Re: Re: Subjective states can be somehow extracted from brains via acomputer
On Saturday, January 12, 2013 6:46:23 AM UTC-5, telmo_menezes wrote: On Fri, Jan 11, 2013 at 6:10 AM, Craig Weinberg whats...@gmail.comjavascript: wrote: On Thursday, January 10, 2013 4:58:32 PM UTC-5, telmo_menezes wrote: Hi Craig, I tend to agree with what you say (or what I understand of it). Despite my belief that it is possible to extract memories (or their 3p shadows) from a brain, As long as you have another brain to experience the extracted memories in 1p, then I wouldn't rule out the possibility of a 3p transmission of some experiential content from one brain to another. I do not believe in the neuroscience hypothesis that consciousness emerges from brain activity. I'm not sure I believe that there is a degree of consciousness in everything, but it sounds more plausible than the emergence from complexity idea. Still I feel that you avoid some questions. Maybe it's just my lack of understanding of what you're saying. For example: what is the primary stuff in your theory? In the same sense that for materialists it's subatomic particles and for comp it's N, +, *. What's yours? For me the primary stuff is sensory-motor presence. It's very hard for me to grasp this. It's supposed to be hard to grasp. We are supposed to watch the movie, not try to figure out who the actors really are and how the camera works. Particles are public sense representations. N, +, * are private sense representations. Particles represent the experience of sensory-motor obstruction as topological bodies. Integers and arithmetic operators represent the sensory-motor relations of public objects as private logical figures. Craig On Wed, Jan 9, 2013 at 2:50 PM, Craig Weinberg whats...@gmail.comwrote: On Wednesday, January 9, 2013 6:18:37 AM UTC-5, telmo_menezes wrote: Hi Craig, Cool. I actually would have agreed with you and a lot of people here at different times in my life. It's only been lately in the last five years or so that I have put together this other way of understanding everything. It gets lost in the debating, because I feel like I have to make my points about what is different or new about how I see things, but I do understand that other ways of looking at it make a lot of sense too - so much so that I suppose I am drawn only to digging into the weak spots to try to get others to see the secret exit that I think I've found... Ok, this sounds interesting and I'd like to know more. I've been away from the mailing list in the last few years, so maybe you've talked about it before. Would you tell me about that secret exit? The secret exit is to reverse the assumption that consciousness occurs from functions or substances. Even though our human consciousness depends on a living human body (as far as we know for sure), that may be because of the degree of elaboration required to develop a human quality of experience, not because the fundamental capacity to perceive and participate depends on anything at all. Being inside of a human experience means being inside of an animal experience, an organism's experience, a cellular and molecular level experience. The alternative means picking an arbitrary level at which total lack of awareness suddenly changes into perception and participation for no conceivable reason. Instead of hanging on to the hope of finding such a level or gate, the secret is to see that there are many levels and gates but that they are qualitative, with each richer integration of qualia reframing the levels left behind in a particular way, and that way (another key) is to reduce it from a personal, animistic temporal flow of 1p meaning and significant preference to impersonal, mechanistic spatial bodies ruled by cause-effect and chance/probability. 1p and 3p are relativistic, but what joins them is the capacity to discern the difference. Rather than sense i/o being a function or logic take for granted, flip it over so that logic is the 3p shadow of sense. The 3p view is a frozen snapshot of countless 1p views as seen from the outside, and the qualities of the 3p view depend entirely on the nature of the 1p perceiver-partcipant. Sense is semiotic. Its qualitative layers are partitioned by habit and interpretive inertia, just as an ambiguous image looks different depending on how you personally direct your perception, or how a book that you read when you are 12 years old can have different meanings at 18 or 35. The meaning isn't just 'out there', it's literally, physically in here. If this is true, then the entire physical universe doubles in size, or really is squared as every exterior surface is a 3p representation of an entire history of 1p experience. Each acorn is a potential for oak tree forest, an encyclopedia of evolution and cosmology, so that the acorn is just a semiotic placeholder which is scaled
Re: Subjective states can be somehow extracted from brains via acomputer
On 11 Jan 2013, at 14:07, Craig Weinberg wrote: On Friday, January 11, 2013 12:27:54 AM UTC-5, Brent wrote: On 1/10/2013 9:20 PM, Craig Weinberg wrote: On Thursday, January 10, 2013 7:33:06 PM UTC-5, Brent wrote: On 1/10/2013 4:23 PM, Telmo Menezes wrote: Do you think there can be something that is intelligent but not complex (and use whatever definitions of intelligent and complex you want). A thermostat is much less complex than a human brain but intelligent under my definition. But much less intelligent. So in effect you think there is a degree of intelligence in everything, just like you believe there's a degree of consciousness in everything. And the degree of intelligence correlates with the degree of complexity ...but you don't think the same about consciousness? Brent I was thinking today that a decent way of defining intelligence is just 'The ability to know what's going on'. This makes it clear that intelligence refers to the degree of sophistication of awareness, not just complexity of function or structure. This is why a computer which has complex function and structure has no authentic intelligence and has no idea 'what's going on'. Intelligence however has everything to do with sensitivity, integration, and mobilization of awareness as an asset, i.e. to be directed for personal gain or shared enjoyment, progress, etc. Knowing what's going on implicitly means caring what goes on, which also supervenes on biological quality investment in experience. Which is why I think an intelligent machine must be one that acts in its environment. Simply 'being aware' or 'knowing' are meaningless without the ability and motives to act on them. Sense and motive are inseparable ontologically, although they can be interleaved by level. A plant for instance has no need to act on the world to the same degree as an organism which can move its location, but the cells that make up the plant act to grow and direct it toward light, extend roots to water and nutrients, etc. Ontologically however, there is no way to really have awareness which matters without some participatory opportunity or potential