But I don't know that this mannequin is not you. When seeing it, I believe it's you. — Patterner
do you think what it's like for me to experience seeing you is the same as what it's like for you to be you? — Patterner
No. RAM is the working memory. ROM is Read Only Memory. Long term memory is more like your hard drive and can be "written" to as we store new experiences in long term memory that we can then access in the future. ROM would be more like our instincts. They cannot be changed, but they can be overridden by RAM, an example would be how we attempt to control our instinctual behavior in social situations.I would say the brain is more like the actual computer with a CPU, working memory and long-term memory, not just a CPU. Each part is necessary and cannot function without the other parts.
— Harry Hindu
I understand you to be referring to R.A.M./R.O.M. with: "working memory and long-term memory." — ucarr
I think that speaking in terms of some "I accessing memory directly" is what loosens the link you speak of. This creates the illusion that the "I" is separate from what it accesses "directly". If the "I" is accessing anything, it is the world via its senses. Working memory is just a working model of the immediate environment relative to the body.I think consciousness, performing in its virtual imaging mode, as based on memory, greatly complicates and perplexes the discreteness and certainty of the location of the referent in relation to the viewer. The portability of memory in time and in space complicates our understanding of the original link between referent and viewer regarding their respective locations.
Furthermore, I think this loosening of the link between the two is one of the main causes of the HPoC. I can access my own subjective memory directly. I can only attempt to access another person's subjective memory indirectly, as via listening to a narrative recounted from memory by another person. — ucarr
Sure, our mind is only part of what we are. We are our body. I can only control my limbs, not the limbs of others. I feel pain when my body is injured, not when someone else is injured. I don't like speaking in terms of "subjectivity" and "objectivity". Are we not trying to speak objectively about what minds are for everyone, not just you or me? Can we talk about the ontology of minds without epistemology getting in the way? Or do we have solve the problem of the ontology of knowledge before we can start talking about the ontology of the world?I think it's possible to understand that even in the case of one's own subjective memory of being oneself, a separation exists between oneself as thing-in-itself (a kind of pure objectivity of a thing, extant, I believe, more as concept than experience) and a mental representation within subjectivity.
I guess I'm saying we are not exactly our thoughts. Evidence for this might be the fact that sometimes the motives for our behaviors are unconscious.
As to the question of the general form of working memory, firstly, I think memory has a circular structure. Going forward from there, I speculate subjectivity is a higher-order of mnemonic feedback looping. Going forward from there, our ability to know what it's like to be someone else depends upon our virtual viewing (in our imagination) of the GUI of the contents (code) of the other person's working memory. — ucarr
If the "I" is accessing anything, it is the world via its senses. Working memory is just a working model of the immediate environment relative to the body. — Harry Hindu
...red exists within the context of the visual field of our eyes... — ucarr
But we can imagine and dream of red things. — Harry Hindu
...do we have solve the problem of the ontology of knowledge before we can start talking about the ontology of the world? — Harry Hindu
So your experience of hitting your thumb with a hammer is the same as my experience of seeing you hit your thumb with a hammer? — Patterner
What I am saying is imagination and dreams are a manifestation of the work being done in working memory. There is also the work of interpreting sensory data and one's memories, which includes imaginings and dreams, is used as a basis for interpreting sensory data.In your earlier quote immediately above, you argue that our working memory is not solely based on the immediate connection between self and world. In addition to this, you say our working memory can also be based upon imagination and dreams. — ucarr
You're forgetting that your understanding of the world is only via your GUI. Your understanding takes the form of the contents of your GUI. So it seems that you need to understand the nature of the GUI before you can even talk about the nature of the world. To say that you understand the world yet can't explain the nature of your mind when you can only know about the world via your mind is illogical. Science is based on observation and if one asserts that their observations are illusions, or cannot be explained, then that just pulls the rug out from all the scientific explanations we have about the world, including how the brain works.If "the ontology of knowledge" can be construed as "the physics of consciousness," the central question of this conversation, then it seems that understanding the ontology of the world -- at least regarding physicalist physics -- has come first, and now consciousness lies under the microscope. — ucarr
