Re: Re: Subjective states can be somehow extracted from brains via acomputer
On Sun, Jan 6, 2013 at 8:55 PM, Roger Clough rclo...@verizon.net wrote: Hi Craig Weinberg Sorry, everybody, I was snookered into believing that they had really accomplished the impossible. So you think this paper is fiction and the video is fabricated? Do people here know something I don't about the authors? The hypothesis is that the brain has some encoding for images. These images can come from the optic nerve, they could be stored in memory or they could be constructed by sophisticated cognitive processes related to creativity, pattern matching and so on. But if you believe that the brain's neural network is a computer responsible for our cognitive processes, the information must be stores there, physically, somehow. It's horribly hard to decode what's going on in the brain. These researchers thought of a clever shortcut. They expose people to a lot of images and record come measures of brain activity in the visual cortex. Then they use machine learning to match brain states to images. Of course it's probabilistic and noisy. But then they got a video that actually approximates the real images. So there must be some way to decode brain activity into images. The killer argument against that is that the brain has no sync signals to generate the raster lines. Neither does reality, but we somehow manage to show a representation of it on tv, right? [Roger Clough], [rclo...@verizon.net] rclo...@verizon.net] 1/6/2013 Forever is a long time, especially near the end. - Woody Allen - Receiving the following content - *From:* Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.com *Receiver:* everything-list everything-list@googlegroups.com *Time:* 2013-01-05, 11:37:17 *Subject:* Re: Subjective states can be somehow extracted from brains via acomputer On Saturday, January 5, 2013 10:43:32 AM UTC-5, rclough wrote: Subjective states can somehow be extracted from brains via a computer. No, they can't. The ingenius folks who were miraculously able to extract an image from the brain that we saw recently http://gizmodo.com/5843117/**scientists-reconstruct-video-** clips-from-brain-activityhttp://gizmodo.com/5843117/scientists-reconstruct-video-clips-from-brain-activity somehow did it entirely through computation. How was that possible? By passing off a weak Bayesian regression analysis as a terrific consciousness breakthrough. Look again at the image comparisons. There is nothing being reconstructed, there is only the visual noise of many superimposed shapes which least dis-resembles the test image. It's not even stage magic, it's just a search engine. There are at least two imaginable theories, neither of which I can explain step by step: What they did was take lots of images and correlate patterns in the V1 region of the brain with those that corresponded V1 patterns in others who had viewed the known images. It's statistical guesswork and it is complete crap. The computer analyzed 18 million seconds of random YouTube video, building a database of potential brain activity for each clip. From all these videos, the software picked the one hundred clips that caused a brain activity more similar to the ones the subject watched, combining them into one final movie Crick and Koch found in their 1995 study that The conscious visual representation is likely to be distributed over more than one area of the cerebral cortex and possibly over certain subcortical structures as well. We have argued (Crick and Koch, 1995a) that in primates, contrary to most received opinion, it is not located in cortical area V1 (also called the striate cortex or area 17). Some of the experimental evidence in support of this hypothesis is outlined below. This is not to say that what goes on in V1 is not important, and indeed may be crucial, for most forms of vivid visual awareness. What we suggest is that the neural activity there is not directly correlated with what is seen. http://www.klab.caltech.edu/~koch/crick-koch-cc-97.html What was found in their study, through experiments which isolated the effects in the brain which are related to looking (i.e. directing your eyeballs to move around) from those related to seeing (the appearance of images, colors, etc) is that the activity in the V1 is exactly the same whether the person sees anything or not. What the visual reconstruction is based on is the activity in the occipitotemporal visual cortex. (downstream of V1 http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0079612305490196) Here we present a new motion-energy [10, 11] encoding model that largely overcomes this limitation. The model describes fast visual information and slow hemodynamics by separate components. We recorded BOLD signals in occipitotemporal visual cortex of human subjects who watched natural movies and fit the model separately to individual voxels. https://sites.google.com/site/gallantlabucb/publications/nishimoto-et-al-2011
Re: Question: Robotic truth
In the case of multigroup collaboration, where each group in made by smaller groups that collaborate in a lesser degree than in each group internally, the survival program to ascertain what is truth or not would be as follows: (IMHO). Any comunication has two main components of truth: The first is about the truth value of this comunication for the knowledge of reality the phisical medium or knowledge of the world. The other component is a instinctive evaluation about in which way this communication modifies the position of each actor in the group: in terms of power, righteousness, respect, status, This also depends on the way in which this comunication modifies the status of our core groups from which we take part formally or informally in the whole society. I name this element social capital. The truth of something, as perceived in the heart take both components. A social robot would take into account both too. It is not very difficult to know that , by evolutionary reasons, without a favourable value in the second evaluation, the first truth can not be accepted Apparently both evaluations are very different. The first is the factual or objective. The second is the subjective or moral, that may be egoistic or altruistic. It can be said that the second depends on interests, values, ascriptions etc, while the first is not. but the first is subject to values too, and the second depends on the factual knowledge. Except the innate knowdledge and/or the one observed with the own eyes (stones tend to fall). to hold something as objective is a matter of having very strong values and beliefs. For example, because I strongly believe in certain institutions and methods, I accept as factual that there are something called electrons. If I have other beliefs or values, I would not accept that as a fact. factual knowledge is like any knowledge,* it has to be positive in the second sense* before being accepted as truth. That is, every objective accepted knowledge implies an acceptation ny the side of the subjective filters. In the other side if I demonstrate by game theorethical reasoning or whatever that something , although bad for you in the short term, is good for the whole society,and thus good for you and for your group in the long term then this something becomes factual. because this truth pass the two filters (objective and subjective) filter that you have to accept something as truth.. The fact is that the verification of what values and beliefs are good for you have been verified by evolution countless times. You are the descent of the people that hold instinctively what was good for you. But what is good has different components: There is what is good for you and your group of interests and bad for the rest and there are what is good for the whole society and for you in the long term but that imposes to you a charge in the short term. The sucessful religions invokes these second set of instincts. Then, there is another way to make you to accept something as truth: instead of making you see rationally what is good for you (if you believe in reason) and pass trough your two filters, I can invoque your egotistic or altruistic instincts that i mentioned in the first paragraph, to make you accept my truth. the first (egoistinc way) is called corruption, the second (altruistic), conversion. NOTE: I´m not being materialist. natural selection is not an agent of causation on the deep, meither matter is. they are a sustrate, the sensible part that we perceived, colored by the mind, of a anthropically selected mathematics. natural selection exist for beings living in time. From a timeless view, from above, the universe has spacetime locations where there is existence, good spacetime trajectories that diverge and flourish and bad ones that are death paths these paths have precise phisiological, social in the same whay that they have phisical laws, that are derived from the mathematical structure of reality that indeed IMHO are a consequence of the antrophic principle of existence of the mind. It seems that the mind is computation, but the phisical substrate, which is ultimately mathematthic reflect this computation as well as the mind, but matter as a product of the mind can *not be *the causation of the mind. For that matter, a product of the mind, and is a proxy for the study of the mind. trough natural selection.. Because NS is how we, as temporal beings perceive the very long term coherence between the mind and the anthropicallly selected mathematical reality 2013/1/6 Alberto G. Corona agocor...@gmail.com The expression Socila construction of reality is an expression that hold any kind or relativism. This is nor that. This is a algorithmical study founded in game theory, and resource optimization with a narrow set of possibilities and a harwired nature of any social being (the ROM element). Social construction of reality theories assumes that there is a deeper reality hidden
Re: Re: Is Sheldrake credible ? I personally think so.
it is perfectly possible to accept natural selection with all the implication in genetics without being a materialist. The materialism is a superfluous ideological substrate. Sheldrake is right about this critic of materialism. I´m not materialist, and I accept Natural selection. Materialism is the logical consequence of the distrust of the human intellect that was Nominalism. This distrust condemned to in-existence any inner knowledge and reified only what produced effect that other can observe in the short term (complex and long term effects were disqualified because they where not so easily observable). So material is anything experimental, that is anything that is enough simple and enough immediate to be observable by many. This excludes long term, complex knowledge imprinted in the mind innately or culturally by natural or social selection. Then the common sense, the human aspirations, motivations and beliefs, are condemned to subjectivity, and rejected as object of study, only as matter of belief for the believers or a matter of engineering for the nonbelievers. I´m not being materialist besides I accept natural Selection. NS is not an agent of causation on the deep. neither matter is. Matter is a substrate. It is the sensible part that we perceive. this perception is composed by the mind, from the input of the anthropically selected mathematical reality. Natural selection only happens for beings living in time like us. From a timeless view, from above, the universe has spacetime locations where there is no dynamic of selection. There are only existence and inexistence. there are good spacetime trajectories that diverge and flourish and bad ones that are death paths. These paths have precise physiological and social laws in the same whay that they have phisical laws, that are derived from the mathematical structure of reality that indeed IMHO are a consequence of the antrophic principle of existence of the mind. It seems that the mind is computation, but the physical substrate, which is ultimately mathematical, only reflect this computation as well as the mind, but matter, being a product of the mind, can *not be *the causation of the mind. As a product of the mind, natter is a proxy for the study of the mind. trough natural selection.. Because NS is how we, as temporal beings perceive the very long term coherence between the mind and the anthropicallly selected mathematical reality 2013/1/6 Platonist Guitar Cowboy multiplecit...@gmail.com On Sat, Jan 5, 2013 at 2:29 PM, Roger Clough rclo...@verizon.net wrote: Hi Platonist Guitar Cowboy You've obviously never watched one of Sheldrake's lectures. Watched, listened, and even read some things a few years back. I sincerely tried to open my mind, but when I realized I was forcing that, instead of doing my homework, I dropped him. Doesn't mean he hasn't changed, but what you posted sounds like the old song. Maybe my prejudice. All of his speculations are supported with empirical data. You'll find some of it on his website, others in his books and lectures. Aware of that. I watched the first hour of McKenna's lecture as given below, It was essentially a promo for taking drugs, and it showed no data, so finding him distasteful after watching for an hour, I gave up. May I ask what approximate criteria you associate with taste in this case? So where's all of McKenna's data? He never pretended to have any. He's self-avowed fool: the object of this talk is that you never have to hear this sort of thing again in your life; you can put that behind you paraphrased from video. I think he died about a decade ago of some brain problem (could it have been from taking drugs?). Begging. His brother became a drug addict also, don't know what happened to him. Same again, which seems to indicate you don't really care. Otherwise one google search and click would've wikied you this on a silver plate: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennis_McKenna PGC [Roger Clough], [rclo...@verizon.net +rclo...@verizon.net] 1/5/2013 Forever is a long time, especially near the end. - Woody Allen - Receiving the following content - From: Platonist Guitar Cowboy Receiver: everything-list Time: 2013-01-05, 07:15:28 Subject: Re: Is Sheldrake credible ? I personally think so. Hi Everythingsters, When things get a little fringe, I want the best bang for my buck (time reading/listening in this case). Here Sheldrake only delivers when held in check by McKenna and Abraham, even if not stunning. On Thu, Jan 3, 2013 at 4:44 PM, Roger Clough wrote: Terence McKenna, Rupert Sheldrake, Ralph Abraham - Metamorphosis by loadedshaman?1 year ago?15,768 views Terence McKenna, Rupert Sheldrake, Ralph Abraham - Metamorphosis (1995) 1:05:49 Otherwise, I find Sheldrake rather a sleeping pill. If we're gonna step into areas of wild speculation, then I want the writer/speaker to go as far as they
Re: Re: Re: Is Sheldrake credible ? I personally think so.
