WTF Bites
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In short, trying to explain how thoughts can be purely the result of the natural biological processes of electrical and chemical reactions in the neurons of our brains can result with the only conclusion being that we cannot actually explain things.
The difficult bit is that we have many layers of complexity, and these things are all resolutely non-linear. We know from our meagre experiments elsewhere that when you put lots of non-linearity together, it's insanely difficult to predict the results. The problem of how to take the basic components of something and predict the higher-level properties of an assembly of those components is the single greatest challenge in science; emergent properties are ever so important yet simple reductionist approaches lose them.
Yet we know from experiment that what's really going on is not the illusion that our minds hold to. There's been some really great results from the top-down neuroscientists showing that our perception of, say, a continuous flow of time is very much not what's actually going on. A part of our minds seems to be devoted to constructing a biographic view that fits what we perceive, and that forms very much the basis for what our higher-level identity operates with. There's also the part that does deliberative thought; most people try to avoid using that at all if they can help it (to the point where it's a joke) and the rest of us usually don't use it anyway (“thinking is hard; don't make me think, bro!”). Those are very high-level processes in the brain and aren't well understood, yet we also know from those brain damage studies that they must nevertheless be embodied within the brain.
Yet to leap from that to claiming that there is a non-physical component to the mind? Well, perhaps so from a certain point of view if you perceive a mind as the software running on the brain's hardware, but reality is messier than that. At least with current technology, brains and minds are very much fused together. If brains are computers, they're very different sorts of computers to what we build out of silicon; perhaps the best analogy there is that brains/minds are what computers would be if we took the concept of self-modifying code and, instead of rigorously walling it away from everything to keep the system comprehensible, applied it all levels down to the individual hardware gates. It's an utterly different way of doing things, with everything bound together, interacting and changing each other all the time; nobody builds computers like that except for madmen (who usually fail, or go on to get a PhD or something).
If there is no metaphysical part of our existence, then everything we think is just another response of our "wetware," which means thoughts are simply more events that we experience, and we are no more responsible for them (and thus for any of our actions) than we are for preferring Brie more than Camembert, nor can we attach any more importance to one thought than another
And yet the fact that we're having this discussion shows that at least the consequent of that statement must be false. I believe that it is because the overall statement is false, you believe that it is because the antecedent is false.
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@dkf To explain what I meant by the “wat” image, the state of neuroscience is that it has a fairly good idea what memories are made of (patterns of synapses and the strengths of activation of those synapses, both of which are resolutely physical) at least for basic memories, and work is ongoing to understand more about what higher-level memories are like. Probably more of the same if you ask me, but the details are tricky (e.g., are there specialized neurons involved or are we just talking general patterns throughout). Thoughts are trickier — in large part because we're not really sure what they are — but betting that they are non-physical would seem odd. I predict that there won't be a single neuron for anything in particular, but the interplay of different patterns of neurons and synapses will be important. (There have been found neural patterns that act as attention selectors, patterns that act as spatial and temporal pattern detectors, and other patterns that act as phase locked loops of various descriptions. How these things fit together in hierarchies that predict possible futures and plan responses to them, that's one of the absolute total frontiers of science right now.)
This stuff is fun, and really needs interdisciplinary approaches; something that looks utterly confusing to one person is very clear to someone else with a different background. And you'll never understand it by a purely full-neuron-model first approach (just like you'd never understand a Google search by starting at the level of electron movement in CMOS gates); there's too many higher levels of organisation.
This is really cool science, and I'd love to learn more about it, but even so, it fails to address the issue I'm raising. To take your Google search analogy, there may be tons of really interesting and complex operations going on behind a search across the internet, and ultimately they come down to a bunch of electrons flowing through conductors and semiconductors in highly patterned and extremely complex ways on very complicated hardware. But, even though Google's servers are sitting there indexing the internet, a search isn't actually triggered until someone from outside that system inputs a query.
That's what I'm suggesting happens with our minds. The wetware is sitting there running its background processes and listeners, recording sensations, and offering automatic responses to certain environmental inputs; and then the metaphysical part of a person inputs a command or query, and away it goes responding to that new event.
