We are no different than computers

[emjay]

Try the reference list of this article.  I've read a few on there, by no means all or most.  
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/computational-mind/
(some of the best stuff on comp mind is actually the criticism of the position, btw!)

To your comment, I would respond that volition is not actually required in order to "break programming".  However, in order to discuss it at length we'd have to have a pretty good idea of what we were referring to when it came to that programming, and how it was broken, which we don't.  I'm leary of claims surrounding "special abilities", specifically in the context of this conversation, because the truth value of comp mind as a theory or explanation wouldn't..by necessity, lend any value to those claims themselves.  There are things which are not under a computational systems control regardless of it's sensory data relative to the item in question.  

Moving forward from that, though, nature intends nothing.  Granted, if we could mess /w the factory defaults so easily, if that were an achievable trait, we'd expect it to express itself in a deleterious way.  If you can stop your heart on accident (or on purpose), by brute force of demographics...more people would have...by now.  Proposing that it can be slowed (say, by some computational process), but only within limits (so as to avoid explaining why people haven't been stopping their hearts intentionally or accidentally so far as we can tell...as we would expect), opens up more questions and fails to resolve the larger question to which it refers.  How?

That particular connection, to me, seems tenuous.  I'll leave the meditative magic in the magic box for the time being (regardless of the value of ctm).  It would be, if it could be shown to be connected, a much better explanation for how meditation works than some nonsense about life energy etc...eh?  I just don't know that our cognitive apparatus is at the helm there, or even could be - even if it would be capable.  I can, however, see alot of reasons why a creature with that sort of ability would nix itself before we ever got around to asking the question of how it achieved that feat.

Thanks Rhythm for those references, I'll have some fun reading them  I've missed our talks about that from when I first joined the site; it certainly was an inspirational theory with a lot going for it.

What I said was just a thought, but not to be taken too seriously  Oddly enough the theory I was suggesting - the part about focus being on what was most active - is from a long time ago when I was trying to deduce what focus actually was, and in that one I came to the conclusion that there was no real volition involved: your neural networks go about doing what they do all the time 'showing' you the most active areas, with the self essentially being dragged along for the ride and leaving focus and volition as an illusion. After all it has already been shown that there is a gap between motor neurons kicking into action and the feeling of having willed the action, suggesting that it really is just an illusion. So in this case it wouldn't be real volition that broke any 'programming' but rather the case that the networks could in these exceptional circumstances settle into a rare state that in theory could result in the the self-destruction of the organism. I don't know if that makes any difference? I didn't quite understand your objection.

And yes it was a bad choice of words saying 'nature intended'. Evolution is like Microsoft when it comes to software: a million little upgrades and patches but never going back and redesigning the system from scratch