for that opportunity. The problem with a machine (any machine) is that at the level which is it a machine, it has no way to participate. By definition a machine does whatever it is designed to do. We can argue that the natural machine are not designed but selected. Even partially self-selected through choice of sexual partners. Anything that we use as a machine has to be made of something which we can predict and control reliably, Human made machine are designed in this way. so that its sensory-motive capacities are very limited by definition. Its range of 'what's going on' has to be very narrow. The internet, for instance, passes a tremendous number of events through electronic circuits, but the content of all of it is entirely lost on it. We use the internet to increase our sense and inform our motives, but its sense and motive does not increase at all. Our computer are not encouraged to develop themselves. They are sort of slaves. But machines in general are not predictable, unless we limit them in some way, as we do usually (a bit less so in AI research, but still so for the applications: the consumers want obedient machines). You have a still a pre-Gödel or pre-Turing conception of machine. We just don't know what universal machine/number are capable of. Bruno 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: Subjective states can be somehow extracted from brains via acomputer
On 11 Jan 2013, at 22:08, meekerdb wrote: On 1/11/2013 11:44 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 10 Jan 2013, at 23:28, Telmo Menezes wrote: On Thu, Jan 10, 2013 at 11:15 PM, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 1/10/2013 1:58 PM, Telmo Menezes wrote: Hi Craig, I tend to agree with what you say (or what I understand of it). Despite my belief that it is possible to extract memories (or their 3p shadows) from a brain, I do not believe in the neuroscience hypothesis that consciousness emerges from brain activity. I'm not sure I believe that there is a degree of consciousness in everything, but it sounds more plausible than the emergence from complexity idea. Do you agree that intelligence requires complexity? I'm not sure intelligence and complexity are two different things. Hmm... I have a theory of intelligence. It has strong defect, as it makes many things intelligent. But not everyone. The machine X is intelligent, if it is not stupid. And the machine X is stupid in two circumstances. Either she asserts that Y is intelligent, or she assert that Y is stupid. (Y can be equal to X). So if X is smart she asserts Y is not intelligent or Y is not stupid. :-) Lol. No problem, she can assert that, but the OR is necessarily non constructive (non intuitionist). It is indeed a way to say that she does not know. Bruno Brent In that theory, a pebble is intelligent, as no one has ever heard a pebble asserting that some other pebble or whatever, is stupid, or is intelligent. (that theory is almost only a identification of intelligence with consistency (Dt)). Intelligence is needed to develop competences. But competences can have a negative feedback on intelligence. Bruno -- 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: Subjective states can be somehow extracted from brains via acomputer
On Fri, Jan 11, 2013 at 6:10 AM, Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.comwrote: On Thursday, January 10, 2013 4:58:32 PM UTC-5, telmo_menezes wrote: Hi Craig, I tend to agree with what you say (or what I understand of it). Despite my belief that it is possible to extract memories (or their 3p shadows) from a brain, As long as you have another brain to experience the extracted memories in 1p, then I wouldn't rule out the possibility of a 3p transmission of some experiential content from one brain to another. I do not believe in the neuroscience hypothesis that consciousness emerges from brain activity. I'm not sure I believe that there is a degree of consciousness in everything, but it sounds more plausible than the emergence from complexity idea. Still I feel that you avoid some questions. Maybe it's just my lack of understanding of what you're saying. For example: what is the primary stuff in your theory? In the same sense that for materialists it's subatomic particles and for comp it's N, +, *. What's yours? For me the primary stuff is sensory-motor presence. It's very hard for me to grasp this. Particles are public sense representations. N, +, * are private sense representations. Particles represent the experience of sensory-motor obstruction as topological bodies. Integers and arithmetic operators represent the sensory-motor relations of public objects as private logical figures. Craig On Wed, Jan 9, 2013 at 2:50 PM, Craig Weinberg whats...@gmail.comwrote: On Wednesday, January 9, 2013 6:18:37 AM UTC-5, telmo_menezes wrote: Hi Craig, Cool. I actually would have agreed with you and a lot of people here at different times in my life. It's only been lately in the last five years or so that I have put together this other way of understanding everything. It gets lost in the debating, because I feel like I have to make my points about what is different or new about how I see things, but I do understand that other ways of looking at it make a lot of sense too - so much so that I suppose I am drawn only to digging into the weak spots to try to get others to see the secret exit that I think I've found... Ok, this sounds interesting and I'd like to know more. I've been away from the mailing list in the last few years, so maybe you've talked about it before. Would you tell me about that secret exit? The secret exit is to reverse the assumption that consciousness occurs from functions or substances. Even though our human consciousness depends on a living human body (as far as we know for sure), that may be because of the degree of elaboration required to develop a human quality of experience, not because the fundamental capacity to perceive and participate depends on anything at all. Being inside of a human experience means being inside of an animal experience, an organism's experience, a cellular and molecular level experience. The alternative means picking an arbitrary level at which total lack of awareness suddenly changes into perception and participation for no conceivable reason. Instead of hanging on to the hope of finding such a level or gate, the secret is to see that there are many levels and gates but that they are qualitative, with each richer integration of qualia reframing the levels left behind in a particular way, and that way (another key) is to reduce it from a personal, animistic temporal flow of 1p meaning and significant preference to impersonal, mechanistic spatial bodies ruled by cause-effect and chance/probability. 