It may be neural. It may be computational - below the level of the neural, as Randy Gallistel suggests. There are some who think neurons alone don't suffice to explain mental activity, hence proposals like Hameroff and Penrose who speak of microtubules. — Manuel

I would think that since computation can be done on physical machines, we would have little reason to think that neurons are not capable of doing it. If mind is computational and computation is a physical process then it would seem to follow that the mental is really a function of the physical. That seems most likely to me, but it remains an opinion.

There's also the linguistic component discussed by Chomsky a very intricate unconscious model which we can tease out into consciousness to discover its form. — Manuel

Not being familiar with Chomsky's work, I have nothing to support a comment.

But unless you want to say something, I enjoy talking with you, I think your use of mental is not problematic, as I said it's a caveat, and I mention it because I feel hesitancy to create more distance than there is between the mental and the physical. It's more monist issue. — Manuel

I also enjoy your input and perspectives. Difference is good―I don't think we want this place to become an echo chamber. I also agree with you on not wishing to create a substantive difference between the mental and physical, even though I think the distinction is useful in some of our thinking practices.

It's not so much the brain (though of course if we lack it, we might not be thinking in high quality), more so what comes alongside consciousness and thinking, which is an obscure apparatus - we cannot introspect into how we do what we do with the mental. But this is just a quibble — Manuel

I'm going to respond with another quibble. You are again referring to what we cannot introspect as "mental", whereas I think it most plausible to consider that what we cannot introspect is 'neural', and that it is precisely it's character as non-mental that makes it impossible to introspect.

I don't understand what you mean by structure on these levels. Are we speaking of the seemingly concrete nature of rocks, or that certain food seems to be liked by many animals? — Manuel

No, I was referring to the different ways different animals' sensory organs are anatomically structured. For example, we know dogs see limited colour compared to us (mostly blues and yellows) due to their lack of red sensitive cones in their eyes.

Yes, normal moral intuitions can be countermanded by religious or political ideologies. It usually takes the form of "offering" it seems.

Yes by and large, but i don't think they come to these convictions by reasoning or considering evidence. — ChatteringMonkey

Right, and I haven't anywhere said otherwise.

Edit: "offering" should have been "othering". Damn spellcheck!

I generally agree, but not for moral beliefs because those are not or at least not easily verifiable with evidence. How many people do actually change their minds about those when confronted with evidence or rational argument? — ChatteringMonkey

Isn't it the case though, that almost everyone already agrees about what is morally right when it comes to the really significant moral issues such as murder, rape, theft, exploitation, torture and so on?

As to how many people change their minds, have you ever heard an argument to support the position that murder, rape, theft, exploitation or torture are morally permissible?

Not rosy, I realise how the people were controlled with brutality. But at least the rulers realised the benefits of the ideological stability provided by the church. — Punshhh

I'm not arguing that it didn't benefit the rulers.

I think religion, in various forms is still a very significant part of modern culture. I also think it is natural, once someone starts thinking for themselves, to require evidence for beliefs.

The nervous system is then a component of a system of which the brain is a part of. — Manuel

Of course. In all organisms there is no actual separation between parts of the system. But I think there are good reasons to think of the brain, just as we do of the heart, the lungs and other organs as functional systems in themselves.

What about language use? We literally do not know what we are specifically going to say prior to saying it (or typing it.) Clearly we have a vague meaning, which we can express through propositions, sometimes expressing what we wanted to say, sometimes we just get approximations. — Manuel

I think what you say here supports my view. What we say is preceded, it seems most plausible to think, by neuronal processes, brain processes of which we cannot be aware. So I don't think it is right to refer to them as mental processes, given that I think the term is most apt when applied to what we can be conscious of.

Yeah we have been stuck on this point before if I recall correctly. I am skeptical that they do. Not that they necessarily experience things COMPLETELY differently from us in all respects, but in some respects they do. Dogs with olfaction have access to a world we barely imagine. Mantis shrimp have 16 color receptive cones which renders the experience they have of the world very different from what we see. — Manuel

You seem to be misinterpreting me to say that other animals see things in the same way as we do. I'm not saying that at all―I'm saying they see the same things we do but in different ways according to the different ways their sensory modalities are structured.

On the other hand, if I say what remains is brain or a nervous system, then I am smuggling in what I am trying to show exists absent me.

We can, without going too speculative reasonably imagine that some intelligent alien species may carve out a different kind of organs (or parts of organs) and call that a brain.

