what makes you so sure that you “feel the meaning” instead of merely recognizing that you have identified the correct one? i think the only difference between humans and robots is that humans get a small zap of satisfying brain chemicals when they realize that they have correctly interpreted something (they do, we’ve seen it); when you discover that when you matched the columns of the tables up correctly, you obtained a prediction about the world based on your previous experience that ended up being true, or that you temporarily believed would come true, dopamine spews. but when you look at the mechanics, there is nothing suggesting anything deeper going on at all.
you can easily say that you ‘feel’ differently, but i can say thats because of the dopamine that spews when you discover that you understand.
I see what you mean Future Man, and of course, this is a long and ongoing argument. On your side there are those that might suggest that we are machine like - responding in certain ways to certain stimuli. Indeed, they would grant that we are highly complex compared to normal machines and that the remarkable array of random and seemingly unpredictable actions that we perform give the illusion of a “ghost in the shell” if you like, but they will ultimately maintain that this is an illusion.
Ultimately, I cannot rest with the notion that a “stimulus>response” explanation could ever account for the depth of human feelings, actions, beliefs etc. Now don’t get me wrong - I do not want to start talking about souls or anything like that and my plea is not just reliant upon an appeal to normal intuitions about the nature of our experiences. I would say that to try and limit what a person is to such simplistic terms is philosophically dangerous. Wittgenstein was deeply preoccupied with this problem and I think that from that very first section in the philosophical investigations, he begins to bring to our attention how uninteligible these mechanical explanations of human behaviour really are when you think about it.
If you would, please read that first section again and we can continue this discussion. Feel free to send me a private message if you want to talk further. It would be very interesting if we could start putting forward our ideas on these things.
i think the way that our brain’s chemicals affect our conscious being is much more magical, soulfull and hard to robotically describe than our decision making processes.
our emotions, which cant even be described by words, math or any kind of description at all, they are what we base our decisions on. what will create the most of the best emotions and avoid the bad ones? it doesnt matter how magical or illogical the emotional feeling is if the only thing you are trying to determine is the way in which a person will decide in a given situation.
he will always robotically pursue the good stimulus, based directly, exactly on what his previous experience tells him will achieve that stimulus, even if nobody knows what exactly the nature of that stimulus is. i actually tend to think that those emotions actually feel good and cause us to be motivated towards them because they really are magical and soulfull.
that totally does not mean that we arent robots, it just means that the thing forcing us to enact our robotic will is not the electromagnetic force like it is for robots and their circuits, but its those indescribably attractive happiness brain chemicals that we cannot avoid no matter how hard we try.
I’m sorry, but you have given nothing here to prove this, not even pointed towards any of the massive ongoing debate that surrounds this issue. How can you be so sure?
what else could a person possibly decide to pursue other than causing the state of his brain to be most enjoyable? empathy, pride, hunger, horniness, curiosity. all human motivation can be summed into words like these. and all those words can be described as beneficial to caveman survival, and thats why we have them. the exact combination of how much effort should be put into satisfying each of them in order to create the most brain reward possible is decided based on previous experience with satisfying those things and how much happiness was created then.
what else could a person possibly decide to pursue other than causing the state of his brain to be most enjoyable? how could any situation be described as anything besides this? (failing to sacrifice yourself for your family will cause your brain to feel worse than it would dead or so you predict, exploiting poor people is caused by past experience suggesting that satisfying pride is more enjoyable than satisfying empathy towards unseen people. etc)
in order for me to not completely believe this, i would need to at least hear a suggestion of an alternative. the only reason why there isnt proof is because quantum mechanics needs to be perfected and extremely new tools need to be invented in order to study the brain in this way. but besides that, im pretty sure all broader psychological research backs up what i say.
I think the room analogy is far too simple to disprove anything. Thinking is so vague that i find it completely subjective. Understanding is a little more descriptive. Understanding is simply a collection of sensory, emotional, and behavioral data that relate to each other. It is in these associations that we understand concepts. I see the word “chair”, I have a visual sensory image of “chair”, I link it to sitting down, to classrooms, etc. If a computer had a way of gaining more input then just single commands, maybe a robot that had sensory that could smell, see, and hear, understanding, strong AI, could be possible. A robot could have even greater understanding then us, it could be equiped with temp. and radiation sensors and could group these sensory experiences together with more common physical data.
Okay - have you ever read Saul Kripke? In a very interesting work of his, “Naming and Necessity” he gave an argument that is still being debated on whether mind and brain can really be the same thing. You see, if the neurological event in my brain (which we can measure) when I feel pain and the feeling of pain that I myself witness are indeed the same thing, then surely they should obey the fundamental logic of Leibniz’s law on the indiscernability of identicals. (To use the jargon, of x, if x = y then it is necessary that if fx then fy.)