In your earlier quote immediately above, you argue that our working memory is not solely based on the immediate connection between self and world. In addition to this, you say our working memory can also be based upon imagination and dreams. — ucarr
What I am saying is imagination and dreams are a manifestation of the work being done in working memory. There is also the work of interpreting sensory data and one's memories, which includes imaginings and dreams, is used as a basis for interpreting sensory data. — Harry Hindu
If the "I" is accessing anything, it is the world via its senses. Working memory is just a working model of the immediate environment relative to the body. — Harry Hindu
...within the neuronal circuits of the brain wherein we interpret the specific wavelength for red, there's nothing therein that's red because the relativistic effect that supports our experience of red exists within the context of the visual field of our eyes, not within the neuronal circuits of the visual cortex of our brain. — ucarr
But we can imagine and dream of red things. So it seems to me that the color red is the form visual information takes and stored as such — Harry Hindu
What I am trying to say is that primary "substance" of the world is process, relationships or information. — Harry Hindu
What form the data takes in memory is the ultimate question here. — Harry Hindu
I've been following this conversation with interest but I don't yet understand whether the computer-based terminology is meant to be a useful analogy or a literal description of the brain/mind/consciousness situation. Would any of you be able to help me out here? — J
The HPoC, as I understand it, derives from the question how (or if) the brain's code for our perceptions includes the subjective experience of perceptions by an experiencing self. — ucarr
I don't see any escape from the contradiction. In your original intention with your quote, you argued that the experience of seeing red can be interior to the mind. Through virtual seeing via the mind-supported imagination, we can lie in our bed at night and "experience" seeing red based on the neuronal memory circuits stored in our brain. Therein resides no literal red. In your later quote, you say, emphatically: — ucarr
First, I have deliberately tried to steer away from using terms like, "internal" and "external", as this just adds to the confusion by incorporating dualism. So whatever you interpreted from what I said, I never implied that the mind is internal and the world external. Instead of saying that working memory is an "internal" representation of the world, we say it is a working representation of the world. We could say the same thing about dreams. They are a working representation of the world, just an incorrect interpretation, no different than a waking hallucination is an incorrect working representation of the world. It is incorrect because we are incorrectly interpreting the red we experience as being a product of our senses' interaction with the world when they are actually another working model. We can have multiple working models going on at once. For instance, I could be seeing the world, but also modeling a future world (a prediction) at the same time. In fact, this is how we learn - by observing the world as it is now and then modeling a potential future and the path to take from how things are observed now to how you want things to be. Dreams are just a model of the second type without the world, which is why we end up confusing it with the real world.This quote says (independent of your intended meaning) working memory is an internal representation of the world. You're describing a bifurcation of sensory experience and virtual seeing. Virtual seeing is constructed from code-bearing memory for "red."
As I understand you now, you're saying: cognitively speaking, the color red is visual information stored in memory as code, and stored code is working memory. — ucarr
Again, I do not think that using terms like, "internal" and "external" is helpful here. The information in a computer is part of the "external" world, so I don't understand what you mean by rocketing "away from the external world into the interior of the mind".When you introduce the word "information," you rocket away from the external world into the interior of the mind. No, the color red itself is not the form of visual information stored in the mind. Instead, there is electro-chemical, neuron-mediated code within the brain.
