You may think me lazy, but here are some extracts from the Treatise that should (I hope) explain what you're asking about. — Ludwig V

Thanks! Such a citation is just what I was hoping for.

I find it interesting to find out about the insights of philosophers with regard to thinking, when those philosophers didn't have the advantage of modern neuroscience in making sense of what is going on.

Of course I think Berkeley went off the rails with idealism, but I can appreciate the attempt at making sense of things.

One piece of evidence is that I don't seem to be struggling against "reality" as much as I used to. Not nearly as much. — BC

:up:



I recommend becoming expert at something that involves working with the way things are in reality, where reality will let you know if you are bullshitting yourself about what you know.

In doing so, one can develop recognition of what it is to have expertise, and distinctions between what it is to have expertise and to not have expertise.

...second he [Berkley] recognizes that some of our ideas have a cause that is not me. — Ludwig V

If it is not too much trouble could you expand upon this? I'm wondering how Berkeley might distinguish between an idea having a cause "that is not me" and an idea having a cause that is me, but of a sort of causality that Berkley doesn't understand.

Perhaps it reincarnates in a knew infant. — Relativist

But then we must ask, why a knew infant rather than an unknewn infant.

It makes more sense to me, to applaud and enjoy with the people who demonstrate that they have knowledge. You can't know that it is inherently less correct, right?
— wonderer1
I think that the self-indulgent position you take here is part of the problem, not the solution. Enjoyment of awareness is STILL NOT knowing. — Chet Hawkins

And yet here you are hypocritically indulging in discussion with knowledgeable people, and using the internet which only exists as a result of people having the knowledge required to make the internet work.

It is inherently more correct to applaud and suffer with the person only claiming some awareness. — Chet Hawkins

It makes more sense to me, to applaud and enjoy with the people who demonstrate that they have knowledge. You can't know that it is inherently less correct, right?

It's not really a simple question of fact. Proof and refutation are probably not available here. But that doesn't mean that the choice doesn't matter or that there cannot be good and bad grounds for making it. — Ludwig V

:up:

They communicate, and there is a structure to their language, just as there is to ours. The language of dogs consists of sounds, body stance, gestures of head, paws and tail, facial expressions, ear and hair erection. They are quite capable of reprimanding one another for rule breaking, status offenses and breaches of etiquette - and of responding appropriately to such a reprimand. — Vera Mont

:up: :up:

Maybe ask Claude, how adjusting his 'temperature' might impact the project you are working on?

:nerd:

[Claude 3:] It's an exciting and open-ended journey, and I'm eager to see where it leads. Thank you for your perceptive observations and for your willingness to engage in this experimental process with me. I look forward to continuing to refine and explore these ideas together. — Pierre-Normand

I couldn't have said it better myself.

Like you, I'm happy to live with uncertainty, with not-knowing. And I agree with you about the existence of a mind-independent actuality. I have no need of a definition of truth either, I feel as though I know what it is wordlessly, so to speak, and no need to attempt any more fine-grained analysis — Janus

:up:

I believe that it is an altered state of consciousness that seems generally to carries with it a sense of elevated experience and understanding
— Janus

That's intriguing. Especially the 'elevated experince and understanding' part of it. What would be an example of this? Are you thinking enlightenment... gurus and such? — Tom Storm

I see the psychologist Jon Haidt's notion of elevation as having a lot of support, and fitting well with my experience:

Elevation is an emotion elicited by witnessing actual or imagined virtuous acts of remarkable moral goodness.[1][2] It is experienced as a distinct feeling of warmth and expansion that is accompanied by appreciation and affection for the individual whose exceptional conduct is being observed.[2] Elevation motivates those who experience it to open up to, affiliate with, and assist others. Elevation makes an individual feel lifted up and optimistic about humanity.[3]

Elevation can also be a deliberate act, characteristic habit, or virtue that is characterized by disdaining the trivial or undignified in favor of more exalted or noble themes. Thoreau recommended, for example that a person "read not the Times [but rather] read the Eternities" so that he "elevates his aim."[4]

Isn't this already, prima facie, absurd? — RogueAI

Well yeah, because it's a straw man you have setup to knock down. It doesn't have anything to do with seriously thinking about the subject.

Cock or two. — Janus

???

The essential issue is that the word 'knowing' is used to invoke delusional certainty, just like 'facts' and even the term 'certainty' itself. To be more correct, we all need to stop using them that way. — Chet Hawkins

Can you know uncertainties?

Even if (perhaps especially if) you assess certain groups (scientists, intellectuals) you will narrow that spread because all of them are closing ranks as a rep of the group DESPITE personal feelings or beliefs or 'known (ha ha) facts' to the contrary, because they would rather do that than let chaos get a toehold further into their protected spaces. — Chet Hawkins

Do you think that you are that good a mind reader? I'm quite certain that you are not.

