Do you think that it is valid to posit that there exists a reference frame within which the Universe ends when YOU die?
— universeness

That's a sound empirical hypothesis. — Wayfarer

Would you end your statement there or would you offer any further opinion on the significance or consequences of the reference frame I suggest?

Computing Science is my field of 'expertise,' in that I taught the subject for 30 years. — universeness

Translation is one of my fields of expertise, in that I have worked as a translator (using a "Computer Assisted Translation" or CAT tool) for 20 years.

To be sure, translation alone is not sufficiently impressive, but 'thought' is most directly manifest (perhaps) in language use. — jas0n

Machine translation doesn't "think" at all however, neither does it do what I do when I translate. Here's a concrete example, intended to illustrate what you do when you understand language, which a computer can't do:

1. The council members refused to allow the protestors to hold their rally as they feared violence.

2. The council members refused to allow the protestors to hold their rally as they advocated violence.

You can tell who "they" refers to in each case because of your immersion of a world of experience. The computer can't tell.

I think it will happen eventually, yes but do you think the potential technological movements toward a transhuman distant future is evidence of emerging panpsychism? — universeness

I wouldn't use that exact word for it myself. I understand that (perhaps incorrectly) in terms of even a copper atom having its little allowance of 'consciousness.' I'm not a consciousness denier, but I think it's almost impossible to talk about apart of public criteria that themselves have no need of that hypothesis. A statement that I can't be wrong about...contains no information? 'I am conscious.' What do/can I mean? A deep question. Messing with it in another thread I started.

Humans merging with technology! Cyborgs/human brains contained in cybernetic bodies/human consciousness transferred to cloned bodies etc. All these sci-fi projections of transhumanism. Will this eventually mean more 'networking' of individual consciousnesses and the ultimate result would be a Universal consciousness which is a merging of the individual consciousness of every lifeform in the Universe? Could such a manifestation of panpsychism satisfy the god criteria, ie the Omni's?

So the reason the god posit has always been with us, is because it is our ultimate fate/goal.
I don't particularly subscribe to this, I am an atheist through and through but I find the 'ultimate result of technological advancement,' interesting. — universeness

Excellent stuff! I'm also an atheist, but the dream/concept/ideal of God remains central for humans (under different names perhaps.) As other thinkers have noted, humanity is already a little god itself, when considered in aggregate. Look at our cities of concrete and steel, our satellites that allow us to facetime one another from the other side of the worldball. Not exactly just beavers, are we? Language is the primary network, but technology could perhaps accelerate communication. On Youtube, I saw a video of a device that allows 'locked in' victims of ALS to talk again. They can't even blink, let alone speak, but can change their brainwaves so that the machine gives them words. Early days, but circumventing the mouth and hands is suggestive.

If we could extend the life of a personality, so that someone could master 30 languages, master physics and chemistry and electronics....and basically build the newer and better cyborg (or a newer body for itself, motivated by a flight from a mortality that is revealed as a stupid and obsolete Darwinian glitch.)
Anyway, Sartre thought the individual consciousness was a futile quest to be god. As a species goal..and conceived less metaphysically..it's at least plausible. More knowledge, more power, and (hopefully!) more wisdom and decency. That's where David Pearce might come in. Dare we tinker with our own DNA to make us kinder and happier? Or is this Act I of an unspeakable tragedy? Deep Blue Sea features sharks that become super-intelligent and super-unfriendly in pursuit of a cure for Alzheimer's. As you already mention, our hubris, however glorious, might also be self-extinguishing.

Translation is one of my fields of expertise, in that I have worked as a translator (using a "Computer Assisted Translation" or CAT tool) for 20 years. — Daemon

I take it you mean human language translators rather than the many other 'translators' used in Computing such as translating high-level languages into low-level languages or into binary etc.

Part of the Advanced Higher computing course we taught included a unit on natural language translation. Computers don't 'understand' anything at all, so you are of course correct.
Getting a computer to process context is one of the hardest parts of NLP.
"Spies like us." Are these spies who like us or spies who ARE like us?
The heuristic algorithms we used employed the semantic and syntactic rules of English to enable the system to display all of the possible contextual meanings on the screen and ask the user to choose which one was closest to the intended meaning. A poor solution but good enough for the purposes of the teaching content of the unit.