If there is no metaphysical part of our existence, then everything we think is just another response of our "wetware," which means thoughts are simply more events that we experience, and we are no more responsible for them (and thus for any of our actions) than we are for preferring Brie more than Camembert, nor can we attach any more importance to one thought than another; if there is no metaphysical aspect to our existence, then thinking itself becomes utterly meaningless, and the fact that we think otherwise is just one of those quirks of our "thoughts." There is therefore basically no difference then between sanity and insanity; no one really knows (nor can know) how the universe actually works. And actually, the fact that we think we're making logical arguments or saying real things about reality falls under the same guillotine.
In short, trying to explain how thoughts can be purely the result of the natural biological processes of electrical and chemical reactions in the neurons of our brains can result with the only conclusion being that we cannot actually explain things. And if anything is to mean something, then that's patently ludicrous. Therefore, by non-contradiction, we must conclude that there is a non-physical/metaphysical part of our minds that can introduce new events into the "processing stream" of our physical existence.
Where does this weird idea come from that our thoughts have to “mean something”. That’s the patently ridiculous part. You’re trying to do a shaky proof by contradiction on something arbitrary, ill defined and unfounded.
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Regardless of its growth-evolution being deterministic or not
An observation: when you have enough internal state variables, whether something is formally deterministic and whether you perceive it as such can diverge quite strongly. Consider the Mersenne-Twister PRNG: it's definitely entirely deterministic, if you know its state, you can predict its future behaviour precisely forever, yet if you just observe its outputs then it is very hard to predict.
And that's achievable with only a few kilobytes of internal state…
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pineal gland
Just a joke on Descartes' guess that the pineal gland is where the soul connected to the brain.
Regardless of its growth-evolution being deterministic or not, a metaphysical being is not necessarily subject to the same problem of meaninglessness. At worst, it might be but we don't have the right faculties to be able to tell†. But since we know that a purely physical process is necessarily subject to the problem, we must conclude that having this meaning requires a non-physical source.
At this point, we're just slowly circling in towards John Searle's Chinese Room Argument. If you want to convince us, you have to answer these questions:
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What observable properties are required for a system to be capable of meaningful understanding?
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Do physical systems inherently lack the required properties?
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Do metaphysical systems exist at all?
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Are the properties of metaphysical systems constrained in any way so that they are not simply whatever is needed to make an argument work?
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perhaps the best analogy there is that brains/minds are what computers would be if we took the concept of self-modifying code and, instead of rigorously walling it away from everything to keep the system comprehensible, applied it all levels down to the individual hardware gates. It's an utterly different way of doing things, with everything bound together, interacting and changing each other all the time; nobody builds computers like that except for madmen (who usually fail, or go on to get a PhD or something).
Reminds me of the first attempts at building airplanes with flapping wings. It was only when the mechanisms for propulsion and lift were separated that working airplanes were built.
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@Tsaukpaetra said in WTF Bites:
@Tsaukpaetra said in WTF Bites:
@ben_lubar said in WTF Bites:
@Tsaukpaetra said in WTF Bites:
@pie_flavor said in WTF Bites:
@ben_lubar what?
Why?
Where?
When?
How?
Who?
Owh?
Woh!
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@dkf There's also the fun part where I recently read an article (I have to follow up on this) where they posited that behavioural science will probably skew sharply towards the "nature" part of nature versus nurture. It would seem that our specific characters/personalities are rather more hardcoded than we previously assumed.
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@Rhywden: that's gonna seriously upset the "everything is a social construct" crowd.
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There's also the fun part where I recently read an article (I have to follow up on this) where they posited that behavioural science will probably skew sharply towards the "nature" part of nature versus nurture. It would seem that our specific characters/personalities are rather more hardcoded than we previously assumed.
It's not an easy thing to study, since you need to find identical twins that are separated very early in life and brought up in quite different environments (pretty rare) and also allow for all the other things that can happen to cause differences (some diseases, pollution, etc.) Without that, you get caught out by the embuggerances of common upbringing, which is where nature and nurture truly interact even without the direct influence of genes.