Hi Alberto G. Corona I have no problem with natural selection, it is a reasonable hypothesis. But natural selection implies some form of intelligence, which materialism cannot explain. [Roger Clough], [rclo...@verizon.net] 1/7/2013 Forever is a long time, especially near the end. - Woody Allen - Receiving the following content - From: Alberto G. Corona Receiver: everything-list Time: 2013-01-07, 07:05:29 Subject: Re: Re: Is Sheldrake credible ? I personally think so. it is perfectly possible to accept natural selection with all the implication in genetics without being a materialist. The materialism is a superfluous ideological substrate. ?heldrake is right about this critic of materialism. I? not materialist, and I accept Natural selection. ?aterialism is the logical consequence of the distrust of the human intellect that was Nominalism. This distrust ?ondemned to?n-existence any inner knowledge and ?eified only what produced effect that other can observe in the short term (complex and long term effects were disqualified because they where not so easily observable). So material is anything experimental, that is anything that is enough simple and enough?mmediate?o be observable by many. This excludes long term, complex knowledge imprinted in the mind innately?r culturally by natural or social selection. Then the common sense, the human aspirations, motivations and beliefs, are condemned to subjectivity, and rejected as object of study, only as matter of belief for the believers or a matter of engineering for the nonbelievers. ?? not being materialist besides I accept natural Selection. NS is not an ?gent of causation on the deep. neither matter is. Matter is ??ubstrate. It is? the sensible part that we perceive. this perception is composed by the mind, from the input of the anthropically selected mathematical reality. Natural selection only happens ?or beings living in time like us. From a timeless view, from above, the universe has spacetime locations where there is no dynamic of selection. There are only existence and inexistence. there are good spacetime trajectories that diverge and flourish and bad ones that are death paths. ?hese paths have precise physiological and social laws in the same whay that they have phisical laws, that are derived from ?he mathematical structure of reality that indeed IMHO are a consequence of the antrophic principle of existence of the mind.? It seems that the mind is computation, but the physical substrate, which is ultimately?athematical, only?eflect this computation as well as the mind, but matter, being a product of the mind, can?not ?e?the causation of the mind. As a product of the mind, ?atter is a proxy for the study of the mind. trough natural selection.. Because NS is how we, as temporal beings perceive the very long term coherence between the mind and the anthropicallly selected mathematical reality 2013/1/6 Platonist Guitar Cowboy On Sat, Jan 5, 2013 at 2:29 PM, Roger Clough wrote: Hi Platonist Guitar Cowboy ? You've obviously never watched one of Sheldrake's lectures. Watched, listened, and even read some things a few years back. I sincerely tried to open my mind, but when I realized I was forcing that, instead of doing my homework, I dropped him. Doesn't mean he hasn't changed, but what you posted sounds like the old song. Maybe my prejudice. ? All of his speculations are supported with empirical data. You'll find some of it on his website, others in his books and lectures. Aware of that. ? I?atched the first hour of McKenna's lecture as given below, It was essentially a promo for taking drugs, and it showed no data, so finding him distasteful after watching for an hour, I gave up. ? May I ask what approximate criteria you associate with taste in this case? ? So where's all of McKenna's data? He never pretended to have any. He's self-avowed fool: the object of this talk is that you never have to hear this sort of thing again in your life; you can put that behind you paraphrased from video. ? I think he died about a decade ago of some brain problem (could it have been from taking drugs?). Begging. ? His brother became a drug addict also, don't know what happened to him. ? Same again, which seems to indicate you don't really care. Otherwise one google search and click would've wikied you this on a silver plate: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennis_McKenna PGC [Roger Clough], [rclo...@verizon.net] 1/5/2013 Forever is a long time, especially near the end. - Woody Allen - Receiving the following content - From: Platonist Guitar Cowboy Receiver: everything-list Time: 2013-01-05, 07:15:28 Subject: Re: Is Sheldrake credible ? I personally think so. Hi Everythingsters, When things get a little fringe, I want the best bang for my buck (time reading/listening in this case). Here Sheldrake only
Re: Re: From nominalism to Scientifc Materialism Re: Is Sheldrakecredible? Ipersonally think so.
Hi Stephen P. King I agree. And would add that structurally liberalism is fascist. Mainly in government control and control of beliefs. [Roger Clough], [rclo...@verizon.net] 1/7/2013 Forever is a long time, especially near the end. - Woody Allen - Receiving the following content - From: Stephen P. King Receiver: everything-list Time: 2013-01-06, 16:33:52 Subject: Re: From nominalism to Scientifc Materialism Re: Is Sheldrakecredible? Ipersonally think so. On 1/6/2013 3:49 PM, Roger Clough wrote: Hi Stephen P. King The word must implies forcible persuasion. Hi, But the use of force to persuade is not the essence of fascism. Fascism is a governing system where the population can own property privately but the use of said property is dictated by the State. Most countries are fascistic. [Roger Clough], [rclo...@verizon.net] 1/6/2013 Forever is a long time, especially near the end. - Woody Allen - Receiving the following content - From: Stephen P. King Receiver: everything-list Time: 2013-01-06, 14:08:54 Subject: Re: From nominalism to Scientifc Materialism Re: Is Sheldrake credible? Ipersonally think so. On 1/6/2013 8:39 AM, Roger Clough wrote: Hi Alberto G. Corona Sounds like fascism to me. How so? [Roger Clough], [rclo...@verizon.net] 1/6/2013 Forever is a long time, especially near the end. - Woody Allen - Receiving the following content - From: Alberto G. Corona Receiver: everything-list Time: 2013-01-06, 06:56:37 Subject: From nominalism to Scientifc Materialism Re: Is Sheldrake credible ? Ipersonally think so. A greath truth. Every human knowledge has also social consequiences. When I say A. I don? only say A is true. I say also that because A is true and you must accept it because a set of my socially reputated fellows of me did something to affirm it, you must believe it, and, more important, I deserve a superior status than you, the reluctant. As a consequence of this fact o human nature (which has a root in natural selection). every corpus of accepted knowledge is associated from the beginning to a chiurch of guardians of ortodoxy. No matter the intentions or the objectivity or the asepsy of the methods of the founders. There is a power to keep, much to gain and loose, and as time goes on, real truth becomes a secondary question. ?he creatie, syncere founders are substituted by media polemizers and mediocre defenders of the status quio. This power-truth tension in science was biased heavily towards the former when State nationalized science at the end of the XIX century, because science was standardized and homogeneized to the minimum common denominator, chopping any heterodoxy, destroying free enquiry which was vital for the advancement. Now peer reviews are ?n many sofft disciplines, filters of ortodoxy, not quality controls. ? As the philosopher of science Feyerabend said, It is necessary a separation of State and science as much as was necessary a separartion of State and church: Because a state with a unique church of science is a danger for freedom, and because a science dominated by the state is a danger for any science. The standardization of science towards materiamism was a logical consequence of ?he a philosophical stance of protestantism: the Nominalism, that rejected the greek philosophical legacy and separated dratically the revelated knowledge of the Bible form the knowledge of the things of the world without the bridge of greek philosophy. Mind-soul and matter became two separate realms. Common sense or the Nous were not a matter of science and reason, like in the greek philosophy (what is reasonable included what makes common sense, just like it is now in common parlancy), but a matter of the individual spirit under the firm umbrela of the biblical revelation. The problem is that this umbrela progressively dissapeared, and with it, common sense. That gave a nihilistic relativism as a consequience. With the exception of USA, where common sense is still supported by the faith. ?he other cause were the wars of religion among christian denominations, that endend up in a agreement of separation between church and state, where any conflictive view was relegated to religion as faith, and only the minimum common denominator was admitted as a foundation for politics, This MCD was a form of political religion. This political religion was teist at the beginning (As is not in USA) laater deist and now is materialist, following a path of progressive reduction to accomodate the progressive secularization (which indeed was a logical consequence of the nominalism and the proliferation of faiths that the reform gave birth). In later stages, the political religion has dropped the country history, and even reversed it, and, following its inexorable logic, try to destroy
Re: Re: Is Sheldrake credible ? I personally think so.
Hi Stephen P. King Its simple. Quantum mechanics is nonphysical (is only mathematical). [Roger Clough], [rclo...@verizon.net] 1/7/2013 Forever is a long time, especially near the end. - Woody Allen - Receiving the following content - From: Stephen P. King Receiver: everything-list Time: 2013-01-06, 16:34:51 Subject: Re: Is Sheldrake credible ? I personally think so. On 1/6/2013 3:52 PM, Roger Clough wrote: Hi Stephen P. King I think what was meant was the inverse, namely that no consistent materialist can believe in quantum mechanics. Ah. OK. I would like to see an explanation of this claim if I had the time for such minutia. -- Onward! Stephen -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Re: Re: Subjective states can be somehow extracted from brains viaacomputer
Hi Telmo Menezes Well then, we have at least one vote supporting the results. I remain sceptical because of the line sync issue. The brain doesn't provide a raster line sync signal. [Roger Clough], [rclo...@verizon.net] 1/7/2013 Forever is a long time, especially near the end. - Woody Allen - Receiving the following content - From: Telmo Menezes Receiver: everything-list Time: 2013-01-07, 06:19:33 Subject: Re: Re: Subjective states can be somehow extracted from brains viaacomputer On Sun, Jan 6, 2013 at 8:55 PM, Roger Clough wrote: Hi Craig Weinberg ? Sorry, everybody, I was snookered into believing that they had really accomplished the impossible. So you think this paper is fiction and the video is fabricated? Do people here know something I don't about the authors? The hypothesis is that the brain has some encoding for images. These images can come from the optic nerve, they could be stored in memory or they could be constructed by sophisticated cognitive processes related to creativity, pattern matching and so on. But if you believe that the brain's neural network is a computer responsible for our cognitive processes, the information must be stores there, physically, somehow. It's horribly hard to decode what's going on in the brain. These researchers thought of a clever shortcut. They expose people to a lot of images and record come measures of brain activity in the visual cortex. Then they use machine learning to match brain states to images. Of course it's probabilistic and noisy. But then they got a video that actually approximates the real images. So there must be some way to decode brain activity into images. The killer argument against that is that the brain has no sync signals to generate the raster lines. Neither does reality, but we somehow manage to show a representation of it on tv, right? ? ? ? [Roger Clough], [rclo...@verizon.net] 1/6/2013 Forever is a long time, especially near the end. - Woody Allen - Receiving the following content - From: Craig Weinberg Receiver: everything-list Time: 2013-01-05, 11:37:17 Subject: Re: Subjective states can be somehow extracted from brains via acomputer On Saturday, January 5, 2013 10:43:32 AM UTC-5, rclough wrote: Subjective states can somehow be extracted from brains via a computer. No, they can't. ? The ingenius folks who were miraculously able to extract an image from the brain that we saw recently ? http://gizmodo.com/5843117/scientists-reconstruct-video-clips-from-brain-activity somehow did it entirely through computation. How was that possible? By passing off a weak Bayesian regression analysis as a terrific consciousness breakthrough. Look again at the image comparisons. There is nothing being reconstructed, there is only the visual noise of many superimposed shapes which least dis-resembles the test image. It's not even stage magic, it's just a search engine. ? There are at least two imaginable theories, neither of which I can explain step by step: What they did was take lots of images and correlate patterns in the V1 region of the brain with those that corresponded V1 patterns in others who had viewed the known images. It's statistical guesswork and it is complete crap. The computer analyzed 18 million seconds of random YouTube video, building a database of potential brain activity for each clip. From all these videos, the software picked the one hundred clips that caused a brain activity more similar to the ones the subject watched, combining them into one final movie Crick and Koch found in their 1995 study that The conscious visual representation is likely to be distributed over more than one area of the cerebral cortex and possibly over certain subcortical structures as well. We have argued (Crick and Koch, 1995a) that in primates, contrary to most received opinion, it is not located in cortical area V1 (also called the striate cortex or area 17). Some of the experimental evidence in support of this hypothesis is outlined below. This is not to say that what goes on in V1 is not important, and indeed may be crucial, for most forms of vivid visual awareness. What we suggest is that the neural activity there is not directly correlated with what is seen. http://www.klab.caltech.edu/~koch/crick-koch-cc-97.html What was found in their study, through experiments which isolated the effects in the brain which are related to looking (i.e. directing your eyeballs to move around) from those related to seeing (the appearance of images, colors, etc) is that the activity in the V1 is exactly the same whether the person sees anything or not. What the visual reconstruction is based on is the activity in the occipitotemporal visual cortex. (downstream of V1 http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0079612305490196) Here we present a new motion-energy [10, 11] encoding
Re: Re: Is Sheldrake credible ? I personally think so.
Hi meekerdb OK. I overreacted. [Roger Clough], [rclo...@verizon.net] 1/7/2013 Forever is a long time, especially near the end. - Woody Allen - Receiving the following content - From: meekerdb Receiver: everything-list Time: 2013-01-06, 16:19:52 Subject: Re: Is Sheldrake credible ? I personally think so. No, I meant that quantum mechanics, quantum field theory, general relativity, are all current models of matter and it's interaction. So it is silly to say QFT is immaterial. Of cours it's immaterial; it's a *theory*. But it's a theory of matter (and a very good one). So to say a materialist can't 'believe in' QFT is confused. Brent On 1/6/2013 12:52 PM, Roger Clough wrote: Hi Stephen P. King I think what was meant was the inverse, namely that no consistent materialist can believe in quantum mechanics. [Roger Clough], [rclo...@verizon.net] 1/6/2013 Forever is a long time, especially near the end. - Woody Allen - Receiving the following content - From: Stephen P. King Receiver: everything-list Time: 2013-01-06, 15:31:01 Subject: Re: Is Sheldrake credible ? I personally think so. On 1/6/2013 3:14 PM, meekerdb wrote: On 1/6/2013 11:37 AM, Stephen P. King wrote: On 1/6/2013 2:17 PM, meekerdb wrote: So no physicists since Schrodinger are materialists. So materialism can't very well be scientific dogma as you keep asserting. Brent Hi Brent, I think that you are taking as evidence the lack of overt statements as evidence. Any person that is marxist, for example, is a materialist, by definition... So how many physicists are marxists in the philosophical sense. I don't know even one. Brent Hi, OK, so we can safely discount your claims about no physicists since Schrodinger are materialists... My point is that the lack of a direct statement in some particular form, like I am a materialist does not act as proof that no physicists since Schrodinger are materialists. It only tells us some of the limits of your personal knowledge. -- Onward! Stephen -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Re: The best of all possible Worlds.