Machine translation doesn't "think" at all however, neither does it do what I do when I translate. — Daemon

I know pretty well what goes on at the level of bits, and I agree, and yet...I don't know if we think either. Zoom in on our neurons and AFAIK there's no localized special sauce.

My own preference is to measure intelligence or thinking in terms of ability (from the outside of that intelligence, ignoring the presence of absence of qualia/intuition/etc.).

Machine translation doesn't "think" at all however, neither does it do what I do when I translate. Here's a concrete example, intended to illustrate what you do when you understand language, which a computer can't do:

1. The council members refused to allow the protestors to hold their rally as they feared violence.

2. The council members refused to allow the protestors to hold their rally as they advocated violence.

You can tell who "they" refers to in each case because of your immersion of a world of experience. The computer can't tell. — Daemon

Excellent example. So currently humans are better. My question would be whether there's any reason why improved algorithms, more compute, and more/better data won't eventually result in machines being as good as humans at translation? Our own brains, immensely complex, are nevertheless finite. Consider a machine the size of the moon, built in 4056, trained on all data generated in the meantime. (I wonder if GANs have been used to detect machine versus human translation. )

The self minus thoughts. This relates to a different idea I've been thinking about.

A single celled organism has no thoughts, but it does have a "self", in that it is distinct from its environment.

Getting a computer to process context is one of the hardest parts of NLP. — universeness

Dreyfus used Heidegger's work to argue against the hopes for AI back in his day. I think the approach was more symbolic at the time. I'm more hopeful with a continuous (floating-point ) approach. The internal thought of such 'machine' is just 'boxes' of numbers, not unlike the brain perhaps, if interpreted appropriately. (Of course we're actually talking about currents, etc., which represent floating point numbers.)

Zoom in on our neurons and AFAIK there's no localized special sauce. — jas0n

That's the second time you've used this rather tired metaphor/straw man. How about explaining what you mean in plain language.

A single celled organism has no thoughts, but it does have a "self", in that it is distinct from its environment. — Daemon

We might say that the self is that which is controlled toward homeostasis. The environment would be where this 'self' finds food and releases waste. We say it has no thought (because it doesn't speak), but if it inherited reactions to its environment, that might deserve to count as intelligence. What do humans really know of their thoughtstuff except as language that organizes other activities?

That's the second time you've used this rather tired metaphor/straw man. How about explaining what you mean in plain language. — Daemon

If you zoom in on the brain and look at neurons firing, where do you find thought? Is there something irreplaceable about human brain tissue? Or does 'consciousness' only require a host of the proper structure? Maybe (I don't know) silicon or something else can work just as well as brain tissue. IMO, we humans are a bit too confident in our consciousness talk. I don't know how well we actually know what we have in...mind ? I suspect that our ignorance is manifest in our haste to accept it as obvious.

The 'pure witness' thread is about consciousness, being, etc., and its fraught relation with language.

Only when you look at it as an object. In practice, the brain is never an object, unless you're a neurologist or some such.
— Wayfarer

I still think your not seeing/addressing the issue I'm raising. You and I both believe that the brain evolved, so this seems to require a stage (space and time and molecules) for the composition and interaction of lifeforms (call it 'physical' or whatever.) That only makes sense as 'outside' the dream of such brains (or better yet the mediated environment of such brains.)

If 'the subject' or 'consciousness' lives in healthy human brains, then what are they made of and where do they exist? An indirect realist might say (1) some kind of non-mental stuff and (2) in some kind of substrate. — jas0n

In practice, the brain is inseparable from the lifeform as an integrated event, and has evolved with a high degree of variability within its protective casing. It is this integrated variability that enables a relational structure of ‘mind’ to develop through the ongoing interoception of affect. It’s effectively a DNA-style structure in 4D, a variable biochemical prediction of this lifeform’s ongoing interaction with the world.