1p and 3p are relativistic, but what joins them is the capacity to discern the difference. Rather than sense i/o being a function or logic take for granted, flip it over so that logic is the 3p shadow of sense. The 3p view is a frozen snapshot of countless 1p views as seen from the outside, and the qualities of the 3p view depend entirely on the nature of the 1p perceiver-partcipant. Sense is semiotic. Its qualitative layers are partitioned by habit and interpretive inertia, just as an ambiguous image looks different depending on how you personally direct your perception, or how a book that you read when you are 12 years old can have different meanings at 18 or 35. The meaning isn't just 'out there', it's literally, physically in here. If this is true, then the entire physical universe doubles in size, or really is squared as every exterior surface is a 3p representation of an entire history of 1p experience. Each acorn is a potential for oak tree forest, an encyclopedia of evolution and cosmology, so that the acorn is just a semiotic placeholder which is scaled and iconicized appropriately as a consequence of the relation of our human quality awareness and that of the evolutionary-historical-**possible future contexts which we share with it (or the whole ensemble of experiences in which 'we' are both embedded as strands of the story of the universe rather than just human
Re: Subjective states can be somehow extracted from brains via acomputer
On Fri, Jan 11, 2013 at 1:33 AM, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 1/10/2013 4:23 PM, Telmo Menezes wrote: Do you think there can be something that is intelligent but not complex (and use whatever definitions of intelligent and complex you want). A thermostat is much less complex than a human brain but intelligent under my definition. But much less intelligent. That's your conclusion, not mine. According to my definition you can only compare thermostats being good at being thermostats and Brents being good at being Brents. Because you can only compare intelligence against a same set of goals. Otherwise you're just saying that intelligence A is more complex than intelligence B. Human intelligence requires a certain level of complexity, bacteria intelligence another. That's all. General Artificial Intelligence is not general at all - what we really want it is for it to be specifically good at interacting with humans and pursuing human goals (ours, no the AI's - otherwise people will say it's dumb). So in effect you think there is a degree of intelligence in everything, just like you believe there's a degree of consciousness in everything. I said I'm more inclined to believe in a degree of consciousness in everything than in intelligence emerging from complexity. And the degree of intelligence correlates with the degree of complexity Again, your conclusion, not mine. ...but you don't think the same about consciousness? 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: Subjective states can be somehow extracted from brains via acomputer
On Friday, January 11, 2013 12:27:54 AM UTC-5, Brent wrote: On 1/10/2013 9:20 PM, Craig Weinberg wrote: On Thursday, January 10, 2013 7:33:06 PM UTC-5, Brent wrote: On 1/10/2013 4:23 PM, Telmo Menezes wrote: Do you think there can be something that is intelligent but not complex (and use whatever definitions of intelligent and complex you want). A thermostat is much less complex than a human brain but intelligent under my definition. But much less intelligent. So in effect you think there is a degree of intelligence in everything, just like you believe there's a degree of consciousness in everything. And the degree of intelligence correlates with the degree of complexity ...but you don't think the same about consciousness? Brent I was thinking today that a decent way of defining intelligence is just 'The ability to know what's going on'. This makes it clear that intelligence refers to the degree of sophistication of awareness, not just complexity of function or structure. This is why a computer which has complex function and structure has no authentic intelligence and has no idea 'what's going on'. Intelligence however has everything to do with sensitivity, integration, and mobilization of awareness as an asset, i.e. to be directed for personal gain or shared enjoyment, progress, etc. Knowing what's going on implicitly means caring what goes on, which also supervenes on biological quality investment in experience. Which is why I think an intelligent machine must be one that acts in its environment. Simply 'being aware' or 'knowing' are meaningless without the ability and motives to act on them. Sense and motive are inseparable ontologically, although they can be interleaved by level. A plant for instance has no need to act on the world to the same degree as an organism which can move its location, but the cells that make up the plant act to grow and direct it toward light, extend roots to water and nutrients, etc. Ontologically however, there is no way to really have awareness which matters without some participatory opportunity or potential for that opportunity. The problem with a machine (any machine) is that at the level which is it a machine, it has no way to participate. By definition a machine does whatever it is designed to do. Anything that we use as a machine has to be made of something which we can predict and control reliably, so that its sensory-motive capacities are very limited by definition. Its range of 'what's going on' has to be very narrow. The internet, for instance, passes a tremendous number of events through electronic circuits, but the content of all of it is entirely lost on it. We use the internet to increase our sense and inform our motives, but its sense and motive does not increase at all. Craig Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msg/everything-list/-/pf0w53nZsoMJ. 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 via acomputer
On 1/11/2013 2:12 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote: On Fri, Jan 11, 2013 at 1:33 AM, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net mailto:meeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 1/10/2013 4:23 PM, Telmo Menezes wrote: Do you think there can be something that is intelligent but not complex (and use whatever definitions of intelligent and complex you want). A thermostat is much less complex than a human brain but intelligent under my definition. But much less intelligent. That's your conclusion, not mine. According to my definition you can only compare thermostats being good at being thermostats and Brents being good at being Brents. Because you can only compare intelligence against a same set of goals. Otherwise you're just saying that intelligence A is more complex than intelligence B. Human intelligence requires a certain level of complexity, bacteria intelligence another. That's all. So you've removed all meaning from intelligence. Rocks are smart at being rocks, we just have to recognize their goal is be rocks. Maybe we can stop dancing around the question by referring to human-level-intelligence and then rephrasing the question as, Do you think human-like-intelligence requires human-like-complexity? 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 via acomputer
