In what sense is it "run" by a computer. Messages can be tapped out in morse code on a telegraph wire.

And to the degree that CTM was a stab at a theory of mind, its signal failure was being able to show how symbol manipulation – syntax – ever connected with semantics. The place where messages get understood or at least acted upon in some mindful way.

So it is not that Cartesianism duality works. It is that computationalism steered cognitive science in that extreme direction for a while. A perhaps useful information technology metaphor was turned into the first AI revolution – crushing the more biologically-realistic neural network community for a while.

In what sense is it "run" by a computer. — apokrisis

Do you want a schematic?

I was only hoping for a serious answer. I've spent enough time in lectures and presentations on the matter.

I was only hoping for a serious answer. I've spent enough time in lectures and presentations on the matter. — apokrisis

You want a serious answer about how the telephone system is run by a computer? What's your background in electronic engineering?

You want a serious answer about how the telephone system is run by a computer? — frank

Well I wanted a serious answer in terms of the beliefs that led to a stampede into symbolic processing as the way to crack consciousness in the 1970s and 1980s. Before your time perhaps?

What's your background in electronic engineering? — frank

As in most things, surprisingly good.

Does the color “red” exist outside of the subjective mind that conceptually designates the concept of “red?” — Mp202020

Yes (e.g. a community – more than any "subjective mind" – that uses the public conventions of "stop signs" & "traffic lights"; see below).

If there is no mind to experience and conceptually designate “red” does red ever aquire an inherent existence independent of a third party mind?

Yes (e.g. thermal EM radiation from stars, etc). The "experience" may be "subjective", though "red" is acquired publicly, but (except for those who are colorblind) what "red" corresponds to in every instance (e.g. EM frequencies) is not "subjective".

but our personal experience of the color red may very well differ from the actual experience of the same light wavelength another may have, which we’ve all agreed to call “red.” I am speaking solely on the subjective experience of “redness.”

Does the color “red” exist outside of the subjective mind that conceptually designates the concept of “red?” — Mp202020



If "red" is just in your mind, when you ask for a red pen, how is it that the person you are asking hands you what you want? — Banno

Exactly Banno! BUT what if the concept of a “red pen” exists within the realm of every subjective mind’s ideas?

I am considering this: perhaps these ideas are visions in the brain, independent of the individual’s subjective experience. The subjective mind possesses ideas, but not in the same way the brain perceived/s them. Ideas are interpreted differently by the brain in its visions, and these interpretations may or may not align with how a subjective being perceives these visions as ideas in their mind or in their interactions with the environment.

What if thinking thoughts* is just the brain existing/being, rather than the subjective body/mind’s doing?

Imagine if two sets of ideas are formed from two different visions - one grounded in reality and first-hand experience in daily life, and the other in the brain’s second-hand experience, experienced for the first time in this life. What if the brain had a first-hand experience before the subject had to live through it? Could it be that the brain was here first and is controlling our intentions?

*the act of thinking-that thinking might be an emergent property of the brain’s activity, rather than an action performed by the subjective mind

but our personal experience of the color red may very well differ from the actual experience of the same light wavelength another may have, which we’ve all agreed to call “red.” I am speaking solely on the subjective experience of “redness.” — Mp202020

This is interesting because this issue generalizes. It may be that there is no such thing as agreement in anything. Yes, we assume that there is, but what if we're wrong? What if the thing we're calling agreement is really just a matter of behavior and speech?

On the one hand, this lays the whole issue of abstract objects to rest, because that idea emerges from a foundation of supposed agreement between thinkers. We're thinking of the same number, or the same proposition. That's where the idea of abstract objects comes from. But what if there's nothing but utterances programmed by biology? Like birds in a yard, if you hear a certain tonal sequence, you respond with another to address the problem, whatever that may be.

At first glance, it looks like the intellect itself becomes an odd sort of... illusion. You can't even agree with yourself from one moment to the next. There's no continuity that would allow for concepts or universals. Food for pondering would be: is that even possible?

The reason a quality like “color” doesn't extend beyond the object is because it is a quality of the object, not the mind. The changes in color within objects and the differences between them are due to changes in the objects themselves, like when a banana turns green to yellow as the chlorophyll breaks down.

I am speaking solely on the subjective experience of “redness.” — Mp202020

Any experience is subjective in the sense that it exists only for the one who is having it. But there is ambiguity in talk of 'subjective' and 'experience of redness'.

First, the experience cannot solely be an experience of redness unless it is the seeing of something red, say a patch of red paint. Or else it would be an hallucination.

The quality of the paint and the conditions under which it is seen fix its visible appearance..That's what there is to see for any observer, and to see its redness, hue, saturation etc. is an epistemically objective experience. The redness of the paint is measurable even with a colour meter.

So, although the experience of redness is ontologically subjective (as it exists only for the one who is having it) it is also epistemically objective as the redness of the paint is open to view!