I wouldn't use that exact word for it myself. I understand that (perhaps incorrectly) in terms of even a copper atom having its little allowance of 'consciousness.' — jas0n

There are many varieties of panpsychism, such as cosmopsychism etc but I don't think the initial 'ingredients' or quanta or initial composites of consciousness are as interesting as it's possible future 'composites.' Our two consciousnesses are networking in such an easy and convenient way that has never existed for the vast majority of the past 14 billion years. The internet does bring individual human consciousnesses closer than has ever been possible before. Surely the distance between us will blur more and more as time passes and transhuman technologies propagate.
I remember watching the much underrated (in my opinion) film AI by Steven Spielberg.
The futuristic creatures portrayed near the end of that movie were 'individual' but also had the ability to merge or act collectively by 'tapping into' the experience of any one of their fellows.
All this stuff is part of why I don't understand the theist position. I would be so so disappointed if any of the religions turn out to be true. The future possibilities for the human species are far more exciting in my opinion than anything heaven posits have to offer.

This is bit dense, but it seems especially relevant .

For Husserl, as we have seen, the voice -- not empirical speech but the phenomenological structure of the voice -- is the most immediate evidence of self-presence. In that silent interior monologue, where no alien material signifier need be introduced, pure self-communication (autoaffection ) is possible.

This is what I take to be the default view, that we can 'talk to ourselves' and know exactly what we mean. The signified shines for an 'intellectual organ' that grasps meaning directly, instead of simply emitting sentences in response, just a machine can do (if not as well.) In this view, sentences are vehicles for meaningstuff, delivered to consciousness. And this is what we don't want to grant machines.

Surely the distance between us will blur more and more as time passes and transhuman technologies propagate. — universeness

Highly plausible ! We might form little subcommunities to (wisely) prevent homogenization.

I remember watching the much underrated (in my opinion) film AI by Steven Spielberg.
The futuristic creatures portrayed near the end of that movie were 'individual' but also had the ability to merge or act collectively by 'tapping into' the experience of any one of their fellows.
All this stuff is part of why I don't understand the theist position. I would be so so disappointed if any of the religions turn out to be true. The future possibilities for the human species are far more exciting in my opinion than anything heaven posits have to offer. — universeness

I love that film! Those are my favorite aliens from any film, though the fellows in Arrival are great too.

I agree that visions of heaven don't tend to make sense. We might not like to admit it, but we need our problems and our projects. We need to be tired to enjoy the bed, hungry to enjoy food, afraid to enjoy safety, etc. There's a Twilight Zone episode where a creep goes to 'Heaven' (where he wins every game without effort, etc.) and slowly figures out it's the bad place.

In practice, the brain is inseparable from the lifeform as an integrated event, and has evolved with a high degree of variability within its protective casing. It is this integrated variability that enables a relational structure of ‘mind’ to develop through the ongoing interoception of affect. It’s effectively a DNA-style structure in 4D, a variable biochemical prediction of this lifeform’s ongoing interaction with the world. — Possibility

Nice ! That makes sense. I like the emphasis on 4D and time. I acknowledge that the brain/non-brain distinction is an abstraction. I think it was appropriate in the context you quoted, but I don't take it seriously. Even the organism/world boundary is an abstraction/approximation. If light from distance stars is tickling my retina...

Dreyfus used Heidegger's work to argue against the hopes for AI back in his day. I think the approach was more symbolic at the time. I'm more hopeful with a continuous (floating-point ) approach. The internal thought of just boxes of numbers, not unlike the brain perhaps, if interpreted appropriately. — jas0n

I think our best attempts algorithmically are 'object oriented' approaches combined with the idea of 'methods.' The autonomous vehicles we have sent to the planets are amongst our best AI attempts compared to say 'expert systems.' The Mars rovers such as spirit, curiosity, opportunity and the new one, 'perseverance' have demonstrated a kind of 'learning' ability. They go a little bit beyond just 'pattern matching' algorithms. Their heuristic algorithms can 'make decisions,' based on a combination of their sensory inputs and their 'recorded data of previous experience.' This previous experience is recorded as a 'knowledge base,' which is formed based on 'training scenarios.' the rover is put through on Earth. This knowledge base can be 'queried,' by the system to simulate a human asking an internal question.
This system does 'kind of,' emulate how humans access their previous experience to make decisions when faced with new unpredicted/unexpected conditions never encountered before.