As for the definition of mental- that's very hard. I think what you say is how it's used. I'd add unconscious processes to this, but this would make me idiosyncratic. — Manuel

I wouldn't say that what remains independently of human perception is merely the brain, but is the manifold of sensitive body, nervous system and brain plus the environment which acts up it, such as to produce perception amongst many other things.

I am not understanding what you are wanting to say with your 'alien' example. I think neurophysiology clearly shows us what reasonably counts as brain and what does not.

I guess we'll have to disagree on what would be the most reasonable scope of the term 'mental'. The idea that some process could be mental and yet be impossible for us to be aware of in vivo, so to speak, just doesn't seem tenable. On the other hand I think it is fair to say that we cannot be directly aware of any neural process in its neurality, so to speak.

Something exists absent us but calling it a "brain" assumes that what we are carving out is a "natural kind", that is the way nature carves itself absent us. This seems to happen in physics, in biology the different framing of other creatures arises, I think. — Manuel

I think science shows us that there are functional organic systems in nature, and I would say the brain is clearly one of them. I mean it is the one without which we wouldn't be having this conversation or experiencing anything at all.

I'm not sure what you mean by "the different framing of other creatures". Other multicellular organisms have sense organs, organs of sight, hearing, touching, tasting and smelling just as do, even though their organs may not be configured in just the same ways as ours. We also know that other animals visually detect the same structures in the environment as we do―it is evidenced by their behavior.

Forget the moral or ethical challenges―given all the physical challenges humanity faces, do you believe human life will look anything like it does today in a couple of centuries? I mean do you believe there will still be a huge population, technological societies, preservation of historical culture, religion?

The problem is that religion asks people to believe things for which there is no evidence. That works as long as people give lip service because they are cowed by fear of punishment, as was the case in the Middle Ages, or as long as they are illiterate and impressionable, which was also the case for most of human history, or as long as they are not capable of critical thought.

So what do you propose? A return to imposed beliefs, theocracy?

This along with a strong moral code, reinforced every Sunday in church, enabled us to pull through the dark ages into the enlightenment without falling back into warring tribes, or corrupt competing kingdoms.
In a sense, Christianity enabled the enlightenment, by engendering a moral stability. — Punshhh

The stability of feudalism was imposed by a combination of church and aristocratic rule. The people were illiterate―so we have no way of knowing what their real thoughts were. They were compelled to give lip service or be punished. I think your view is rosy and simplistic.

I'm not convinced. I see people uniting into all kinds of groups. Organised religion, in my view, is a particular worldview, imposed if not by force like in totalitarian systems and the churches in the Middle Ages, at least imposed by indoctrination. Is that what you'd like to see?

At minimum, 'idealism' implies (A) that brains are 'not mind-independent' and (B) that (a priori) 'minds are substances' rather than what brains do. — 180 Proof

Yep, I think this is exactly right.

It may be more than merely a mental construction, but it is at least a mental construction, or we would have no way to perceive or model it. I presume you know Russell's quote on this topic, and he was not an idealist. But what he says is factual as far as I can see. — Manuel

If the brain is more than merely a mental construction then it is a mind-independent existent. If it is not more than a mental construction then it is not a mind-independent existent. Our perceptions of the brain ( not our own, obviously, because we do not perceive our own brains) could be said to be mental constructions, but it would depend on what is meant by "mental construction". We are not aware of how our perceptions are pre-cognitively constructed. The predominant neuroscientific view seems to be that our perceptions arise as the kind of "tip"―the part we can be conscious of―of the "iceberg" of neuronal process. When we refer to something as mental, is it not usually a reference to things we can be aware of? If so, 'mental construction' as opposed to 'brain process' or 'brain model' might seem inapt.

Who ascribes these functions? We do. What does a brain do? It produces consciousness, but it does many things which are unrelated to consciousness which are equally important. Why privilege consciousness over many of the other things brains do? — Manuel

I'm certainly not privileging consciousness over the unconscious brain functions. In fact what I say about the term "mental construction" is precisely based on my disavowal of any such privileging. The point is that if the brain is doing things we cannot be mentally aware of, then that would seem to indicate that it is a mind-independent functional organ or structure.

It is true that we, on the basis of neuroscientific study, ascribe the functions, but it doesn't seem to follow that those functions are not real independently of our ascriptions. In fact the obverse seems more plausible.

