"Unphysical" just seems like a misleading word imo when you are just talking about the utility of high level explanations that trace over and present what we observe in a nice, useful way. — Apustimelogist

:up:

"Epistemically pragmatic metaphors" I like to say.

Nice history lesson!

That isnt a source of evidence concerning the views of most everyone informed in the life sciences, its a source of evidence concerning the views of a particular community of scholars who integrate phenomenological insights with pragmatism, biology and embodied , enactive cognitive science. They would lose the popularity contest, but It should be added that the kind of evidence that matters to them doesn’t concern whether today’s physics is correct or incorrect in some objective sense, but how its practices and results can be viewed under a different light, according to a model which doesnt invalidate it but leads to alternative ways of relating the physics, the biological and the cultural. — Joshs

I'm still curious about this. It sounds to me like you are describing a priesthood (of which you are a part?) which you think should be listened to as authoritative on all matters related to human minds.

Can you say how I am getting something significantly wrong there?

I used to be a Catholic. In some contorted ways, I probably still am. I do not believe that "Christianity is false". Christianity is just not good at defending itself. Everybody and their little sister can insult the religion and nobody cares. Well, in that case, I don't care either. — Tarskian

Yeah, so much better, are religions that encourage homicide when members get all offended. :roll:

I suppose the after life for an autistic person would be a world in which perfect steam engines ran exactly to time according to a really clear timetable and everyone said exactly what they meant and meant exactly what they said. — bert1

I'd recommend avoiding such stereotyping, unless your goal is to be seen as an insensitive douche bag, in which case :up:

It's not my conclusion; it's what the science says, and I am simply reporting on that. I have no idea why you and others think that you can figure out how perception works by sitting in your chair and thinking really hard. — Michael

:smirk:

This is a good example of the non sequitur I referred to earlier. "Christians are divisive, therefore Mormons are Christians." The conclusion does not follow. — Leontiskos

No. I wasn't making any such argument. I was just pointing out what is easily recognized with sufficient knowledge of history.

Christians and Mormons are a bit like bees and wasps. The uninitiated is liable to confuse them but someone who understands their significant differences—their respective theologies and histories—will see them as very different animals. Of course if one doesn't care and only wants to avoid being stung, then one can think of bees and wasps as identical. — Leontiskos

It's not that I am unaware that Mormonism began as a weird cultish offshoot of Christianity and that many if not most Christians, do not consider Mormons to be Christians.

The fact is, I'm sufficiently initiated to understand that many Christians are apt to label large swaths of Christians as heretical. For example:

https://carm.org/about-theology/what-is-theosis/
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whore_of_Babylon#Reformation_view

It's just an aspect of the inherent divisiveness of Christianity.

- That post was never edited. — Leontiskos

Ok, I guess I misinterpreted of misattributed something.

I'm guessing you dramatically edited a post while I was looking up a link:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theosis_(Eastern_Christian_theology)

Theosis (Ancient Greek: θέωσις), or deification (deification may also refer to apotheosis, lit. "making divine"), is a transformative process whose aim is likeness to or union with God, as taught by the Eastern Catholic Churches and the Eastern Orthodox Church; the same concept is also found in the Latin Church of the Catholic Church, where it is termed "divinization". As a process of transformation, theosis is brought about by the effects of catharsis (purification of mind and body) and theoria ('illumination' with the 'vision' of God). According to Eastern Christian teachings, theosis is very much the purpose of human life. It is considered achievable only through synergy (or cooperation) of human activity and God's uncreated energies (or operations).

Perhaps, not relevant to what you have edited to, but it seems relevant to what I thought you were claiming earlier.

Sure, there are people with all sorts of agendas, but perhaps we should step back.

Do you agree when I say:

...it is so clearly a matter for extremely interdisciplinary thinking. — wonderer1

Yep. They really have the distinctive property that they appear to. They are red. — Banno

I'd say they have absorption spectrums within the 'spectrum space' that people typically classify as red.

