> [Krimel] > Again with levels exploiting and being exploited. Really what sense does > that make?
(Bo) Lots of sense, but if "exploitation" sounds offensive please find a better one. [Krimel] My problem here is with assigning the qualities of personhood to abstractions. The levels desire nothing. They exploit nothing. They are explanatory tools not autonomous agents. > [Krimel] > Intellect to the extent that it is measured on tests seems to reflect > speed of access to short term memory. STM is what is held instant to > instant in immediate awareness. In this sense intelligence is the ability > to quickly insert new ideas and seek out new and novel patterns of > concepts. [Bo] Agree, this is the way most people of this discussion regards the intellectual level. For me it is the ability to distinguish between what's subjective and what's objective .. which BTW is how my dictionary defines "intellect". [Krimel] I think we are agreed that the concept is nebulous at best. I would maintain that the ability to distinguish what is self and what is not self is no illusion. I recently watched a video of a schizophrenic woman describing her distress at being unable to distinguish her "self" from the chair she sat in. She said she tried to move the arm of the chair and found it quite distressing that it would not move the way her arm would move. It is one thing to see connection and inter-relationship and quite another to claim that "I" and "it" are one. The former helps fit the self into the larger stream of reality the later is a delusion that can only lead to disappointment. I am willing to back off of this a sckosh in that, "it" is what is represented within my neural network. A chair is an assemblage of material with a certain form designed to serve a particular function. But the concept of chair is a pattern of concepts and associations that I have personally assembled from my own life experience. These include the sensations and emotions that have been triggered through my past history with "chair". So yes the chair is still me in a certain sense but the arm attached to my shoulder acts differently than the arm of the chair. My control of it and ability to interact with it are qualitatively different. [Bo] Indeed I am, because - as said - most people at this discussion are somists in spite of using MOQ terminology, and SOM (intellect before becoming MOQ's 4th level) has selfawarenes as a criterion of intelligence. Dubious concept - you bet. I know Francis Crick and other efforts to trace consciousness in various places (Hammeroff) "microtubes " or (Zohar) something I no longer remember. Totally wasted because there is nothing called consciousness ... or mind .. or awareness in the MOQ as such, all are static 4th. level patterns. Valuable as working hypotheses but not as metaphysics. [Krimel] I find a fairly solid consensus among those who study "the mind" rather than idly speculate about it, that the mind is what the brain does. But there is also a consensus that the mind is not single thing. Pinker covers this at length in "How the Mind Works." The mind creates a sense of unity but this is an illusion. Just as "the mind" patches over the blind spot in our visual field or creates a sense of continuous motion when viewing images at 33 frames per second. Here is a site that offers up the best collection of optical illusion I have run across. I highly recommend it. Some of the effects are astounding. http://www.michaelbach.de/ot/ The point being that we construct reality out of raw sense impressions and our history of having such impressions. Similarly "consciousness" is a kind of illusion of the perception of self. It is not wrong or inaccurate nor is it fixed. It changes and adapts. But this is an example were I think there are other "levels" that serve much better than Pirsig's. There is the emotional level, the sensory level, the memory level. These have identifiable structures and pathways of processing in the brain. [Bo] Yes, If you say what I believe you are saying, maybe YOU of all people around this place have understood. A biological pattern is copied in computers and I do not scoff at them for being "mechanical" - they have long since reached the same computing power, yet the said selfawareness will never occur because they can't reach the emotional social level and after that the intellectual (SOM) level .... which is I repeat NOT a consciousness level, but the level where consciousness is seen as criterion for intelligence. [Krimel] Kurzweil and others maintain that the brain is hardware and the mind is software and that it should be possible to have the software run on other hardware. Kurzweil thinks this could happen within the live span of some living today. He says that you could transfer your "self" into a machine. I see nothing in principle that would prevent this. In fact I would say it is already happening. We are transferring large amounts of our collectively held awareness and memory into machine storage. We are constructing higher orders of efficiency in processing outside of our bodies that could never be possible via biological evolution. As Pirsig points out in his discussion of random access this process yields extraordinary efficiencies in our ability to access and use the information we have. Improvements in our ability to construct and manipulate categories of thought mechanically and as a result biologically have made us all, well most of us, smarter than those who preceded us. > [Krimel] > Quite the opposite, consciousness (whatever it is) arises out of > emotions which are far more ancient on the evolutionary scale. [Bo] Well, what SOM calls consciousness may have occurred at the social (emotional) level, but I believe that the MOQ will call it "awareness of social values. But OK, at least this is a thousand times better that the ...... no names dropped ;-) [Krimel] I really do not think emotions are "social" I think they are entirely biological. They happen to us as a result of our interactions with the environment. They are universal in all of mankind and in most if not all mammals. Certainly they are often expressed socially and have profound social consequences but the very fact that all humans can communicate emotionally suggests it is hardwired not learned. [Bo] Again ... with a little help this may fit. The function of intellect (whose definition isn't exactly consciousness - as said - where the term occurs, but let that rest) is indeed to check the social emotions. That way they are not "heuristic" but are seen in an even greater erspective - intellect's objective perspective. Dammit first time I have agreed so mucht. Thank you Case. Will return to the Benjamin Libet issue later. [Krimel] Thanks but perhaps a bit more refinement is in order. Emotions are hardwired heuristics in that, it is a good rule of thumb that when you see a bear charging at you, you should run away. When you see a fertile mate you should become aroused. When you see a patch of berries you should be happy and pick them. These rules of thumb work almost all of the time and are effective across a wide range of species. But there are times when our rules of thumb do not work and our emotions will prove to be counter-productive. Our species has adapted to exploit this to our reproductive advantage by being able to recall past experiences and refine our rules of thumbs to make them better. Don't know if this hinders our moment of harmony but that's the way I see it. Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org.uk/pipermail/moq_discuss_archive/