However, there are many properties that my feeling of pain has that could never be equated with what is occurring in my brain. So, by using Leibniz’s law, Kripke seems to have shown a proof that the mind is not reducible to the brain.
Now of course, this is an outline only and you might begin to punch holes in it right away, but that would be anti-philosophical. I really think a re-read of Kripke and also of that Wittgenstein passage I suggested would be useful but if you would rather carry on saying that you believe you are right because you know it couldn’t be any other way, then go ahead. However, that would not be philosophy.[/code]
Exactly, I agree. The mind just cannot be reduced to the brain. Thomas Nagel’s paper “What is it like to be a bat?” shows this quite nicely, as well as that Mary-in-a-black-and-white room argument. Those who disagree usually say that"The subjective realm is just an illuision" or that ‘qualia’ (what it is like to experience something) doesnt exist, which is quite absurd.
Good to hear NovaWave…I rarely meet people who read Nagel and I’m yet to read the “Bat” paper myself, but ‘the View from Nowhere’ was a fine piece of work. Nagel really knows how to see things through and even when he ultimately has to admit that he cannot see the answer, he does a damn good job of spelling out the problem.
I think that the kind of mind-brain identity and the reduction of man to mechanical impulses advocated by futureman in the above is rash to say the least. A reading of Nagel might help him realise that the debate is far from over. Would like to talk more on this in the future. Thanks for the enthusiasm.
I would say that a person communicating with the machine is really communicating with the people who programmed it. The people who programmed the machine were just so clever that the user cannot tell that they prepared answers in advance. The machine does not know Chinese, but the programmers of the machine did know Chinese. When people read a book, are they learning from the book or from the author of the book? The reader learns just as well from reading the book whether the author is presently living or is sleeping with his ancestors.
Searle, in all of his works, suffers the same boring flaw… Searle relies too heavily on Searle’s intuition. This is less obvious in the CR argument, but i think a numbing intuition has a clouding effect on all Searle’s works… and is usually made explicit somewhere in the text.
inveterately plain man i guess you could say.
i suppose i’m getting at what is Searle’s real problem with strong AI… that it doesn’t account for first person experience. which is odd, because Searle himself is a zombie.
what do you know about the basic nature of your experiences and ‘what they are’, and what do you know about the specific quantum mechanical activities that take place on the most basic level of your brain activity? nothing. you have no reason to say that they arent the same exact thing other than the fact that i dont know that they are, either. and also that its literally impossible to experience, first hand, what its like to be, firsthand the electricity that i say we are nothing more than. we cant do experiments that prove electricity moving in a certain path causes what we know as happiness because one of us would actually have to go be that electricity, but we already are something else. what we can see is that certain electric paths in our own brain, facilitated by chemicals like dopamine, do coincide with us being happy. you can say that a magical, invisible force is working in addition to that electricity in order to create that extra consciousness that we think makes us so much more special than regular electricity, but i have no idea why you would say that. what evidence would suggest that?
my “argument” that supports the idea that humans only follow instincts is that… well thats what they do. tell me an example of somebody not following their caveman instincts, and im sure that i can describe it as a caveman instinct. there is nothing that could possibly cause them to do something else unless its random or divine. what else coul dpossibly do it?!
al, define “felt the meaning” and explain how you know that the computer didnt do that. i would say the difference is only dopamine or other chemicals, which are known to spew in our brain when we ‘feel the meaning of things’, and are known not to spew in computers. what else is there?
what are these esoteric philosophy things you are talking about, where are they. i dont care for what other people say unless it directly refutes me, which you can probably do better than wittgenstein since he hasnt read what i just said.
id say thats the entire counterargument against me here. “it doesnt feel like im a robot, whatever that means, i have no idea, so i must not be a robot.” i dont think thats a real reason.
huh?
maybe those people are a combination of chemicals and electric pathways that is gay. but youre right, the possibility that somebody will do something that they arent naturally inclined to do is completely unproven, unseen, impossible.
Hello again Futureman. I really feel that I should take some time to answer you properly now. First of all, I do not currently believe in any magical, invisible forces. I also have a deep respect for a philosopher called Edgar Wilson (whose work was preserved by an associate I have at the MMU though Edgar himself died before he showed it to many people) who advocated the same kind of response that you do to Kripke’s ideas. Edgar believed that an evolution of the scientific perspective regarding the mind would eventually help us to understand how what we refer to as “the mind” is reducible to brain processes. So, please don’t think that I am dismissive of your position.