Nice ! That makes sense. I like the emphasis on 4D and time. I acknowledge that the brain/non-brain distinction is an abstraction. I think it was appropriate in the context you quoted, but I don't take it seriously. Even the organism/world boundary is an abstraction/approximation. If light from distance stars is tickling my retina... — jas0n

The distinction/boundary is heuristic.

There's a Twilight Zone episode where a creep goes to 'Heaven' (where he wins every game without effort, etc.) and slowly figures out it's the bad place — jas0n

Yeah, I have the Twilight Zone box sets. I remember the episode well.
I wonder how long it would be before the physical joy of an eternal orgasm would turn into a horrific scream. Pleasure of any kind must reach a 'ok stop now because I am full,' point. Hell must exist or else heaven cannot be. We are creatures who need comparators as you state yourself.
Of course, theists get around this easily by claiming 'you are trying to conceive 'heaven' with a human mind and you cant do that,' my answer is normally 'but that's all I have! and it's all you have too!' They will normally just respond with a head shake and a comment like 'have faith in god!' To which I INTERNALLY say 'AW F*** OFF!' :naughty:

This system does 'kind of,' emulate how humans access their previous experience to make decisions when faced with new unpredicted/unexpected conditions never encountered before. — universeness

Thanks. I've studied pieces of the field but others are blanks for me. I expect algorithims to get better, and this may turn out to be more important than more compute and more data.

I wonder how long it would be before the physical joy of an eternal orgasm would turn into a horrific scream. — universeness

Even orgasms of normal length, if sufficiently intense, aren't always simply pleasure. 'Ride the lightning.'

Of course, theists get around this easily by claiming 'you are trying to conceive 'heaven' with a human mind and you cant do that,' my answer is normally 'but that's all I have! and it's all you have too!' They will normally just respond with a head shake and a comment like 'have faith in god!' — universeness

One way to view philosophy is as a thinking that doesn't run off into the darkness. Of course some will tell you that the 'Truth' is 'foolishness to the Greeks,' that the 'Inner Light' hides in what the arrogant and faithless philosopher can only misunderstand as darkness. It's a battle of the labor of concept (against and yet through metaphors) and what seems more like paradoxical mystical poetry.

The distinction/boundary is heuristic. — Possibility

For us as viewers, the organism, or both? I suppose both. Is your background in biology, btw? You seem to know some stuff!

Your view reminds me to some degree of that presented in I am a Strange Loop, which is probably why it made sense to me so quickly (though fairly complex.)

We say it has no thought (because it doesn't speak), but if it inherited reactions to its environment, that might deserve to count as intelligence. — jas0n

It's not because it doesn't speak that I say a bacterium doesn't think. I say it because we can fully explain its behaviour, which looks like consciousness, by means of non-conscious biochemical processes. Also, it doesn't have the elaborate biological mechanisms (neurons and all that) that are so clearly linked to our consciousness (and that of other animals).

The bacterium's inherited reactions to its environment could be described as intelligent behaviour, but it's non-conscious.

If you zoom in on the brain and look at neurons firing, where do you find thought? — jas0n

This is what a family member is doing:

We ask if sensory cortex activations during sleep can be decoded in a more concrete manner by inferring the imagery encoded in neural activations. We propose an ambitious approach in which we will train a deep neural network to learn pixel by pixel mappings between visual input presented to the awake mouse and neural activations in visual cortex. We will leverage our expertise in longitudinal tracking of individual neurons, and the large-scale neural recording capabilities of two-photon microscopy, to present 200k natural images to 10k of neurons, across multiple visual areas, over a 2-week period. We will then apply the trained model to decode the stimuli most likely to give rise to patterns of internally generated neural activity observed during sleep.

