Christianity is heading for a full allegorization

[emjay]

I've never heard of machine theory... is it related to comp mind or have you moved on from that in your thinking? And what does it mean to 'attend' to the fact that you're seeing... in the case of humans, do you mean mental focus or something?

I used it as an umbrella term for theories that attempt to explain the potential behaviors and reports of machines.  They’re not explicitly about human consciousness, though I think they speak to the question of whether or not there’s any conceivable explanation arising from materialistic principles.  

If comp mind is the what, a specific machine theory could be the how.  Attending to sight, more broadly attending to attention, is one way that researchers have proposed that a machine might be able to make a genuine report about what it’s doing, rather than -just doing it.  It’s posited that a machine would have advantages if it possessed the systems and information required to do some sort of internal monitoring or modeling.  Benefits to control, being the most well developed and well evidenced.

I saw it mentioned that consciousness doesn’t seem to be required for addition.  I think that’s true, but I also struggle to think of anyone who thinks that our brains are an evolutionary response to needing to do addition.

Ah, okay, my bad. I see what you're saying.

As for addition, well any arithmetic, I guess I'd think of it more as a byproduct... an ability that is made possible only by combining learned procedural and/or experimental/ad hoc knowledge with the various forms of imaginative/abstract mental processing at our disposal... the latter of which, and the level of development of which, are/can be different in different individuals; such as might be measured by an IQ test; measuring things like visual awareness and spacial awareness, and due to the plasticity of the brain, are probably trainable to improve them.

For instance, I don't know about you, but if I'm asked to do mental arithmetic, I do it ?symbolically (ie by manipulating an abstract concept of numbers), but not by any rigid method... ie it is contextual what method I use, just whatever's best for the job at hand, based on the characteristics of the numbers involved, such as whether they're large or small, odd or even, greater than or less than certain numbers etc. Whereas other people, with better visual awareness, might achieve the same end, but a completely different way; by imagining for instance a blackboard and then imagining themselves writing a longhand mathematical calculation. And then there are those savants that have seemingly superhuman mathematical abilities... what is going on in their brains I can only guess, but maybe it's due to any of those specific imaginative faculties being highly developed, at the expense (or not) of others, and/or perhaps a difference in how those modes are integrated, who knows.

So basically, in other words from this perspective, arithmetic only seems to essentially piggyback upon the different forms/modes of imaginative/abstract processing, contextually using different learned methods depending not only on the characteristics of the numbers involved, but also the different modes/types of imagination used to process them. As such, from this perpective it's not our mathematical capacity per se that I think needs to be explained in evolutionary terms, but the underlying medium so to speak of our ability to imagine itself... that is the ability to mentally manipulate abstract symbols/ideas across a range of different modalities (visual, spacial etc)... but I think that has much more simple and obvious evolutionary interpretations, in the sense that the ability to experiment with and test how different ideas/mental representations fit together in our minds ahead or instead of putting them into physical practice, saves not only time and energy but also prevents potential physical danger.

As great as they are though, our imaginative capacities are nonetheless quite limited in and of themselves... limited by both the capacities of short and long term memory... and indeed any learned method of mental processing (such as mental arithmetic) has to take those limitations into account to be useful/practical. So on their own I'd say they're only really useful for creating rough plans/conceptions, something that would get you out of a jam quickly in nature, which is what I think they evolved for, but extensive and detailed plans/conceptions, such as designing complex machinery or whatever, can't be done in the head alone because of those limitations... it would be great if it could, and maybe for some exceptional minds it is possible (ie on account of highly developed memory or visual capabilities such as a photographic memory etc), but I would think that most people can't. But with the advent of language and writing - a means to represent information outside of ourselves, or in different forms (such as the oral transmission of information pre-writing) - those limitations to our imagination essentially disappeared, creating a basically exponential increase in our capacity to learn and innovate, as an unstoppable feedback loop between information 'in here' and 'out there'. So yeah, that's how I'd see it; mathematics and any mental procedures developed to calculate with it, are the fruits of this process, rather than its evolutionary impetus.