Observers may have different abilities, habits, interests, backgrounds etc. that influence their experiences of the paint. These are epistemically subjective features of experience that might result in disagreements. Yet there is seldom disagreement about what there is to see when it's open to see and investigate, e.g. whether the paint is red, whether one patch is darker or lighter or more saturated than another etc.

what if the concept of a “red pen” exists within the realm of every subjective mind’s ideas? — Kizzy

Is a red pen not enough?

like when a banana turns green to yellow as the chlorophyll breaks down. — NOS4A2

I wonder how we see yellow when the retina has three kinds of photoreceptor cone and none are tuned to yellow as their frequency?

- I am enjoying these posts. What would be a good primer on dyadic-Cartesian AI vs. triadic-semiotic neural networks?

I'll give it some thought. No primer comes to mind as such. I speak from being engaged in this debate since the 1980s. So thousands of papers, many conversations. Some hard won wisdom I hope.

Howard Pattee would be my usual go to. Not the simple argument but the exact argument...

The illusion of autonomous symbol systems

There is a real conceptual roadblock here. In our normal everyday use of languages the very concept of a "physics of symbols" is completely foreign. We have come to think of symbol systems as having no relation to physical laws. This apparent independence of symbols and physical laws is a characteristic of all highly evolved languages, whether natural or formal. They have evolved so far from the origin of life and the genetic symbol systems that the practice and study of semiotics does not appear to have any necessary relation whatsoever to physical laws. As Hoffmeyer and Emmeche (1991) emphasize, it is generally accepted that, "No natural law restricts the possibility-space of a written (or spoken) text.," or in Kull's (1998) words: "Semiotic interactions do not take place of physical necessity." Adding to this illusion of strict autonomy of symbolic expression is the modern acceptance of abstract symbols in science as the "hard core of objectivity" mentioned by Weyl. This isolation of symbols is what Rosen (1987) has called a "syntacticalization" of our models of the world, and also an example of what Emmeche (1994) has described as a cultural trend of "postmodern science" in which material forms have undergone a "derealization".

Another excellent example is our most popular artificial assembly of non-integrable constraints, the programmable computer. A memory-stored programmable computer is an extreme case of total symbolic control by explicit non-integrable hardware (reading, writing, and switching constraints) such that its computational trajectory determined by the program is unambiguous, and at the same time independent of physical laws (except laws maintaining the forces of normal structural constraints that do not enter the dynamics, a non-specific energy potential to drive the computer from one constrained state to another, and a thermal sink). For the user, the computer function can be operationally described as a physics-free machine, or alternatively as a symbolically controlled, rule-based (syntactic) machine. Its behavior is usually interpreted as manipulating meaningful symbols, but that is another issue. The computer is a prime example of how the apparently physics-free function or manipulation of memory-based discrete symbol systems can easily give the illusion of strict isolation from physical dynamics.

This illusion of isolation of symbols from matter can also arise from the apparent arbitrariness of the epistemic cut. It is the essential function of a symbol to "stand for" something - its referent - that is, by definition, on the other side of the cut. This necessary distinction that appears to isolate symbol systems from the physical laws governing matter and energy allows us to imagine geometric and mathematical structures, as well as physical structures and even life itself, as abstract relations and Platonic forms.

I believe, this is the conceptual basis of Cartesian mind-matter dualism. This apparent isolation of symbolic expression from physics is born of an epistemic necessity, but ontologically it is still an illusion. In other words, making a clear distinction is not the same as isolation from all relations. We clearly separate the genotype from the phenotype, but we certainly do not think of them as isolated or independent of each other. These necessary non-integrable equations of constraint that bridge the epistemic cut and thereby allow for memory, measurement, and control are on the same formal footing as the physical equations of motion. They are called non-integrable precisely because they cannot be solved or integrated independently of the law-based dynamics. Consequently, the idea that we could usefully study life without regard to the natural physical requirements that allow effective symbolic control is to miss the essential problem of life: how symbolic structures control dynamics.

https://casci.binghamton.edu/publications/pattee/pattee.html

what if the concept of a “red pen” exists within the realm of every subjective mind’s ideas? — Kizzy


Is a red pen not enough? — jkop

Hi jkop, It seemed to me at first that Banno's reply to mp202020 was worth a deeper dive. I am now finding myself struggling to explain where I was going with my shared contributions. When you put it so simply it's clear I was mistakenly considering how the red is noticed perceptually in the brain when its not actually being seen in person. The red pen must be enough in order to do that! Duh....a swing and a miss for me.

I recall you saying when the color is unseen, the question whether it exists isn't referring to the color perceptions but its considering the conditions in the environment it as a color can emerge from/in/with. Does that mean the brain cant allow colors to emerge from it because no light is there? What if the conditions of the mind could be trained to use ideas or visions from past memories or brain activity patterns? Maybe i'm missing a fundamental understanding and my loosely thrown ideas aren't even realistically possible. Thank you. I think... :smirk:

EDIT:

First, the experience cannot solely be an experience of redness unless it is the seeing of something red, say a patch of red paint. Or else it would be an hallucination. — jkop

I got ya now and see where I went off the rails.

