational access to our environment to generate representational knowledge of it, precisely because representation is such a relationship between us and our environment.

This undermines the force of necessity accompanying phenomenological description; it's no longer an a-priori conceptual structure imbued with transcendental necessity through immediately discerning its own properties; and turns it into, like any representational mechanism, a machine for making conjectures.

We have to think of introspection and derived conceptual analysis as one experiment among others, as far as our inner workings are concerned.

Do we see properties? Give an account of properties, and we'll check.

I don't want to drown you in reading material, but the idea is explained in this paper. It may answer some of your concerns. — Isaac

Eh, I'm still a noob in this, I'll take any free education I can get. The forward/backward propagation steps in Box 3 in the Frisk paper are probably worth me reading more closely too (with the neural implementation of gradient descent through message passing in mind).

@Swan @Mark Dennis

In Soviet Russia pissing contest stops you. Now.

I'm struggling to think of an example where we, as humans, might verbalise a concept which is completely absent in its entirety in other social animals. — Isaac

Because this is also interesting, @StreetlightX had a thread on this at some point in the past. The gist of it was that relational concepts admit of a degree of abstraction; "analogy (is) the core of cognition" as Hofstadter puts it. Monkeys can learn relationships between tokens quite easily (this is red, that is red), but they find it much harder to learn relationships between generated types (this is coloured, that is coloured) or (this is a pair, that is a pair) (in Street's example); they also seem to need a token based learning exercise for more abstract concepts. I think it would be quite surprising if a monkey could be taught what tuple is in the general case; there probably aren't enough tokens to serve as an external memory bank for an arbitrarily relationally complex abstract object for monkeys to learn it.

But I suppose that depends on the scope of "in its entirety"; abstracting a type from tokens is something monkeys can do, abstracting higher order types into abstract objects to synthesise even higher order types is probably not on the cards arbitrarily. Humans struggle with tuples (until we learn what's in 'em doesn't matter, nor does their length...).

I doubt all of our precursors would struggle though? The boundary between human and human precursor (in terms of cognitive development) seems pretty fuzzy.

Well on an ecological level, we simply wouldn't behave as efficiently as a creature which had a clear answer, on an epistemic level, how would we experience that with some means of modelling it... — Isaac

I like this conjecture a lot. Explaining the unity of consciousness in terms of our body's self modelling processes as realising a single action-sensation-internal state from a space of possible ones is pretty neat. We must act in some specified way, and that specification coincides with a collapse (through sampling) into a unique state.

Yes. The great thing about the free-energy approach is that it gives both a mechanism and an evolutionary story to the Bayesian modelling system which we already have a good idea the brain uses. — Isaac

One thing I'm generally apprehensive about with Bayesian brain approaches is the parameter optimisation mechanism. A lot of effort is put into the neural implementation of the modelling procedure, but less seems to be put into the neural implementation of the optimisation mechanism.

A rough guideline for how this works is that there is some neuroscientific model $M(\theta)$, where $M$ is the total model (the whole dependency loop in the referenced paper) and $\theta$ are the model parameters. In order to make a prediction of a specific value; say the ridge width in your example; the model has to be mapped to a specific set of parameters $\hat{\theta}$ which then allow the model to output a prediction based on the mapping; our predictions of the ridge width at a given time. This mapping is called a point estimation procedure.

One strength of the paper (again, if I read it right) is that it dodges the problem of "which point is output from a probabilistic model for our action?" by having random sampling from a posterior distribution obtained by variational inference (what sampling procedure though? How is it in the wetware?). But the optimisation; model choice steps; in constraining the M3 functional forms are conjectured to work through steepest gradient descent.

Without any math detail, steepest gradient descent is like pouring water onto a landscape defined by a function; a valley with elevations and contour lines; it travels down into the valley down the (locally) steepest slopes, the 'flow of water' is the iteration of the algorithm from step to step down the valley towards its basin. Unlike in nature, the water's movement needs to 'know' which directions are which and what they mean. In the algorithm, the "valley" is a cost function, whose "elevation" and "angle from the bottom on a contour" are parameters (directions) which are optimised over; there is also some geometry applied to the directions; how far is what from what. Steepest gradient descent finds the closest thing it can to the minimum of the cost function with some parametrisation and some geometry.

It is plausible that if we had complete model specification of the human mind, it would not really matter so long as some part of its dynamics implemented the steepest gradient descent. But whether and how the process internally optimises with steepest gradient descent is left unconsidered.