Hi meekerdb There are some errors in fact in the Bible, but IMHO it is inerrant with regard to faith and practice. By inerrant, I mean that it is completely consistent along those lines. You have to take it as a whole. [Roger Clough], [rclo...@verizon.net] 1/7/2013 Forever is a long time, especially near the end. - Woody Allen - Receiving the following content - From: meekerdb Receiver: everything-list Time: 2013-01-06, 16:21:42 Subject: Re: The best of all possible Worlds. On 1/6/2013 12:57 PM, Roger Clough wrote: Hi meekerdb Sorry, I obviously missed the point of your quote from Matthew. What is your point ? That the Christian Bible, and by extension fundamentalist Christianity, is a cartoonish world view which no thinking person would take as a guide for morality or ethics. Brent [Roger Clough], [rclo...@verizon.net] 1/6/2013 Forever is a long time, especially near the end. - Woody Allen - Receiving the following content - From: meekerdb Receiver: everything-list Time: 2013-01-06, 14:15:41 Subject: Re: The best of all possible Worlds. On 1/6/2013 5:24 AM, Roger Clough wrote: Hi meekerdb I'm sorry that Christ does not measure up to your liberal standards. I should have thought maintaining love and respect for one's family would be a conservative family value. Brent Matthew 10:34 Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword. 10:35 For I am come to set a man at variance against his father, and the daughter against her mother, and the daughter in law against her mother in law. 10:36 And a man's foes shall be they of his own household. 10:37 He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me: and he that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Re: Is Sheldrake credible ? I personally think so.
Hi meekerdb Quantum fields are nonphysical, since they do not exist in spacetime. [Roger Clough], [rclo...@verizon.net] 1/7/2013 Forever is a long time, especially near the end. - Woody Allen - Receiving the following content - From: meekerdb Receiver: everything-list Time: 2013-01-06, 16:23:37 Subject: Re: Is Sheldrake credible ? I personally think so. On 1/6/2013 12:59 PM, Roger Clough wrote: quantum physics, which is nonphysical A new record. You've contradicted yourself in only five words. Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Re: From nominalism to Scientifc Materialism Re: Is Sheldrakecredible? Ipersonally think so.
Hi meekerdb So much irritation about my use of the word fascism ! There must have been a dozen postings complaining about its use here. Could that not be a sign that liberalism, so prevalent here, is a hidden form of fascism ? It seeks to control us. To change us and society to conform to its agenda through law. [Roger Clough], [rclo...@verizon.net] 1/7/2013 Forever is a long time, especially near the end. - Woody Allen - Receiving the following content - From: meekerdb Receiver: everything-list Time: 2013-01-06, 16:56:43 Subject: Re: From nominalism to Scientifc Materialism Re: Is Sheldrakecredible? Ipersonally think so. On 1/6/2013 1:33 PM, Stephen P. King wrote: On 1/6/2013 3:49 PM, Roger Clough wrote: Hi Stephen P. King The word must implies forcible persuasion. Hi, But the use of force to persuade is not the essence of fascism. Fascism is a governing system where the population can own property privately but the use of said property is dictated by the State. Most countries are fascistic. Only because you've taken a single attribute of Fascism and taken it to be a definition. Fascism is the idea that a nation is a kind of super-being in which labor, industry, and government are *bound together into one* (hence the name) and the life of citizens takes meaning from how they serve their function as an element of The State. This was further taken to imply that superior, i.e. Fascist, nations should bring this superior culture to other inferior, i.e. non-Fascist, nations by armed conquest. Brent Fascism should more properly be called corporatism, since it is the merger of state and corporate power. --- Benito Mussolini. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Liberal Fascism
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberal_Fascism Not everybody agrees, but... Liberal Fascism In the book, Goldberg argues that fascist movements were and are left-wing. He claims that both modern liberalism and fascism descended from progressivism, and that prior to World War II, fascism was widely viewed as a progressive social movement with many liberal and left-wing adherents in Europe and the United States.[2] Goldberg writes that there was more to fascism than bigotry and genocide, and argues that those characteristics were not so much a feature of Italian fascism, but rather of German Nazism, which was allegedly forced upon the Italian fascists after the Nazis had invaded northern Italy and created a puppet government in Salò.[3] He argues that over time, the term fascism has lost its original meaning and has descended to the level of being a modern word for 'heretic,' branding an individual worthy of excommunication from the body politic, noting that in 1946, the socialist and anti-fascist writer George Orwell described the word as no longer having any meaning except to signify something not desirable.[4][4][5] [Roger Clough], [rclo...@verizon.net] 1/7/2013 Forever is a long time, especially near the end. - Woody Allen - Receiving the following content - From: meekerdb Receiver: everything-list Time: 2013-01-06, 20:51:07 Subject: Re: From nominalism to Scientifc Materialism Re: Is Sheldrakecredible? Ipersonally think so. On 1/6/2013 3:19 PM, Stephen P. King wrote: On 1/6/2013 4:56 PM, meekerdb wrote: On 1/6/2013 1:33 PM, Stephen P. King wrote: On 1/6/2013 3:49 PM, Roger Clough wrote: Hi Stephen P. King The word must implies forcible persuasion. Hi, But the use of force to persuade is not the essence of fascism. Fascism is a governing system where the population can own property privately but the use of said property is dictated by the State. Most countries are fascistic. Only because you've taken a single attribute of Fascism and taken it to be a definition. Fascism is the idea that a nation is a kind of super-being in which labor, industry, and government are *bound together into one* (hence the name) and the life of citizens takes meaning from how they serve their function as an element of The State. This was further taken to imply that superior, i.e. Fascist, nations should bring this superior culture to other inferior, i.e. non-Fascist, nations by armed conquest. Brent Fascism should more properly be called corporatism, since it is the merger of state and corporate power. --- Benito Mussolini. -- Thank you, Brent, for this. ;-) I was trying to highlight the behavior of fascism in ways that do not invoke extraneous discussion. All that you added, while true, is irrelevant to my definition as it is representative of just one form of fascism, that of Mussolini's Italy. That's like saying Hitler's Germany was just one form of Nazism, or China 1945 to 1976 was just one form of Maoism. Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Re: Question: Robotic truth
Hi Alberto G. Corona Wiords are socially constructed, so anything in words is suspect. [Roger Clough], [rclo...@verizon.net] 1/7/2013 Forever is a long time, especially near the end. - Woody Allen - Receiving the following content - From: Alberto G. Corona Receiver: everything-list Time: 2013-01-06, 17:53:05 Subject: Re: Question: Robotic truth The expression Socila construction of reality is an expression that hold any kind or relativism. This is nor that. This is a algorithmical study founded in game theory, and resource optimization with a narrow set of possibilities and a harwired nature of any social being (the ROM element).? Social construction of reality theories assumes that there is a deeper reality hidden by a evil society. This is a gnostic belief. There is no deeper reality. and the reality neither the society is evil per se.? Yes, politics and advertising make use of this, like any of us in any activity. we?o it by instinct and by experience, but not fbased on a well founded ?heory. This is so because we have a a innate ability for manipulation and an innate resistance to manipulation. This must be part of a social cooperator subsumed in a process of variation and selection. The knowledge of this limitation in our knowledge and the flawed nature of our communications have moral, epistemological and in general philosophical implications. 2013/1/6 meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net On 1/6/2013 12:42 PM, Alberto G. Corona wrote: I read some workd of Gintis,. but the experimental game theorists give up when things get complicated. The dynamic of groups stability and cooperation and their mechanisms is an field which has not even started. They do not study the vital role of public cult and rites, for example that are critical for an efficient group. And when started, the philosophical consequences have not been explored. Because this ?as profound implicatiopns for what people believe that is true or not. I'm not sure what you mean by 'philosophical' consequence (isn't this what deconstructionists study - the social construction of 'truth'); but the more practical consequences are *very* extensively studied and the results are applied - in advertising and in political campaigns. Brent The first of then is that whatever people say ?ave two meanings: one the pure truth content, the other the implication of this truth for the prominence and cohesion of his group, and both appreciations are mixed, bot at the time to communicate it and at the time of evaluating them. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. -- Alberto. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: From nominalism to Scientifc Materialism Re: Is Sheldrake credible? Ipersonally think so.
On Mon, Jan 7, 2013 at 2:56 AM, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 1/6/2013 3:45 PM, Platonist Guitar Cowboy wrote: On Mon, Jan 7, 2013 at 12:19 AM, Stephen P. King stephe...@charter.netwrote: On 1/6/2013 4:56 PM, meekerdb wrote: On 1/6/2013 1:33 PM, Stephen P. King wrote: On 1/6/2013 3:49 PM, Roger Clough wrote: Hi Stephen P. King The word must implies forcible persuasion. Hi, But the use of force to persuade is not the essence of fascism. Fascism is a governing system where the population can own property privately but the use of said property is dictated by the State. Most countries are fascistic. Only because you've taken a single attribute of Fascism and taken it to be a definition. Fascism is the idea that a nation is a kind of super-being in which labor, industry, and government are *bound together into one* (hence the name) and the life of citizens takes meaning from how they serve their function as an element of The State. This was further taken to imply that superior, i.e. Fascist, nations should bring this superior culture to other inferior, i.e. non-Fascist, nations by armed conquest. Brent Fascism should more properly be called corporatism, since it is the merger of state and corporate power. --- Benito Mussolini. -- Thank you, Brent, for this. ;-) I was trying to highlight the behavior of fascism in ways that do not invoke extraneous discussion. All that you added, while true, is irrelevant to my definition as it is representative of just one form of fascism, that of Mussolini's Italy. Negative, from German perspective: Nazi as adherent to NSDAP (German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei) so national socialist german worker's party wrote in their constitution that corporations potentially pose a threat to the state and have to thus be merged with state force to facilitate common good. This was done not only to build and develop weapons, but to build the A1 freeway, on which yours truly traveled south today. Don't know how Japan handled it, but imagine that it would've run along similar lines. High efficiency, high productivity, lowers unemployment, automatically restrains budding monopolies... all the kind of things the west proclaims to want today; even though history should at some point teach us what this means, we don't seem to get it or don't want to. Nazism was not Fascism. It borrowed from Fascism but it added mystic racism, Hitler cult, and genocide. Brent Didn't imply that. Much less I'd say... if someone's wearing a Mussolini corporate state control merger fascism-pin, as implied by your quote of Mussolini, then it doesn't matter to me which other pins, mystical or belief (what was that difference again?) based, that person wears: they are fascist in that precise sense. They might be Japanese, play scrabble, and be slightly overweight too, which is absolutely, definitely healthy ;) An adherent to Nazism is a fascist via the corporate-state-merger-idea and reasoning, although the reverse is not necessary. Nazism did not merely borrow this: the whole economic upswing in the early Nazi years can be traced to the merger idea, and Germany took this as far as it could. If corporations didn't play ball: leave or die. They were facist or corporatist in this precise sense, and the cult/mysticism (difference to belief, I ask again? Isn't any belief system viewed externally just 'mysticism' in pejorative sense?) didn't change this: it enforced it. PGC -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Re: Re: Is Sheldrake credible ? I personally think so.