Genes seem to determine which general area of the brain each neuron sends axonal projections to, but not the exact details (and the physical arrangement of things might also have a big impact on this; the understanding of the importance of the physical environment of each cell is pretty poor beyond generally being known to be critical). The details seem to be fairly random, mediated by the fact that (the tips of) axons and dendrites can move and will form and remove synapses dependent on activity levels; that process seems to turn a randomly connected network into one that is highly tuned to its purpose. It's rather impressive how initially random networks can learn unprompted to recognise not just hand-written digits, but also sequences of them in time. Deep learning is very much a thing, but without live training (horrendously difficult in traditional ANNs) they can only ever hope to be a shadow of what neurons do.
I know I don't understand the physical level of what's going on in synapse strength plasticity (other than that it's probably linked to the number of particular types of ion channel somehow).
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Why is the quality of being metaphysical any help in giving a process meaning?
Don't you get it? Everything in powershell is .net! It's God's shell.
Hang on. I may have crossed the
streamssubthreads
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@Tsaukpaetra said in WTF Bites:
I found a nice relaxation topic to detox with for a while...
I've been seeing quite a few of those in the suggested videos list. Many of them include duplicate clips from other such videos.
Brings a whole new meaning to the phrase "spam traffic."
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@boomzilla said in WTF Bites:
Why is the quality of being metaphysical any help in giving a process meaning?
Don't you get it? Everything in powershell is .net! It's God's shell.
Hang on. I may have crossed the
streamssubthreadsCan God spawn a thread that not even He can kill? Would it instead become a philosophical zombie process?
These are important questions. See Figure 1 below.
Figure 1: A metaphysical development process. [1]
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Can God spawn a thread that not even He can kill? Would it instead become a philosophical zombie process?
According to @cartman82's experience, probably.
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@anotherusername said in WTF Bites:
@Rhywden And which principles are those?
Centuries old theories not revisited, revised and ultimately thrown away in light of modern scientific discoveries?
Um, actually. Homeopathy was invented pretty much wholesale in an era when the principles were already known to be wrong. All the arguments from antiquity are pure marketing bullshit trying to make it sound like "wisdom of the ancients"
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rational creationists
E_NON_SEQUITUR
creationists with an integer numerator and denominator
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@anotherusername He doesn't understand what Homeopathy is about. If there's actually an active ingredient in there it's not Homeopathy anymore.
Some of those fucktards regard alcohol as an inactive ingredient, so you can get some really horrible booze labeled as some quack remedy for whatever from the homeopaths.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uJokxl4RY4s
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rational creationists
E_NON_SEQUITUR
I think you mean
E_OXYMORON.
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why is this topic so popular? https://what.thedailywtf.com/topic/3677/wife-wtf
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@ben_lubar Huh, 1/20 clicks/impression ratio. That's pretty impressive...
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Does anybody else have a problem on Windows 7 where two (completely different) windows can end up in some kind of quantum entangled state where Windows can't decide which one's icon it should use?
(2 screenshots, same 2 windows in both screenshots... activating either of the windows is "fixing" its icon but then the other window's icon changes to mimic it as soon as its button is repainted, e.g. moused over or if the taskbar reappears after auto hiding)
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@anotherusername I don't have that problem, because I don't use Windows 7. Hint.
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@pie_flavor I've never had the problem except on this one crappy laptop...
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@Tsaukpaetra said in WTF Bites:
@ben_lubar Huh, 1/20 clicks/impression ratio. That's pretty impressive...
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@ben_lubar said in WTF Bites:
@Tsaukpaetra said in WTF Bites:
@ben_lubar Huh, 1/20 clicks/impression ratio. That's pretty impressive...
What three sites are so incredibly popular they like linking to his profile?
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@Tsaukpaetra said in WTF Bites:
@ben_lubar said in WTF Bites:
@Tsaukpaetra said in WTF Bites:
@ben_lubar Huh, 1/20 clicks/impression ratio. That's pretty impressive...
What three sites are so incredibly popular they like linking to his profile?
and to answer your next question:
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@Tsaukpaetra said in WTF Bites:
@ben_lubar said in WTF Bites:
to answer your next question:
Wat.
This search finds 9 results:
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@ben_lubar Now I'm curious what megalodon.jp is. Google Translate suggests something to do with fish, but I pushed a random letter in the search box, which happened to be 'h', and results for hentai came up.