This is kinda first world problems at this point, considering it's usually easier to model something first then pick an appropriate estimation procedure, but I'm still a bit skeptical of "model first; then estimate" when both are running simultaneously in the same wetware. On a computer, you input the model and the optimisation constraints (cost function, also space geometry if you're pedantic) to find the parameter estimates; our brains seem to model and estimate at the same time.

This is alleviated in the paper by having parameters sampled from models, rather than deterministically outputted from them (if I've read it right, again) globally through some optimisation algorithm, so I can see an argument that specifying 'the general statistical structure' of our mind 'before' looking at how it estimates itself is a better approach, I'm just suspicious that something of fundamental importance is being missed.

because they are made of something else. — OmniscientNihilist

Silicon lattices are made of silicon. They can still change.

nd if they are made of something else then they are not really themselves — OmniscientNihilist

Silicon lattices are not silicon lattices since they are made of silicon.

or what they are made of was merely impersonating something else — OmniscientNihilist

Silicon impersonating silicon.

fooled you — OmniscientNihilist

Silicon lattices being anything but their constituent silicon is an illusion dependent upon a perspective.

for example: i shape some gold into a bird and give it to you. what do you have? a bird or gold? — OmniscientNihilist

A gold bird. A bird made of gold. Gold shaped into a bird.

A great sage does not stink of Zen. You stink of Zen.

It's by no means a single event; it's an order, a pattern, that shows up in events, that in some sense 'governs' them. And 'self-organising', which is one of the questions implicit in the OP, is a vexed question in its own right. The point about the anthropic principle is that the process by which organic matter was created, required first of all that stars went through their entire life-cycle. ('We are stardust'.) — Wayfarer

Zoom back in time to stellar accretion; what makes you say life must happen, rather than being very likely to? How could you possibly distinguish a universe governed by necessities from one governed by the accumulation of chances? What could happen next appears retroactively as what must have happened.

I'm just waiting for the comet (metaphorically or literally) to strike.

"What changes is not real, what is real does not change." -Nisargadatta — OmniscientNihilist

What I take from that is that you never put the bong down.

off your mind and onto reality — OmniscientNihilist

...

Put the bong down.

shift your point of view — OmniscientNihilist

To where. :P

The point is that there is far greater likelihood of the magnitude of billions to one - of order not arising; that the chance of order arising spontaneously from chaos is incalculably slight. So it’s not an equal bet. And what kind of philosophy says ‘well it just happened’? — Wayfarer

You make it sound like "order" is a single event, and "chaos" is a single event that happens when order doesn't. In reality, lots of stuff is self organising on the back of this chaos.

The oldest structures we know of (afaik) are primordial stars; which still took about 100 million years to form. Think of it. A whole universe's collective activity takes 100 million years for something interesting (large stable structures) to happen. That must make interesting things incredibly unlikely. But primordial stellar accretion is still a process, once underway and all else held equal it has a propensity to continue absent sufficiently strong external perturbations.

That's the dance of contingency and necessity; stuff is contingent and full of flux; the flux has propensities (contingencies) to do stuff which refine their trajectories (actualities), limiting their options (necessities) absent external factors disrupting everything (the contingency of necessity). This whole thing is as it must be ontologically (the necessity of contingency).

It is a strange universe, a strange Milky Way, perpetually fine tuned for life but still populated by world destroying comets.

This article gives an overview. — Isaac

Super interesting article.

This can be seen by expressing the free-energy as surprise
plus a [Kullback Leibler] divergence between the recognition and conditional densities. Because this divergence is always positive, minimising free-energy makes the recognition density an approximation to the true posterior probability. This means the system implicitly infers or represents the causes of its sensory samples in a Bayesoptimal fashion. At the same time, the free-energy becomes a tight bound on surprise, which is minimised through action. — from the article

If I've read the article right, we have that actions and anticipations are both generated to minimise predictive surprise of their motivating model. In turn, actions and internal states are sampled from the internal model and used for this predictive task, then re-incorporated as representations (sufficient statistics) of previous states (specifically their parameters). Predictive surprise and entropy are tightly related, and entropy minimisation is linked to energy expenditure; it makes sense that the relation between our embodied minds and their environment would be an entropy minimising process in a non-incidental manner, as that's an efficient solution to acting in accord with environmental and bodily regularities - utilising both to act.

How this is postulated to work in practice is set out in Box 1.

These is an overall process of external states, sensations, internal states and actions.