On Mon, Jan 7, 2013 at 12:57 PM, Roger Clough rclo...@verizon.net wrote: Hi Platonist Guitar Cowboy You're allowed to have that opinion, or any opinion. We're different. I am a retired laboratory scientist and a pragmatist to boot. So to me, data trumnps everything. So I will believe that the moon is made of green cheese if there's data to suppport that. Not to me, I'll give you that. Data is as important as who is delivering the data and how it was collected, as data is hardly separable from belief about data. And you wouldn't believe the moon is made of green cheese, because you'd probably not like the data's taste and stop reading/listening in under an hour, well before the conclusion of the talk or paper, as you show above with McKenna, when you throw out ten videos for everyone to see, but will not be able to finish just one, posted by the same youtube uploader you chose, that somebody in this thread puts up, clicking on your links. This paints a picture, I do not have to elaborate. Drugs and their promotion, entirely misses McKenna's narrative focus as the semantics with which you use the term, do not apply to what he's talking about. Drugs in your usage do not exist, implying some definite ethical line between permissible and non-permissible pleasures, which is about as far removed from McKenna's speculations as you can get. It's seems not surprising that you don't listen to a talk, when you post ten. PGC -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Re: Re: Subjective states can be somehow extracted from brains viaacomputer
Hi Roger, On Mon, Jan 7, 2013 at 1:28 PM, Roger Clough rclo...@verizon.net wrote: Hi Telmo Menezes Well then, we have at least one vote supporting the results. Scientific results are not supported or refuted by votes. I remain sceptical because of the line sync issue. The brain doesn't provide a raster line sync signal. The synch signal is a requirement of a very specific technology to display video. Analog film does not have a synch signal. It still does sampling. Sampling is always necessary if you use a finite machine to record some visual representation of the world. If one believes the brain stores our memories (I know you don't) you have to believe that it samples perceptual information somehow. It will probably not be as neat and simple as a sync signal. A trivial but important point: every movie is a representation of reality, not reality itself. It's just a set of symbols that represent the world as seen from a specific point of view in the form of a matrix of discrete light intensity levels. So the mapping from symbols to visual representations is always present, no matter what technology you use. Again, the sync signal is just a detail of the implementation of one such technologies. The way the brain encodes images is surely very complex and convoluted. Why not? There wasn't ever any adaptive pressure for the encoding to be easily translated from the outputs of an MRI machine. If we require all contact between males and females to be done through MRI machines and wait a couple million years maybe that will change. We might even get a sync signal, who knows? Either you believe that the brain encodes images somehow, or you believe that the brain is an absurd mechanism. Why are the optic nerves connected to the brain? Why does the visual cortex fire in specific ways when shown specific images? Why can we tell from brain activity if someone is nervous, asleep, solving a math problem of painting? [Roger Clough], [rclo...@verizon.net] 1/7/2013 Forever is a long time, especially near the end. - Woody Allen - Receiving the following content - From: Telmo Menezes Receiver: everything-list Time: 2013-01-07, 06:19:33 Subject: Re: Re: Subjective states can be somehow extracted from brains viaacomputer On Sun, Jan 6, 2013 at 8:55 PM, Roger Clough wrote: Hi Craig Weinberg ? Sorry, everybody, I was snookered into believing that they had really accomplished the impossible. So you think this paper is fiction and the video is fabricated? Do people here know something I don't about the authors? The hypothesis is that the brain has some encoding for images. These images can come from the optic nerve, they could be stored in memory or they could be constructed by sophisticated cognitive processes related to creativity, pattern matching and so on. But if you believe that the brain's neural network is a computer responsible for our cognitive processes, the information must be stores there, physically, somehow. It's horribly hard to decode what's going on in the brain. These researchers thought of a clever shortcut. They expose people to a lot of images and record come measures of brain activity in the visual cortex. Then they use machine learning to match brain states to images. Of course it's probabilistic and noisy. But then they got a video that actually approximates the real images. So there must be some way to decode brain activity into images. The killer argument against that is that the brain has no sync signals to generate the raster lines. Neither does reality, but we somehow manage to show a representation of it on tv, right? ? ? ? [Roger Clough], [rclo...@verizon.net] 1/6/2013 Forever is a long time, especially near the end. - Woody Allen - Receiving the following content - From: Craig Weinberg Receiver: everything-list Time: 2013-01-05, 11:37:17 Subject: Re: Subjective states can be somehow extracted from brains via acomputer On Saturday, January 5, 2013 10:43:32 AM UTC-5, rclough wrote: Subjective states can somehow be extracted from brains via a computer. No, they can't. ? The ingenius folks who were miraculously able to extract an image from the brain that we saw recently ? http://gizmodo.com/5843117/scientists-reconstruct-video-clips-from-brain-activity somehow did it entirely through computation. How was that possible? By passing off a weak Bayesian regression analysis as a terrific consciousness breakthrough. Look again at the image comparisons. There is nothing being reconstructed, there is only the visual noise of many superimposed shapes which least dis-resembles the test image. It's not even stage magic, it's just a search engine. ? There are at least two imaginable theories, neither of which I can explain step by step: What they did was take lots of images and correlate patterns in the V1 region of the brain with those that corresponded V1 patterns in
Re: Re:
Hi Roger Clough, The reason for this is that a hard problem theory doesn't have to actually do anything, but a easy problem theory most certainly does. Any hard problem theory will work just fine, any at all, but the wrong easy problem theory will send a start-up company into bankruptcy. So the end result is that being a hard problem theorist is ridiculously easy but being a easy problem theorist is devilishly hard, and that's why armchair philosophers concentrate on the one and not the other. Author unknown On Sun, Jan 6, 2013 at 3:53 PM, Roger Clough rclo...@verizon.net wrote: Hi Telmo Menezes Could be, but so far no success. [Roger Clough], [rclo...@verizon.net] 1/6/2013 Forever is a long time, especially near the end. - Woody Allen - Receiving the following content - From: Telmo Menezes Receiver: everything-list Time: 2013-01-06, 07:51:49 Subject: Re: Hi Roger, Hi Telmo Menezes Thanks. But can such biomolecular structures develop into a living cell ? Current mainstream Biology believes that's the case. There isn't a complete model yet, but many pieces of the puzzle are already known. The current developmental theory is based on self-organisation processes. A cartoonish view of it would be that proteins are building blocks with highly specific affinities, so you can throw a bunch of them into the air and they will self-assembly into something more complex. This model is not just theoretical. Many cellular processes are known, and they all follow this principle. Effective drugs based on this model have been created. Modelling and entire cell has not been achieved yet, as far as I know. I know of people who are trying. The main problem seems to be that it's terribly complex. We seem to be getting closer as available computing power increases. Unlike generic artificial intelligence, where no amount of computing power can make up for the fact that we don't fully understand the first principles. If you don't mind a book recommendation: http://www.amazon.com/Hidden-Order-Adaptation-Builds-Complexity/dp/0201442302/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8qid=1357476298sr=8-4keywords=hidden+order This is one of the books that changed the way I see the world. It's a bit dated but I love it. I think you might like it too, because it's essentially applied philosophy. Sheldrake's morphisms all pertain to living entities. I listed to a few of the videos and I can't help but like the guy. I just think that he's wrong in claiming that we cannot explain morphogenesis without his field. That doesn't mean that he hasn't come across phenomena that challenge our current understandings of reality. But we have to keep a cool mind. Monads do also, except that for Leibniz, the whole universe is alive. I have no problem with that idea. [Roger Clough], [rclo...@verizon.net] 1/5/2013 Forever is a long time, especially near the end. - Woody Allen - Receiving the following content - From: Telmo Menezes Receiver: everything-list Time: 2013-01-04, 16:57:26 Subject: Re: Re: Rupert Sheldrake - The Morphogenetic Universe Hi Roger, On Fri, Jan 4, 2013 at 5:16 PM, Roger Clough rclo...@verizon.net wrote: Hi Telmo Menezes All I can find on the web is that DNA only contains instructions to make various biomolecules such as proteins, RNA, etc. That's enough. Proteins fold into complex 3D structures with very specific chemical affinities. They are capable of self-assembling into specific macro-structures. Here's a simulation: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lm-dAvbl330 There's a field of biology dedicated to this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Developmental_biology It only works on the molecular scale; the morphic fields are needed for larger macrostructrures. [Roger Clough], [rclo...@verizon.net] 1/4/2013 Forever is a long time, especially near the end. - Woody Allen - Receiving the following content - From: Telmo Menezes Receiver: everything-list Time: 2013-01-04, 03:51:54 Subject: Re: Rupert Sheldrake - The Morphogenetic Universe Hi Roger, On Thu, Jan 3, 2013 at 7:14 PM, Roger Clough 爓rote: ?upert Sheldrake - The Morphogenetic Universe What is space ? ?here is no such thing as space, there are only fields, ? ? which are mathematical structures. Fine. ? What is matter ? There is no such thing as matter, because it is only a field. ? ? There is no such thing as mass, which is why there is no such thing needed ? ? as a Higgs field to form what we call mass. Hence we haven't found a Higgs ? ? or field. Ok. ? What causes a foetus to grow into a baby ? Is it DNA ? Biologists agree DNA does not do that. This I have a problem with. Biologists agree on no such thing and they do have very compelling explanations for how morphogenesis works. As an aside, I find that someone using some variation of the phrase all scientists agree is a very bad sign. I believe this results from an outdates view
Re: From nominalism to Scientifc Materialism Re: Is Sheldrake credible ? I personally think so.
On 06 Jan 2013, at 20:07, Stephen P. King wrote: On 1/6/2013 6:56 AM, Alberto G. Corona wrote: A greath truth. Every human knowledge has also social consequiences. When I say A. I don´t only say A is true. I say also that because A is true and you must accept it because a set of my socially reputated fellows of me did something to affirm it, you must believe it, and, more important, I deserve a superior status than you, the reluctant. As a consequence of this fact o human nature (which has a root in natural selection). every corpus of accepted knowledge is associated from the beginning to a chiurch of guardians of ortodoxy. No matter the intentions or the objectivity or the asepsy of the methods of the founders. There is a power to keep, much to gain and loose, and as time goes on, real truth becomes a secondary question. The creatie, syncere founders are substituted by media polemizers and mediocre defenders of the status quio. This power-truth tension in science was biased heavily towards the former when State nationalized science at the end of the XIX century, because science was standardized and homogeneized to the minimum common denominator, chopping any heterodoxy, destroying free enquiry which was vital for the advancement. Now peer reviews are in many sofft disciplines, filters of ortodoxy, not quality controls. As the philosopher of science Feyerabend said, It is necessary a separation of State and science as much as was necessary a separartion of State and church: Because a state with a unique church of science is a danger for freedom, and because a science dominated by the state is a danger for any science. The standardization of science towards materiamism was a logical consequence of the a philosophical stance of protestantism: the Nominalism, that rejected the greek philosophical legacy and separated dratically the revelated knowledge of the Bible form the knowledge of the things of the world without the bridge of greek philosophy. Mind-soul and matter became two separate realms. Common sense or the Nous were not a matter of science and reason, like in the greek philosophy (what is reasonable included what makes common sense, just like it is now in common parlancy), but a matter of the individual spirit under the firm umbrela of the biblical revelation. The problem is that this umbrela progressively dissapeared, and with it, common sense. That gave a nihilistic relativism as a consequience. With the exception of USA, where common sense is still supported by the faith. The other cause were the wars of religion among christian denominations, that endend up in a agreement of separation between church and state, where any conflictive view was relegated to religion as faith, and only the minimum common denominator was admitted as a foundation for politics, This MCD was a form of political religion. This political religion was teist at the beginning (As is not in USA) laater deist and now is materialist, following a path of progressive reduction to accomodate the progressive secularization (which indeed was a logical consequence of the nominalism and the proliferation of faiths that the reform gave birth). In later stages, the political religion has dropped the country history, and even reversed it, and, following its inexorable logic, try to destroy national identity of each individual european country, in the effort to accomodate the incoming inmigration worldviews. This is in part, no matter how shockig is, the logical evolution of the agreement that ended the religious wars of the XVI century. In the teistic and deistic stages the State made use of the transcendence in one form or another for his legitimacy, since the divine has a plan, and people belive in the divine, the legitimacy of the state, in the hearths fo the people, becomes real when the nation-state is inserted in this divine plan. When, to accomodate the materialistic sects, marxists among them, the state took over Science to legitimate itself, because the State no longer had the transcendence as an option to suppor his legitimacy. the legitimacy of the state was supported by a materialistic sciece, subsidized, controlled and depurated from any heterodoxy. So there is the current science, an image of the state political religion, Multicultural, relativistic and materialist. Hi! Excellent post! OK. Bruno 2013/1/4 Stephen P. King stephe...@charter.net On 1/4/2013 9:54 AM, Roger Clough wrote: Hi Stephen P. King very few scientists Sheldrake has done many successful experiments to empirically prove what he claims. The results are in his books. Some have been published in New Scientist. See http://www.sheldrake.org/Research/overview/ A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather
Re: Is Sheldrake credible ? I personally think so.