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@pie_flavor said in WTF Bites:
@ben_lubar Now I'm curious what megalodon.jp is. Google Translate suggests something to do with fish, but I pushed a random letter in the search box, which happened to be 'h', and results for hentai came up.
"Web fishery is a tool for quoting web pages."
So probably some kind of archive site.
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@pie_flavor said in WTF Bites:
@ben_lubar Now I'm curious what megalodon.jp is. Google Translate suggests something to do with fish, but I pushed a random letter in the search box, which happened to be 'h', and results for hentai came up.
it's an on-demand archival site, similar to archive.is .
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What? No. Like Microsoft, you need to understand that people do not have conversations where they recommend things like this to their friends.
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DST again!
Some Apple Watch Series 4 models repeatedly crashing and rebooting due to daylight saving time bug
Update: The date has now rolled over again in Australia and everyone’s watches are working normally again. Nevertheless, expect Apple...
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@Luhmann The key point is that an app can't cope with the reality of human time, so it crashes the whole device on boot…
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@pie_flavor said in WTF Bites:
@anotherusername I don't have that problem, because I don't use Windows 7. Hint.
Now you have 10 problems.
And that's not binary, JWZ
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@ben_lubar said in WTF Bites:
why is this topic so popular? https://what.thedailywtf.com/topic/3677/wife-wtf
It involves the words 'wife' and 'fuck' - perfectly cromulent words for anyone looking for porn.
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In short, trying to explain how thoughts can be purely the result of the natural biological processes of electrical and chemical reactions in the neurons of our brains can result with the only conclusion being that we cannot actually explain things.
The difficult bit is that we have many layers of complexity, and these things are all resolutely non-linear. We know from our meagre experiments elsewhere that when you put lots of non-linearity together, it's insanely difficult to predict the results. The problem of how to take the basic components of something and predict the higher-level properties of an assembly of those components is the single greatest challenge in science; emergent properties are ever so important yet simple reductionist approaches lose them.
Emergence doesn't help fix the problem. In essence, it still just says that physical processes are forcing us to "think" certain thoughts. You do understand the distinction between a cause-and-effect relationship between two events and a grounds-to-consequent relationship between two ideas, right? But one thought (i.e. state of the brain) causing the next thought (state of the brain) to occur, no matter how complex the processes, cannot be shown to be more likely to formulate a sound or cogent grounds-to-consequent relationship between the ideas. How could it? A ground does not necessitate drawing all, or even any, of its possible consequents, whereas a cause does inevitably lead to all of its effects.
Yet we know from experiment that what's really going on is not the illusion that our minds hold to. There's been some really great results from the top-down neuroscientists showing that our perception of, say, a continuous flow of time is very much not what's actually going on. A part of our minds seems to be devoted to constructing a biographic view that fits what we perceive, and that forms very much the basis for what our higher-level identity operates with.
Might these top-down neuroscientists be suggesting that our minds may be "outside" the normal flow of time? If they're "outside" Time, then they're also outside Space as well, though obviously still connected to it, meaning minds are "meta"-physical, right?
There's also the part that does deliberative thought; most people try to avoid using that at all if they can help it (to the point where it's a joke) and the rest of us usually don't use it anyway (“thinking is hard; don't make me think, bro!”). Those are very high-level processes in the brain and aren't well understood, yet we also know from those brain damage studies that they must nevertheless be embodied within the brain.
Yet to leap from that to claiming that there is a non-physical component to the mind? Well, perhaps so from a certain point of view if you perceive a mind as the software running on the brain's hardware, but reality is messier than that. At least with current technology, brains and minds are very much fused together. If brains are computers, they're very different sorts of computers to what we build out of silicon; perhaps the best analogy there is that brains/minds are what computers would be if we took the concept of self-modifying code and, instead of rigorously walling it away from everything to keep the system comprehensible, applied it all levels down to the individual hardware gates. It's an utterly different way of doing things, with everything bound together, interacting and changing each other all the time; nobody builds computers like that except for madmen (who usually fail, or go on to get a PhD or something).