The HPoC, as I understand it, derives from the question how (or if) the brain's code for our perceptions signifies the subjective experience of perceptions by an experiencing self. — ucarr
Instead of saying that working memory is an "internal" representation of the world, we say it is a working representation of the world. We could say the same thing about dreams. They are a working representation of the world, — Harry Hindu
Maybe a bit of both. When you, or computer scientists, talk about how a computer works we can't help but use the mentalistic terms to describe the behavior of the computer. We can't help but use terms like "know", "thinks", "understand", "trying", "learns", "communicate", etc. to describe what the computer is doing. Some might say that this is all loose talk and the machines aren't really understanding or trying anything, but computer scientists use these terms and aren't they authorities in this field? A better explanation is that computation has finally demystified mentalistic terms. Beliefs are information in memory, desires are goals, thinking is computation, perceptions are information triggered by sensors, trying is executing functions triggered by a goal. Instead of being hunks of metal, our brains are hunks of organic tissue, but still function like a computer in processing information for some goal.I've been following this conversation with interest but I don't yet understand whether the computer-based terminology is meant to be a useful analogy or a literal description of the brain/mind/consciousness situation. Would any of you be able to help me out here? — J
I think this working model is somewhere in the brain, or maybe what the entire brain does rather than just part of it. A first step would be to isolate (if it's not something that the brain as a whole does), how or where sensory information from all senses come together (as the mind is amalgam of the information from all five senses at once) from which the model is constructed. I would think a combination of neurology and quantum physics would be applicable here, maybe some new field being a merging of the two. As for falsification, I think we would need to first determine how we can falsify the various interpretations in quantum mechanics to begin to think about how what I am proposing could be falsified.Where does this working representation of the world occur? Is it discoverable by science? Which scientific discipline would we expect to discover and describe it? What would count as falsifying this theory? — J
So whatever you interpreted from what I said, I never implied that the mind is internal and the world external. — Harry Hindu
Instead of saying that working memory is an "internal" representation of the world, we say it is a working representation of the world. — Harry Hindu
We could say the same thing about dreams. They are a working representation of the world, just an incorrect interpretation, no different than a waking hallucination is an incorrect working representation of the world. — Harry Hindu
They are a working representation of the world, just an incorrect interpretation, no different than a waking hallucination is an incorrect working representation of the world. It is incorrect because we are incorrectly interpreting the red we experience as being a product of our senses' interaction with the world when they are actually another working model. — Harry Hindu
We don't experience seeing when asleep. — Harry Hindu
The information in a computer is part of the "external" world, so I don't understand what you mean by rocketing "away from the external world into the interior of the mind". — Harry Hindu
Maybe we should talk in terms of experiences only and then assign seeing and imagining to types of experiences... — Harry Hindu
You keep forgetting the first step and that is that any time you talk of... code, you are only talking about how it all appears in your GUI. — Harry Hindu
The information in the computer is not the information that it received through it's input. It can even recall the processed information stored to process further without any access to the world, meaning that the information it is working with stored information instead of information received via some input. — Harry Hindu
This isn't much different from how we can have a working model of the world and other kinds of working models going on in the form of predictions, imaginings and dreams. — Harry Hindu
Some might say that this is all loose talk and the machines aren't really understanding or trying anything, but computer scientists use these terms and they authorities in this field? A better explanation is that computation has finally demystified mentalistic terms. — Harry Hindu
I think this working model is somewhere in the brain, — Harry Hindu
A first step would be to isolate (if it's not something that the brain as a whole does), how or where sensory information from all senses come together (as the mind is amalgam of the information from all five senses at once) from which the model is constructed. — Harry Hindu
A first step would be to isolate (if it's not something that the brain as a whole does), how or where sensory information from all senses come together (as the mind is amalgam of the information from all five senses at once) from which the model is constructed.