On 10 Jan 2013, at 23:28, Telmo Menezes wrote: On Thu, Jan 10, 2013 at 11:15 PM, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 1/10/2013 1:58 PM, Telmo Menezes wrote: Hi Craig, I tend to agree with what you say (or what I understand of it). Despite my belief that it is possible to extract memories (or their 3p shadows) from a brain, I do not believe in the neuroscience hypothesis that consciousness emerges from brain activity. I'm not sure I believe that there is a degree of consciousness in everything, but it sounds more plausible than the emergence from complexity idea. Do you agree that intelligence requires complexity? I'm not sure intelligence and complexity are two different things. Hmm... I have a theory of intelligence. It has strong defect, as it makes many things intelligent. But not everyone. The machine X is intelligent, if it is not stupid. And the machine X is stupid in two circumstances. Either she asserts that Y is intelligent, or she assert that Y is stupid. (Y can be equal to X). In that theory, a pebble is intelligent, as no one has ever heard a pebble asserting that some other pebble or whatever, is stupid, or is intelligent. (that theory is almost only a identification of intelligence with consistency (Dt)). Intelligence is needed to develop competences. But competences can have a negative feedback on intelligence. Bruno 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 . 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: Subjective states can be somehow extracted from brains via acomputer
On 1/11/2013 11:44 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 10 Jan 2013, at 23:28, Telmo Menezes wrote: On Thu, Jan 10, 2013 at 11:15 PM, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net mailto:meeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 1/10/2013 1:58 PM, Telmo Menezes wrote: Hi Craig, I tend to agree with what you say (or what I understand of it). Despite my belief that it is possible to extract memories (or their 3p shadows) from a brain, I do not believe in the neuroscience hypothesis that consciousness emerges from brain activity. I'm not sure I believe that there is a degree of consciousness in everything, but it sounds more plausible than the emergence from complexity idea. Do you agree that intelligence requires complexity? I'm not sure intelligence and complexity are two different things. Hmm... I have a theory of intelligence. It has strong defect, as it makes many things intelligent. But not everyone. The machine X is intelligent, if it is not stupid. And the machine X is stupid in two circumstances. Either she asserts that Y is intelligent, or she assert that Y is stupid. (Y can be equal to X). So if X is smart she asserts Y is not intelligent or Y is not stupid. :-) Brent In that theory, a pebble is intelligent, as no one has ever heard a pebble asserting that some other pebble or whatever, is stupid, or is intelligent. (that theory is almost only a identification of intelligence with consistency (Dt)). Intelligence is needed to develop competences. But competences can have a negative feedback on intelligence. Bruno -- 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
Hi Craig, I tend to agree with what you say (or what I understand of it). Despite my belief that it is possible to extract memories (or their 3p shadows) from a brain, I do not believe in the neuroscience hypothesis that consciousness emerges from brain activity. I'm not sure I believe that there is a degree of consciousness in everything, but it sounds more plausible than the emergence from complexity idea. Still I feel that you avoid some questions. Maybe it's just my lack of understanding of what you're saying. For example: what is the primary stuff in your theory? In the same sense that for materialists it's subatomic particles and for comp it's N, +, *. What's yours? On Wed, Jan 9, 2013 at 2:50 PM, Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.comwrote: On Wednesday, January 9, 2013 6:18:37 AM UTC-5, telmo_menezes wrote: Hi Craig, Cool. I actually would have agreed with you and a lot of people here at different times in my life. It's only been lately in the last five years or so that I have put together this other way of understanding everything. It gets lost in the debating, because I feel like I have to make my points about what is different or new about how I see things, but I do understand that other ways of looking at it make a lot of sense too - so much so that I suppose I am drawn only to digging into the weak spots to try to get others to see the secret exit that I think I've found... Ok, this sounds interesting and I'd like to know more. I've been away from the mailing list in the last few years, so maybe you've talked about it before. Would you tell me about that secret exit? The secret exit is to reverse the assumption that consciousness occurs from functions or substances. Even though our human consciousness depends on a living human body (as far as we know for sure), that may be because of the degree of elaboration required to develop a human quality of experience, not because the fundamental capacity to perceive and participate depends on anything at all. Being inside of a human experience means being inside of an animal experience, an organism's experience, a cellular and molecular level experience. The alternative means picking an arbitrary level at which total lack of awareness suddenly changes into perception and participation for no conceivable reason. Instead of hanging on to the hope of finding such a level or gate, the secret is to see that there are many levels and gates but that they are qualitative, with each richer integration of qualia reframing the levels left behind in a particular way, and that way (another key) is to reduce it from a personal, animistic temporal flow of 1p meaning and significant preference to impersonal, mechanistic spatial bodies ruled by cause-effect and chance/probability. 1p and 3p are relativistic, but what joins them is the capacity to discern the difference. Rather than sense i/o being a function or logic take for granted, flip it over so that logic is the 3p shadow of sense. The 3p view is a frozen snapshot of countless 1p views as seen from the outside, and the qualities of the 3p view depend entirely on the nature of the 1p perceiver-partcipant. Sense is semiotic. Its qualitative layers are partitioned by habit and interpretive inertia, just as an ambiguous image looks different depending on how you personally direct your perception, or how a book that you read when you are 12 years old can have different meanings at 18 or 35. The meaning isn't just 'out there', it's literally, physically in here. If this is true, then the entire physical universe doubles in size, or really is squared as every exterior surface is a 3p representation of an entire history of 1p experience. Each acorn is a potential for oak tree forest, an encyclopedia of evolution and cosmology, so that the acorn is just a semiotic placeholder which is scaled and iconicized appropriately as a consequence