External states at time t: are samples from a model of form M1 based on previous external states at t-1 and actions at t-1 with some error.
Sensations at time t: are samples from a model of form M2 based on external states at time t and actions at time t-1 with some error.
Internal states at time t: are samples from a model of form M3 based on internal states at time t-1 and sensations at time t. The specific model of form M3 which is formed at this stage is an approximate minimizer over all models of type M3 with respect to criterion C1.
Actions at time t: are samples from a model of form M3 based on internal states at time t and sensations at time t. The specific model of form M3 which is formed at this stage is an approximate minimizer over all models of type M3 with respect to criterion C2.

(Edit: something interesting here is that precisely what counts as a "time step" is just... one part of the process feeding into another, the paper doesn't write it out like that, it does it in terms of dependency arrows.

Edit 2: another thing presenting it as time steps under emphasises is that a perturbation can intervene at any one of the processes and will propagate its effects through the arrows; if a perturbation happens in, say, the sensations component, it will propagate to the internal state and action components without the intermediary action step, but also with mediation through the action step. Imagining, say, holding an electric fence makes the hand clench up, it might well propagate to the actions component as the clenching reflex but also the internal state as "i'm being electrocuted" or "what the fuck")

Criterions C1 and C2 are functions of model type M3; specifically they minimise the free energy.
In both, there is a representation of the previous internal states and the current external states, a "recognition density", that represents the causal structure of the environment in terms of change propensities given interventions (our actions and environmental activity); this is called Q. Then there is a representation of (the representation of) the previous sensations and the representation of the current external states, which is like a current 'self model' (our anticipations and memories and presence at the time), this is called P. Both criteria add the mismatch of P from Q (the kullback liebler divergence) to the surprise (informational discrepancy) of P given the previous self model.

C1 minimises (the above paragraph) over the panoply of internal states that have previously been sampled; an adjustment of our internal state to the current situation representation.

C2 minimises (the above paragraph) over the panoply of suggested actions that have been previously sampled; an adjustment of our behaviour to minimise the distinction between our model of the causal structure of our environment and our self model.

Our self model updates through a variational inference procedure.

The proposal I gave would have there being more than one functional form in the M3 class; and the functional forms would interact. Less parsimonious, messier. They may be consistent with each other depending on whether the models in M3 factorise over input sources; like partitioning a likelihood into different factors (say, a model for people in Africa and people in America for birth rates, the two being different; analogously a model for visual information and proprioceptory information being independently weighted).

What both emphasise is that our minds realise from a "set of available minds" consistent with its history.

Daivd Graeber - Debt: The First 5000 Years — StreetlightX

I've been reading this one on and off for a while. Tell me what you think of it plx!

However this topic is not just about sex but my "superstition" and the failure of my rationality when I have a degree which involved complex thorough reasoning and psychology. — Andrew4Handel

Before you learned to think critically and analyse stuff, you were still learning. It's not your fault that it's hard to challenge these things with reasoning; it's a blessing that you can analyse it, that gives you some tools to fight it. But it won't be refuted by a single knock down argument, it's not a proposition, it's a pattern of thought you've had the misfortune of getting rooted deep in you. Reasoning to fight it is more like house work than essay writing, thinking analytically like you do about it is a form of self care; it takes time.

I've had some therapy for sex stuff - related to shame, body image, and feelings of numbness/anhedonia during the act. One of the things they got me to do was pay very close attention to how sex stuff, even wanking, feels. How it feels to fantasise, what the bodily sensations are, what pleasures you. This was accompanied by being asked to pay more attention to how my body feels in general; just being present with the sensations.

It wasn't always a pleasant exercise, feeling how my body moved and what pleasured me was uncomfortable and even frightening at times, I really wanted to switch off from it. It was hard not to look away. Eventually worth it though - sex became a lot different, and less shameful. I felt less ashamed about my body (still working on it) and enjoyed being in it more (still working on that too).

Why are you quoting my posts and then editing them without any notification that you edited them (trolling), instead of answering a simple question I asked? — Harry Hindu

Why did you pretend to be a trans person in another thread you tried this crap in?

Go see a therapist? A sex therapist?

It'll be hard work, but it'll be worth it.

I think that would better be called an embodied cognition than an embodied concept, since animals do these kinds of things just as well as we do. — Janus

I think that's a nice corrective, but I don't want to throw the baby out with the bath water. I did consider writing "embodied cognition", but I didn't think that conveyed well (in context) that embodied cognition has sub processes that inter link. "an embodied cognition" might've been better.