On 06 Jan 2013, at 21:59, Roger Clough wrote: Hi meekerdb Not all physicists are materialists, or if they are, they are inconsistent if they deal with quantum physics, which is nonphysical. All theories are non physical, but this does not make a materialist theory inconsistent. With non comp you can make identify mind and non physical things with some class of physical phenomena. Careful, in philosophy of mind, materialism means only matter fundamentally exists. But comp is already contradicting weak materialism, the thesis that some matter exists fundamentally (among possible other things). Some physicists are non materialist and even non-weak-materialist ( (which is stronger and is necessary with comp). But even them are still often physicalist. They still believe that everything is explainable from the behavior of matter (even if that matter is entirely ontologically justified in pure math). Comp refutes this. Physics becomes the art of the numbers to guess what are the most common universal numbers supporting them in their neighborhood, well even the invariant part of this. Bruno [Roger Clough], [rclo...@verizon.net] 1/6/2013 Forever is a long time, especially near the end. - Woody Allen - Receiving the following content - From: meekerdb Receiver: everything-list Time: 2013-01-06, 14:17:42 Subject: Re: Is Sheldrake credible ? I personally think so. On 1/6/2013 5:30 AM, Roger Clough wrote: Hi meekerdb Materialists can't consistently accept inextended structures and functions such as quantum fields--or if they do, they aren't materialists. So no physicists since Schrodinger are materialists. So materialism can't very well be scientific dogma as you keep asserting. Brent [Roger Clough], [rclo...@verizon.net] 1/6/2013 Forever is a long time, especially near the end. - Woody Allen - Receiving the following content - From: meekerdb Receiver: everything-list Time: 2013-01-05, 15:37:09 Subject: Re: Is Sheldrake credible ? I personally think so. On 1/5/2013 6:26 AM, Roger Clough wrote: Hi Richard Ruquist Empirical data, to my way of thinking, trumps scientific dogma (such as materialism) any day. It's rather funny that you keep assailing scienctists as being dogmatic materialists and yet you think their world picture: curved metric space, quantum fields, schrodinger wave functions,... is all immaterial. Brent No virus found in this message. Checked by AVG - www.avg.com Version: 2013.0.2805 / Virus Database: 2637/6007 - Release Date: 01/03/13 -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com . For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en . -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com . For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en . http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Re: Re: Re: Is Sheldrake credible ? I personally think so.
Hi Platonist Guitar Cowboy Better data connected to opinion than opinion alone. [Roger Clough], [rclo...@verizon.net] 1/7/2013 Forever is a long time, especially near the end. - Woody Allen - Receiving the following content - From: Platonist Guitar Cowboy Receiver: everything-list Time: 2013-01-07, 08:33:45 Subject: Re: Re: Re: Is Sheldrake credible ? I personally think so. On Mon, Jan 7, 2013 at 12:57 PM, Roger Clough rclo...@verizon.net wrote: Hi Platonist Guitar Cowboy ? You're allowed to have that opinion, or any opinion. ? We're different. I am a retired laboratory scientist and a pragmatist to boot. ?o to me, data trumnps everything. So I will believe that the moon is made of green cheese if there's data to suppport that. ? ? Not to me, I'll give you that. Data is as important as who is delivering the data and how it was collected, as data is hardly separable from belief about data. And you wouldn't believe the moon is made of green cheese, because you'd probably not like the data's taste and stop reading/listening in under an hour, well before the conclusion of the talk or paper, as you show above with McKenna, when you throw out ten videos for everyone to see, but will not be able to finish just one, posted by the same youtube uploader you chose, that somebody in this thread puts up, clicking on your links. This paints a picture, I do not have to elaborate. Drugs and their promotion, entirely misses McKenna's narrative focus as the semantics with which you use the term, do not apply to what he's talking about. Drugs in your usage do not exist, implying some definite ethical line between permissible and non-permissible pleasures, which is about as far removed from McKenna's speculations as you can get. It's seems not surprising that you don't listen to a talk, when you post ten. PGC ? ? -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Re: Re: Re: Subjective states can be somehow extracted from brainsviaacomputer
Hi Telmo Menezes Yes, but the display they show wouldn't work if there were no sync signal embedded in it. There's nothing in the brain to provide that, so they must have. [Roger Clough], [rclo...@verizon.net] 1/7/2013 Forever is a long time, especially near the end. - Woody Allen - Receiving the following content - From: Telmo Menezes Receiver: everything-list Time: 2013-01-07, 09:33:30 Subject: Re: Re: Re: Subjective states can be somehow extracted from brainsviaacomputer Hi Roger, On Mon, Jan 7, 2013 at 1:28 PM, Roger Clough rclo...@verizon.net wrote: Hi Telmo Menezes Well then, we have at least one vote supporting the results. Scientific results are not supported or refuted by votes.? ? I remain sceptical because of the line sync issue. The brain doesn't provide a raster line sync signal. The synch signal is a requirement of a very specific technology to display video. Analog film does not have a synch signal. It still does sampling. Sampling is always necessary if you use a finite machine to record some visual representation of the world. If one believes the brain stores our memories (I know you don't) you have to believe that it samples perceptual information somehow. It will probably not be as neat and simple as a sync signal. A trivial but important point: every movie is a representation of reality, not reality itself. It's just a set of symbols that represent the world as seen from a specific point of view in the form of a matrix of discrete light intensity levels. So the mapping from symbols to visual representations is always present, no matter what technology you use. Again, the sync signal is just a detail of the implementation of one such technologies. The way the brain encodes images is surely very complex and convoluted. Why not? There wasn't ever any adaptive pressure for the encoding to be easily translated from the outputs of an MRI machine. If we require all contact between males and females to be done through MRI machines and wait a couple million years maybe that will change. We might even get a sync signal, who knows? Either you believe that the brain encodes images somehow, or you believe that the brain is an absurd mechanism. Why are the optic nerves connected to the brain? Why does the visual cortex fire in specific ways when shown specific images? Why can we tell from brain activity if someone is nervous, asleep, solving a math problem of painting? ? [Roger Clough], [rclo...@verizon.net] 1/7/2013 Forever is a long time, especially near the end. - Woody Allen - Receiving the following content - From: Telmo Menezes Receiver: everything-list Time: 2013-01-07, 06:19:33 Subject: Re: Re: Subjective states can be somehow extracted from brains viaacomputer On Sun, Jan 6, 2013 at 8:55 PM, Roger Clough ?rote: Hi Craig Weinberg ? Sorry, everybody, I was snookered into believing that they had really accomplished the impossible. So you think this paper is fiction and the video is fabricated? Do people here know something I don't about the authors? The hypothesis is that the brain has some encoding for images. These images can come from the optic nerve, they could be stored in memory or they could be constructed by sophisticated cognitive processes related to creativity, pattern matching and so on. But if you believe that the brain's neural network is a computer responsible for our cognitive processes, the information must be stores there, physically, somehow. It's horribly hard to decode what's going on in the brain. These researchers thought of a clever shortcut. They expose people to a lot of images and record come measures of brain activity in the visual cortex. Then they use machine learning to match brain states to images. Of course it's probabilistic and noisy. But then they got a video that actually approximates the real images. So there must be some way to decode brain activity into images. The killer argument against that is that the brain has no sync signals to generate the raster lines. Neither does reality, but we somehow manage to show a representation of it on tv, right? ? ? ? [Roger Clough], [rclo...@verizon.net] 1/6/2013 Forever is a long time, especially near the end. - Woody Allen - Receiving the following content - From: Craig Weinberg Receiver: everything-list Time: 2013-01-05, 11:37:17 Subject: Re: Subjective states can be somehow extracted from brains via acomputer On Saturday, January 5, 2013 10:43:32 AM UTC-5, rclough wrote: Subjective states can somehow be extracted from brains via a computer. No, they can't. ? The ingenius folks who were miraculously able to extract an image from the brain that we saw recently ? http://gizmodo.com/5843117/scientists-reconstruct-video-clips-from-brain-activity somehow did it entirely through computation. How was that possible? By passing off a weak Bayesian regression analysis as a terrific consciousness
Re: Re: Is Sheldrake credible ? I personally think so.
Hi Bruno Marchal Yes, the theories are nonphysical, and in addition, quantum theories quantum theory applies to quantum fields, which are nonphysical. [Roger Clough], [rclo...@verizon.net] 1/7/2013 Forever is a long time, especially near the end. - Woody Allen - Receiving the following content - From: Bruno Marchal Receiver: everything-list Time: 2013-01-07, 11:17:56 Subject: Re: Is Sheldrake credible ? I personally think so. On 06 Jan 2013, at 21:59, Roger Clough wrote: Hi meekerdb Not all physicists are materialists, or if they are, they are inconsistent if they deal with quantum physics, which is nonphysical. All theories are non physical, but this does not make a materialist theory inconsistent. With non comp you can make identify mind and non physical things with some class of physical phenomena. Careful, in philosophy of mind, materialism means only matter fundamentally exists. But comp is already contradicting weak materialism, the thesis that some matter exists fundamentally (among possible other things). Some physicists are non materialist and even non-weak-materialist ( (which is stronger and is necessary with comp). But even them are still often physicalist. They still believe that everything is explainable from the behavior of matter (even if that matter is entirely ontologically justified in pure math). Comp refutes this. Physics becomes the art of the numbers to guess what are the most common universal numbers supporting them in their neighborhood, well even the invariant part of this. Bruno [Roger Clough], [rclo...@verizon.net] 1/6/2013 Forever is a long time, especially near the end. - Woody Allen - Receiving the following content - From: meekerdb Receiver: everything-list Time: 2013-01-06, 14:17:42 Subject: Re: Is Sheldrake credible ? I personally think so. On 1/6/2013 5:30 AM, Roger Clough wrote: Hi meekerdb Materialists can't consistently accept inextended structures and functions such as quantum fields--or if they do, they aren't materialists. So no physicists since Schrodinger are materialists. So materialism can't very well be scientific dogma as you keep asserting. Brent [Roger Clough], [rclo...@verizon.net] 1/6/2013 Forever is a long time, especially near the end. - Woody Allen - Receiving the following content - From: meekerdb Receiver: everything-list Time: 2013-01-05, 15:37:09 Subject: Re: Is Sheldrake credible ? I personally think so. On 1/5/2013 6:26 AM, Roger Clough wrote: Hi Richard Ruquist Empirical data, to my way of thinking, trumps scientific dogma (such as materialism) any day. It's rather funny that you keep assailing scienctists as being dogmatic materialists and yet you think their world picture: curved metric space, quantum fields, schrodinger wave functions,... is all immaterial. Brent No virus found in this message. Checked by AVG - www.avg.com Version: 2013.0.2805 / Virus Database: 2637/6007 - Release Date: 01/03/13 -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com . For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en . -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com . For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en . http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Re: Re:
Hi Richard Ruquist Neither hard or soft solutions are valid since they fantasize a meterial connection between mind and brain. Which is absurd. Leibniz is the only one to have solved the problem successfully. [Roger Clough], [rclo...@verizon.net] 1/7/2013 Forever is a long time, especially near the end. - Woody Allen - Receiving the following content - From: Richard Ruquist Receiver: everything-list Time: 2013-01-07, 09:39:36 Subject: Re: Re: Hi Roger Clough, The reason for this is that a hard problem theory doesn't have to actually do anything, but a easy problem theory most certainly does. Any hard problem theory will work just fine, any at all, but the wrong easy problem theory will send a start-up company into bankruptcy. So the end result is that being a hard problem theorist is ridiculously easy but being a easy problem theorist is devilishly hard, and that's why armchair philosophers concentrate on the one and not the other. Author unknown On Sun, Jan 6, 2013 at 3:53 PM, Roger Clough rclo...@verizon.net wrote: Hi Telmo Menezes Could be, but so far no success. [Roger Clough], [rclo...@verizon.net] 1/6/2013 Forever is a long time, especially near the end. - Woody Allen - Receiving the following content - From: Telmo Menezes Receiver: everything-list Time: 2013-01-06, 07:51:49 Subject: Re: Hi Roger, Hi Telmo Menezes Thanks. But can such biomolecular structures develop into a living cell ? Current mainstream Biology believes that's the case. There isn't a complete model yet, but many pieces of the puzzle are already known. The current developmental theory is based on self-organisation processes. A cartoonish view of it would be that proteins are building blocks with highly specific affinities, so you can throw a bunch of them into the air and they will self-assembly into something more complex. This model is not just theoretical. Many cellular processes are known, and they all follow this principle. Effective drugs based on this model have been created. Modelling and entire cell has not been achieved yet, as far as I know. I know of people who are trying. The main problem seems to be that it's terribly complex. We seem to be getting closer as available computing power increases. Unlike generic artificial intelligence, where no amount of computing power can make up for the fact that we don't fully understand the first principles. If you don't mind a book recommendation: http://www.amazon.com/Hidden-Order-Adaptation-Builds-Complexity/dp/0201442302/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8qid=1357476298sr=8-4keywords=hidden+order This is one of the books that changed the way I see the world. It's a bit dated but I love it. I think you might like it too, because it's essentially applied philosophy. Sheldrake's morphisms all pertain to living entities. I listed to a few of the videos and I can't help but like the guy. I just think that he's wrong in claiming that we cannot explain morphogenesis without his field. That doesn't mean that he hasn't come across phenomena that challenge our current understandings of reality. But we have to keep a cool mind. Monads do also, except that for Leibniz, the whole universe is alive. I have no problem with that idea. [Roger Clough], [rclo...@verizon.net] 1/5/2013 Forever is a long time, especially near the end. - Woody Allen - Receiving the following content - From: Telmo Menezes Receiver: everything-list Time: 2013-01-04, 16:57:26 Subject: Re: Re: Rupert Sheldrake - The Morphogenetic Universe Hi Roger, On Fri, Jan 4, 2013 at 5:16 PM, Roger Clough rclo...@verizon.net wrote: Hi Telmo Menezes All I can find on the web is that DNA only contains instructions to make various biomolecules such as proteins, RNA, etc. That's enough. Proteins fold into complex 3D structures with very specific chemical affinities. They are capable of self-assembling into specific macro-structures. Here's a simulation: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lm-dAvbl330 There's a field of biology dedicated to this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Developmental_biology It only works on the molecular scale; the morphic fields are needed for larger macrostructrures. [Roger Clough], [rclo...@verizon.net] 1/4/2013 Forever is a long time, especially near the end. - Woody Allen - Receiving the following content - From: Telmo Menezes Receiver: everything-list Time: 2013-01-04, 03:51:54 Subject: Re: Rupert Sheldrake - The Morphogenetic Universe Hi Roger, On Thu, Jan 3, 2013 at 7:14 PM, Roger Clough ?rote: ?upert Sheldrake - The Morphogenetic Universe What is space ? ?here is no such thing as space, there are only fields, ? ? which are mathematical structures. Fine. ? What is matter ? There is no such thing as matter, because it is only a field. ? ? There is no such thing as mass, which is why there is no such thing needed ? ? as a Higgs field to form what we
Re: Science is a religion by itself.