of the relation of our human quality awareness and that of the evolutionary-historical-possible future contexts which we share with it (or the whole ensemble of experiences in which 'we' are both embedded as strands of the story of the universe rather than just human body and acorn body or cells and cells etc). To understand the common thread for all of it, always go back to the juxtaposition of 1p vs 3p, not *that* there is a difference, but the qualities of *what* those differences are - the sense of the juxtaposition. http://media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m9y9by2XXw1qe3q3v.jpg http://media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m9y9boN5rP1qe3q3v.jpg That's were I get sense and motive or perception and participation. The symmetry is more primitive than either matter or mind, so that it isn't one which builds a bridge to the other but sense which divides itself on one level while retaining unity on another, creating not just dualism but a continuum of monism, dualism, dialectic, trichotomy, syzygy, etc. Many levels and perspectives on
Re: Subjective states can be somehow extracted from brains via acomputer
On 1/10/2013 1:58 PM, Telmo Menezes wrote: Hi Craig, I tend to agree with what you say (or what I understand of it). Despite my belief that it is possible to extract memories (or their 3p shadows) from a brain, I do not believe in the neuroscience hypothesis that consciousness emerges from brain activity. I'm not sure I believe that there is a degree of consciousness in everything, but it sounds more plausible than the emergence from complexity idea. Do you agree that intelligence requires complexity? 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 via acomputer
On Thu, Jan 10, 2013 at 11:15 PM, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 1/10/2013 1:58 PM, Telmo Menezes wrote: Hi Craig, I tend to agree with what you say (or what I understand of it). Despite my belief that it is possible to extract memories (or their 3p shadows) from a brain, I do not believe in the neuroscience hypothesis that consciousness emerges from brain activity. I'm not sure I believe that there is a degree of consciousness in everything, but it sounds more plausible than the emergence from complexity idea. Do you agree that intelligence requires complexity? I'm not sure intelligence and complexity are two different things. 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: Subjective states can be somehow extracted from brains via acomputer
On 1/10/2013 2:28 PM, Telmo Menezes wrote: On Thu, Jan 10, 2013 at 11:15 PM, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net mailto:meeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 1/10/2013 1:58 PM, Telmo Menezes wrote: Hi Craig, I tend to agree with what you say (or what I understand of it). Despite my belief that it is possible to extract memories (or their 3p shadows) from a brain, I do not believe in the neuroscience hypothesis that consciousness emerges from brain activity. I'm not sure I believe that there is a degree of consciousness in everything, but it sounds more plausible than the emergence from complexity idea. Do you agree that intelligence requires complexity? I'm not sure intelligence and complexity are two different things. Of course they're two different things. An oak tree is complex but not intelligent. The question is whether you think something can be intelligent without being complex? 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 via acomputer
On Fri, Jan 11, 2013 at 12:01 AM, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 1/10/2013 2:28 PM, Telmo Menezes wrote: On Thu, Jan 10, 2013 at 11:15 PM, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 1/10/2013 1:58 PM, Telmo Menezes wrote: Hi Craig, I tend to agree with what you say (or what I understand of it). Despite my belief that it is possible to extract memories (or their 3p shadows) from a brain, I do not believe in the neuroscience hypothesis that consciousness emerges from brain activity. I'm not sure I believe that there is a degree of consciousness in everything, but it sounds more plausible than the emergence from complexity idea. Do you agree that intelligence requires complexity? I'm not sure intelligence and complexity are two different things. Of course they're two different things. An oak tree is complex but not intelligent. The question is whether you think something can be intelligent without being complex? I don't agree that an oak tree is not intelligent. It changes itself and its environment in non-trivial ways that promote its continuing existence. What's your definition of intelligence? 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: Subjective states can be somehow extracted from brains via acomputer
On 1/10/2013 3:15 PM, Telmo Menezes wrote: On Fri, Jan 11, 2013 at 12:01 AM, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net mailto:meeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 1/10/2013 2:28 PM, Telmo Menezes wrote: On Thu, Jan 10, 2013 at 11:15 PM, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net mailto:meeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 1/10/2013 1:58 PM, Telmo Menezes wrote: Hi Craig, I tend to agree with what you say (or what I understand of it). Despite my belief that it is possible to extract memories (or their 3p shadows) from a brain, I do not believe in the neuroscience hypothesis that consciousness emerges from brain activity. I'm not sure I believe that there is a degree of consciousness in everything, but it sounds more plausible than the emergence from complexity idea. Do you agree that intelligence requires complexity? I'm not sure intelligence and complexity are two different things. Of course they're two different things. An oak tree is complex but not intelligent. The question is whether you think something can be intelligent without being complex? I don't agree that an oak tree is not intelligent. It changes itself and its environment in non-trivial ways that promote its continuing existence. What's your definition of intelligence? What's yours? I don't care what example you use, trees, rocks, bacteria, sewing machines... Are you going to contend that everything is intelligent and everything is complex, so that the words loose all meaning? Do you think there can be something that is intelligent but not complex (and use whatever definitions of intelligent and complex you want). 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 via acomputer