They have a somewhat distinctive absorption spectrum as individuals, although they don't have perfectly homogenous surfaces, and different areas on the surface of the tomato will vary in absorption spectrum to some extent. However most of the subregions of the surface of the tomato, despite being somewhat different in absorption spectrum, still fall within the spectrum space typically classified as red.

(Or at least, that is what I would say if I was particularly in the mood to be pedantic.)

I certainly do, but it involves a familiarity with the substance of scholarship integrating naturalism with phenomenology. — Joshs

I'm not seeing how how that is a source of evidence, as to the views of most everyone well informed in the life sciences.

Can you point out specific papers that make a case for what the consensus towards physics is, of people in the life sciences?

...I don’t believe that physics can be a useful participant alongside the life and social disciplines. — Joshs

I would think that most everyone well informed in the life sciences would recognize the usefulness of physics in such an interdisciplinary project. Do you have evidence to the contrary?

So I think the point here isn’t that psychology and biology are not in principle reducible to a more fundamental description like physics. It is that today’s physics is not up to the job because it is mired in older metaphysical assumptions. It would have to re-invent itself as a new kind of physics. Maybe it wouldnt even call itself physics anymore. — Joshs

It seems strange to me that someone would even consider the question of whether physics is up to the job. To me, it is so clearly a matter for extremely interdisciplinary thinking.

:up:

Holy cow! You guys are great! Penn and Teller wouldn't have been able to pull that off more smoothly! — Patterner

:sparkle: :pray: :sparkle:

Still raging.

Sorry you got caught in it @Apustimelogist.

:grin:

Srap's whole post is excellent. — Patterner

That should be "@Srap Tasmaner's whole post is excellent."

Legend has it, that if you say it just like I did, he will appear.

If intuition is, as it says in the part you quoted, "zipping through the analysis," that's fine. That doesn't make it any kind of mysterious sources of knowledge. And the many times people's intuition leads them to the wrong answer would be explained by the fact that their careful analysis also leads to the wrong answer. As you say, whether the answer comes from intuition or analysis, you'll be correct more often in areas where you have some expertise. — Patterner

I wouldn't describe it that way myself, though as a metaphorical way of describing it, I think it is pretty good.

I think it is more a matter of subconscious pattern recognition developing in the process of gaining expertise and stored as deep learning in the expert's neural nets.

This is a relevant article.

Guess my straylian is not so bad. — wonderer1

This reminds me of when I let a straylian woman drive my car. Not the safest thing I've done. I had to keep reminding her that we drive on the right side of the road, because she was constantly drifting over to the wrong side of the road.

Indeed - and educative, in explaining the use of commas. You probably know the old joke about the difference between "The wombat eats roots, shoots, and leaves" and "The wombat eats, roots, shoots and leaves".

For those from 'merca, in the English speaking world "roots" is a synonym for "fucks". — Banno

Guess my straylian is not so bad. Didn't need the translation myself, but perhaps it will be helpful to my fellow mercans.

I like wombats. — Banno

:up:

There are certainly more unpleasant animals.

Be honest about it. My biosemiotic position arises within a community of reason that was Aristotelean and then became Peircean. So the reworking of Hegel would have been done by Peirce.

But you seem quite ignorant of all these metaphysical distinctions. Time to womble off in the direction of your lunch. Don't pretend you have any training in either biophysics or functional neuroscience. — apokrisis

So here we see the rage of grandiose narcissist in most splendid form. Note the venom dripping out it's mouth when it howls. That is one fine specimen folks.

In case you are interested... — apokrisis

I'm afraid that my grandiosity detector has become too sensitive to read much of that.