Is there something irreplaceable about human brain tissue? Or does 'consciousness' only require a host of the proper structure? Maybe (I don't know) silicon or something else can work just as well as brain tissue.

You mean silicon like in a computer?

This system does 'kind of,' emulate how humans access their previous experience to make decisions when faced with new unpredicted/unexpected conditions never encountered before. — universeness

Emulate: match or surpass (a person or achievement), typically by imitation.
"most rulers wished to emulate Alexander the Great"

Computing
reproduce the function or action of (a different computer, software system, etc.).
"the adaptor is factory set to emulate a Hercules graphics board"

The Mars Rovers do not match or surpass the way humans access experience because they don't have experience.

They don't reproduce what we do.

They do something different to what we do.

My question would be whether there's any reason why improved algorithms, more compute, and more/better data won't eventually result in machines being as good as humans at translation? — jas0n

Algorithms, computation, representation and ‘data’ are part of the ‘old’ way of thinking about what brains do. Affective, Enactive, embodied, auto-poetic, self-organizing , embedded and extended point to the new ways of conceiving behavior in living systems. A designed entity that can rival humans at translation will likely be along the lines of a ‘wet-wear’ creature that we interact with rather than ‘program’.

The Mars Rovers do not match or surpass the way humans access experience because they don't have experience. — Daemon

Perhaps that's why I included the words 'kind of' and put them in quotes for emphasis.
I don't have the qualifications in cognitive science or in the development of Mars rovers to make statements like yours above.

I don't really subscribe to old ways or new ways of thinking, especially on a website that is forever quoting from ancient thinking and thinkers. There are just different/alternate ways of thinking. I am happy to accept any way of thinking if it results in new knowledge.

I don't really subscribe to old ways or new ways of thinking, especially on a website that is forever quoting from ancient thinking and thinkers. — universeness

Do you feel the same way about old science vs new science? Does science advance, such that ignoring the distinction between old and new theories in physics or biology is hard to justify?

Perhaps that's why I included the words 'kind of' and put them in quotes for emphasis. — universeness

That's no way to achieve clarity is it? "The Mars Rover "kind of" emulates human thought".

Back to topic!

One thing I didn't consider: without thoughts, we still have bodily feelings, and emotions. These are both egoic in the sense that they mark a "me" as distinct from the sensory world. Unless I am dissociated, this pain is my pain, and I am frightened.

But then, suppose we subtract these. A hapless individual suffers a stroke. As the cerebral artery occludes, his train of thought fades away, his mind is utterly empty. He is terrified, but is unable to mentally formulate his situation in any way. He sees, he hears, he is afraid, he has a throbbing migraine. That is his experience. Can you empathize with this state?

Then, his migraine fades away, replaced by an all encompassing numbness. Yet even numbness is a feeling, what he feels is nothing. His terror is replaced by a corresponding emotional blankness. He sees bright lights passing above him. He hears the doctors comment on his condition, but can't seem to understand. He smells the antiseptic odor of hospital, and tastes copper in his mouth. That is all. No thoughts, no feelings, no sense of the body. Can you empathize? Is this being strictly speaking still sentient?

Sadly for our subject, the cerebral artery, a mighty river in more halcyon days, is now barely a stream. Sight is gone. Taste is gone. Smell is gone. Hearing is gone. What is left? Is it a unperturbed sea, as per ? I contend, there is nothing left at all. Our hero is now a vegetable.

Do you feel the same way about old science vs new science? — Joshs

I don't see them as combative. 'Standing on the shoulders of giants,' is how new science should forever view old science.

Does science advance, such that ignoring the distinction between old and new theories in physics or biology is hard to justify? — Joshs

To me, the term 'new science,' can often be portrayed, by some, as in some way 'superior,' to 'old science.' I simply defend against that. Otherwise, I have no problem with the two labels 'old' and 'new' applied to anything. I also don't fully subscribe to the comment that an 'old head' is wiser than a 'new head.' Perhaps it's true in a majority of cases but certainly not all.