You have mentioned structures several times. I can understand epistemic structural realism in physics, but above that, say in biology and so on, I don't quite follow what you are saying.

At least you are framing something which can be discussed that materialism means mind independent structure and that idealism denies that. That's a big improvement over usual conversations on these topics. — Manuel

What about ontic structural realism? It's true that we rely on our perceptions to reveal structures to us, so we know them only as they appear to us. This does seem to leave the question as to what they might be absent our perception of them. That question cannot be answered with certainty, but then what questions can? To my way of thinking it is more plausible to think that our perceptions reveal things about what we perceive, but that there remain aspects which we are incapable of perceiving. So, I don't see it as black and white―I don't see it as being the case that we can know nothing about things in themselves.

Maybe one could just say that is fine, people can make up their own minds. But as I alluded to earlier I doubt that is true, maybe for the philosophical types it is, but not for most.

I think a lot of people learn by mimicking and copying others (children certainly do), hence the success of all these influencer types today. And so if you don't have organised religion anymore and the state is supposed to be secular and value-neutral... the only ones left with enough resources can almost only be commercial actors, who end up molding the minds of people, for their interests. — ChatteringMonkey

I agree with you that many, if not most, people are not philosophically reflective and/ or do not have a good grounding in critical thought. The influence of advertising and the transnational corporations is certainly problematic, perhaps mostly significantly so when it comes to politics and unnecessary consumerism.

I disagree with you that the state is "value neutral"―the laws of the state reflect the most significant moral injunctions. So, what is missing according to you? Are you advocating something like the "noble lie" when it comes to instilling religious belief in children?

I don't see why we would need a transcendent authority (God) as lawgiver, when we already have the state as lawgiver, and I think it is arguable that most people do not think murder, rape, theft, corruption, exploitation and so on, are acceptable. So just what is it that you think is missing?

For my part, I think ethics should be taught in school as early as possible.

Yes, Streetlight in particular was a genuine intellect. I always saw Harry as an annoying contrarian.

Personally, I am content to ignore when it seems necessary, and I'm like apo in not being concerned by the "knockabout" character of this site, but I can also see that I may well feel differently if I were the creator and financial sustainer.

I think you do a great job in providing an enjoyable resource Jamal.

Most all religions not only address what the point of life is but also why one ought to live life ethically. I say it would be nice to address these same topics without all the religiosity traditionally implied. — javra

I agree with you. Religions give general, purportedly universally applicable, answers to these questions and others. The problem, as I see it, is as to how we could ever universally agree on any answer. The religions certainly don't agree except in regard to the most significant moral questions, and the answers they give condemning murder, rape, theft, and so on, can easily be understood to be the answers best suited to communal harmony and flourishing.

Though here posed as if mutually exclusive, they in fact are quite amiable to being readily converged: most anything out there can be warped for the sake of authoritarian purposes. — javra

Right, but I was referring more to the "spiritual" answers―the answers that posit a transcendent realm of value as distinct to the immanent pragmatic needs of communities and individuals. So Christianity, for example, might say that murder and the other sins are wrong because God says so, and Buddhism might say they are wrong because if you commit them your rebirth will not be favorable, whereas a secular ethics can simply say they are wrong because they are detrimental to both individuals and communal life.

And in today’s world, save for traditional religions, what else speaks to these same issues with any sort of authority (not specific to “authoritarian authority” but also applicable to things such as the authority of reason)? — javra

I don't see ethics as an authoritarian problematic because people are free to accept or reject authority, even if to reject it will entail punishment. I take the ethical sense to be a function of education and normal human compassion. The pragmatic ethics that evolves out of the need for communal stability, harmony and flourishing I see as being supported by practical reason. I also think that pure reason gives us no rationale for favoring one person over another―any favoring is driven by individual preference and agenda and is not supportable by pure reason. Some contextual favoring may be supported by practical reasoning, but nonetheless there can be no pure reason not to treat all human individuals as being equal before the law, and entitled to equal opportunity regarding education, medical treatment and so on.

That's what they were about, although the term 'existential dilemma' is very much a modern one. But they sought to situate humanity within the cosmic drama, either positively (orthodox Christianity) or negatively (gnosticism). That provided a reason for why we are as we are in terms other than physical causation.