You said "achieving recognition that one of my current intuitions is faulty has been something which had enabled me to improve the reliability of my intuitions over the long run." I'm thinking you mean something like recognizing a flaw in critical thinking? — Patterner

First, let me state that unusual intuitive abilities is an aspect of how autism affects me, so it is certainly something where YMMV. However, I've good reason to think everyone has somewhat similar intuitive capacities, on the basis of human neurology, talking with diverse others about their experiences with intuition, and introspection, amongst other things.

Yes, recognizing flaws in critical thinking is an aspect of it, but there is a very significant subconscious aspect as well. Conscious recognition that intuitions I hold are not logically consistent with each other seemingly affects my subconscious so that it works in its mysteriously subconscious way to eliminate the cognitive dissonance. Sometimes the result can be the development of a new intuitive perspective which is free of the logical inconsistency that my older set of intuitions had. Sometimes the new intuitive perspective seems to arise out of the blue from my subconscious, in which case it is what I experience as an epiphany.

Having improved intuitions in some realm is a key aspect of having expertise as explained here:

Chess provides a clear example, as usual: there's a saying among masters that the move you want to play is the right move, even if it seems impossible. This is intuition, and the idea is that careful analysis will justify your inclination, so some part of your mind must have zipped through that analysis without bothering to keep you informed, which would only slow things down. That fits nicely with the two-systems model, because the fast system here is just the unconscious and efficient habits that used to be carried out laboriously and consciously. --- But that still suggests that the conscious analysis you do is properly modeled as reasoning of the most traditional sort. There's no difference in kind here, only a difference in implementation. (This algorithm is known to work, so we can run it on the fast but unconscious machine.) — Srap Tasmaner

So if you want to grok what I am saying, it might be worth considering your thinking with regards to something that you have expertise in.

Is this something that is done already on hardware, or only on software to this day? — Shawn

At least to an extent, though likely not the extent that you have in mind, a math coprocessor to A CPU provides 'canned math optimization' to CPUs. Although often this is 'hidden' from a programmer, in that the compiler 'knows' how to make use of the coprocessor, and the programmer doesn't need to concern himself with it. (Aside from perhaps understanding that, for example, the combination of hardware and software will be able to produce 32 bit multiplication results in one clock cycle.)

Similar can be pairing a CPU with an FPGA. With such a hardware setup, a wide variety of processes can be designed into the logic fabric of the FPGA (for example a Fast Fourier Transform) so that what would otherwise require a lot of CPU clock cycles can be done much more quickly within the FPGA.

On the technological horizon, are hardware instantiations of artificial neural networks, which will allow memory and processor to be entertwined within each artifical neuron, in such a way that very powerful information processing can occur within the neural network as a whole, which can be faster and much more energy efficient than today's AIs like Chat-GPT.

Also, another reason why I am not an antinatalist is that I am open to the possibility of an afterlife. I am not sure how the possibility of the afterlife would influence the dilemma of antinatalism (I guess that it also depends on how the afterlife is, if there is one). — boundless

As someone on the autism spectrum, the question arises for me of whether in an afterlife I would be autistic.

If not, then it doesn't seem like it would be me in the afterlife.
If so, and for eternity, I expect I'd think the afterlife kind of sucks.

and, on occasion, mild insanity. — Ludwig V

:monkey:

But you said all the complex behaviours of neurons emerge from lower level physics which is quite wrong. They emerge from the information processing which entropically entrains the physical world in a way that brains and nervous systems can be a thing. — apokrisis

That's just backwards, and verging on magical thinking, not to mention overdetermination.

I don’t favour computer analogies but what do you think causes the state of a logic gate to flip. Is it the information being processed or the fluctuating voltage of the circuits? — apokrisis

I provided somewhat of an explanation of this on the forum beginning here.

A logic gate flipping is a physical process with emergent properties which allow us to treat it as if logic determines the results, by imposing additional constraints by only sampling the output of the logic gate on clock edges.

Logic gates don't flip, but they can 'slide' (or slew) pretty fast.

