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.

:up: :up: Of course.
:grin:

I think this is a little bit of a red herring when it comes to theorizing in teh way we do here (or, philosophy in general). I think if the theory has no knock-downs, we can hold unparsimonious theories. They just shouldn't take precedence. But, the "brain-as-receiver" theory is as old as time and has some explanatory power so I like that it's not being written off. — AmadeusD

Do you have the conscious experience of homunculusly controlling a meat puppet through some sort of communication channel? If so, what do the controls (that homunculus-you uses to control meat puppet-you) looks like?

Are they red?

It is a question that has been argued many times here on the forum. I've made my arguments so many times, it's hard to work up any enthusiasm to do it again. — T Clark

Same here. :wink:

You and I understand metaphysics differently. It's not that we haven't found proof that free will exists or doesn't exist, it's that it is not a question that can be answered empirically. — T Clark

This is a topic for a thread. A thread which I have no interest in starting. :razz:

I did not take the passage as a matter of intention. It was more a reporting of a gap. We do stuff and find out later what it brought about. Maybe. — Paine

:up:

Are you saying that free will doesn't exist - that it's somehow a alllusion to mysticism or the supernatural? — T Clark

Free will doesn't exist in the sense Peck thought it did. That doesn't mean it isn't reasonable to think about what would be a more realistic notion of free will - something along the lines of what Peter Tse is pointing towards with The Neural Basis of Free Will: Criterial Causation

I don't see it that way. Sometimes it makes sense to act as if ours and others' behaviors are the result of outside influences and sometimes it makes sense to act as if we are in control. — T Clark

Sure it makes practical sense, to go with the simplistic modelling of things that our brains generate, including our models of other people. However, I would think it unfortunate, to not be able to see beyond the simplistic modeling, even if only a bit.

Free will vs. determinism is a metaphysical issue. Its not about facts - true or false. — T Clark

All the more reason to take consideration of free will out of the box of metaphysics.

The phrase "the road less travelled" is from a poem by Robert Frost - "The Road Not Taken." It is ironic that the Peck used this quote because Frost meant it ironically. It is not meant as a paean to a life of non-conformity but rather a wry comment on how we look back on our lives and try to show how we are masters of our fate. — T Clark

I liked this discussion of the poem:

The poem masquerades as a meditation about choice, but the critic William Pritchard suggests that the speaker is admitting that “choosing one rather than the other was a matter of impulse, impossible to speak about any more clearly than to say that the road taken had ‘perhaps the better claim.’” In many ways, the poem becomes about how—through retroactive narrative—the poet turns something as irrational as an “impulse” into a triumphant, intentional decision. Decisions are nobler than whims, and this reframing is comforting, too, for the way it suggests that a life unfolds through conscious design. However, as the poem reveals, that design arises out of constructed narratives, not dramatic actions.

To me the poem suggests recognition of determinism - that many little things make all the difference in the courses of our lives. I think Peck somewhat recognized determinism. And perhaps, that by writing TRLT, he would to some degree determine the course of other people's lives. However, he also had a woo based belief in free will, and yes, using the metaphor from the poem is pretty ironic.

Yea maybe my word choice wasn't the best. I guess I think emotions provide the motivation for thinking, but I suppose a thinking process can work just fine once it gets going without further emotional input. — Brendan Golledge

Well, I wouldn't go that far either, although I'd be hard put to give much of an account of the role of emotion when I'm deep into doing electronics design. It's not something I've thought much about, and I suspect that if I were to pay more attention to the role of emotions in such a case, I'd see that emotions were playing a subtle role all along. If nothing else, I think there is a background of desire to achieve a design I'm happy with.

I agree with this. I thought of consciousness as just being, "having a model of the self," and this can clearly occur in degrees. And as I said before, it seems to me that reason and emotion are inseparable in their operation. — Brendan Golledge

I largely agree as well, but I balk at saying "inseparable". I'd say having emotions is what drives the process which results in our developing models of selves in the larger world.

The Road Less Travelled by M. Scott Peck

This has not aged well. Absolutely horrible at times. — fdrake

That was an important book for me at one time, but yeah. I see books on psychology as having a shelf life of about 20 years.

Protestants do more splitting than an atom smasher, which, I think, keeps them strong and healthy — BC

:lol:

"Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing" is a Christian hymn written by the pastor and hymnodist Robert Robinson, who penned the words in the year 1758 at the age of 22. It was set to a number of tunes, including shape-note tunes which were generally sung at a fast clip, a cappella. Here is a Primitive Baptist congregation a cappella performance to its most familiar tune. — BC

I also know that one well.

My parents both grew up in Evangelical United Brethren churches. Some interesting tidbits:

The United Brethren took a strong stand against slavery, beginning around 1820. After 1837, slave owners were no longer allowed to remain as members of the United Brethren Church. The Evangelical United Brethren churches sustained a strong fellowship with Nazarene (believing) Jews. In 1853, the Home, Frontier, and Foreign Missionary Society was organized. Expansion occurred into the western United States, but the church's stance against slavery limited expansion to the south.

By 1889, the United Brethren had grown to over 200,000 members with six bishops. In that same year they experienced a division. Denominational leaders desired to make three changes: to give local conferences proportional representation at the General Conference; to allow laymen to serve as delegates to General Conference; and to allow United Brethren members to hold membership in secret societies such as the Freemasons. The denominational leadership made these changes, but the minority felt the changes violated the constitution because they were not made by the majority vote of all United Brethren members. One of the bishops, Milton Wright (the father of aviation pioneers Wilbur Wright and Orville Wright), disagreed with the actions of the majority. Bishop Wright and other conference delegates left the meeting and resumed the session elsewhere. They believed that the other delegates had violated the constitution (and, in effect, withdrawn from the denomination), and deemed themselves to be the true United Brethren Church. Therefore, the body initially known as the United Brethren in Christ of the Old Constitution,[1] now called the Church of the United Brethren in Christ.

The denomination merged with the Evangelical Church in 1946 to form a new denomination known as the Evangelical United Brethren Church (EUB). This in turn merged in 1968 with The Methodist Church to form the United Methodist Church (UMC).

My father was ordained into, and began preaching in, the First Brethren church. (Not sure where First Brethren fits in.) However, when I was 10 he decided to try farming the family farm, and we began going to the United Methodist church which had been the EUB church that my father went to as a child.