Seeing red

[Angrboda]

Have it your way. Now what is on the other side of passive description? It's one thing to say what kinds of things are changing and how they change. It is another thing entirely to say what makes something the kind of thing that it is and why it changes at all. Your philosophy lacks first principles.

My philosophy doesn't lack first principles. It incorporates different first principles than yours does. I don't concern myself with why something is the kind of thing that it is and why it changes at all because under my first principles, there is no 'why'. There is simply random and/or ordered change and its description in my world.

What makes a thing what it is, is the types of economies/systems described above.

[bennyboy]

It may not meet your definition, regardless of it's truth.  OFC, one might wonder if one's self would meet that definition as well.  

An interesting thought (that I think you and I find some common ground on), our brains or minds are largely in some form of actual or philosophical isolation.  Our brains may not be using the same "code" after all this time spent alone.  It may be that without layers and layers of interpretation...such as spoken words, facial expressions, and body language....the exact experience of a system even slightly unlike yourself, fundamentally, is non-communicable.

The experience of the "other" sends a five digit command line when the users experience calls for six.  What to do?  My guess, approximate.  

Yes, and this isn't really even worldview dependent. A brain in a jar, for example, could still be functioning in a purely material universe. Or in an idealism, you can be so separated from the universe of ideas that it serves as objective-- not in the sense that you're right about physicality, but in the sense that there are things which are external to you, and whose existence is persistent.

[Neo-Scholastic]

What makes a thing what it is, is the types of economies/systems described above.

I don’t see how a materialist can justify dividing all of physical reality into discrete objects and distinguishable processes, each with unique features, without either 1) taking those divisions for granted or 2) tacitly relying on universal attributes that transcend particular instances as defining criteria.

My philosophy doesn't lack first principles. It incorporates different first principles than yours does. There is simply random and/or ordered change and its description in my world.

You are stating what has been obvious to all even before Parmenides and Heraclitus: change happens. The very first question of philosophy has always been about how things can persist in their being and still be subject to change. As I recall, you answer has generally been that they just do, i.e. brute facts.

That is your choice. All I ask is that you do not fool yourself into thinking that making that existential choice serves as a rational alternative to the contrary position, which is to say, that some principle(s) constrain the operations of change and also support existence.

Second, you focus on describing the changes. That’s a noble pursuit. It doesn’t touch on the ultimate causes, though. You’ve already given up on those. To quote:

I don't concern myself with why something is the kind of thing that it is and why it changes at all because under my first principles, there is no 'why'.

Indeed. For you there is no “why?”

[Angrboda]

What makes a thing what it is, is the types of economies/systems described above.

I don’t see how a materialist can justify dividing all of physical reality into discrete objects and distinguishable processes, each with unique features, without either 1) taking those divisions for granted or 2) tacitly relying on universal attributes that transcend particular instances as defining criteria.

Or maybe that's just how our minds divide things up for reasons which have to do with the evolution of our brains.  Take it for granted?  Sure, because that's what our brains do.  I can no more step outside of that than I can fly.

My philosophy doesn't lack first principles.   It incorporates different first principles than yours does. There is simply random and/or ordered change and its description in my world.

You are stating what has been obvious to all even before Parmenides and Heraclitus: change happens. The very first question of philosophy has always been about how things can persist in their being and still be subject to change.  As I recall, you answer has generally been that they just do, i.e. brute facts.

That is your choice. All I ask is that you do not fool yourself into thinking that making that existential choice serves as a rational alternative to the contrary position, which is to say, that some principle(s) constrain the operations of change and also support existence.

And don't fool yourself into thinking that the contrary position is a rational decision either, regardless of what "reasonable men" might conclude.  It's simply an arbitrary choice. And lacking any real evidence of the supposed mover informing it, seems prima facie irrational.

Second, you focus on describing the changes. That’s a noble pursuit. It doesn’t touch on the ultimate causes, though. You’ve already given up on those. To quote:

I don't concern myself with why something is the kind of thing that it is and why it changes at all because under my first principles, there is no 'why'.

Indeed. For you there is no “why?”

Is there a point in there somewhere?

[emjay]

I don’t see how a materialist can justify dividing all of physical reality into discrete objects and distinguishable processes, each with unique features, without either 1) taking those divisions for granted or 2) tacitly relying on universal attributes that transcend particular instances as defining criteria.

This is ultimately my problem as well with my own materialist position. Thanks to Jormungandr I now have much better clarity on how things can be things at different levels of description... and thus it's much more clear to me now what Rhythm meant earlier when he called me out on separating the system from the hardware. I mean I understand it, and rely on it in my thinking, but it wasn't explicitly clear to me until now. For instance in a computer, any piece of software can be understood at multiple hierarchical levels of abstraction... all the way from the user experience right down to how it is ultimately manifested in the hardware - without which it could not exist - but which is at the same time, independent of any particular form of the hardware... once you've got the concept of, say, storage it doesn't matter what medium you use as long as it can fit in the system... be it an SSD, and HDD, a memory stick etc.

