Substitute sight with a computer vision system, touch with suitable sensors [1], the nose with a gas chromatography device [2], taste with a MEMS device [3], and hearing with the kind machine learning in devices all around us. These devices yield signals that can be quantified. Most can function beyond the domain of human sensitivity. These signals could be fed into some self-organizing neural network to accurately reproduce the distributions of presented phenomena. Some of the neurons in a synthetic network will represent qualia for that machine learning system. But we can also peek inside that system and make it all quantitative. Further we can compare it to other machine learning systems that were presented different phenomena. And we and do quantify attention. [4]
[1] https://techxplore.com/news/2021-06-artificial-tactile-skin-mimics-human.html [2] https://pmclegacy.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3892869/ [3] https://www.eetimes.com/mems-tongue-mimics-taste-buds/ [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attention_(machine_learning) From Friam [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> On Behalf Of Prof David West Sent: Tuesday, March 22, 2022 2:31 PM To: [email protected] Subject: [FRIAM] Analytic Idealism "Back in the seventeenth century, when science as we know it today took its first steps, scientists based their entire work on—what else?—perceptual experience: the things and phenomena they could see, touch, smell, taste or hear around them. That starting point, is course, qualitative in nature. Soon, however, scientists realized that it is very convenient to describe the eminently qualitative world by means of quantities. But then something bizarre happened: many scientists seemingly forgot where it all started and began attributing fundamental reality only to the quantities. This, in a nutshell, is the beginning of metaphysical materialism, a philosophy that—absurdly—grants fundamental reality to mere descriptions, while denying the reality of that which is described. ... we began cluelessly replacing reality with its description, the territory with the map. And so now we face the so-called 'hard problem of consciousness': the impossibility of explaining qualities in terms of quantities. In the space of a couple of centuries, we tied ourselves up in hopelessly abstract conceptual knots and managed to lose touch with reality altogether. Laboratory results in quantum mechanics, for instance, strongly indicate that there is no autonomous material world of tables and chairs out there. Coupled with the inability of materialist neuroscience to explain experience, this is forcing us to reexamine our earlier assumptions and contemplate alternatives. Analytic idealism—the notion that reality, while equally amenable to scientific inquiry, is fundamentally qualitiative–is a leading contender to replace metaphysical materialism." The preceding was from Science Ideated by Bernado Klastrup. Factoid: when "perceiving alternate realities," e.g., while on LSD, brain activity decreases when material neuroscience predicts an increase. "Attention is not just receptive, but actively creative of the world we inhabit. How we attend makes all the difference to the world we experience. Forget everything you thought you knew about the difference between the hemispheres, because it will be largely wrong. It is not what each hemisphere does – they are both involved in everything – but how it does it, that matters. And the prime difference between the brain hemispheres is the manner in which they attend. For reasons of survival we need one hemisphere (in humans and many animals, the left) to pay narrow attention to detail, to grab hold of things we need, while the other, the right, keeps an eye out for everything else. The result is that one hemisphere is good at utilising the world, the other better at understanding it. Absent, present, detached, engaged, alienated, empathic, broad or narrow, sustained or piecemeal, attention has the power to alter whatever it meets. The play of attention can both create and destroy, but it never leaves its object unchanged. How you attend to something – or don’t attend to it – matters a very great deal." Preceding from Iain McGilchrist's Ways of Attending. I am a big fan of McGilchrist and his book The Master and his Emissary and, I expect, the just ordered two volume, The Matter with Things. Just throwing some things to see if they stick against anyone's walls and prompts some conversation. Also, big fan of The Dawn of Everything mentioned on the list in the last couple of days. I think it has some valuable information and insights that would inform a lot of conversations on this list with regard sociopolitical organization and means of effecting change. davew
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