Case, Platt -- Quoting Case <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>: > In short this talk of inorganic matter having purpose and values strikes > me > as animism. Imbuing the mindless with mind and agency seem to me to be a > regression in understanding not an advance.
Quoting Platt <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>: > Which begs the question, "How does mind emerge from the mindless?" > Science is still struggling with the answer wouldn't you agree? I wonder if the preposition "with" instead of "for" in your (rhetorical) question was intentional. Honestly, Platt, I don't think Science is struggling "to find" an answer. By the beginning of the twentieth century the physiologists, neurophysicists, eugenicists, anthropologists, and psychiatrists whose research constitutes the Science of Mankind had pretty much concluded that "mind" is an integrative sensory function of biological evolution. This paragraph from Richard Vitzthum's "Philosophical Materialism" is a typical summation of the objectivist view of mind as a physiological "computer". From it you can see why the cognitive scientists are exploiting AI as the logical step to mind enhancement. "The bottom line of this theoretical approach, of course, is that the mind is reducible to natural processes that can be translated into the language of math and physics. Neuronal networks are computing mechanisms that effortlessly transform multi-dimensional vectors of one kind of mathematical value into other vectors of mathematical value. Visual space being changed into motor space has been mentioned, but a great deal of work has already also been done along these lines on how we see and hear. Images from the eyes' retinas are translated into neuronal signals and processed through countless neural networks simultaneously so quickly that it seems to the viewer she is seeing the external world on a mirror in her mind, whereas in fact her brain is recreating and re-representing everything "out there" from, as it were, scratch. So too with sound. Varying air pressures entering the ear are translated into electrical impulses which are then massively and instantly parallel-processed into noises that seem to be coming to us, direct and unmediated, from the external world. But in fact they too, like our vision, are the result of incredibly complex processes of vector transformation among multi-dimensional coordinate systems performed by the countless neural networks of our brain." If the objectivists "struggle with this answer", it is most likely the result of an internal conflict over whether their functional description of mental processes accurately represents what we mean by "conscious awareness." A computer can process information and spit out analyses. A seismometer can "sense" movements in the earth's crust and plot their amplitude in Richter units. Knowledge can be recorded on paper or tape and stored as a body of "intelligence". A stretched elastic band has a "memory" that returns it to its initial length. But none of these devices has proprietary awareness of what it detects, records, or analyzes. It does not KNOW that it senses. Which is why conscious awareness cannot be reduced to digits, signals, and patterns. I must say, though, it's extraordinary for me to be siding with Case in an exchange with Platt. Wonders never cease! Essentially yours, Ham 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/