On Fri, Jan 4, 2013 at 4:47 AM, socra...@bezeqint.net socra...@bezeqint.net wrote: Science is a religion by itself. Why? Becouse the God can create and govern the Universe only using physical laws, formulas, equations. Then God must get very board because that really doesn't leave much for Him to do. Why do you even bother to invent Him? John K Clark -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Liberal Fascism
Because of the dominance of Leftists, people forget, sometimes deliberately, about the murderousness, of Stalin and Mao. My peeps were burned up by ugly, Adolf, but it doesn't excuse people from overlooking other mass killing systems. A great historical compilation of Hitler and Stalin's killing machines, is The Bloodlands: Between Hitler and Stalin. If we want to play historical mind-games, I wonder what the world would have been like if Mussolini had stayed away from his Axis buddy, and plotted his own foreign policy, with an alliance with Britain? Would that even have been possible? Would it have made any difference in world history? Just a thought. -Original Message- From: Roger Clough rclo...@verizon.net To: everything-list everything-list@googlegroups.com Sent: Mon, Jan 7, 2013 7:59 am Subject: Liberal Fascism See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberal_Fascism Not everybody agrees, but... Liberal Fascism In the book, Goldberg argues that fascist movements were and are left-wing. He claims that both modern liberalism and fascism descended from progressivism, and that prior to World War II, fascism was widely viewed as a progressive social movement with many liberal and left-wing adherents in Europe and the United States.[2] Goldberg writes that there was more to fascism than bigotry and genocide, and argues that those characteristics were not so much a feature of Italian fascism, but rather of German Nazism, which was allegedly forced upon the Italian fascists after the Nazis had invaded northern Italy and created a puppet government in Salò.[3] He argues that over time, the term fascism has lost its original meaning and has descended to the level of being a modern word for 'heretic,' branding an individual worthy of excommunication from the body politic, noting that in 1946, the socialist and anti-fascist writer George Orwell described the word as no longer having any meaning except to signify something not desirable.[4][4][5] [Roger Clough], [rclo...@verizon.net] 1/7/2013 Forever is a long time, especially near the end. - Woody Allen - Receiving the following content - From: meekerdb Receiver: everything-list Time: 2013-01-06, 20:51:07 Subject: Re: From nominalism to Scientifc Materialism Re: Is Sheldrakecredible? Ipersonally think so. On 1/6/2013 3:19 PM, Stephen P. King wrote: On 1/6/2013 4:56 PM, meekerdb wrote: On 1/6/2013 1:33 PM, Stephen P. King wrote: On 1/6/2013 3:49 PM, Roger Clough wrote: Hi Stephen P. King The word must implies forcible persuasion. Hi, But the use of force to persuade is not the essence of fascism. Fascism is a governing system where the population can own property privately but the use of said property is dictated by the State. Most countries are fascistic. Only because you've taken a single attribute of Fascism and taken it to be a definition. Fascism is the idea that a nation is a kind of super-being in which labor, industry, and government are *bound together into one* (hence the name) and the life of citizens takes meaning from how they serve their function as an element of The State. This was further taken to imply that superior, i.e. Fascist, nations should bring this superior culture to other inferior, i.e. non-Fascist, nations by armed conquest. Brent Fascism should more properly be called corporatism, since it is the merger of state and corporate power. --- Benito Mussolini. -- Thank you, Brent, for this. ;-) I was trying to highlight the behavior of fascism in ways that do not invoke extraneous discussion. All that you added, while true, is irrelevant to my definition as it is representative of just one form of fascism, that of Mussolini's Italy. That's like saying Hitler's Germany was just one form of Nazism, or China 1945 to 1976 was just one form of Maoism. Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Science is a religion by itself.
Well, another writer/scientist Bernardo Kastrup considered the universe a run, like computation, because It/He/She is not complete. Hence, our lives, the past, the future, and all that. Consider God, a word for Mind, and then pretend that mind is a space alien, because It probably is, from human points of view. Why limit our concepts of The Lord to something Aquinas, Augustin, or some other Church dude said centuries ago? Maybe Its like Skeptic, Michael Shermer mused-a space alien? Why peddle the notion that God is all-knowing, because maybe It ain't? -Original Message- From: John Clark johnkcl...@gmail.com To: everything-list everything-list@googlegroups.com Sent: Mon, Jan 7, 2013 12:42 pm Subject: Re: Science is a religion by itself. On Fri, Jan 4, 2013 at 4:47 AM, socra...@bezeqint.net socra...@bezeqint.net wrote: Science is a religion by itself. Why? Becouse the God can create and govern the Universe only using physical laws, formulas, equations. Then God must get very board because that really doesn't leave much for Him to do. Why do you even bother to invent Him? John K Clark -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Re: Science is a religion by itself.
Hi spudboy100 Theism, like atheism, is unprovable. So you have to treat it as an experimental hypothesis. Assume that, and see how you life is changed. If at all. [Roger Clough], [rclo...@verizon.net] 1/7/2013 Forever is a long time, especially near the end. - Woody Allen - Receiving the following content - From: spudboy100 Receiver: everything-list Time: 2013-01-07, 12:53:11 Subject: Re: Science is a religion by itself. Well, another writer/scientist Bernardo Kastrup considered the universe a run, like computation, because It/He/She is not complete. Hence, our lives, the past, the future, and all that. Consider God, a word for Mind, and then pretend that mind is a space alien, because It probably is, from human points of view. Why limit our concepts of The Lord to something Aquinas, Augustin, or some other Church dude said centuries ago? Maybe Its like Skeptic, Michael Shermer mused-a space alien? Why peddle the notion that God is all-knowing, because maybe It ain't? -Original Message- From: John Clark To: everything-list Sent: Mon, Jan 7, 2013 12:42 pm Subject: Re: Science is a religion by itself. On Fri, Jan 4, 2013 at 4:47 AM, socra...@bezeqint.net wrote: Science is a religion by itself. Why? Becouse the God can create and govern the Universe only using physical laws, formulas, equations. Then God must get very board because that really doesn't leave much for Him to do. Why do you even bother to invent Him? John K Clark -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Re: Liberal Fascism
Hi spudboy100 While Hitler was the far Right, and Stalin of the far Left, they were silmilar in that both creating dominating Big Government types. Similar in that respect to today's liberals. [Roger Clough], [rclo...@verizon.net] 1/7/2013 Forever is a long time, especially near the end. - Woody Allen - Receiving the following content - From: spudboy100 Receiver: everything-list Time: 2013-01-07, 12:47:13 Subject: Re: Liberal Fascism Because of the dominance of Leftists, people forget, sometimes deliberately, about the murderousness, of Stalin and Mao. My peeps were burned up by ugly, Adolf, but it doesn't excuse people from overlooking other mass killing systems. A great historical compilation of Hitler and Stalin's killing machines, is The Bloodlands: Between Hitler and Stalin. If we want to play historical mind-games, I wonder what the world would have been like if Mussolini had stayed away from his Axis buddy, and plotted his own foreign policy, with an alliance with Britain? Would that even have been possible? Would it have made any difference in world history? Just a thought. -Original Message- From: Roger Clough To: everything-list Sent: Mon, Jan 7, 2013 7:59 am Subject: Liberal Fascism See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberal_Fascism Not everybody agrees, but... Liberal Fascism In the book, Goldberg argues that fascist movements were and are left-wing. He claims that both modern liberalism and fascism descended from progressivism, and that prior to World War II, fascism was widely viewed as a progressive social movement with many liberal and left-wing adherents in Europe and the United States.[2] Goldberg writes that there was more to fascism than bigotry and genocide, and argues that those characteristics were not so much a feature of Italian fascism, but rather of German Nazism, which was allegedly forced upon the Italian fascists after the Nazis had invaded northern Italy and created a puppet government in Sal?.[3] He argues that over time, the term fascism has lost its original meaning and has descended to the level of being a modern word for 'heretic,' branding an individual worthy of excommunication from the body politic, noting that in 1946, the socialist and anti-fascist writer George Orwell described the word as no longer having any meaning except to signify something not desirable.[4][4][5] [Roger Clough], [rclo...@verizon.net] 1/7/2013 Forever is a long time, especially near the end. - Woody Allen - Receiving the following content - From: meekerdb Receiver: everything-list Time: 2013-01-06, 20:51:07 Subject: Re: From nominalism to Scientifc Materialism Re: Is Sheldrakecredible? Ipersonally think so. On 1/6/2013 3:19 PM, Stephen P. King wrote: On 1/6/2013 4:56 PM, meekerdb wrote: On 1/6/2013 1:33 PM, Stephen P. King wrote: On 1/6/2013 3:49 PM, Roger Clough wrote: Hi Stephen P. King The word must implies forcible persuasion. Hi, But the use of force to persuade is not the essence of fascism. Fascism is a governing system where the population can own property privately but the use of said property is dictated by the State. Most countries are fascistic. Only because you've taken a single attribute of Fascism and taken it to be a definition. Fascism is the idea that a nation is a kind of super-being in which labor, industry, and government are *bound together into one* (hence the name) and the life of citizens takes meaning from how they serve their function as an element of The State. This was further taken to imply that superior, i.e. Fascist, nations should bring this superior culture to other inferior, i.e. non-Fascist, nations by armed conquest. Brent Fascism should more properly be called corporatism, since it is the merger of state and corporate power. --- Benito Mussolini. -- Thank you, Brent, for this. ;-) I was trying to highlight the behavior of fascism in ways that do not invoke extraneous discussion. All that you added, while true, is irrelevant to my definition as it is representative of just one form of fascism, that of Mussolini's Italy. That's like saying Hitler's Germany was just one form of Nazism, or China 1945 to 1976 was just one form of Maoism. Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send
Re: Science is a religion by itself.
On Mon, Jan 7, 2013 spudboy...@aol.com wrote: Consider God, a word for Mind OK, I have a mind therefore I am God. I said it before I'll say it again, for some strange reason that is unknown to me many people are willing to abandon the idea of God but not the word G-O-D. Those letters and in that sequence (DOG just will not do) MUST be preserved and it doesn't matter what it means. John K Clark -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Re: Science is a religion by itself.