I also wanted to portray the relevance of embodied cognition to conception; so using concept in both places seemed appropriate. Conception still leverages body stuff that we usually take as conceptually unrelated to it.

Logic. Your skin color only matters in biological/medical contexts (except between group vs within group variability when classifying by sociological race doesn't vindicate them as biologically relevant categories), and should not not matter in political/judiciary contexts (fiat equality vs equality of opportunity & systemic discrimination aside). — Harry Hindu

This is the typical "squeaky wheel gets the grease" political tactics where the loudest groups get the special treatment, while the silent majority gets their rights trampled on. — Harry Hindu

Why did those bloody abos get an apology when I didn't..

Then, have we not succeeded in complicating the rationally system without proper warrant? — Mww

I think what @Isaac is imagining as a concept is quite different from, in virtue of being a more general form of, ideas about what we do with rationality. Philosophical concepts like justice or modus ponens or "The Private Language Argument" are just one type of concept (I think) in what Isaac is discussing.

We can populate an entire philosophy through (rational/reflective) concepts, concept generating mechanisms (interpretive paradigms, ordinary language philosophy and deconstruction, say), conceptual links (logical inference, induction, ampliative reasoning). These concepts are for the most part articulable; we know of them, we can relate to them as (roughly) distinct objects or themes, we can write about them, discussion surrounding them allows them to propagate, research about involved topics allows the concept to grow. This is an apophantic domain. Broadly concerned with articulation in language; declaratives, knowing that, knowing how to reason; how to think rationally. This is typically the domain we study in epistemology (what are items of knowledge, how do we know what we know). It's the surface of a much deeper sea.

But that's just one type of concept (with this reading of it); if you try to articulate how you would catch a ball, you'd probably only be able to do something like; "Keep your eye on it, judge the distance and speed, raise your hand and make the best corrections you can to your position to grab the ball"; "judge the distance and speed" there isn't apophantic; it's pre-reflective even. We can't articulate that kind of concept so readily; it's a know-how, an embodied concept, requiring adaptive regulation between our body's state and the ball's state through how we process our senses and integrate information from all of 'em and about ourselves. The modes of linkage between the ball and our body are much different from the modes that link concepts in argument and rational thought. This is what lays below the surface.

When we reason, we do a lot of borrowing from what lays below the surface, and we do so without being aware of it. The kind of mechanism that notices a contradiction between propositions is probably a more abstract form of the kind of thing that notices a discrepancy between the ball and the position of my body; reasoning is (well, conjecture with some evidence) just one way of attenuating discrepancies and forecasting our actions.

Seeing the world from a purely apophantic viewpoint; an ontology of properties and objects, concepts, subjects and predicates, propositions and propositional content -minds and bodies even; misses a lot. And for analysing ourselves, it's a disastrous error; it stops us asking where all that shit comes from and how it works.

But when we reason, we can't avoid taking something similar to that perspective; but we can be aware of the blinkers it prediposes us to and cultivate habits of thought that circumvent them (hyper reflection). Moreover, it's not always relevant to think about this stuff: we don't need a neurological description of a bad argument to practice critical thinking. We're still active beings no matter how we describe ourselves.

What? I didn't understand the other quote either. — frank

That was from another other thread.

You're condoning the racial profiling of "white cops" as all possessing group-think - as if all white cops see race & color the same way - the way you do - because you are the one racially profiling people based on their "whiteness" - which is a genetic condition. — Harry Hindu

:rofl: If only we lived in a world where dragons actually did exist, or in a country where systematic racism did exist. — Harry Hindu

(previous thread)

If social constructions have very little to do with anything material, then how is it that they influence our social behaviors? — Harry Hindu

We already went over how one gets various identities. Your problem is that you are confusing biological real identities (being born with certain body parts and functions) with SHARED ASSUMPTIONS ABOUT THOSE IDENTITIES. Shared assumptions are not identities that one can assume for themselves, but are identities that are assumed by others about the individual, and our assumptions about people aren't always accurate. Isn't this the problem of generalizing people and putting them in boxes based on how they dress? Isn't that the definition of being biased and sexist?

I don't think he said that. His accusation was inconsistency. — frank

You're right. It's not just that. It's:

Your position is internally inconsistent.
But If it weren't, you (or the worldview you promote) exhibits the prejudice.

The Card Says "Moops".