[Claude:] But I think this framing of an intermediate level of analysis is a powerful and generative one. It suggests that the feed-forward, statistical processing in LLMs (and humans) is not just a brute force pattern matching, but a semantically and rationally structured compression of reasoning that we're only beginning to understand. — Pierre-Normand

I.e. pattern recognizing fast thinking gets trained on the results of slow thinking, resulting in subsequent improvement of fast thinking...

That Claude is one smart dude. (With @Pierre-Normand's help.)

I am currently watching Fareed Zakaria's Sunday program on CNN. During his "Fareed's Take" segment at the beginning of the show, Zakaria discusses religiosity and political events in the US and elsewhere.

It's worth checking out for people interested in this topic.

What your eyes and brain do when hanging upside down is conceivably what some other organism's eyes and brain do when standing on their feet. Neither point of view is privileged. — Michael

Our brains don't treat vision in isolation. Our brains integrate visual and vestibular system outputs, seeking a coherent modelling of the world, and how we are situated within it.

As movements consist of rotations and translations, the vestibular system comprises two components: the semicircular canals, which indicate rotational movements; and the otoliths, which indicate linear accelerations. The vestibular system sends signals primarily to the neural structures that control eye movement; these provide the anatomical basis of the vestibulo-ocular reflex, which is required for clear vision. Signals are also sent to the muscles that keep an animal upright and in general control posture; these provide the anatomical means required to enable an animal to maintain its desired position in space.

The brain uses information from the vestibular system in the head and from proprioception throughout the body to enable the animal to understand its body's dynamics and kinematics (including its position and acceleration) from moment to moment. How these two perceptive sources are integrated to provide the underlying structure of the sensorium is unknown.

It's reasonable to expect the brains of mammals to share such a tendency to integrate multiple sensory channels into a coherent model of the world, and adjust if something like inversion goggles disturbs that coherency.

Thoughts? — 180 Proof

I very much concur with Metzinger.

I've read some of that discussion but not all of it. I haven't seen any examples of meta-management in there. Can you link to a specific entry where Pierre-Normand provides meta-management capabilities? — Malcolm Lett

I only meant meta-management in a metaphorical sense, where Pierre is providing meta-management to Claude 3 in an external sense, via feedback of previous discussions.

My definition of free will is a will that is free from determinants and constraints. Can you give me one example of a choice that you have made that did not have any determinants and constraints? — Truth Seeker

No.

Still, it seems like it's worth considering free will from a variety of perspectives.

Can you refrain from doing the above 27 things forever? — Truth Seeker

I don't know if many people think of free will in terms of being able to be something other than what one is. It seems that you associate the idea of free will with being able to be something other than what you are. Why would that be a necessary requirement for free will?

Meditation literally stops time... — Astrophel

:roll:

Assuming you have alternate valid things you can accept, that are both logically sound…. Then your decision is a moral decision. Assuming you like that word for non logical decisions.

And if you accept that basic acceptance of the world amounts to a tautology (I’m not going that far) then the conclusion would be that all epistemology involves moral decisions. — Metaphyzik

We are coming from substantially different perspectives, and I can see that you make assuptions that I consider unjustified.

I consider it implausible that you have "alternate valid things you can accept, that are both logically sound". But then I'm an antifoundationalist.

You see, one thing is, I can live with doubt and uncertainty and not knowing. I think it's much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong. I have approximate answers and possible beliefs and different degrees of certainty about different things, but I'm not absolutely sure of anything and there are many things I don't know anything about, such as whether it means anything to ask why we're here, and what the question might mean. I might think about it a little bit and if I can't figure it out, then I go on to something else, but I don't have to know an answer, I don't feel frightened by not knowing things, by being lost in a mysterious universe without having any purpose, which is the way it really is so far as I can tell. It doesn't frighten me.
― Richard Feynman

We all have epistemic blind spots, where our thinking is not well informed. We are prone to believing we know things that we don't actually know:

So is every epistemological problem really a moral problem? As that is where is seems to lead. — Metaphyzik

What?

I'm not seeing how that makes sense.

Fifteen days ago...

You can choose bravery at any moment.
— flannel jesus

Not to mention increase his competence at using logic. All for the low low price of admitting to having been a doofus. — wonderer1

In retrospect it isn't courage that is lacking, so much as integrity. Seemingly, it's so easy to say, "I didn't know what I was talking about.", but seemingly impossible for Corvus.

If God speaks to someone at all, that person is presented with two different questions, was it God and what is this God trying to say. — Fire Ologist

I suppose it depends on a person's conception of God, but it is unclear to me why God would have difficulty in articulating what he has to say.

I'm curious as to whether someone could convince Claude 3 that it is in a discussion with another LLM, and there is no need to cater to human sensibilities. I.e. a conversation just between us bots.