I've always sought the cosmic dimension of philosophy, which is why I lean towards some form of religious spirituality. — Wayfarer

You frame it one way and I would frame it in another way. I would say religions sought to impose ideas about how humanity was situated within the cosmos. As you say they "provided a reason" instead of allowing individuals to work it out for themselves or to be informed by science. And that is why the predominant religions in the West opposed any finding of science which contradicted their central dogmas.

I have no problem with your "leaning towards some form of religious spirituality"―that may be right for you, but it doesn't follow that it's right for everyone. Your leaning is merely one of personal preference, just like the different leanings of others.

Well in Europe that's probably more the case than in the US. Most non-muslim Europeans are secular nowadays. — ChatteringMonkey

Not according to this site:

Europeans who consider themselves atheists are a small minority, except in France and in Sweden, where about 20 per cent say that they are atheists; a vast majority of all Europeans nominate themselves as religious persons.

:up: :up:

What is this supposed clash? Is the mind not coming out of a brain? Is the brain not a mental construction based on sense data? — Manuel

My criticism here is that If materialism is true, then the brain is not merely a "mental construction" even if our models of it, and perhaps even our perceptions of it, are mental constructions (idealism) or brain generated models (materialism).

According to materialism, there would be some mind-independent functional structures which appear to us as brains, and what we experience as thoughts are on the level of the physical brain, neuronal processes.

On the other hand according to idealism, the brain is merely one among all the other ideas which are taken by materialists to be mind-independently real functional structures, but are really, through and through, mental constructions..

The issue between the two is one of metaphysical fundamentality, and if the idea of metaphysical fundamentality is a coherent one, then the incompatibility between the two views is not merely verbal.

The idealists collapse epistemology and ontology, claiming there is no substantive distinction between the two, while the materialists maintain a substantive distinction.

The other point is that when you say that the problem which can be meaningfully posed is the "problem of the world"―the question regarding how much of the world is a construction of the mind (or a brain generated model) just is the salient question the answer to which precisely distinguishes idealism from materialism.

As usual you say a lot, and drop a lot of names, in your critical (and I would say one-dimensional) characterizations of modernity and modern thought, but you never say what you think the solution or alternative to the purportedly problematic nature of modernity is.

I agree. We need to check our sources if we are to be rigorous in our thinking. The good things about AI is that it can help you find sources you might not have otherwise, or at least would have had to spend more time searching. AI uses all the same sources that are available to us. One danger is that AIs may start using material created by AIs and perhaps very quickly the net may become flooded with this material. We can always ask an AI to reveal the sources of its responses.

Nor do I. I believe I already have those things... conceited bastard that I am....

Anyway I think we all desire and/or need different things in order to cultivate wisdom, have a sense of the sacred and feel connected to life...there is no one size fits all...

I think most religion is more about feeling connected to the possibility of an afterlife than about feeling connected to life.

Also I watched about 30 of Vervaeke's lectures a few years ago and found myself waiting for something concrete which didn't arrive, so I gave up. I couldn't discover just what he was proposing.

This leads to a question: is it possible to believe that religions are all not wrong, without believing that they are all right? Or is the idea that they are neither wrong not right, but are merely helpful or unhelpful stories? Then we might ask how a religion could be helpful or unhelpful.

Yes, but it doesn't imply present retrieval of unchanged past information. Things are always changing. Studies have shown how unreliable memory actually is. It consists of part plausible inference and part confabulation.

Right, but it is not as though religion, as opposed to theocracy, has been "done away with" (in the West).I think that what the OP complains about...the disenchantment of Nature due to a supposed decline of reverence for nature is a furphy, a strawman.

There is a tendency in all transcendence-based eschatalogically motivated religions to disvalue this world as the source of suffering, the veil of illusion or the vale of tears in favour of an imagined perfect realm.

So it is not really a case of the disenchantment of Nature, but of the disenchantment of the transcendent accompanying a return to nature. This begins with Aristotle...think of Rafael's painting 'The School of Athens'...Plato points to the heavens and Aristotle points to the ground
.

[quoted="Tom Storm;1022700"]I’m not convinced that consumerism or the instrumentalisation of knowledge wouldn’t still be dominant even if the West had remained committed to Christianity.[/quote]

"And Man shall have dominion..."

If habits are the result of patterns of neural networks established in response to present information (established when the past was present) then memory might not be a resurfacing of the original information but rather an inference manifesting, driven by, the current neural traces of the pre-established patterns.