On Fri, Jan 11, 2013 at 12:58 AM, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 1/10/2013 3:15 PM, Telmo Menezes wrote: On Fri, Jan 11, 2013 at 12:01 AM, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 1/10/2013 2:28 PM, Telmo Menezes wrote: On Thu, Jan 10, 2013 at 11:15 PM, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 1/10/2013 1:58 PM, Telmo Menezes wrote: Hi Craig, I tend to agree with what you say (or what I understand of it). Despite my belief that it is possible to extract memories (or their 3p shadows) from a brain, I do not believe in the neuroscience hypothesis that consciousness emerges from brain activity. I'm not sure I believe that there is a degree of consciousness in everything, but it sounds more plausible than the emergence from complexity idea. Do you agree that intelligence requires complexity? I'm not sure intelligence and complexity are two different things. Of course they're two different things. An oak tree is complex but not intelligent. The question is whether you think something can be intelligent without being complex? I don't agree that an oak tree is not intelligent. It changes itself and its environment in non-trivial ways that promote its continuing existence. What's your definition of intelligence? What's yours? I don't care what example you use, trees, rocks, bacteria, sewing machines... If you allow for the concepts of agent, perception, action and goal, my definition is: the degree to which an agent can achieve its goals by perceiving itself and its environment and using that information to predict the outcome of its actions, for the purpose of choosing the actions that has the highest probability of leading to a future state where the goal are achieved. Intelligence can then be quantified by comparing the effectiveness of the agent in achieving its goals to that of an agent acting randomly. But you can only compare intelligence in relation to a set of goals. How do you compare the intelligence of two agents with different goals and environments? Any criteria is arbitrary. We like to believe we're more intelligent because we're more complex, but you can also believe that bacteria are more intelligent because they are more resilient to extinction. Are you going to contend that everything is intelligent and everything is complex, so that the words loose all meaning? I never said that. I do think that intelligence is a mushy concept to begin with, and that's not my fault. Do you think there can be something that is intelligent but not complex (and use whatever definitions of intelligent and complex you want). A thermostat is much less complex than a human brain but intelligent under my definition. 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: Subjective states can be somehow extracted from brains via acomputer
On 1/10/2013 4:23 PM, Telmo Menezes wrote: Do you think there can be something that is intelligent but not complex (and use whatever definitions of intelligent and complex you want). A thermostat is much less complex than a human brain but intelligent under my definition. But much less intelligent. So in effect you think there is a degree of intelligence in everything, just like you believe there's a degree of consciousness in everything. And the degree of intelligence correlates with the degree of complexity ...but you don't think the same about consciousness? 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 Thursday, January 10, 2013 4:58:32 PM UTC-5, telmo_menezes wrote: Hi Craig, I tend to agree with what you say (or what I understand of it). Despite my belief that it is possible to extract memories (or their 3p shadows) from a brain, As long as you have another brain to experience the extracted memories in 1p, then I wouldn't rule out the possibility of a 3p transmission of some experiential content from one brain to another. I do not believe in the neuroscience hypothesis that consciousness emerges from brain activity. I'm not sure I believe that there is a degree of consciousness in everything, but it sounds more plausible than the emergence from complexity idea. Still I feel that you avoid some questions. Maybe it's just my lack of understanding of what you're saying. For example: what is the primary stuff in your theory? In the same sense that for materialists it's subatomic particles and for comp it's N, +, *. What's yours? For me the primary stuff is sensory-motor presence. Particles are public sense representations. N, +, * are private sense representations. Particles represent the experience of sensory-motor obstruction as topological bodies. Integers and arithmetic operators represent the sensory-motor relations of public objects as private logical figures. Craig On Wed, Jan 9, 2013 at 2:50 PM, Craig Weinberg whats...@gmail.comjavascript: wrote: On Wednesday, January 9, 2013 6:18:37 AM UTC-5, telmo_menezes wrote: Hi Craig, Cool. I actually would have agreed with you and a lot of people here at different times in my life. It's only been lately in the last five years or so that I have put together this other way of understanding everything. It gets lost in the debating, because I feel like I have to make my points about what is different or new about how I see things, but I do understand that other ways of looking at it make a lot of sense too - so much so that I suppose I am drawn only to digging into the weak spots to try to get others to see the secret exit that I think I've found... Ok, this sounds interesting and I'd like to know more. I've been away from the mailing list in the last few years, so maybe you've talked about it before. Would you tell me about that secret exit? The secret exit is to reverse the assumption that consciousness occurs from functions or substances. Even though our human consciousness depends on a living human body (as far as we know for sure), that may be because of the degree of elaboration required to develop a human quality of experience, not because the fundamental capacity to perceive and participate depends on anything at all. Being inside of a human experience means being inside of an animal experience, an organism's experience, a cellular and molecular level experience. The alternative means picking an arbitrary level at which total lack of awareness suddenly changes into perception and participation for no conceivable reason. Instead of hanging on to the hope of finding such a level or gate, the secret is to see that there are many levels and gates but that they are qualitative, with each richer integration of qualia reframing the levels left behind in a particular way, and that way (another key) is to reduce it from a personal, animistic temporal flow of 1p meaning and significant preference to impersonal, mechanistic spatial bodies ruled by cause-effect and chance/probability. 1p and 3p are relativistic, but what joins them is the capacity to discern the difference. Rather than sense i/o being a function or logic take for granted, flip it over so that logic is the 3p shadow of sense. The 3p view is a frozen snapshot of countless 1p views as seen from the outside, and the qualities of the 3p view depend entirely on the nature of the 1p perceiver-partcipant. Sense is semiotic. Its qualitative layers are partitioned by habit and interpretive inertia, just as an ambiguous image looks different depending on how you personally direct your perception, or how a book that you read when you are 12 years old can have different meanings at 18 or 35. The meaning isn't just 'out there', it's literally, physically in here. If this is true, then the entire physical universe doubles in size, or really is squared as every exterior surface is a 3p representation of an entire history of 1p experience. Each acorn is a potential for oak tree forest, an encyclopedia of evolution and cosmology, so that the acorn is just a semiotic placeholder which is scaled and iconicized appropriately as a consequence of the relation of our human quality awareness and that of the evolutionary-historical-possible future contexts which we share with it (or the whole ensemble of experiences in which 'we' are both embedded as strands of the story of the universe rather than just human body and acorn body or cells and cells etc). To