(1) Harryhindu posts in a thread regarding a prejudice or systemic injustice.
(2) Harryhindu attacks all narratives which affirm the relevance of the prejudice and the existence of systemic injustice by trying to beat them at their own game: the people highlighting said prejudice or systemic injustice are the real prejudiced people.

Move along people, move along.

so habituated conceptual environments don't seem to have the same effect. — Isaac

My (broadly Humean) guess is that concepts typically are learned associations; iterated relations of relations of neural patterns (patterns of patterns..., patterns articulating previous patterns partially articulating previous patterns partially articulating...) that interface less strongly with the neural architecture for sensation. There's something about energy expenditure in thought and parts of the brain which are involved too (prefrontal cortex shit, an imagined - my fanfiction - neural basis for Kahnnemann's 2 system approach).

So my take is: concepts mediate and inspire bodily processes and comportments rather than being strongly (probabilistically) tied to the neural architecture involved with executing (most types) of them. Concepts; and the contexts they are articulated in; are reflective, usually calm, memory and imagination focussed (most of the time), so any strong feelings are likely to be felt as through a memory or an anticipation; if strong feeling happens it's probably leveraging some architectural shortcut (limbic shit, "that's unnatural" = "I am disgusted") or (non exclusively) intermediary strong association between cogitation and the other association schemes of neural patterns ("If I'm wrong on the internet my identity is a lie"). No one runs away from a keyboard in panic while typing, but guys do sometimes smash their computer in nerd rage.

"hey, why's my heart beating faster, there's no tiger I can see" and panicking about the difference between the autosomal information and the perceptual information and completely ignoring the conceptual information that would have made sense of it all. — Isaac

That's really cool. Do you think there's any correspondence with model averaging in stats, if you're familiar? If we imagine anticipation and memory as models of input states based on previous patterns of association; there might be more than one anticipation (model) running at once; a multithreading of thought-action chains (neural+sensorimotor impetus for the body's comportment, including thoughts) that originate in multiple places; these will amplify and die out in accordance with continual feedback (models learning different weights); but the feedback mechanism might 'get stuck' in a certain pattern of valuation. Edit: perhaps when, say, two patterns (which are models in this analogy) generate predictions (anticipations) that are "valued" very highly by each other? (edit: analogy breaks down a lot here, models and loss functions... stupid loss functions).

Edit: oooh, random thought, if there are lots of models permeating the brain at once, any proposed model could be evaluated relative to any other one in terms of difference in predictions, and we'd get a domination effect if the models modulated eachothers' behaviour to be more in accord with what the 'most typical' model was proposing - so we model until we have annihilated differences in expectations/anticipations (sources of panic) coming from aberrantly proposed models. The hypochondriac's situation model down weights any mere conceptual mediation; it differs too strongly from the anticipations generated through the autosomal and perceptual decoupling), so 'forcing oneself to think' contrary to the situation doesn't do much (maybe the multithreadeded bits don't always implicate themselves in the bits that generate our phenomenal awareness... uncountable subselves appearing and dying to the routine of our personality).

Probably the same demographic attends. We just remember the exemplary and contrast it to the usual.

but the brain seems to perceive an inconsistent environment as one of the bigger threats. — Isaac

That makes sense. Sudden noises, people going apeshit on shrooms, forgetting your keys, leaving the oven on while you're out... I wonder what the scope of environment is there? I guess as abstract as can be habituated within. (germaphobe panic response? "your disease only makes sense in the light of our understanding of infection and contamination..")

Ever wondered what the evolutionary advantage could possibly be of legs turning to jelly at the exact moment you need to run away from said tiger in the bush? — Isaac

I thought it was so you could politely ask the girl to go on top.

I often end up writing stuff even I don't believe just to get the ideas that surround it down before the next ones take over. — Isaac

I figured you were all about the extended mind stuff, I wasn't just writing for you there, I wanted to highlight that it's easy to use a vocabulary that we're used to that nevertheless contradicts the nature of the topic. Sort of like trying to draw on white paper with white chalk.

Redness' I think should be consigned to use only by printers and paint manufacturers! — Isaac

Shame the flames we'd like to burn these ideas in are red.