The same thing with the brain. But my problem is that one of those levels of descriptive abstraction appears to be us. But not just in consciousness as it is experienced phenomenally but also, in my understanding/theorising at least, at the neural network level which I fully believe - based on both how it works and how it is organised - could fully mirror the representations differentiated and integrated in consciousness... including the sense of self; the apparent homunculus. In other words it seems to me that the neural network does exactly the same process of descriptive hierarchical abstraction as we do in consciousness in our attempts to understand it Just as 'we' model the world in thoughts and ideas, the neural network is modelling that same world and reaching exactly the same conclusions, and those conclusions are what is represented in phenomenal mind.

So from my perspective there are two equivalent but different 'descriptive hierarchical abstractions' , ie models, representing mind - the neural network and consciousness - and the only logical conclusion I can draw from that is that they are one and the same. So if they are equivalent it stands to reason that if we for the sake of argument remove phenomenal mind from the equation and look only at the equivalent neural network model... the philosophical zombie part... then it is doing exactly as we are... it has a representation of the self - the we's and I's of this post - and it is trying to understand itself in neural network terms but is having difficulty settling - if you'll pardon the deliberate pun - on an explanation. Indeed perhaps by representing itself it has created a paradox that it (and thus 'we') can never resolve until we (and thus the network also) make the leap that the two are the same thing... that phenomenal mind is, or should be, the same neural representation... or should at least be associated with it... as our understanding of NN mind.

The dualist position takes a lot more for granted than I do about the responsibility of the 'homunculus'. Stereotyping, bias, fear, desire, belief, understanding, memory, learning, focus etc... all these things I look at in terms of neural network dynamics and are things the neural network is more than capable of modelling by virtue of it's very nature. And all these things are differentiated in consciousness. And by their absence following brain damage or experiments, more of these differentiated states are becoming apparent every day, such as the inability to recognise faces as Benny mentioned earlier. And the sense of will, with say Tourette's Syndrome, or people who are incapable of feeling pain etc. All with neural correlates.

So either we're a completely separate, disembodied mind that happens by extraordinary coincidence to process data in the same manner a neural network demonstrably can and does as a matter of course - i.e. stereotyping etc - and that again by extraordinary coincidence changes to the underlying neural network that it has laid claim to - even as simple as taking a Paracetamol - coincide with changes in experience in predictable and expected ways in that mind, OR we are that network.

You mentioned strawmanning earlier and I don't want to do that. The above is what I see as an extreme dualist position - one where the mind is absolutely separate from brain. But I don't know where you stand on the question... how much independent responsibility you ascribe to the apparent homunculus (and therefore conversely how much influence the brain has) or whether you even equate a soul with a homunculus in the first place (it has been my assumption that you do, apologies if that is wrong)?

As for me, I came into this thread not believing in a homunculus/soul (and I still don't) and believing that at most all it could be was a tiny speck experiencing it all but not influencing it in any way, and thus, incapable of having a 'personality' of its own because all of that is accounted for in the brain in my view, would be exactly the same in everyone and thus could not be held accountable to God for what the neural network did. At that point the only thing it could possibly be to me was the part in consciousness that notices (or not in some cases) the absence or presence of stimuli whether 'out there' in the world or 'in here' in the sense of our meta-awareness of our own perceptions and channels in consciousness... the part that notices the pain disappears after taking Paracetamol or the part that is distressed finding that it can see without seeing in the case of Blindsight... lacks the confidence that having perceptions seems to provide. But now, thanks to this thread, I'm convinced more than ever that even that is a representation in the network, which finds itself mirrored in phenomenal mind or more specifically as phenomenal mind.

[bennyboy]

If the homunculus were a play, I'd liken it more to the stage than to the individual actors that play their various parts upon it. Whatever the actors do, to say they ARE the play doesn't make sense to me-- there must be some framework which brings them all into relationship with each other.

Similarly, even if all the actors of the mind are neural actions, and for each idea or perception you can isolate and reproduce neural correlates, I must still ask myself-- what is the context in which all these are brought together? To me, that's what mind is-- not the ideas or perceptions themselves, exactly, but the "space" in which they are brought together as experiences. And I'm still not so sure that there's anything to be found in the brain that represents this.

[The Grand Nudger]

That's strange, since the brain -is- the "space" in which this experience resides.   This would seem like a trivial question, but, if you can ask it in such a manner as a part of the statements above then I fear nothing will satisfy as an answer.

