Regarding Jill Bolte Taylor, dmb said: http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/jill_bolte_taylor_s_powerful_stroke_of_in sight.html
I haven't read her book, "My Stroke of Insight", but as she explains in the TED talk, the right hemisphere of the brain is like a parallel processor and the left side is like a series processor. That probably means more to you than it does to me, you big geek, but I think the difference is more than just a little relevant to our dispute here. [Krimel] Take a deep breath... I agree with this entire paragraph. Yes, I am a big geek. [dmb] Now before you stuff all this in your giant reductionism machine, won't you at least admit that brain science doesn't kill the MOQ? Don't you see how stuff like this means that Pirsig's claims about empiricism are entirely scientifically plausible? It's clear that even the MOQ's claims about mysticism are scientifically plausible, don't you think? And doesn't this paint the picture in such a way that the empiricism and the mysticism are very nearly the same thing? It sure looks that way to me. [Krimel] Far from claiming that brain science kills the MoQ, I have argued long, hard and often that the MoQ enriches and is enriched by brain science. I suspect you are hearing more in the last part of her talk than the first and there is enough slack in her intentionally loose description of brain processing for you to hang yourself but it is good to have you finally listening. I was very hesitant about answering this. It seems like you are on the verge of getting it and I know that anything I say is more likely to hinder than help but here goes... I especially liked the first part of Taylor's talk where she describes us all as energy beings. "Information in the form of energy streams in simultaneously through all of our sensory systems and then it explodes into this enormous collage of what this present moment looks like what this present moment smells like and tastes like what it feels like and what it sounds like. I am an energy being connected to the energy all around me through the consciousness of my right hemisphere." She over simplifies the process for her audience of course but as I said a few posts back, we reformat physical energy into sense data and we synthesize that sense data into a unity. She did not lose the entire left hemisphere of her brain. She seems to have damages her speech centers and she seemed to have ongoing motor problems after a seven year recovery so it sounds like a pretty big stroke. Not the sort of thing I would recommend Nirvana seekers anywhere. My point to you has always been that your reconstruction or deconstruction of experience cannot be meaningful if it ignores the data from neuroscience. I would also recommend attention to the information processing metaphor Taylor uses. Since it was first introduced in 1948 the concept of information theory has permeated most of science. It was figured out early on that the laws of thermodynamics turn out to be a subset of information theory. Physicist John Wheeler includes among his really big fundamental questions, "It from bit?" The application of the metaphor to brain processing that Taylor uses, has resulted in an explosion of research and understanding within psychology and the neurosciences. It helped establish a synthesis between the behaviorists, who despised any talk of mental processes and the cognitive folks who talked about little else. For the behaviorists the fit was natural. They had always talked in terms in stimulus, response and consequences. The translation into input, output and processing was simple. The cognitive folks had always been looking specifically at the processing part. The cognitive revolution has resulted from the collaboration of psychologists, philosophers, neuroscientists and computer folks. Before you get all testy and start citing Dreyfus to me, let me say this about that. I listened to Dreyfus's 27 part lecture series on Heidegger and in it he talks about the problems with AI. What he is arguing against is what might be called the algorithmic model of AI. Using this model the attempt is made to mimic human thought processes by devising a program or a series of steps that can simulate thinking. Dreyfus is against this and he is probably right at least to the extent that algorithms could not actually become conscious entities. However, at some point Dreyfus mentions another approach which he terms Heidegarian AI. With this Heidegarian AI you set up a network or a nest of interconnections. You give it input. It produces output. You give it feedback. Based on the feedback, connections within the network either strengthen or weaken. You keep doing this over and over and eventually the system will start giving you increasingly "intelligent" answers. It learns from its experience. Dreyfus, the penultimate critic of AI, says this approach might actually work. For the truly geeky reading this, I would point out that the Asimov's sentient robots and Commander Data in STNG are equipped with "positronic brains" or "positronic nets" which sound more like Heidegarian than the good old fashioned AI. The reason this might work is that, this is what we do. We learn from the feedback we acquire through experience. Our nervous system is a complex network of about a trillion interconnected neurons. There are, in the brain alone, about 100 billion nerve cells and each individual cell can connect to as many as 50,000 other cells. It is literally Indra's net of jewels. I don't want to get all mathematical on you but while the brain may not have infinite capacity, 100 billion cells, each connected to 50K other cells is really, really complex. You just can't believe how incredibly complicated it really is. Feedback is a key point in the way that a neural network works, whether it is alive or synthetic. This is what Hofstadter talks about as recursion. The process of reflecting on a previous state such that the previous state influences the future state. This feedback process produces Hofstadter's strange loop. We see lots of feedback systems even in the inorganic world. Consciousness for Hofstadter is an consequence of nested, recursive feedback loops within Indra's net. What the MoQ adds to all of this is the recognition that inside Indra's net there is an ever changing process of stable connections interacting, shifting and changing, becoming unstable and reforming. It is a flux of static and dynamic interactions. Just a final note: Within the network of the nervous system in a kind of gross overview what we see are several essential functions. First is input and output in the form of sensory and motor nerves. These are for the most part under voluntary control. There are other autonomic functions that are for the most part outside of voluntary control. Their functions is basically to speed us up or slow us down. There are also basic emotional pathways for sensory input that tell us before we can think about it at all, whether what we are sensing is good or bad for us. This is Pirsig's internal sense of the perception of Quality. Although I think Kahneman's claim that it is built in ability to evaluate probability is a better description. In any case what should be obvious from this paragraph is that the system in question is shot through and through with opposites uniting. Binary systems that blend into patterns of ever changing beauty, complexity and wonder. 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/