On Mon, Jan 7, 2013 Roger Clough rclo...@verizon.net wrote: Theism, like atheism, is unprovable. Why is that? You're saying that even though God is omnipotent He is incapable of proving His existence to us. I can prove my existence to you but God can not. That seems a bit odd to me. John K Clark -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Re: Re: Re: Subjective states can be somehow extracted from brainsviaacomputer
Hi Roger, Imagine a very simple brain that can recognise two things: a cat and a mouse. Furthermore, it can recognise if an object is still or in motion. So a possible perceptual state could be cat(still) + mouse(in motion). The visual cortex of this brain is complex enough to process the input of a normal human eye and convert it into these representations. It has a very simple memory that can store states and temporal precedence between states. For example: mouse(still) - cat(in motion) + mouse(still) - cat(still) + mouse(in motion) - cat(still) Through an MRI we read the activation level of neurons that somehow encode this sequence of states. An incredible amount of information is lost BUT it is possible to represent a visual scene that approximates the meanings of those states. In a regular VGA screen with a synch signal I show you an animation of a mouse standing still, a cat appearing and so on. Of course the cat may be quite different from what the brain actually perceived. But it is also recognised as a cat by the brain, it produces an equivalent state so it's good enough. Now imagine the brain can encode more properties about objects. Is is big or small? Furry? Dark or light? Now imagine the brain can encode more information about precedence. Was it a long time ago? Just now? Aeons ago? And so on and so on until you get to a point where the reconstructed video is almost like what the brain saw. No synch signal. On Mon, Jan 7, 2013 at 5:22 PM, Roger Clough rclo...@verizon.net wrote: Hi Telmo Menezes Yes, but the display they show wouldn't work if there were no sync signal embedded in it. There's nothing in the brain to provide that, so they must have. [Roger Clough], [rclo...@verizon.net] rclo...@verizon.net] 1/7/2013 Forever is a long time, especially near the end. - Woody Allen - Receiving the following content - *From:* Telmo Menezes te...@telmomenezes.com *Receiver:* everything-list everything-list@googlegroups.com *Time:* 2013-01-07, 09:33:30 *Subject:* Re: Re: Re: Subjective states can be somehow extracted from brainsviaacomputer Hi Roger, On Mon, Jan 7, 2013 at 1:28 PM, Roger Clough rclo...@verizon.net wrote: Hi Telmo Menezes Well then, we have at least one vote supporting the results. Scientific results are not supported or refuted by votes.� � I remain sceptical because of the line sync issue. The brain doesn't provide a raster line sync signal. The synch signal is a requirement of a very specific technology to display video. Analog film does not have a synch signal. It still does sampling. Sampling is always necessary if you use a finite machine to record some visual representation of the world. If one believes the brain stores our memories (I know you don't) you have to believe that it samples perceptual information somehow. It will probably not be as neat and simple as a sync signal. A trivial but important point: every movie is a representation of reality, not reality itself. It's just a set of symbols that represent the world as seen from a specific point of view in the form of a matrix of discrete light intensity levels. So the mapping from symbols to visual representations is always present, no matter what technology you use. Again, the sync signal is just a detail of the implementation of one such technologies. The way the brain encodes images is surely very complex and convoluted. Why not? There wasn't ever any adaptive pressure for the encoding to be easily translated from the outputs of an MRI machine. If we require all contact between males and females to be done through MRI machines and wait a couple million years maybe that will change. We might even get a sync signal, who knows? Either you believe that the brain encodes images somehow, or you believe that the brain is an absurd mechanism. Why are the optic nerves connected to the brain? Why does the visual cortex fire in specific ways when shown specific images? Why can we tell from brain activity if someone is nervous, asleep, solving a math problem of painting? � [Roger Clough], [rclo...@verizon.net] 1/7/2013 Forever is a long time, especially near the end. - Woody Allen - Receiving the following content - From: Telmo Menezes Receiver: everything-list Time: 2013-01-07, 06:19:33 Subject: Re: Re: Subjective states can be somehow extracted from brains viaacomputer On Sun, Jan 6, 2013 at 8:55 PM, Roger Clough 爓rote: Hi Craig Weinberg ? Sorry, everybody, I was snookered into believing that they had really accomplished the impossible. So you think this paper is fiction and the video is fabricated? Do people here know something I don't about the authors? The hypothesis is that the brain has some encoding for images. These images can come from the optic nerve, they could be stored in memory or they could be constructed by sophisticated cognitive processes related to creativity, pattern matching and so
Re: The best of all possible Worlds.
On 1/7/2013 4:43 AM, Roger Clough wrote: Hi meekerdb There are some errors in fact in the Bible, but IMHO it is inerrant with regard to faith and practice. By inerrant, I mean that it is completely consistent along those lines. You have to take it as a whole. By which you really mean that one must use their own moral sense to pick and choose a reasonable subset of ethical advice, which they can then claim that God commands. Brent The Israelites were all waiting anxiously at the foot of the mountain, knowing that Moses had had a tough day negotiating with God over the Commandments. Finally a tired Moses came into sight. I've got some good news and some bad news, folks, he said. The good news is that I got Him down to ten. The bad news is that adultery's still banned. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Question: Robotic truth
On 1/7/2013 3:30 AM, Alberto G. Corona wrote: In the case of multigroup collaboration, where each group in made by smaller groups that collaborate in a lesser degree than in each group internally, the survival program to ascertain what is truth or not would be as follows: (IMHO). Any comunication has two main components of truth: The first is about the truth value of this comunication for the knowledge of reality the phisical medium or knowledge of the world. The other component is a instinctive evaluation about in which way this communication modifies the position of each actor in the group: in terms of power, righteousness, respect, status, This also depends on the way in which this comunication modifies the status of our core groups from which we take part formally or informally in the whole society. I name this element social capital. The truth of something, as perceived in the heart take both components. A social robot would take into account both too. Yes, that is a useful way to look at it. And the relative weight given the two valuations will also depend on circumstances, e.g. if you must act on the valuation you will probably give more weight to the objective valuation, whereas if you are just discussing it you may incline to the social valuation. It is not very difficult to know that , by evolutionary reasons, without a favourable value in the second evaluation, the first truth can not be accepted I'm not so sure about that; people certainly accept very unpleasant facts. I have a friend who was just diagnosed with Parkinson's disease. Acceptance has very negative implications, both personal and social. Apparently both evaluations are very different. The first is the factual or objective. The second is the subjective or moral, that may be egoistic or altruistic. It can be said that the second depends on interests, values, ascriptions etc, while the first is not. but the first is subject to values too, and the second depends on the factual knowledge. Except the innate knowdledge and/or the one observed with the own eyes (stones tend to fall). to hold something as objective is a matter of having very strong values and beliefs. For example, because I strongly believe in certain institutions and methods, I accept as factual that there are something called electrons. If I have other beliefs or values, I would not accept that as a fact. factual knowledge is like any knowledge,/it has to be positive in the second sense/ before being accepted as truth. That is, every objective accepted knowledge implies an acceptation ny the side of the subjective filters. But then you need an account of what gains acceptance on subjective side. Does the fact have to be pleasant? socially shared? In the other side if I demonstrate by game theorethical reasoning or whatever that something , although bad for you in the short term, is good for the whole society,and thus good for you and for your group in the long term then this something becomes factual. I'd say it is still theoretical - but I take you point that I would probably act on it (if it weren't too far in the future). because this truth pass the two filters (objective and subjective) filter that you have to accept something as truth.. No, that's exactly what you *don't* have to do. You may have to act, but often you don't; you're just theorizing and discussing what might be true - as on this list. Scientists, as scientists, never accept something as true, except in the provisional sense of designing an experiment that depends on it. The fact is that the verification of what values and beliefs are good for you have been verified by evolution countless times. You are the descent of the people that hold instinctively what was good for you. But what is good has different components: There is what is good for you and your group of interests and bad for the rest and there are what is good for the whole society and for you in the long term but that imposes to you a charge in the short term. The sucessful religions invokes these second set of instincts. The problem is that your instinctive valuations evolved to work within a tribe of a few hundred people in the same culture. But small tribes are conquered by large coalitions of tribes which are conquered by nation states, etc. So then we need laws and public institutions to align our relations with strangers so they satisfy our instincts insofar as possible. Religion has played a part in all sizes of cultures, but it been divisive and oppressive as well as unifying and satisfying. Then, there is another way to make you to accept something as truth: instead of making you see rationally what is good for you (if you believe in reason) and pass trough your two filters, I can invoque your egotistic or altruistic instincts that i mentioned in the first paragraph, to make you accept my truth. the first (egoistinc
Re: Is Sheldrake credible ? I personally think so.
On 1/7/2013 3:57 AM, Roger Clough wrote: Hi Platonist Guitar Cowboy You're allowed to have that opinion, or any opinion. We're different. I am a retired laboratory scientist and a pragmatist to boot. So to me, data trumnps everything. So I will believe that the moon is made of green cheese if there's data to suppport that. Nobody believes a theory, except the guy who thought of it. Everbody believes an experiment, except the guy who did it. --- Leon Lederman, Nobel prize winner, physics -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Is Sheldrake credible ? I personally think so.
On 1/7/2013 4:16 AM, Roger Clough wrote: But natural selection implies some form of intelligence, You don't understand evolution. Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Liberal Fascism
On 1/7/2013 4:58 AM, Roger Clough wrote: See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberal_Fascism Not everybody agrees, but... Liberal Fascism In the book, Goldberg argues that fascist movements were and are left-wing. He claims that both modern liberalism and fascism descended from progressivism, and that prior to World War II, fascism was widely viewed as a progressive social movement with many liberal and left-wing adherents in Europe and the United States.[2] Goldberg writes that there was more to fascism than bigotry and genocide, and argues that those characteristics were not so much a feature of Italian fascism, but rather of German Nazism, which was allegedly forced upon the Italian fascists after the Nazis had invaded northern Italy and created a puppet government in Salò.[3] He argues that over time, the term fascism has lost its original meaning and has descended to the level of being a modern word for 'heretic,' branding an individual worthy of excommunication from the body politic, noting that in 1946, the socialist and anti-fascist writer George Orwell described the word as no longer having any meaning except to signify something not desirable.[4][4][5] Which is why conservatives invent terms like liberal fascism to smear progressives. Of course the political extremes of left and right tend to meet because extremes have to be imposed. So Maoism and Nazism both became cults of their leaders. But fascism was a respectable political philosophy before WW2, and it was a conservative, authoritarian, right-wing philosophy because it emphasized that the worth of the individual came from his fulfilling his niche within the superbeing of the state and the state had it's own value. The state did not exist just to serve its citizens. Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Science is a religion by itself.
Becouse the God can create and govern the Universe only using physical laws, formulas, equations. Then God must get very board because that really doesn't leave much for Him to do. Why do you even bother to invent Him? John K Clark Any eternal God would be so bored after one eternity that It would do Its best to commit suicide by creating an equally adept Opponent. Half of the time the Opponent would succeed and the process would repeat. It is impossible to know whether the current God is an even or odd term in the series. --- Roahn Wynar :-) -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: From nominalism to Scientifc Materialism Re: Is Sheldrake credible? Ipersonally think so.