What I'm suggesting is to add to this metaphor the point that the mind/software is sourced remotely from the hardware (SaaS?); the computer's state would therefore affect the reception and presentation of a person's thoughts, and could in the other direction affect what and how the mind can receive input. Being drunk or high or tired affects how the processing works, and damaging or destroying the local hardware also inhibits or terminates the connection.
If there is no metaphysical part of our existence, then everything we think is just another response of our "wetware," which means thoughts are simply more events that we experience, and we are no more responsible for them (and thus for any of our actions) than we are for preferring Brie more than Camembert, nor can we attach any more importance to one thought than another
And yet the fact that we're having this discussion shows that at least the consequent of that statement must be false. I believe that it is because the overall statement is false, you believe that it is because the antecedent is false.
Are you saying that you think the implication itself is invalid? That a purely physical event (if it's complicated enough) can cause a consequent thought? In other words, a thought being grounds for another (consequential) thought is also sufficient to cause the latter?
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Might these top-down neuroscientists be suggesting that our minds may be "outside" the normal flow of time? If they're "outside" Time, then they're also outside Space as well, though obviously still connected to it, meaning minds are "meta"-physical, right?
No, that's the complete opposite of what they are suggesting.
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@dkf To explain what I meant by the “wat” image, the state of neuroscience is that it has a fairly good idea what memories are made of (patterns of synapses and the strengths of activation of those synapses, both of which are resolutely physical) at least for basic memories, and work is ongoing to understand more about what higher-level memories are like. Probably more of the same if you ask me, but the details are tricky (e.g., are there specialized neurons involved or are we just talking general patterns throughout). Thoughts are trickier — in large part because we're not really sure what they are — but betting that they are non-physical would seem odd. I predict that there won't be a single neuron for anything in particular, but the interplay of different patterns of neurons and synapses will be important. (There have been found neural patterns that act as attention selectors, patterns that act as spatial and temporal pattern detectors, and other patterns that act as phase locked loops of various descriptions. How these things fit together in hierarchies that predict possible futures and plan responses to them, that's one of the absolute total frontiers of science right now.)
This stuff is fun, and really needs interdisciplinary approaches; something that looks utterly confusing to one person is very clear to someone else with a different background. And you'll never understand it by a purely full-neuron-model first approach (just like you'd never understand a Google search by starting at the level of electron movement in CMOS gates); there's too many higher levels of organisation.
This is really cool science, and I'd love to learn more about it, but even so, it fails to address the issue I'm raising. To take your Google search analogy, there may be tons of really interesting and complex operations going on behind a search across the internet, and ultimately they come down to a bunch of electrons flowing through conductors and semiconductors in highly patterned and extremely complex ways on very complicated hardware. But, even though Google's servers are sitting there indexing the internet, a search isn't actually triggered until someone from outside that system inputs a query.
That's what I'm suggesting happens with our minds. The wetware is sitting there running its background processes and listeners, recording sensations, and offering automatic responses to certain environmental inputs; and then the metaphysical part of a person inputs a command or query, and away it goes responding to that new event.
If there is no metaphysical part of our existence, then everything we think is just another response of our "wetware," which means thoughts are simply more events that we experience, and we are no more responsible for them (and thus for any of our actions) than we are for preferring Brie more than Camembert, nor can we attach any more importance to one thought than another; if there is no metaphysical aspect to our existence, then thinking itself becomes utterly meaningless, and the fact that we think otherwise is just one of those quirks of our "thoughts." There is therefore basically no difference then between sanity and insanity; no one really knows (nor can know) how the universe actually works. And actually, the fact that we think we're making logical arguments or saying real things about reality falls under the same guillotine.
In short, trying to explain how thoughts can be purely the result of the natural biological processes of electrical and chemical reactions in the neurons of our brains can result with the only conclusion being that we cannot actually explain things. And if anything is to mean something, then that's patently ludicrous. Therefore, by non-contradiction, we must conclude that there is a non-physical/metaphysical part of our minds that can introduce new events into the "processing stream" of our physical existence.
Where does this weird idea come from that our thoughts have to “mean something”. That’s the patently ridiculous part.