EDIT 2: 119AM 7/30/24

What if we watch the brain activity looking at a painting of a red pen? The painting itself is not a real pen, but it still conveys the idea of “redness” and “pen” to anyone who views it.

Okay, wow, this is fascinating - thanks. I know a little bit about semiotics but I didn't realize these ideas had already progressed so far. I originally come from a computer science background, and the inanity of the AI folk made me think that everyone was on the wrong path. But this article and your own points demonstrate that some are on the right path, actively developing it. A pleasant surprise.

This then may be a useful primer as well. A more recent attempt at the historical context.

Predictive processing is an ambitious theory in cognitive and computational neuroscience. Its central thesis is that brains self-organize around the imperative to minimize a certain kind of error: the mismatch between internally generated, model-based predictions of their sensory inputs and the externally generated sensory inputs themselves (Clark 2016; Friston 2009, 2010; Hohwy 2013). Clark (2015) has recently suggested that this overarching theory of neural function has the resources to put an ecumenical end to what he calls the “representation wars” of recent cognitive science. Specifically, he argues that it implies an understanding of internal representation that can accommodate important insights from the enactivist tradition without renouncing the theory’s representational credentials.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6566209/

If "red" is just in your mind, when you ask for a red pen, how is it that the person you are asking hands you what you want? — Banno

You would know it when that person handed you the 'red pen’. If that person mistakenly hands you a blue one, you should ask for a red one instead. Another example of how colours are social conventions. At the very least, the person is obeying by handing over the pen.

Asking for a 'green', 'red', or 'blue' pen is simply picky. The aim of every pen is to write, not to display colours.

Yep.

Asking for a 'green', 'red', or 'blue' pen is simply picky. — javi2541997

Not when marking papers. Another lost skill.

but our personal experience of the color red may very well differ from the actual experience of the same light wavelength another may have, which we’ve all agreed to call “red.” I am speaking solely on the subjective experience of “redness.

By stipulating that you are speaking specifically of the subjective experience of red (as opposed to the ability of objects to reflect certain wavelengths of light), then redness cannot exist without an observer to interpret visual images as "red".

the mind could be trained to use ideas or visions from past memories or brain activity patterns? — Kizzy

Our ability to remember and imagine and dream is astonishing. It's fairly easy to imagine what a red pen might look like, or a floroucent pen that glows red in the dark etc. Past memories might help, but with basic language skills one can compose infinitely many descriptions of what a red pen looks like, or might look like, in real or fictional worlds etc.

However, I don't know how to imagine what it might be like to see something invisible, or a pen that is red yet green in the same respect. It's easy to write or say, but not so easy to imagine.

What if we watch the brain activity looking at a painting of a red pen? The painting itself is not a real pen, but it still conveys the idea of “redness” and “pen” to anyone who views it. — Kizzy

Empathy is the ability to experience what someone else is experiencing. Since someone elses experience is not open to view, we must access it indirectly via languages, verbal, pictorial, interpretation of gestures etc

That's basically how a painting conveys experiences. In the late 1800s and early 1900s empathy theory was used for explaining works of art and architecture.

Another example of how colours are social conventions. — javi2541997

I mean, the name is a social convention and being able to pick it out might be a matter of cultural norms, but the color itself probably has to do with our biology, right?

Rather than perceiving colour, I believe we perceive light and reflection. That is why a blind person suffers from no light perception. Therefore, a blind person will never understand the social convention of ‘red’, ‘blue’ or ‘yellow’. It is a waste of time to explain to them that our world is colourful because a colour is not something they can smell or taste. Without light, everything is over regarding perceiving electromagnetic spectrum.

Did you know the eye has evolved independently about 50 times on earth? Crazy.

The photons are the same, whether or not they are perceived at all. Without a perceiver who has subjective experiences, there is no red.

Did you know the eye has evolved independently about 50 times on earth? Crazy. — frank

I had only heard of human and octopus, and thought that was amazing!!

Yes, it is awesome. The eye is probably one of the most important sensory organs, yet it is a bit underrated.

but the color itself probably has to do with our biology, right — frank

It depends on what you mean by "the colour itself". Our sensitivity to certain wavelengths of light, and the fact that some of our retinal cells are more sensitive to some wavelengths than other ones, is certainly a matter of biology. How we actually experience that colour, perhaps not. I mean, I still think it's biological, but not necessarily entirely biology we're born with - biology that is developed in the brain by use and adaptation.

Folks, why do I buy different coloured collars for my dog? Why do I say that my dog’s favourite ball is the red one? Why do I put the water and food in different coloured bowls? My dog doesn’t care at all. She acts with different biological impulses. She goes to eat where the food is, and she goes to run whenever a park is. Dogs don’t waste time with socially biassed conventions like we do.

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