Re: Subjective states can be somehow extracted from brains via acomputer
On Thursday, January 10, 2013 7:33:06 PM UTC-5, Brent wrote: On 1/10/2013 4:23 PM, Telmo Menezes wrote: Do you think there can be something that is intelligent but not complex (and use whatever definitions of intelligent and complex you want). A thermostat is much less complex than a human brain but intelligent under my definition. But much less intelligent. So in effect you think there is a degree of intelligence in everything, just like you believe there's a degree of consciousness in everything. And the degree of intelligence correlates with the degree of complexity ...but you don't think the same about consciousness? Brent I was thinking today that a decent way of defining intelligence is just 'The ability to know what's going on'. This makes it clear that intelligence refers to the degree of sophistication of awareness, not just complexity of function or structure. This is why a computer which has complex function and structure has no authentic intelligence and has no idea 'what's going on'. Intelligence however has everything to do with sensitivity, integration, and mobilization of awareness as an asset, i.e. to be directed for personal gain or shared enjoyment, progress, etc. Knowing what's going on implicitly means caring what goes on, which also supervenes on biological quality investment in experience. Craig -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msg/everything-list/-/4H86jbpmVrsJ. 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 via acomputer
On 1/10/2013 9:20 PM, Craig Weinberg wrote: On Thursday, January 10, 2013 7:33:06 PM UTC-5, Brent wrote: On 1/10/2013 4:23 PM, Telmo Menezes wrote: Do you think there can be something that is intelligent but not complex (and use whatever definitions of intelligent and complex you want). A thermostat is much less complex than a human brain but intelligent under my definition. But much less intelligent. So in effect you think there is a degree of intelligence in everything, just like you believe there's a degree of consciousness in everything. And the degree of intelligence correlates with the degree of complexity ...but you don't think the same about consciousness? Brent I was thinking today that a decent way of defining intelligence is just 'The ability to know what's going on'. This makes it clear that intelligence refers to the degree of sophistication of awareness, not just complexity of function or structure. This is why a computer which has complex function and structure has no authentic intelligence and has no idea 'what's going on'. Intelligence however has everything to do with sensitivity, integration, and mobilization of awareness as an asset, i.e. to be directed for personal gain or shared enjoyment, progress, etc. Knowing what's going on implicitly means caring what goes on, which also supervenes on biological quality investment in experience. Which is why I think an intelligent machine must be one that acts in its environment. Simply 'being aware' or 'knowing' are meaningless without the ability and motives to act on them. 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
Hi Craig, Cool. I actually would have agreed with you and a lot of people here at different times in my life. It's only been lately in the last five years or so that I have put together this other way of understanding everything. It gets lost in the debating, because I feel like I have to make my points about what is different or new about how I see things, but I do understand that other ways of looking at it make a lot of sense too - so much so that I suppose I am drawn only to digging into the weak spots to try to get others to see the secret exit that I think I've found... Ok, this sounds interesting and I'd like to know more. I've been away from the mailing list in the last few years, so maybe you've talked about it before. Would you tell me about that secret exit? -- 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 Wednesday, January 9, 2013 6:18:37 AM UTC-5, telmo_menezes wrote: Hi Craig, Cool. I actually would have agreed with you and a lot of people here at different times in my life. It's only been lately in the last five years or so that I have put together this other way of understanding everything. It gets lost in the debating, because I feel like I have to make my points about what is different or new about how I see things, but I do understand that other ways of looking at it make a lot of sense too - so much so that I suppose I am drawn only to digging into the weak spots to try to get others to see the secret exit that I think I've found... Ok, this sounds interesting and I'd like to know more. I've been away from the mailing list in the last few years, so maybe you've talked about it before. Would you tell me about that secret exit? The secret exit is to reverse the assumption that consciousness occurs from functions or substances. Even though our human consciousness depends on a living human body (as far as we know for sure), that may be because of the degree of elaboration required to develop a human quality of experience, not because the fundamental capacity to perceive and participate depends on anything at all. Being inside of a human experience means being inside of an animal experience, an organism's experience, a cellular and molecular level experience. The alternative means picking an arbitrary level at which total lack of awareness suddenly changes into perception and participation for no conceivable reason. Instead of hanging on to the hope of finding such a level or gate, the secret is to see that there are many levels and gates but that they are qualitative, with each richer integration of qualia reframing the levels left behind in a particular way, and that way (another key) is to reduce it from a personal, animistic temporal flow of 1p meaning and significant preference to impersonal, mechanistic spatial bodies ruled by cause-effect and chance/probability. 