The traditional religions did address existential dilemmas, but then, they didn't arise in today's interconnected global world with all its diversities and the massive increase of scientific knowledge. — Wayfarer

Can you give an example of a religion in the pre-scientific era addressing existential dilemmas? Did religions really address the needs of the common folk or was it mostly the needs of the elites? I would like to see you at least attempt to address such serious questions instead of viewing them, on account of their difficulty for your thesis, as hostile.

In the modern era, wherein religious tolerance has greatly increased it would seem that the primary existential need religions have served is the need for community.

Of course, there are still tensions if not outright conflicts between different religious communities.

I’m nonplussed that it was received with such hostility when I think it is pretty well established theme in the history of ideas. I’m also getting tired of having the same arguments about the same things with the same people. It becomes a bit of a hamster wheel. — Wayfarer

Why must you see disagreement as hostility? Also, why would you not expect the same arguments against your position if you keep presenting the same arguments over and over yourself? I don't believe that your narrowly focused conclusions about the actual documented history of ideas are "well-established" at all. If they were everyone would be agreeing with you. Do you have any openness to (radically?) changing your views? It certainly doesn't seem that way.

But the societies we are a part of aren't recognized as being an end in themselves, they are just there to fulfil the desires of it's members. — ChatteringMonkey

If the desires are conditioned into the people rather than being critically realized by them, then of course that's a problem. We come to be blind followers instead of critically active members in our communities.

Today we might say we are brainwashed by culture in the form of advertising and popular media, whereas in the past, in theocratic and aristocratic societies, and today in autocratic societies, critical thinking is not only implicitly discouraged, but explicitly banned under penalty of punishment.

I don’t disagree that education, greed, and social dysfunction are serious issues, but those are symptoms rather than the root. — Wayfarer

Okay then, we simply disagree, because I see those, among other factors, as some of the root causes of humanity's woes.

I don't believe it has anything to do with metaphysics. People who are materialists can enjoy a sense of the wonder of life and existence itself, and all the more so the more they are educated through science to appreciate their mind-blowing beauty and complexity.

Of course metaphysical assumptions should be questioned, if people are even interested in metaphysical questioning, as opposed to endeavoring to understand as much as possible the nature of the world in whatever spheres garner their interest.

For me the only possibility of a universally shared worldview that is not imposed would be an education and curiosity-based valuing and even reverence for the incredible diversity and beauty of people and other animals and the physical world itself.

Vague, oversimplistic, poorly motivated ideologies that claim to solve all our problems like this are distractions from actual problems and actual solutions, imo. — Apustimelogist

I'm with you on that!

Look, we’ve had about 150 years of genuine secularism in the West (and the journey began before that), but to imagine that thousands of years of theism and religious values are not at least partly to blame for our presuppositions and our current predicament seems distorted. — Tom Storm

:up: As I see it the suite of real and dire problems we face as a species has little to do with a crisis of meaning, but rather grows out of a lack of education, critical thinking and respect for science, not to mention consumerism and greed and the paranoia-fueled competition for dominance.

I agree with you that many, or perhaps even most, people do not critically examine their lives. But much of that lack of critical self-awareness comes down to introjected cultural values that emphasize acquiring stuff over inquiring about stuff.

You need to understand that the search for meaning is not a script or a dogma. It is not about returning to some imagined pre-modern utopia at all. Every time this is discussed, that is what you assume that I'm talking about, hence your mistaken depiction of me as a 'proselytizing dogmatist'. — Wayfarer

Can you explain how the search for and finding of meaning could be universally shared in a world of human diversity? I'm not denying that groups of people can share meanings and purposes within various contexts. But additional to that you have what each individual's life means to each individual, that is the overall sense of direction in their personal live's that they might favour.

I'm not claiming that such favouring is independent of culture, but modern culture offers a huge smorgasbord―a situation quite different from what obtains in traditional cultures―at least in relation to what people gave lip service, if not real dedication, to.

Yes, the only possibility for a return to universally shared life purpose is totalitarian.
— Janus
:meh: — 180 Proof

Can you elaborate?

Maybe because meaningful is only really meaningful if it transcends mere individual preferences, because it plays a part in a larger whole... that would be the reason for it. — ChatteringMonkey

Okay, that's an assertion―can you provide an argument for it? I mean, we all, as members of a society, and to one degree of consciousness or another, play a part in a larger whole―we have no choice but to do that.