But... they do... (Many of them, anyways. There's always the thoughts of wishful thinking, prejudices, and insane delusions.)
How else could we communicate?You’re trying to do a shaky proof by contradiction on something arbitrary, ill defined and unfounded.
Not at all. It's only shaky, arbitrary, ill-defined, and unfounded (ungrounded) if the physical world encompasses all of existence.
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YOU'RE A FUCKING WEBSITE
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@pie_flavor
I didn't realize you were going to that sort of school
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Not at all. It's only shaky, arbitrary, ill-defined, and unfounded (ungrounded) if the physical world encompasses all of existence.
Narrator: "It does."
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Emergence doesn't help fix the problem. In essence, it still just says that physical processes are forcing us to "think" certain thoughts. You do understand the distinction between a cause-and-effect relationship between two events and a grounds-to-consequent relationship between two ideas, right? But one thought (i.e. state of the brain) causing the next thought (state of the brain) to occur, no matter how complex the processes, cannot be shown to be more likely to formulate a sound or cogent grounds-to-consequent relationship between the ideas. How could it? A ground does not necessitate drawing all, or even any, of its possible consequents, whereas a cause does inevitably lead to all of its effects.
I think you're arguing a nonsense point.
When one's fundamental perspective is that the physical is all that there is, the notion that you've got some higher non-physical part is the motivating agent just sounds ridiculous. There multiple levels of operation, sure, but there's ultimately nothing other there than the physical. You can claim that this cannot be, but that doesn't necessarily make your claim correct. The differences you claim between grounds and causes are irrelevant, as there's nothing but causes (though they're often not available to us to examine; we're talking a hidden variable theory here).
Might these top-down neuroscientists be suggesting that our minds may be "outside" the normal flow of time? If they're "outside" Time, then they're also outside Space as well, though obviously still connected to it, meaning minds are "meta"-physical, right?
No, they're suggesting that our perceptions are at least partially illusory.
Are you saying that you think the implication itself is invalid? That a purely physical event (if it's complicated enough) can cause a consequent thought? In other words, a thought being grounds for another (consequential) thought is also sufficient to cause the latter?
Yep. Though to properly state it, it's not just the thought that causes the second one, but rather the whole state of the brain which is extremely dependent on the history of the brain (there's all sorts of environmental insults which can change how things work, of which death is merely one of the more extreme ones). The first thought is merely a part of that state and that history.
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https://i.imgur.com/wArTi4M.png
https://i.imgur.com/9SE76eh.png
spot the difference
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It appears I can't count braces without IntelliSense anymore, smh.
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pineal gland
Just a joke on Descartes' guess that the pineal gland is where the soul connected to the brain.
Ah, okay.
Regardless of its growth-evolution being deterministic or not, a metaphysical being is not necessarily subject to the same problem of meaninglessness. At worst, it might be but we don't have the right faculties to be able to tell†. But since we know that a purely physical process is necessarily subject to the problem, we must conclude that having this meaning requires a non-physical source.
At this point, we're just slowly circling in towards John Searle's Chinese Room Argument.
Ooh, interesting. I hadn't heard of this scenario before.
If you want to convince us, you have to answer these questions:
- What observable properties are required for a system to be capable of meaningful understanding?
The only alternative to meaningful understanding is non-understanding. If we are deluded in thinking that our thinking is meaningful, then what can we trust to be true?
- Do physical systems inherently lack the required properties?
We certainly act as if they do! We reject others' claims on the grounds that those claims are grounded on physical causes: "You support that just because you're a ______."
If physical events are sufficient to cause a belief, then because of the way cause-and-effect works, that belief would have to occur. Finding grounds for the belief would be unnecessary. But then that means that every thought is subject to the same process and must occur, regardless of the truth of those thoughts. And that includes the thought that we might be in a purely physical system.- Do metaphysical systems exist at all?
As shown above, some sort of metaphysical system would be necessary for us to be able to even have thoughts that we could know to be true.
- Are the properties of metaphysical systems constrained in any way so that they are not simply whatever is needed to make an argument work?
Not really, but need they be? I am simply arguing for the existence and a minimum set of properties of a metaphysical system. There may be other properties that are not of concern to the argument.