1p and 3p are relativistic, but what joins them is the capacity to discern the difference. Rather than sense i/o being a function or logic take for granted, flip it over so that logic is the 3p shadow of sense. The 3p view is a frozen snapshot of countless 1p views as seen from the outside, and the qualities of the 3p view depend entirely on the nature of the 1p perceiver-partcipant. Sense is semiotic. Its qualitative layers are partitioned by habit and interpretive inertia, just as an ambiguous image looks different depending on how you personally direct your perception, or how a book that you read when you are 12 years old can have different meanings at 18 or 35. The meaning isn't just 'out there', it's literally, physically in here. If this is true, then the entire physical universe doubles in size, or really is squared as every exterior surface is a 3p representation of an entire history of 1p experience. Each acorn is a potential for oak tree forest, an encyclopedia of evolution and cosmology, so that the acorn is just a semiotic placeholder which is scaled and iconicized appropriately as a consequence of the relation of our human quality awareness and that of the evolutionary-historical-possible future contexts which we share with it (or the whole ensemble of experiences in which 'we' are both embedded as strands of the story of the universe rather than just human body and acorn body or cells and cells etc). To understand the common thread for all of it, always go back to the juxtaposition of 1p vs 3p, not *that* there is a difference, but the qualities of *what* those differences are - the sense of the juxtaposition. http://media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m9y9by2XXw1qe3q3v.jpg http://media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m9y9boN5rP1qe3q3v.jpg That's were I get sense and motive or perception and participation. The symmetry is more primitive than either matter or mind, so that it isn't one which builds a bridge to the other but sense which divides itself on one level while retaining unity on another, creating not just dualism but a continuum of monism, dualism, dialectic, trichotomy, syzygy, etc. Many levels and perspectives on sense within sense. http://multisenserealism.com/about/ Craig -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msg/everything-list/-/elwBNPr92z4J. 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 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: 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
information. Craig [Roger Clough], [rcl...@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/**sci**entists-reconstruct-video-**clip** s-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.htmlhttp://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/**S0079612305490196http://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-2011https://sites.google.com/site/gallantlabucb/publications/nishimoto-et-al-2011 So what they did is analogous to tracing the rectangle pattern that your eyes make when generally tracing the contrast boundary of a door-like image and then comparing that pattern to patterns made by other people's eyes tracing the known images of doors. It's really no closer to any direct access to your interior state than any data-mining advertiser gets by chasing after your web history to determine that you might buy prostate vitamins if you are watching a Rolling Stones YouTube. a) Computers are themselves conscious (which can neither be proven nor disproven) and are therefore capable of perception. Nothing can be considered conscious unless it has the capacity to act in its own interest. Computers, by virtue of their perpetual servitude to human will, are not conscious. or 2) The flesh of the brain is simultaneously objective and subjective. Thus an ordinary (by which I mean not conscious) computer can work on it objectively yet produce a subjective image by some manipulation of the flesh of the brain. One perhaps might call this milking of the brain. The flesh of the brain is indeed simultaneously objective and subjective (as are all living cells and perhaps
Re: Re: Subjective states can be somehow extracted from brains via acomputer
'? 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. Images aren't 3p. Images are 1p visual experiences inferred through 3p optical presentations. The algorithm can't learn anything about images because it will never experience them in any way. 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. That's what makes people jump to the conclusion that they are looking at something that came from a brain rather than YouTube + video editing + simple formula + data sets from experiments that have no particular relation to brains or consciousness. 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. Why would there by a correlation between your Google history and 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. 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 information. The information being modeled here visually is not extracted from the human brain. Videos are matched to videos based on incidental correlations of brain activity. The same result could be achieved in many different ways having nothing to do with the brain at all. You could have people listen to one of several songs and draw a pictures of how the music makes them feel, and then write a program which figures out which song they most likely drew based on the statistics what known subjects drew - voila, you have a picture of music. Craig. [Roger Clough], [rcl...@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/**sci**entists-reconstruct-video-**clip** s-from-brain-activityhttp://gizmodo.com
Re: Re: Subjective states can be somehow extracted from brains via acomputer
Hi Craig Weinberg Sorry, everybody, I was snookered into believing that they had really accomplished the impossible. The killer argument against that is that the brain has no sync signals to generate the raster lines. [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 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 So what they did is analogous to tracing the rectangle pattern that your eyes make when generally tracing the contrast boundary of a door-like image and then comparing that pattern to patterns made by other people's eyes tracing the known images of doors. It's really no closer to any direct access to your interior state than any data-mining advertiser gets by chasing after your web history to determine that you might buy prostate vitamins if you are watching a Rolling Stones YouTube. a) Computers are themselves conscious (which can neither be proven nor disproven) and are therefore capable of perception. Nothing can be considered conscious unless it has the capacity to act in its own interest. Computers, by virtue of their perpetual servitude to human will, are not conscious. or 2) The flesh of the brain is simultaneously objective and subjective. Thus an ordinary (by which I mean not conscious) computer can work on it objectively yet produce a subjective image by some manipulation of the flesh of the brain. One perhaps might call this milking of the brain. The flesh of the brain is indeed simultaneously objective and subjective (as are all living cells and perhaps all molecules and atoms), but the noise comparisons being done in this experiment aren't milking anything but the hype