Yes, the only possibility for a return to universally shared life purpose is totalitarian. Given inherent human diversity and creativity, why would we ever want something so stultifying as a universally held meaning or purpose?

I take @Wayfarer to mean we are adrift from a culturally imposed overarching purpose. Such overarching purposes were imposed by political elites who throughout most of history were the only literate members of societies. The oppressed illiterate masses had no choice but to at least pay lip service to the imposed values and meanings. To what extent they were genuinely interested in, or were privately opposed to, these impositions remains, and will remain, unknown, precisely because they were illiterate. The irony is that freedom from that imposed life purpose enables the burgeoning of "many kinds of shared purpose".

Shall I dip my toe in the murk? Hmmm...........no.....

Are the pictures in your mind like photographs that are stable and sustainable enough that you can examine them in detail? Are the songs in your mind rich and complete such that playing them is exactly like listening to the actual songs?

:ok:

Not exactly what I said. I noted that the self-evidence of material intuition can't exceed that of self-evidence simpliciter, which is to say thought. It isn't an ontological claim, but an epistemological framework for making an ontological claim.To assert anything about reality —material or otherwise— is already to presuppose the structure of intelligibility in which that claim appears. That structure is thought. — Pantagruel

Materiality is evident in embodiment and in the body's interactions with other bodies. The conceptualization of materiality is derivative in being an expression of pre-linguistic experience. You say "to assert anything about reality" but any and all assertions are secondary to, and dependent upon, experience.

We are animals. To say that all experience is first and foremost linguistically mediated would be to claim that non-linguistic animals don't experience anything, which would be absurd. Thought, at least linguistically mediated thought cannot constitute the primordial "structure of intelligibility" or else animals could not find their Umwelts intelligible. Our primary experience, shared with animals, is as material entities in a material world, subject to all the physical constraints and opportunities that world imposes and affords.

And yes, linguistically mediated self-reflection is a kind of culmination of self-awareness, which doesn't exclude or preclude other kinds, whose existence doesn't contradict the characterization. — Pantagruel

The point is that linguistically mediated self-reflection and what seems self-evident to that reflection should not be 'sublimed' away from its primordial sources in embodied material life, because to do creates the illusion of an immaterial dimensionless point of consciousness, and all the misleading conclusions that follow from that kind of thinking.

Your phenomenological inventory doesn't actually contradict the premise, which doesn't require us to be constantly reflective, only capable of reflectivity...among other things. — Pantagruel

Our metaphysical conclusions should be derived from, and not stray away from, the whole of the pre-reflective experience that linguistically mediated reflectivity is parasitic upon. Otherwise we land in a "hall of mirrors".

What is it one “retrieves” from memory? An image. Or as the enactive view of cognition puts it….

Ulric Neisser argued that mental images are plans for the act of perceiving and the anticipatory phases of perception. They are not "inner pictures" that are passively viewed by an "inner man," but rather active, internal cognitive structures (schemata) that prepare the individual to seek and accept specific kinds of sensory information from the environment. — apokrisis

:up: Heave ho to the homunculus.

And what do you know about dreaming? Ain’t it a brain generating imagery of hallucinatory intensity? We aren’t stimulating the memory banks and rousing flashes of our past. We are stimulating our sensation anticipation circuits and generating disconnected flashes of plausible imagery or suddenly appearing and disappearing points of view at a rate of about two a second. — apokrisis

This makes intuitive sense. It explains the novel, not to mention bizarre, character of dream imagery. I once sustained a practice of recording the dreams I could remember for a couple months, and the more I wrote the more I seemed to recall. But I was always suspicious about what I recalled being genuine or accurate memories of what I had dreamed. It seemed to me they could just as easily have been confabulations.

I find it amusing that people argue that LLMs cannot understand as we do―that their tendency to confabulate, or "hallucinate" as it most often framed, shows that they don't really understand and that they are thus very different than us―when it seems the reality is that we confabulate all the time, and that what we take to be accurate memoires are also very often confabulations at least in part. And this is a very salient point which you also make here:

And this architecture generates “hallucinations”. Which seems to be doing something right in terms of a step towards neurobiological realism. — apokrisis

Confabulation may be seen not as a disability but as an ability―we call it imagination. Abductive and counterfactual thinking would be impossible without it.

