For a start, the brain cells did not "learn to play pong", they just avoided "a chaotic stream of white noise". — Banno
Still, not bad for apokrisis, @Isaac, and anyone else in the free energy camp. — Srap Tasmaner
For a start, the brain cells did not "learn to play pong", they just avoided "a chaotic stream of white noise". That is, the dishbrain had no intent to play pong. — Banno
Did you know you're a closet Freudian? — Srap Tasmaner
Sellars has that just-so story in "Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man" in which he derives the idea of natural law from the observation that some of the persons in nature (old man river, old man mountain, that sort of thing) are set in their ways, the way people get, and thus predictable, the way some people are. (Big Lake is freezing over again, like he always does this time of year.) He suggests we recognized the efficacy of habit first and derived the idea of mechanical determination from that. (A sort of corollary to the 'theory' that we derive the idea of force from our own efficacious action.) — Srap Tasmaner
Trump as the political incarnation of free energy. — Banno
the brain cells did not "learn to play pong", they just avoided "a chaotic stream of white noise". It was the experimenters who turned this into a game. That is, the dishbrain had no intent to play pong. — Banno
No, I was thinking more of the Chinese Room and extended cognition. In order to play pong the dishbrain had to be wired up to a screen that did a fair amount of interpretation for the neural signals to play pong. — Banno
DishBrain is able to identify habits or tendencies in the "ball" and to develop matching habits or tendencies or propensities. For what purpose? In an earlier age, we might have heard this described as a manifestation of the death drive, the will to become mechanical, but maybe Freud was on the right track in seeing life as paradoxically trying always to reduce irritation and excitation, or to predict it well enough that it ceases to be experienced as surprise. (See, Isaac, I do listen. Did you know you're a closet Freudian?) — Srap Tasmaner
Part of the logical difficulty with Skinner's approach was that what was considered an averse stimulation was no more than that which the organism avoided. The explanation of Dishbrain's behaviour in terms of free energy doesn't suffer a similar circularity. Dishbrain just grows in the laziest way possible.Skinner’s
rats as avoiding aversive stimulation. — Joshs
My point is that explanations in terms of intent do not apply to dishbrain. Talk of intent is part of a different language game. — Banno
(There are often odd carriage returns in your posts; just mentioning it in case you were not aware. Presumably your device or browser?) — Banno
So is it legitimate to describe dishbrain as having intended to move the paddle to deflect the ball? — Banno
In contrast, contemporary dynamical systems and autopoietic approaches assume that equilibration is not driven toward static balance but a dynamical tension characterized by incessant activity and change. That is, equilibration tends in the direction of an increasingly active, increasingly organized organism, rather than a drive toward mechanical equilibrium ( the death drive). — Joshs
What's missing is the intent to make some actual change in the world. — apokrisis
I'm not convinced that a thermostat intends to keep the temperature stable. Nor that a virus intends to reproduce. — Banno
My suspicion is that for some act to count as intentional, the organism might in some sense have done otherwise. — Banno
Consider Anscombe's two lists, both of the very same items, but one a receipt printed by the register after your purchases, the other the list you brought with you to remind yourself of what you wanted to purchase. Which is intentional? — Banno
So is it legitimate to describe dishbrain as having intended to move the paddle to deflect the ball?
— Banno
What's missing is the intent to make some actual change in the world.
A biosemiotic view of Dishbrain, and predictive coding in general, is that it is meaningless unless it is driving some pragamatically useful result for the organism. — apokrisis
I'm not convinced that a thermostat intends to keep the temperature stable. Nor that a virus intends to reproduce. My suspicion is that for some act to count as intentional, the organism might in some sense have done otherwise — Banno
If so, then the pragmatic usefulness of the dishbrain’s behaviors is driven by its ‘striving ‘ to maintain a patterned self-consistency. — Joshs
So in leaping to Anscombe, you would be just importing a bunch of unexamined thought habits into this neurobiological discussion. — apokrisis
But can we rule out the idea there is in some sense a structural coupling taking place between the dish brain and the environmental stimuli that the experimenters have drummed up? — Joshs
If the biologist's use of "intent' does not match the philosophers, then perhaps they are talking about something quite different — Banno
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