The physics of neurons is shaped by the top-down needs of Bayesian modelling. Bayesian modelling isn’t a bottom-up emergent product of fluctuating chemical potentials. — apokrisis

Bayesian brain theorizing is just another case of people looking for their keys under the street light, because that is where the light is. Sure neural nets behave in many regards as if they they are implementing a Bayesian process, but it would be thinking simplistically to think that is the whole story.

But I suppose humanity needs its simplisticators.

:zip:

I’m arguing that the full implications of the non-linearity of complex systems in living beings makes it impossible to derive them from physical models as they are currently understood. — Joshs

"Currently understood" is rather vague. Currently understood by whom? Certainly there are plenty of people who have a deeper understanding of the implications of the non-linearity of complex systems in living beings than do most philosophers or even psychologists. Just to give an example I am experienced with... In an EE curriculum, linear circuit analysis is typically covered in the first two EE classes, from that point on, it is all about non-linear systems.

It is not the non-linearity that is particularly problematic when trying to grasp minds/brains. It is the complexity, and lack of anything remotely approaching a detailed account of that complexity.

This story (myth) is not "salvation" because, in fact, one's "suffering" (i.e. frustrations, fears, pains, losses, traumas, dysfunctions) ceases only with one's death. The world's oldest confidence game ritually over-promises and under-delivers: false hope. Besides, most historical religions preach that every person has an 'eternal soul' – imo, there isn't any notion that's more of an ego-fetish than this. — 180 Proof

:up:

:up:

Brains in some sense synchronizing with other brains as well as other parts of the environments they navigate.
— Apustimelogist
H'm what does "in some sense" mean? — Ludwig V

I know @Apustimelogist already answered, but I want to add the following link to flesh out the very literal sense in which synchronization occurs:

https://drsarahmckay.com/brain-to-brain-synchrony-how-neuroscience-decodes-trust-rapport-and-attachment/

Surely someone has read this book here. — Lionino

[Godel, Escher, Bach]

I consider the book an intellectual masterpiece. I've known for a long time that Hofstadter was naive in some of his beliefs about the potential for computation as it was when the book was written. But regardless, Hofstadter provides a lot of valuable tools for thinking about thinking.

Especially valuable (as my 40 year old memory of the book recalls) are Hofstadter's discussion of the importance of being able to flip between reductive and holistic perspectives, and the way he conveys an understanding of emergence.

At present "emergent properties" seems to be pretty much a label for the undefined. — Ludwig V

I can understand why it would seem that way, but I'll try show emergence in a different light.

Suppose I design an electronic circuit that has the property of producing accurate measurements of something. I, in principle, could explain in an enormous amount of detail, why these specific components, interconnected with each other in this specific way, results in the emergent property of the design. For such an explanation to succeed, the person I am explaining this to, would need more than a four year degree in electrical engineering provides as background knowledge.

Neither of us probably wants to go through such an explanatory process. :wink:

So it seems reasonable to me, to see understanding of emergence as something particular experts have, and that non-experts for practical purposes, have to be left with the seemingly hand-wavey explanation, "The property emerges from the physical structure of the device."

This answers nought. Sometimes those choices appear Red to me. This also doesn't answer anything ;) — AmadeusD

It wasn't intended to answer anything. Just provide food for thought.

I suspect the lion’s share of those intuitions are formed by early adulthood , which may explain why philosophers like Heidegger, Nietzsche and Kierkegaard were able to generate profound psychological insights while living essentially monastic lives. — Joshs

I wanted to revisit this, and ask about the reading habits of these three men, and whether there was a lot of similarity between the reading habits of these three and what you would expect of religious monastics?

Even someone who superficially appears socially isolated, may be interacting with diverse others via reading and writing. I'm not sure that comparing those three to monastics is very apples to apples, but you tell me.

I am not at all sure of what I think I know. — Athena

That can be a very good thing. It can be what leads to an epiphany.

I think you can know that many here wish you well.