Becoming a walking memory bank is very much a human sociocultural ideal. Just about our highest achievement your school days might make you believe. — apokrisis

Based on what is certainly seeming to turn out to be another "folk" misunderstanding of how the mind, how memory, works. That said some "idiot savants" are claimed to have "eidetic memory". I am reminded of a Jorge Luis Borges story I read when I was in my teens called 'Funes the Memorious".

Out of both haziness and laziness I asked Claude to summarize the story, and it included an interesting philosophical point at the end of the summary that seems, fortuitously, kind of germane to the discussion . Here are the salient parts of the summary:

Claude: The story is narrated by a man recalling his encounters with Ireneo Funes, a young Uruguayan with an extraordinary memory. The narrator first meets Funes as a teenager in the town of Fray Bentos.

Funes has the remarkable ability to tell the exact time without consulting a clock.
Later, the narrator learns that Funes suffered a horseback riding accident that left him paralyzed.

Paradoxically, this accident also gave him the ability to remember absolutely everything with perfect clarity and detail. After the fall, Funes became incapable of forgetting anything—every moment, every perception, every detail of his experience was permanently etched in his memory.

This total recall proves to be more curse than blessing. Funes remembers every leaf on every tree, every shape of every cloud, every sensation from every moment. His mind is so cluttered with particular details that he struggles with abstract thought and generalization. For instance, it bothers him that a dog seen at 3:14 (in profile) should share the same name as the dog seen at 3:15 (from the front).

The story is a philosophical meditation on memory, perception, and thought. Borges suggests that forgetting is actually essential to thinking—that abstraction, generalization, and understanding require us to discard details.

Funes, who cannot forget, is paradoxically unable to truly think.
It's one of Borges' most celebrated stories, exploring themes of infinity, the nature of consciousness, and the relationship between memory and identity.

I find the argument tendentious in that it presupposes what it seeks to prove, i.e. that thought is fundamental. It presumes that we most directly know our thoughts, and then goes on to make a universal ontological claim based on that presumption. Even if it were true that what we most directly know is thought, that would merely be a truth about us, and the justification of a leap from there to an ontological claim remains unargued.

A further point I would add is that the idea that what we are most directly aware of is thought if true at all, would seem to be true only in moments of linguistically mediated self-reflection. If that were so, it shows us only how language might make things seem to us, and that says nothing about the arguably more fundamental pre-linguistic experience of the world.

The argument relies on the premise that we most directly know our thoughts, a premise which seems plausible only when we are already in a linguistically reflective mode. It then concludes, as though it were self-evident, that thought is fundamental to reality.

But the linguistically mediated reflective mode is not the most common mode of human experience at all. When I am engaged in activities, such as playing or listening to music, painting, wood-working, gardening, playing ball games and an endless list of other activities, it is simply not phenomenologically true that thoughts are what I am most directly aware of.

So, as I see it, the argument doubly fails―the premise fails to be sound, and even if it were sound it would tell us something only about our selves. Basically the argument makes an unsupported leap from the epistemological premise to the ontological conclusion, while the epistemological premise itself is only true, if true at all, in a very particular mode of being.

:up:

Cheers, perhaps I misunderstood what you were saying then, or didn't pay enough attention to the surrounding context.

Edit: I looked back over the whole paragraph wherein the part I responded to occurs and it now seems to me that you were referring just to some conversations with LLMs, not all.

Do you think LLMs understand what we say to them, and can actually reason as we do, as opposed to how we think we do?

I was not arguing that this was because they were conversations (like Plato's dialogues), but rather because they were occurring in a sort of echo chamber similar to what occurs in cogitation, when one "talks" to oneself and rehearses thoughts and arguments, or when one jots down notes (for oneself) summarising such cogitations. — Pierre-Normand

I'm not so convinced that they are necessarily like an inner dialogue―although I'm only beginning to explore ideas with Claude I have found that it comes up with interesting ideas I would likely never have arrived at alone or would be likely to have found searching the internet..

:up: It is also true that science can be, for some at least, an entire way of life.

Okay, so you seem to be suggesting that there could be concerns arising other than the decoupling of the service and survival imperatives. That seems reasonable. I guess protocols designed to ameliorate such other concerns would also be part of the research into methods for safe development (if such research were to become a significant element in general AI research and development).

Are you familiar with the work of Blaise Aguera y Arcas? He seems to think that we are at an evolutionary point of what he calls symbiogenesis, and that it is unlikely that AIs will, or would even want to, supplant humanity. He understands not merely intelligence, but life itself, to be essentially computational.

I found this talk very interesting.