— Harry Hindu — J
the problem of the subjective unity of experience which currently escapes scientific definition. — Wayfarer
Are you saying that philosophers should be telling the computer scientist how the computer works? Who do you call when your computer does not work - a linguist, philosopher or a computer tech?This is ingenious, but I see two problems. First, computer scientists are not authorities at all in the fields of linguistics or philosophy -- indeed, in my experience, they often have no interest in these fields. Their use of mentalistic terms about machines is as likely to be loose talk as anyone else's. Second, computation has if anything intensified the mystifying aspects of mentalistic terms. Hard enough to understand how to talk sensibly about human beliefs, desires, thoughts, and perceptions! but now we're also supposed to attribute physical or information-based versions of these states to a computer? Now that's mystifying. — J
Then why can't you open the brain and point out where the mind is? I also said that it is possible that the mind is what the entire brain does, not just some internal part of it. What do you mean by "internal" and "external" in this respect? Do you mean the same thing as your birthday present being internal to the box with the wrapping paper and bow? If so, then why can't we open the brain to see the mind like we can open the box and see your present? It seems to me that using terms like "internal", "external", "subjective" and "objective" is evidence of your dualistic thinking making it more difficult to solve the problem.With all respect, surely this is what "internal" is meant to refer to. Why deny that it's different from "external," i.e., not somewhere in the brain? — J
This is why I said that we need to reconcile the contradictory aspects of quantum mechanics and classical physics. In doing so we would solve the observer and measurement problems and those solutions would pave the way to solving the HPoC.This is reasonable, but if we succeed in doing this, what is the second step? What do you imagine could come next, scientifically? This is a serious question -- in fact, the question of the HPoC. We have to picture some way of explaining the mental with relation to the physical; finding the place in the brain that hosts or constructs the "model" merely sets the stage for this explanation by restating the problem. — J
What do you mean by your use of the words, "internal/external"? Are you using them in the same sense that the dog is internal to the dog house? If so, then why can we look in the dog house and see the dog but not look in the brain and see the mind? What if the mind is what the whole brain does, and not what some internal part of the brain does? How did the contents of my mind get on your computer screen for you to read? How did the contents of your mind get on my computer screen for me to read? Are the contents of your mind inside my computer?Are you telling me it's generally true the mind and the world have no internal/external relationship? On the other hand, are you instead telling me the mind and the world have no internal/external relationship within the limited context of our two-person dialogue without generalizing further? — ucarr
If it does, I'm not sure when-where it would be. The contents of working memory is about a specific temporal_spatial location, namely you and your immediate environment. It is a relationship between you and your environment. Does that mean the the relationship exists somewhere between you and the environment, or in some other dimension beyond the four we are aware of? Are the four dimensions just mental representations of the relations between objects, causes and their effects? I am humble enough to say that I just don't know the answer to these questions. All I do know is that dualistic thinking, and the terms that go along with them (internal/external, physical/non-physical), causes more problems than it solves.Does working memory have a temporal_spatial location, or is that irrelevant? — ucarr
Because when we compare them to our actual observations of the world, we find that they are not the case. But what about predictions? Predictions are a working model of a future state of the world. They can be correct or incorrect in how one works to achieve them. Just as we can make our predictions come true, we can make our dreams come true.If a dream is a working representation of the world, and likewise a waking hallucination is a working representation of the world, why are they in some sense incorrect? In the context of your post overall, I'm getting the impression that dreams, hallucinations and socially verified perceptions are distinct types of working representations. How is it that some of them can be incorrect? — ucarr
I think about information as the relationship between cause and effect. Effects carry information about their causes. We are informed about the state of the world by the effect it has on our mind. We might misinterpret some percepts, but over time we can work those out by making more observations and making logical sense of these multiple observations as in the way we solve the mirage problem. We no longer interpret what we see as a pool of water thanks to multiple observations made over time and applying logic, yet we still see it as such. We now know that a mirage is really caused by the behavior of light and we can now predict when we will see one. So there is still some translation being done as we can only experience the effect and get at the causes by translating the effect (which means making multiple observations over time and using logic).Are you saying the red we experience is just our interaction with more information labeled as “working model”? If this is so, does it follow that there is no translation from observed physico_material objects (existing independently within an objective world) into information in a form compatible with our brain? — ucarr
It comes down to the causal relationship and how we might interpret the effects to get at the causes. While dreaming, we interpret the experience of a red stop sign as seeing a red stop sign. When we wake up (and thereby make another observation), we interpret the experience as a dream, not as an actual experience of seeing. We can now predict that when we go to sleep we will experience the illusion of seeing a red stop sign.Are you saying there's no parallel between seeing a red stop sign while driving a car and seeing a red stop sign while dreaming? — ucarr
Not what the world is like, but what the mind is like, and the mind is part of the world. This is why I don't like seeing someone confuse the mind with the world, as if the mind and the world are the same thing. They are not. The mind is part of the world and part of the causal chain that everything else is part of. Apples, chairs, trees, mountains, planets and stars are all information in that they are all effects of prior causes and causes of subsequent effects. Minds are not special in this regard.So, you're saying we're always interacting with one or more types of information systems, and, speaking generally, this is what the world is like? — ucarr