[bennyboy]

That's strange, since the brain -is- the "space" in which this experience resides.

Mind/body and philosophical issues aside, this needs to be demonstrated.  Waving at the brain and insisting it must be in there somewhere isn't enough.

Let's say you have neuron bundles coming from different parts of the brain.  How does say, "tree appearance" pass from one part of the brain to another to be integrated with "bark smell"?  Is there a tree-bark neural pathway, or is it a common "bus"?  And if it's a common bus, how does one brain part's identification of "tree" get passed along non-visual systems to get integrated?

Links or theories, please.  Let's drop the babble and start talking about the brain, its parts, and specific, physical theories of how it works. My understanding is that there's a bunch of stuff happening all over the brain, and coordination, but not substantive coordination-- i.e. that only the visual cortext can process sight, but doesn't really send visual signals to other parts of the brain-- which aren't equipped to receive them.

[The Grand Nudger]

That's strange, since the brain -is- the "space" in which this experience resides.

Mind/body and philosophical issues aside, this needs to be demonstrated.  Waving at the brain and insisting it must be in there somewhere isn't enough.

Would you prefer to have this discussion before or -after- a few shots of whiskey?  Perhaps we could consume some hallucinogenic substances or beat our heads against a wall...and then, have this discussion.   It hardly matters whether you think brain accounts for mind, ultimately, since any context or space which does not include the situations described above is obviously -not- the context or space in which experience is had.   I think that we've done a little more than wave at the brain,  you're going to refer to at least -some- of that waving......invariably.  

Let's say you have neuron bundles coming from different parts of the brain.  How does say, "tree appearance" pass from one part of the brain to another to be integrated with "bark smell"?  Is there a tree-bark neural pathway, or is it a common "bus"?  And if it's a common bus, how does one brain part's identification of "tree" get passed along non-visual systems to get integrated?

I can't give you a tech schem of a brain.   I can't give you a tech schem of a phone either. You probably don't have trouble accepting that whatever's going on is going on inside the phone, but you halt in the case of mind.  You could find some very exacting "mechanical" descriptions of vision and the visual cortex (it's a heavily studied system), but I seriously doubt that any answer to the question posed above would satisfy that objection.  You asked for a where, a what.....that we know. How, we don't.

Links or theories, please.  Let's drop the babble and start talking about the brain, its parts, and specific, physical theories of how it works.  My understanding is that there's a bunch of stuff happening all over the brain, and coordination, but not substantive coordination-- i.e. that only the visual cortext can process sight, but doesn't really send visual signals to other parts of the brain-- which aren't equipped to receive them.

I've got to ask, why would it? You'd have to be -incredibly- specific.  

What do you mean by substantive coordination and visual signals (I don't think that anyone expects a sort of handoff of images), and what are we taking this to imply? Comp mind would tell you that the visual cortex translates sensory inputs into actionable sets of variables. Similar to how a digital camera turns the patterns of light hitting its aperture into a file. There's an interesting division of labor apparent in that system, btw. Such that damage to a portion causes a predictable range of decrease in function within that division while the others remain intact. Color vision, as the easiest example...can be lost all on it's own.

[emjay]

For a start Benny, I would recommend this book very highly:

Computational Explorations in Cognitive Neuroscience: Understanding the Mind by Simulating the Brain by Randall O'reilly

This is the most influential book I've ever read and it changed my life and whole understanding and way of thinking about the brain and psychology. If you read it you'll learn all about the biology of the neural networks of the brain but also what they actually do in computational terms... the latter you don't really get from a book that is purely about the biology... or at least I never did. Most of the language I use and which is now second nature to me - transformations, abstractions etc - I learned from this book, along with that way of looking at the brain. So I cannot recommend it highly enough if you want to understand where I'm coming from.

The book is about simulating the known biology of the brain using neural network modelling software that is as biologically accurate as possible. So for instance it will teach you all about how a neuron works biologically and then show you, step by step, how it is mathematically implemented in the model such that the neurons in the software are modelled right down to the level of specific ion channels etc. Then how learning works biologically, followed by an algorithm to model it. Then about the connectivity in the brain, and again, show you step by step how it's modelled in the software, leaving no stone unturned and nothing to chance, because they want the models to be as biologically plausible as possible. Then it will guide you through modelling specific networks in the brain - for instance the visual system - again... according to the connectivity that they actually exhibit biologically. So not only do you learn from reading the text - which is very heavy on the biology and the computation - but also by observing these networks in action and also by tweaking things and observing their effects and experimenting with your own models.

If you read the book I would hope that you'd be filled with the same sense of wonder and excitement at the possibilities that I experienced, and which has never left me. And by seeing the neural network dynamics I've talked about in action, I'd hope that you'd also see how closely they parallel our experiences in consciousness.