(having a two psychologists for parents is not always a good thing, but we did stop experimenting eventually, promise). — Isaac

I can't imagine not being academically interested in your kid if you're academically inclined. I'm more surprised that you stopped experimenting than that you started!

he panic is the brain's response to contradictory information, just like travel sickness (motion feedback from the eyes, no motion feedback from the body). The interesting thing, for me, is the strong extent to which most of what we think of as our model of reality is the brain's kind of buffer against this panic. Most sensations, including memory-based ones, are actually contradictory to some extent. The stories our brain tells us, the illusion of self, is all about minimising the confusion. I think that's why we love stories so much. — Isaac

This is very cool. Do you have a citation for this type of account? I'm a bit skeptical that "panic" is one sort of thing; my understanding of it neurologically, which is probably wrong, is that it's a neural/endocrine response to some threat that sets off a bunch of bodily cascades (including behavioural), the "threat" can be really abstract; nowadays a work meeting can be a tiger in the bush. It seems to me the underlying threat (threat in general, like kidney the organ) is unanticipated but now sufficiently negatively valued differences rather than contradictory information sources (not talking about people who get the panic response due to anticipation or memory here I guess too?). Anyway, these are causal types rather than causal instances; "excessive caloric intake causes weight gain" vs "if I keep eating 1 kg of carrot cake every day I'm going to be obese very soon".

'Red' seems primarily used as a description of external states of affairs, never internal ones. I think there's still some sleight of hand being done here to define a post hoc division of the memory of experience into the 'qualia' of actual experience — Isaac

Agree that red is a concept. Stuff is also red. There's an interplay between language use and perception; the language we are used to invites us to parse our self reports in accordance with its rules. There are probably effects in the inverse direction; playing with associations of signifiers for dramatic effect. Maybe sometimes we can expect red and see green? Movies, green blooded human = replicant or something, the basis of surprise there.

Unsure the internal/external distinction makes sense for most things like this. When your phenomenal self model (Metzinger) can assimilate to include a table, or when your apartment becomes a living memory bank (alzheimers patients); the boundaries break down due to what is involved with what. It seems more productive to think of these structures as ones of involvement that span the distinction between mind and body, rather than retroactively imposing more categorical distinctions which don't seem to be there. To my mind:

"internal/external = ideal/material = subject/object= phenomenal/noumenal = mind/body = reason/affect"

is a chain of associations that acts to straitjacket thought; a madness purporting to be its own cure. Thinking in these terms generates access and interaction problems everywhere that the manifest relations between each pole have already undermined; why ask how can when we can already ask how? I hope we can eat just the best bits of these concepts' already dead bodies.

The brain certainly divides things up, different cortices deal with different aspects of the experience, but evidence from synathetes, phantom limb, paraprenalia, psychosis...all indicate very strongly that the consciousness does not have any direct isolated access to those cortices. If it did, then synathetes, for example, would be able to divide up their number identification experience from their colour identification experience prior to the hyper-connection between the two which causes the mixed sensation. — Isaac

Yes! Components seem to call other components, there's both specialisation and plasticity, relative independence and specificity; seemingly contextually (sensorimotor process, social cue etc) dependent too. Reflection seems to be a high effort process that reorganises (stratifies/contextualises/conjectures) pre-reflective (and evolutionarily older) bodily processes; it takes time. What this doesn't preclude, however, is that someone's ideas can change cultural norms which change... You see what I mean.

All of which put together makes a 'redness' quale nothing but a philosophical conceit. — Isaac

I certainly think it's a retrojection to put it back into experience without heavy qualifications. I'm quite happy with "red" though.

Aside: a friend of mine is a synesthete. He had numbers and letters with colours. He let me experiment on him for a bit, drew him a few pictures and made a powerpoint slide - studying, say, how far away would two 0's need to be on a page before they got seen as an 8. He could tell that from what colour association he saw from the image. I made him something like this abomination:



so it would be like a Necker Cube for his synesthetic sight. Apparently very disorienting. The different colours shifted to reflect the gestalt form of the image (whether overall it's an 8, or focussing on the 1 interconnections, or the individual 9s...). The most interesting thing there seemed to be that his attention coincided with the synesthetic impression; even though he didn't seem aware of or able to tell which gestalt shifts would occur when just looking at the image. I guess that's not surprising if it's neurological-architecture-of-sensorimotor-systems deep; he may as well have been trying to exert the vaunted force of his will over the micromovements of his eyes.

He could also smell the letter U, it was palma violets (lavendery-violety-lilacy sweeties), from the previous stuff with the 0's and 8's we found out that continuous transformation (translation on a powerpoint slide) eventually produced a gestalt shift and changed the synesthetic impression. The letter C was just gold for him.

So I picked a font where C and U were rotated copies of each other, and slowly rotated C to U. The gestalt shift caused him considerable feelings of panic, which is perhaps not so surprising.

We are not used to a colour rotating into a smell.