You're talking about how the information is structured and presented as your GUI. You can only talk neuronal activity as it is presented and structured as your GUI. You are confusing the GUI with what it represents when you use terms like "physical". The world is not physical. It is presented as physical by the way your GUI represents it. For you to think of anything, you have to create objects of thought and your objects of thought have boundaries that don't exactly line up with the "boundaries" in the world. This is why we have trouble with defining the boundaries of what it is to be a human or a planet, and find ourselves adjusting our definitions of objectsWhen I talk of code, I'm accessing the GUI-constructed resultant of my neuronal activity? — ucarr
What I was attempting to do is to show how what a computer does is not much different from what we do. We, and the computer, can acquire new information by observation and by logic. We take in new information via our inputs and we can manipulate the information to come up with new information by applying deductive and indictive reasoning. If we allowed the computer to take in some input and then use that information as input to a deductive or inductive process, we end up with new information. The question then becomes, does the new information apply to the world (you might ask, "is the information correct or incorrect?")? If the new information is useful in the world, and it allows you to make predictions of new experiences then it is correct, if not, then it is incorrect.In my attempt to understand what you've written immediately above, here's my paraphrase:
The information in the computer is not the information it received through its input. What's in the computer can recall its stored information for further processing without accessing the world. This means the information within the computer works with its own memory instead of working with information received from an input. — ucarr
Yes. You could even say that an effect is a representation of its causes. A chair is representative of all the processes that went into making it. A crime scene is representative of the crime that was committed and the one that committed it. This is what I mean when I say that everything is a relationship, process or information. If you like, we can say that everything is a relational information process.So, working representations cover a range of types including: the world, predictions of future worlds, imaginings and dreams? — ucarr
What do you mean by your use of the words, "internal/external"? Are you using them in the same sense that the dog is internal to the dog house? — Harry Hindu
If so, then why can we look in the dog house and see the dog but not look in the brain and see the mind? — Harry Hindu
What if the mind is what the whole brain does, and not what some internal part of the brain does? — Harry Hindu
How did the contents of my mind get on your computer screen for you to read? How did the contents of your mind get on my computer screen for me to read? Are the contents of your mind inside my computer? — Harry Hindu
Are the four dimensions just mental representations of the relations between objects, causes and their effects? — Harry Hindu
The contents of working memory is about a specific temporal_spatial location, namely you and your immediate environment. It is a relationship between you and your environment. — Harry Hindu
I'm getting the impression that dreams, hallucinations and socially verified perceptions are distinct types of working representations. How is it that some of them can be incorrect? — ucarr
Because when we compare them to our actual observations of the world, we find that they are not the case. — Harry Hindu
I think about information as the relationship between cause and effect. Effects carry information about their causes. We are informed about the state of the world by the effect it has on our mind. We might misinterpret some percepts, but over time we can work those out by making more observations and making logical sense of these multiple observations as in the way we solve the mirage problem. — Harry Hindu
When we wake up (and thereby make another observation), we interpret the experience as a dream, not as an actual experience of seeing. — Harry Hindu
So, you're saying we're always interacting with one or more types of information systems, and, speaking generally, this is what the world is like? — ucarr
The mind is part of the world and part of the causal chain that everything else is part of. Apples, chairs, trees, mountains, planets and stars are all information in that they are all effects of prior causes and causes of subsequent effects. Minds are not special in this regard. — Harry Hindu
What does it mean to be "subjective"? Does it not have to do with a view from somewhere as opposed to a view from nowhere / everywhere? — Harry Hindu
You're talking about how the information is structured and presented as your GUI. — Harry Hindu
You are confusing the GUI with what it represents when you use terms like "physical". The world is not physical. It is presented as physical by the way your GUI represents it. — Harry Hindu
For you to think of anything, you have to create objects of thought and your objects of thought have boundaries that don't exactly line up with the "boundaries" in the world. — Harry Hindu
If we allowed the computer to take in some input and then use that information as input to a deductive or inductive process, we end up with new information. The question then becomes, does the new information apply to the world (you might ask, "is the information correct or incorrect?")? — Harry Hindu
It's just that in the moment of the dream, we misinterpret what we are experiencing and confuse the prediction or imagining with the world... — Harry Hindu
You could even say that an effect is a representation of its causes. A chair is representative of all the processes that went into making it. — Harry Hindu
Are you saying that philosophers should be telling the computer scientist how the computer works? — Harry Hindu
What do you mean by "internal" and "external" in this respect? — Harry Hindu
How did you come to the conclusion that I did not imply that a view from somewhere isn't a view from somewhere, as in where someone is standing? If it is a view from somewhere, how could you imply that I meant that it is just hanging around, and not hanging around somewhere? Your version is the same as my version, just redundant.What does it mean to be "subjective"? Does it not have to do with a view from somewhere as opposed to a view from nowhere / everywhere?