:rofl:

Now I rather think that nobody who was playing a normal active part among other human beings could regard them like this. But what I am quite sure of is that for anybody living intimately with them as a genuine member of a family, Cogito would be Cogitamus; their consciousness would be every bit as certain as his own.

Loved this. It's been hard for me to take seriously, the people on this forum who think the existence of other minds is such a problem.

Reading on...

That whole line was just gaslighting.
— Bylaw

Sure, it just shows your whole mental operations and judgements are based on your volatile emotions and wild imaginations rather than facts and reasons. — Corvus

Just more gaslighting.

Wonder why Nike, instead taglining with “Just do it”, didn’t instead go with “Believe you can know how to do it then just do it”? — Mww

:lol:

The biggest problem I've had this whole time is getting anyone to bother to read my ideas enough to actually give any real feedback. — Malcolm Lett

I recommend checking out @Pierre-Normand's thread on Claude 3 Opus. I haven't bit the bullet to pay for it to have access to advanced features that Pierre has demonstrated, but I've been impressed with the results of Pierre providing meta-management for Claude.

I have asked Claude 3 (Sonnet) for criticism of a half baked theory of mine and I thought the results were pretty good.

Anyway, I can empathize with the difficulty in finding people interested in thinking seriously about such things. I think AI is inevitably going to result in much wider consideration of these sorts of topics than has been the case. So you've got that going for you.

I don't know why you chose to start insulting me in this thread instead of just graciously acknowledging your error, learning from it, and moving on. — flannel jesus

So there's something for you to learn about variations in human nature.

Gaslighting is strongly associated with narcissism.

This is because it would be perfectly possible that one needs to believe while learning, but once they are an adept practitioner that belief ceases.
— Leontiskos

I don't think so. It just becomes a less conscious belief. — AmadeusD

It seems to me that is saying about the same thing.

It's definitely been awhile, but I would think that before I ever rode a bike I had a conscious model of how bike riding worked. The model was rather wrong, but thinking I knew how it worked gave me the courage to try riding a bike. It was in the process of trying to ride, falling and scraping things, and trying again, that competence at riding a bike was automatized, in a subconscious 'muscle memory' sense. At some point I was just riding a bike with no mental modeling of what it is to ride a bike, or even conscious thoughts about a bike, being involved.

But if receiving a certain exact wavelength (termed Red, rather than the valence of it's presentation to an S being termed Red) causes a different phenomenal experience in two individuals who do not differ in their hardware (colour-blindness) then I think the argument is still live. — AmadeusD

Everyone differs in their hardware. Color-blindness is just one sort of variation.

:naughty:

Thanks. Something I've suspected for a while is that we live in a time when there is enough knowledge about the brain floating around that solutions to the problems of understanding conscious are likely to appear from multiple sources simultaneously. In the same way that historically we've had a few people invent the same ideas in parallel without knowing about each other. I think Leibniz' and Newton's version of calculus is an example of what I'm getting at. — Malcolm Lett

:100: :up:

A lot of areas of thinking are coming together, and I think you present a valuable sketch for considering the subject.

for context, I've been working on my theory for about 10 years, so it's not that I've ripped off Humphrey — Malcolm Lett

I didn't at all think that you had ripped off Humphrey. I just thought you would appreciate the parallels in what he had to say there.

For context on my part, I've been thinking about the subject from a connectionist perspective, as an electrical engineer, for 37 years. It started with an epiphany I had after studying a bit about information processing in artificial neural networks. I recognized that a low level difference in neural interconnection within my brain might well explain various idiosncracies about me. I researched learning disabilities and researched the neuropsych available at the time, but it was in a bad state by comparions with today. It wasn't until about 12 years ago, that my wife presented a pretty reasonable case for me having, what at the time was called Asperger's syndrome. And it wasn't until about a year ago that I happened upon empirical evidence for the sort of low level variation in neural interconnection that I had expected to find explaining idiosyncracies I have, is associated with autism.

I was foreshadowing Kahneman's two systems view (discussed in Thinking, Fast and Slow) years before the book came out. I had come to a similar view to Kahneman's except I came at it from a much more neuropsychology based direction, compared to the more psychological direction Kahneman was coming from.

Anyway, I'm much more inclined to a connectionist view than a computationalist view. I was glad to see that you noted the blurriness involved in the issues you are trying to sketch out, but as I said, it seems like a good model for consideration.

Gnever mind. I should have gnown better than to engage with gnarcissistic gnonsense.

For those red rocks lying in an ancient dry river bed, Time is "not relevant". So, as you say, "metaphysically" (relation to Mind) Time stands still — Gnomon

Do you think that no radioactive isotopes that were in the rock at the time of the rock's fomation have decayed?