On 1/7/2013 5:09 AM, Platonist Guitar Cowboy wrote: On Mon, Jan 7, 2013 at 2:56 AM, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net mailto:meeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 1/6/2013 3:45 PM, Platonist Guitar Cowboy wrote: On Mon, Jan 7, 2013 at 12:19 AM, Stephen P. King stephe...@charter.net mailto:stephe...@charter.net wrote: On 1/6/2013 4:56 PM, meekerdb wrote: On 1/6/2013 1:33 PM, Stephen P. King wrote: On 1/6/2013 3:49 PM, Roger Clough wrote: Hi Stephen P. King The word must implies forcible persuasion. Hi, But the use of force to persuade is not the essence of fascism. Fascism is a governing system where the population can own property privately but the use of said property is dictated by the State. Most countries are fascistic. Only because you've taken a single attribute of Fascism and taken it to be a definition. Fascism is the idea that a nation is a kind of super-being in which labor, industry, and government are *bound together into one* (hence the name) and the life of citizens takes meaning from how they serve their function as an element of The State. This was further taken to imply that superior, i.e. Fascist, nations should bring this superior culture to other inferior, i.e. non-Fascist, nations by armed conquest. Brent Fascism should more properly be called corporatism, since it is the merger of state and corporate power. --- Benito Mussolini. -- Thank you, Brent, for this. ;-) I was trying to highlight the behavior of fascism in ways that do not invoke extraneous discussion. All that you added, while true, is irrelevant to my definition as it is representative of just one form of fascism, that of Mussolini's Italy. Negative, from German perspective: Nazi as adherent to NSDAP (German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei) so national socialist german worker's party wrote in their constitution that corporations potentially pose a threat to the state and have to thus be merged with state force to facilitate common good. This was done not only to build and develop weapons, but to build the A1 freeway, on which yours truly traveled south today. Don't know how Japan handled it, but imagine that it would've run along similar lines. High efficiency, high productivity, lowers unemployment, automatically restrains budding monopolies... all the kind of things the west proclaims to want today; even though history should at some point teach us what this means, we don't seem to get it or don't want to. Nazism was not Fascism. It borrowed from Fascism but it added mystic racism, Hitler cult, and genocide. Brent Didn't imply that. Much less I'd say... if someone's wearing a Mussolini corporate state control merger fascism-pin, as implied by your quote of Mussolini, then it doesn't matter to me which other pins, mystical or belief (what was that difference again?) based, that person wears: It would make a difference to me. A fascist just has a bad idea about the relation of the state, the corporation and the individual. A nazi is a racist who believes that there is a superior Aryan race which should rule over all other people and that there are inferior races that should be exterminated. they are fascist in that precise sense. They might be Japanese, play scrabble, and be slightly overweight too, which is absolutely, definitely healthy ;) An adherent to Nazism is a fascist via the corporate-state-merger-idea and reasoning, although the reverse is not necessary. Nazism did not merely borrow this: the whole economic upswing in the early Nazi years can be traced to the merger idea, and Germany took this as far as it could. If corporations didn't play ball: leave or die. They were facist or corporatist in this precise sense, and the cult/mysticism (difference to belief, I ask again? Isn't any belief system viewed externally just 'mysticism' in pejorative sense?) didn't change this: it enforced it. No, the arguments made for fascism and communism were mostly rational. The argument for the superiority of an Aryan race and the significance of Blud und Volk was purely an emotional appeal to the German ego (corruption as Alberto would say). Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Subjective states can be somehow extracted from brains viaacomputer
On 1/7/2013 6:33 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote: The way the brain encodes images is surely very complex and convoluted. Why not? There wasn't ever any adaptive pressure for the encoding to be easily translated from the outputs of an MRI machine. If we require all contact between males and females to be done through MRI machines and wait a couple million years maybe that will change. In only a generation there'll be nobody to notice a change. :-) Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Re: Subjective states can be somehow extracted from brains via acomputer
On Monday, January 7, 2013 6:19:33 AM UTC-5, telmo_menezes wrote: On Sun, Jan 6, 2013 at 8:55 PM, Roger Clough rcl...@verizon.netjavascript: wrote: Hi Craig Weinberg Sorry, everybody, I was snookered into believing that they had really accomplished the impossible. So you think this paper is fiction and the video is fabricated? Do people here know something I don't about the authors? The paper doesn't claim that images from the brain have been decoded, but the sensational headlines imply that is what they did. The video isn't supposed to be anything but fabricated. It's a muddle of YouTube videos superimposed upon each other according to a Bayesian probability reduction. Did you think that the video was coming from a brain feed like a TV broadcast? It is certainly not that at all. The hypothesis is that the brain has some encoding for images. Where are the encoded images decoded into what we actually see? These images can come from the optic nerve, they could be stored in memory or they could be constructed by sophisticated cognitive processes related to creativity, pattern matching and so on. But if you believe that the brain's neural network is a computer responsible for our cognitive processes, the information must be stores there, physically, somehow. That is the assumption, but it is not necessarily a good one. The problem is that information is only understandable in the context of some form of awareness - an experience of being informed. A machine with no user can only produce different kinds of noise as there is nothing ultimately to discern the difference between a signal and a non-signal. It's horribly hard to decode what's going on in the brain. Yet every newborn baby learns to do it all by themselves, without any sign of any decoding theater. These researchers thought of a clever shortcut. They expose people to a lot of images and record come measures of brain activity in the visual cortex. Then they use machine learning to match brain states to images. Of course it's probabilistic and noisy. But then they got a video that actually approximates the real images. You might get the same result out of precisely mapping the movements of the eyes instead. What they did may have absolutely nothing to do with how the brain encodes or experiences images, no more than your Google history can approximate the shape of your face. So there must be some way to decode brain activity into images. The killer argument against that is that the brain has no sync signals to generate the raster lines. Neither does reality, but we somehow manage to show a representation of it on tv, right? What human beings see on TV simulates one optical environment with another optical environment. You need to be a human being with a human visual system to be able to watch TV and mistake it for a representation of reality. Some household pets might be briefly fooled also, but mostly other species have no idea why we are staring at that flickering rectangle, or buzzing plastic sheet, or that large collection of liquid crystal flags. Representation is psychological, not material. The map is not the territory. Craig [Roger Clough], [rcl...@verizon.net] javascript: 1/6/2013 Forever is a long time, especially near the end. - Woody Allen - Receiving the following content - *From:* Craig Weinberg javascript: *Receiver:* everything-list javascript: *Time:* 2013-01-05, 11:37:17 *Subject:* Re: Subjective states can be somehow extracted from brains via acomputer On Saturday, January 5, 2013 10:43:32 AM UTC-5, rclough wrote: Subjective states can somehow be extracted from brains via a computer. No, they can't. The ingenius folks who were miraculously able to extract an image from the brain that we saw recently http://gizmodo.com/5843117/**scientists-reconstruct-video-** clips-from-brain-activityhttp://gizmodo.com/5843117/scientists-reconstruct-video-clips-from-brain-activity somehow did it entirely through computation. How was that possible? By passing off a weak Bayesian regression analysis as a terrific consciousness breakthrough. Look again at the image comparisons. There is nothing being reconstructed, there is only the visual noise of many superimposed shapes which least dis-resembles the test image. It's not even stage magic, it's just a search engine. There are at least two imaginable theories, neither of which I can explain step by step: What they did was take lots of images and correlate patterns in the V1 region of the brain with those that corresponded V1 patterns in others who had viewed the known images. It's statistical guesswork and it is complete crap. The computer analyzed 18 million seconds of random YouTube video, building a database of potential brain activity for each clip. From all these videos, the software
Re: Re: Subjective states can be somehow extracted from brains via acomputer
Hi Craig, On Tue, Jan 8, 2013 at 12:41 AM, Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.comwrote: On Monday, January 7, 2013 6:19:33 AM UTC-5, telmo_menezes wrote: On Sun, Jan 6, 2013 at 8:55 PM, Roger Clough rcl...@verizon.net wrote: Hi Craig Weinberg Sorry, everybody, I was snookered into believing that they had really accomplished the impossible. So you think this paper is fiction and the video is fabricated? Do people here know something I don't about the authors? The paper doesn't claim that images from the brain have been decoded, Yes it does, right in the abstract: To demonstrate the power of our approach, we also constructed a Bayesian decoder [8] by combining estimated encoding models with a sampled natural movie prior. The decoder provides remarkable reconstructions of the viewed movies. http://www.cell.com/current-biology/abstract/S0960-9822%2811%2900937-7 but the sensational headlines imply that is what they did. Starting with UC Berkeley itself: http://newscenter.berkeley.edu/2011/09/22/brain-movies/ The video isn't supposed to be anything but fabricated. ALL videos are fabricated in that sense. It's a muddle of YouTube videos superimposed upon each other according to a Bayesian probability reduction. Yes, and the images you see on your computer screen are just a matrix of molecules artificially made to align in a certain way so that the light being emitted behind them arrives at your eyes in a way that resembles the light emitted by some real world scene that it is meant to be represented. Did you think that the video was coming from a brain feed like a TV broadcast? It is certainly not that at all. Nice straw man + ad hominem you did there! The hypothesis is that the brain has some encoding for images. Where are the encoded images decoded into what we actually see? In the computer that runs the Bayesian algorithm. These images can come from the optic nerve, they could be stored in memory or they could be constructed by sophisticated cognitive processes related to creativity, pattern matching and so on. But if you believe that the brain's neural network is a computer responsible for our cognitive processes, the information must be stores there, physically, somehow. That is the assumption, but it is not necessarily a good one. The problem is that information is only understandable in the context of some form of awareness - an experience of being informed. A machine with no user can only produce different kinds of noise as there is nothing ultimately to discern the difference between a signal and a non-signal. Sure. That's why the algorithm has to be trained with known videos. So it can learn which brain activity correlates with what 3p accessible images we can all agree upon. It's horribly hard to decode what's going on in the brain. Yet every newborn baby learns to do it all by themselves, without any sign of any decoding theater. Yes. The newborn baby comes with the genetic material that generates the optimal decoder. These researchers thought of a clever shortcut. They expose people to a lot of images and record come measures of brain activity in the visual cortex. Then they use machine learning to match brain states to images. Of course it's probabilistic and noisy. But then they got a video that actually approximates the real images. You might get the same result out of precisely mapping the movements of the eyes instead. Maybe. That's not where they took the information from though. They took it from the visual cortex. What they did may have absolutely nothing to do with how the brain encodes or experiences images, no more than your Google history can approximate the shape of your face. Google history can only approximate the shape of my face if there is a correlation between the two. In which case my Google history is, in fact, also a description of the shape of my face. So there must be some way to decode brain activity into images. The killer argument against that is that the brain has no sync signals to generate the raster lines. Neither does reality, but we somehow manage to show a representation of it on tv, right? What human beings see on TV simulates one optical environment with another optical environment. You need to be a human being with a human visual system to be able to watch TV and mistake it for a representation of reality. Some household pets might be briefly fooled also, but mostly other species have no idea why we are staring at that flickering rectangle, or buzzing plastic sheet, or that large collection of liquid crystal flags. Representation is psychological, not material. The map is not the territory. I agree. I never claimed this was an insight into 1p or anything to do with consciousness. Just that you can extract information from human brains, because that information is represented there somehow. But you're only going to get 3p
Re: Science is a religion by itself.
On 1/7/2013 10:47 AM, John Clark wrote: On Mon, Jan 7, 2013 spudboy...@aol.com mailto:spudboy...@aol.com wrote: Consider God, a word for Mind OK, I have a mind therefore I am God. I said it before I'll say it again, for some strange reason that is unknown to me many people are willing to abandon the idea of God but not the word G-O-D. Those letters and in that sequence (DOG just will not do) MUST be preserved and it doesn't matter what it means. An observation also made by Bertrand Russell,People are more unwilling to give up the word 'God' than to give up the idea for which the word has hitherto stood Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Re: Subjective states can be somehow extracted from brains via acomputer
On Monday, January 7, 2013 7:24:24 PM UTC-5, telmo_menezes wrote: Hi Craig, On Tue, Jan 8, 2013 at 12:41 AM, Craig Weinberg whats...@gmail.comjavascript: wrote: On Monday, January 7, 2013 6:19:33 AM UTC-5, telmo_menezes wrote: On Sun, Jan 6, 2013 at 8:55 PM, Roger Clough rcl...@verizon.net wrote: Hi Craig Weinberg Sorry, everybody, I was snookered into believing that they had really accomplished the impossible. So you think this paper is fiction and the video is fabricated? Do people here know something I don't about the authors? The paper doesn't claim that images from the brain have been decoded, Yes it does, right in the abstract: To demonstrate the power of our approach, we also constructed a Bayesian decoder [8] by combining estimated encoding models with a sampled natural movie prior. The decoder provides remarkable reconstructions of the viewed movies. The Bayesian decoder is not literally decoding the BOLD and fMRI patterns into images, no more than listing the ingredients of a bag of chips in alphabetical order turns potatoes into words. The key is the 'sampled natural movie prior'. That means it is a figurative reconstruction. They are giving you a choice of selecting one video from hundreds, then looking at the common patterns in several people's brains when they choose the same video. They are not decoding the patterns into videos. By 'reconstructions' they are not saying that they literally recreated any part of the visual experience, but rather that they were able to make a composite video from the videos that they used by plugging the Bayesian probability into the data sets. The videos that you see are YouTube videos superimposed, *not in any way* a decoded translation of neural correlates. http://www.cell.com/current-biology/abstract/S0960-9822%2811%2900937-7 but the sensational headlines imply that is what they did. Starting with UC Berkeley itself: http://newscenter.berkeley.edu/2011/09/22/brain-movies/ Of course. Does that surprise you? University PR is notoriously hyped. Exciting the public is the stuff that endowments are made of. The video isn't supposed to be anything but fabricated. ALL videos are fabricated in that sense. Sure, but a video from a camera on the end of a wire in someone's esophagus is less of a fabrication than a collage of verbal descriptions about digestion. See what I'm driving at? The images are images they got off the internet superimposed over each other - not out of someone's brain activity being interpreted by a computer. The only thing being interpreted or decoded is cross referenced statistics. Try thinking about it this way. What would the video look like if they plugged the Bayesian decoder algorithm into the regions related to the memory of flavors? Show someone a picture of strawberries, let's you get a pattern in the olfactory-gustatory regions of the brain. Show someone else a bunch of pictures of tasty things, and lo and behold, through your statistical regression, you can match up a pictures of strawberry candy, strawberry ice cream, etc with the pictures of stawberries, pink milk, etc. You get a video of blurry pink stuff and proclaim that you have reconstructed the image of strawberry flavor. It's a neat bit of stage magic, but it has nothing at all to do with translating flavor into image. No more than searching strawberries on Google gives routers and servers a taste of strawberry. It's a muddle of YouTube videos superimposed upon each other according to a Bayesian probability reduction. Yes, and the images you see on your computer screen are just a matrix of molecules artificially made to align in a certain way so that the light being emitted behind them arrives at your eyes in a way that resembles the light emitted by some real world scene that it is meant to be represented. Photography is a direct optical analog. The pixels on a computer screen are a digitized analog of photography. The images 'reconstructed' are not analogs at all, they are wholly synthetic guesses which are reverse engineered purely from probability. What you see are not in fact images, but mechanically curated noise which remind us of images. Did you think that the video was coming from a brain feed like a TV broadcast? It is certainly not that at all. Nice straw man + ad hominem you did there! Sorry, I wasn't trying to do either, although I admit it was condescending. I was trying to point out that it seems like you were saying that brain activity was decoded into visual pixels. I'm not clear really on what your understanding of it is. The hypothesis is that the brain has some encoding for images. Where are the encoded images decoded into what we actually see? In the computer that runs the Bayesian algorithm. I'm talking about where in the brain are the images that we actually see 'decoded'?