— Harry Hindu
I would say no. I believe "subjective" means "a view that someone, some viewing entity has from somewhere," so "to be subjective" means "to be an entity that has such a view." Leaving out the "someone" allows you speak about "a view," as if the view is kind of hanging around. But this is impossible -- a view requires a viewer. Hence subjectivity is crucially about the person who has the view. Or not to beg the question -- if it could be shown that a computer was an entity that could have a view, then it would be a candidate for subjectivity. — J
Add cameras for eyes, microphones for ears and tactile sensors to be aware of objects in direct contact, to the computer. The manner in which the information is structured in your mind, or the computer's working memory, would be representative of the world relative to an entity's location within it. It makes no sense to program a human or computer to navigate its environment with information about the world that is not related to its own position within it.To anticipate a possible objection: All kinds of things can be viewed from a computer's point of view, but that's not what we're talking about. The viewer in such cases is me or you, seeing things from the computer's PoV. I'm arguing that the computer per se has no views at all -- it isn't the sort of thing that can have such an experience. — J
Exactly. This is why I asked what you mean by the words, "understanding", "trying" and "knowing". You can only say that the computer scientist and biologist is wrong in their usage when you have clearly defined the words themselves. That has yet to be done here.No, but I am saying that we have every right to criticize computer scientists' language when they begin to talk about other things besides computers and science -- such as "knowledge," "thinking," "understanding," et al. The analogy would be no different for a biologist: I wouldn't dream of telling them how DNA works, but if they began using expressions like "the organism knows" or "the cells are trying to . . . " and that sort of thing, I would certainly protest. This also comes up constantly in talk about evolution.
(And I'm not saying that we philosophers aren't guilty of this kind of loose talk too. We certainly are, but we ought to be better on our guard than most, since questions of language loom so large in our concept of what we do.) — J
We seem to be getting a little muddled between two different questions. One is, "Is there a place for dualistic thinking in metaphysics?" The other is, "What do we mean when we use 'internal' to describe a feeling or a thought, or the mind itself?" To the first, I'm saying, "You yourself don't seem able to do without dualistic concepts when you talk about this, so perhaps this sort of dualism is important in talking about metaphysics." A statement like "I think this working model is somewhere in the brain" can have no meaning unless it's opposed to "I think this working model is not somewhere in the brain." So the dualism of "in/not in" (internal/external) seems important to what you want to say.
The second question is more complex, because there's likely not a single usage of "internal" when it comes to mentalistic terms -- it may be meant literally, metaphorically, or somewhere quite vague. Your riposte shows this nicely: In one sense, it seems absolutely true to me that mental paraphernalia are internal to the brain, by virtue of direct supervenience. But in another sense, we certainly can't take a scalpel to the brain and locate "the mind," or any single mental event. In that sense, "internal" isn't the right word. I think a good response here would be to say, "Fine, let's not get hung up on language choices which may not satisfy everyone. I'm happy to consider using your terminology -- what would it be? How would you prefer to distinguish the 'location' of a mind so that we can talk meaningfully about its supervenience on my brain and not on, say, the tree in my front yard?" — J
YOU are the one using the terms "internal/external". I'm asking you what YOU mean by those terms. If you are saying that the mind is caused by the brain, then that is not an internal/external relationship. It is a causal relationship. So what do YOU mean by saying that the mind is internal to the brain if you do not mean the same thing as the relationship between the dog and doghouse?Let me make a beginning to my response by asking if dog_doghouse and mind_brain are two duos forming a true parallel. Dog_doghouse is a relationship between two things not connected. No one claims the dog was caused by the doghouse. Mind_brain is a relationship between two things connected. Because some say the mind is caused by the brain, and some say the mind is independent of the brain, there is an issue in debate about which claim is true. — ucarr
Then you are agreeing with me that using terms like "internal" and "external" are not helpful here and actually make understanding the distinction more difficult. Now let me say the same thing about "immaterial" and "material". You keep making the same mistake by incorporating dualism into the conversation. What does it mean for something to be immaterial or material? How does one get at the material nature of the world via a dimensionless, immaterial GUI?Additional thought – Whether or not the mind is inside of the brain might also be a sticking point in your contextualization of internal/external. If, as some claim, the mind is immaterial, then it is not inside of the brain, nor is it inside of any other material thing.