This view has many advantages. When our brains are affected by chemical or physical changes, we often experience simultaneous alterations in the way that we think and act. Happiness does indeed correspond to dopamine levels, adrenalin can even make time pass more slowly from our perspective - there are seemingly countless ways in which the chemical constitution of our brain at any given time directly relates to our mental state. Nagel takes this very seriously, and even for him, our mental life belongs to our brain and not to any esoteric, Cartesian soul.
I must admit that I am often on the same side. The mind and the brain are the same creature, surely! I can explain everything that I do in scientific terms and be very pleased that I know exactly how I tick, even if we haven’t quite got all of the measuring equipment refined yet. However, I cannot rest just because the picture fits. I cannot say that just because a scientific causal explanation of human behaviour works, it is necessarily the right explanation. Firstly, science will not be able to give us the whole picture. Nagel, for example, gives us this illustration. The way that a cockroaches sense apparatus works (i.e. its sight, sense of taste and hearing) can be explained in a very detailed way by scientists. We can understand how the stimulus create certain responses in the brain and how the brain responds to that stimulus and construct a very lengthy explanation of what is going on. However, you and I will never know what scrambled eggs taste like for a cockroach. Science cannot take that sensation and make it objective. We can understand how the cockroach tastes the egg, but we cannot understand how the egg tastes to the cockroach.
Now this is important because it shows that we cannot objectify everything. Science can give us a vast and fascinating picture of the universe, but that picture cannot account for irreducible subjective experiences. Of course, this doesn’t refute anything you have said, but it starts to make us realise that we can’t just start reducing everything to tidy scientific explanations. There are some things that just wont submit to that method of description.
I realise that this is a lot for one post, so I’m going to treat that as the first step in my response and let you respond if you would like. I really do appreciate that you have a very good point, but please, please don’t just rule everything out because you think the picture you have fits. An answer can fit a riddle perfectly and still not be the only (or the correct) answer. Please respond.
I’d like to respond a little here too if that’s alright. You’re not really saying anything other than ‘we cannot turn the subjective entity to an objective one’. I’m not sure that’s what Future man was getting at.
That the mind contains properties thatare subjective is well and good - yet who is claiming subjective properties provide us with understanding of any useful differentiation between mind and body? That I find something salty because I just ate something sweet, for example, where otherwise I may find it quite plain, is not particularly helpful. Infact it’s just subjectively causal and not related in any way to natural laws that may or may not govern the mind and the brain.
Indeed, the mind does not outlive the body. In this sense, what is the mind if not the brain - or a metaphysical product of the brain? I’m just not seeing where the link to subjective experience becomes useful.
As I said, Nova, I just want to take this part by part and get an idea across that I think will ultimately let Future see that there are at least other possibilities to what he is saying. In this first comment I just wanted to start breaking down the idea that scientific explanations are the be all and end all. We have to allow for different pictures of the world, let our imaginations loose a little bit if we are going to advance. I don’t like it when someone settles on one point of view and then covers their ears and “lah lah lah’s” at everything else. I want to see if there is any flexibility here and I’m doing it in baby-steps. Let’s all be patient.
imagine that when i taste eggs, there is a path going through some section of my brain, if you were to take away the brain and look at the shape of the electric path itself, it would coincidentally be shaped like a monkey. and when i taste salt, there is another path that coincidentally is shaped like a gorilla.
if the cockroach has a path that is shaped like a gorilla when he eats eggs, couldnt we guess that, to him, it tastes like salt does to us? what if its shaped like a gorilla with a monkey head? yikes who knows.
ive always kind of avoided this. i think a really easy solution is to say that all of the possible basic sensations are predetermined before birth. you have, in your brain, the ideas of blue red and yellow, but you dont know that the sun is yellow or the sky blue yet. when you get outside the womb, the first color you see is automatically yellow. the second one you see is blue. and the photons from your sensory organs plow their way through your brain that first time, identifying light with a wavelength of 100nm is “color indicator number 2” which we refer to as blue, its that blue thing in our brains. you know, the part of the description of blue that you cant put into words, the part about it that makes it immediately appear to be different than the other two colors. and if you got out of the womb and were immediately placed in a pure blue room for a few weeks, your color perception would be different from everyone elses forever. (maybe strange interior decoration color schemes at the infants house are the cause of color blindness!)
that doesnt really solve the problem though. except i suppose we could identify the parts of our brains that contain these predetermined color and taste identifiers. if we could identify which chunk of brain signifies each indescribable basic sense element (like blue, sweet, or soft), and we could see it in cockroaches, and we could see that the sweet section of his brain goes off… then… thats too obvious… i think it was more complicated when i just thought of it, but maybe i lost it. but work is over, time to go home and do drugs.