The lack of dimensional extension of immaterial things is one of the difficulties with connecting them to material things. Following from this, obviously, the claim an immaterial mind is connected to a material brain makes posits a very hard theory to prove. On the other hand, we know it’s true that “no brain, no mind.” On the surface of things, the theory claiming mind is either: a) identical to brain, or b) emergent from brain presents as much easier to argue.
If immaterial things exist dimensionless, then there’s the strong suggestion inside/outside, being dimensional properties, have no meaning for them. If this is the case, then we have to try to answer the difficult question: Where are they? Can an existing thing exist nowhere? — ucarr
This is only vision but I have four other senses that come together with vision in my mind. Where do they all come together in the information structure we call the mind, or the GUI? If you can't point to a specific structure in the brain where all the sensory information comes together, then maybe it is what the entire brain does, not what part of it does, that is the mind.From neuroscience we know that certain parts of the brain do things made use of by the mind. For example, the visual cortex, which is the part of the cerebral cortex that receives and processes sensory nerve impulses from the eyes, produces memorizable visual images essential to the mind's imaginative activity. — ucarr
Exactly. The scribbles on my screen represent your ideas in your mind via causation. I can get at the thoughts in your head by correctly interpreting the causal relationship between the scribbles I see on the screen and the thoughts in your mind.We know our communication depends upon representation that, in turn, gets manipulated by our computers. — ucarr
I'm not sure I am understanding what you are saying here. I would need you to rephrase. If you are saying what I think you are, then I would just say that self and environment are themselves relationships and processes. Try pointing to the boundaries of each and see if you can succeed. Everything is a relationship. Bodies are relationships between organs, organs are relationships between cells, cells are relationships between molecules, molecules are relationships between atoms, atoms are relationships between protons, neutrons and electrons and protons are relationships between quarks, and then we have quantum mechanics in which some interpretations imply that observations are a relationship between observer and world. Where is the material stuff you keep talking about if all we can ever point to are relationships?Your use of the preposition "between" evidences the fact we cannot make sense in thinking or writing about navigating and experiencing our material world without separations across spacetime and, conversely, connections across spacetime. Self and environment and living seem to entail necessary binaries. — ucarr
No, because you have to bring in what I said about information being a relationship between causes and their effects, and the way you get at the causes is by making more than one observation and using logic. Kant is the one with the problem of explaining how we don't get confused when experiencing a mirage. If what Kant said is the case then how do we ever come to understand that a mirage is not a pool of water, but an effect of the behavior of light and how it interacts with our eye-brain system? How do you come to realize your dream is not representative of the world if not by waking up into the world that you have always woken up to and where each dream is a different world, where we often forget what happened the night before in a dream, or even forget what happened in the world before you went to sleep?Haven't you been arguing that "our actual observations of the world," like dreams and hallucinations, are just another type of information system, i.e., just another working representation no more a literal transcription from an objective reality than are dreams and hallucinations?
Haven't you, as evidenced via my paraphrasing of your language above, been implying Kant is correct in asserting there is a noumenal world of things-in-themselves, presumably objective, that's inaccessible to our necessarily representative translations thereof via the senses_the brain_the mind?
Haven't you been using this argument to support the argument denying an inside/outside duality?
Haven't you been implying that a network of information systems is our insuperable environment?
Haven't you, through the above stages of argumentation, been arguing generally that the "map is not the territory," an argument rooted within Kant's noumena? — ucarr
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