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Does it make sense to speak of "Universal Consciousness" or "Universal Intelligence"?
#31
RE: Does it make sense to speak of "Universal Consciousness" or "Universal Intelligence"?
(May 14, 2014 at 7:45 am)Confused Ape Wrote: On to computer viruses.

Computer viruses 'could cross frontier into biological realm'

Quote:Computer hackers could create malicious software that crosses the line from technology to biology, crafting viruses that could spread dangerous epidemics, researchers said at Black Hat Europe.

"We are really on the border between the living and the not living," said Guillaume Lovet, senior manager of Fortinet's Threat Research and Response Center, during a keynote speech discussing the similarities between biological and computer viruses. Fortinet was the main sponsor of the Black Hat Europe security conference in Amsterdam last week.

The comparison between computer and human viruses was made to give security researchers a better understanding of why the human immune system is so much better in battling viruses then antivirus systems.

"We came to wonder if there can be some kind of convergence between human viruses and computer viruses," Lovet added. "It may sound like a scenario for a bad Hollywood movie, but it is not such a stupid question."

One of the main things that led Fortinet researchers to that conclusion is the similarity between computer and human viruses. In essence they behave the same way, including information coding for parasitic behavior inside a host system.

Pure speculation and maybe people working in this field get paranoid.

There are umpteen articles on the internet pointing out similarities between how computer viruses and biological viruses work. Maybe computer viruses are the nearest we've got to creating life so far.

They're paranoid. :p They're similar, sure, if we're keeping the comparison simple. But as I said before, it just sounds like sensationalism for attention, much as the A.I. researchers who trumpet the technological singularity do. In fact, the latter said years ago we should be reaching it this year. Wink
"The reason things will never get better is because people keep electing these rich cocksuckers who don't give a shit about you."
-George Carlin
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#32
RE: Does it make sense to speak of "Universal Consciousness" or "Univer...
(May 14, 2014 at 7:32 am)Hegel Wrote:
(May 13, 2014 at 8:29 pm)Chas Wrote: No, that doesn't make sense. The evidence points to consciousness being an emergent property of a complex assemblage of matter, not the matter itself.

What evidence? How do you test your hypothesis that consciousness is an emergnet property?

The fact is that emergent materialism is piece of metaphysics, not science ... So, you seem to have a double standard.

In any case, you have the burden of proof to tell us how is emergent materialism testable? So go ahead, if you know something that I don't.

I do not claim that human consciousness is not the product of brain. Surely it seems to be. The question is: what is it in the brain that is responsible for this miracle? You claim it's some emergent information processing. Ok, that's a hypothesis, but how do you test it?

I claim that it's more plausible that consciousness is connected to some quantum phenomena in the brain, most likely in the microtubules.

This is a fucking joke right? Unless you ascribe to some form of dualism, consciousness is an emergent property of the brain by definition.

Not understanding this you ask how emergent materialism is testable. You then immediately foist on us Hameroff's unsupported microtubule claims. Doesn't it bother you that those claims are impossible to test?

I suppose you also don't realize that all the microtubule baseless speculation does is attempt to give a materialistic explanation for the rise of emergent consciousness that you are trying to replace. If on the other hand you are claiming that actual computation occurs at the microtubule level, you are suffering from the fallacy of division. Decoherence is a bitch.

Woo Meister is as Woo Meister does.
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#33
RE: Does it make sense to speak of "Universal Consciousness" or "Univer...
(May 13, 2014 at 9:56 pm)bennyboy Wrote: I was not making any claim for which I have no evidence. Only you are, if you claim that emergent materialism is a fact, not just a hypothesis, which has other alternatives, such as the theory of quantum mind.
And the idea of some "supermind" does not follow from quantum mind. Quantum mind is scientific theory, theory of "supermind is" piece of speculative metaphysics. I only maintain that neither such notion of "cosmic intelligent" is no nonsense. Scientific idea -- that it ain't.

In any case, you confuse notions of testability scientificity and reasonability.
Testability is the strongest notion: not all science can be testable, for science has to make some assumptions that are non-testable and at its limits it must include speculative elements. And not all non-science is unreasonable nor "pseudo- science" (unless it prtends to be science), for scope of current scientific knowledge never grasps everything, and one can make reasonabel non-scientific speculations about what is left6 outside (e.g. is universe infinite, are there alternative universes, etc). Such ideas can later insipire science, as it has frequently happened. The question of "supermind" belongs to this last subclass. It ain't science, I never said that.
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My claim is only that the evidence supports a purely materialistic mechanism.

Microtubules are still part of the brain structure, so that does not contradict the hypothesis that consciousness is brain-based and emergent.

I am not the least confused between reasonableness and testability. I am also not going to entertain ideas for which there is not only no evidence but no proposed mechanism, like matter being 'conscious all the way down'. Not reasonable, not testable.
Skepticism is not a position; it is an approach to claims.
Science is not a subject, but a method.
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#34
RE: Does it make sense to speak of "Universal Consciousness" or "Univer...
(May 12, 2014 at 6:42 am)Confused Ape Wrote:
(May 11, 2014 at 8:16 pm)Pickup_shonuff Wrote: I want to talk about the idea of Universal Conscious or Intelligence in a philosophical context, as a notion that logically proceeds from the realization that there really isn't an external world that is fundamentally separate from the mind. That is because the mind is itself a product of the external world, just another feature that arose from atomic interactions. In the sense that we are all part of the larger Cosmos, perhaps analogous to the cells that comprise one brain, it seems at least that something like a Universal Conscious or Intelligence can be made into an intelligible framework... no?

Re-using bits and pieces from a post in another topic.

Here's a Carl Sagan Quote From Cosmos

Quote:“The surface of the Earth is the shore of the cosmic ocean. On this shore, we've learned most of what we know. Recently, we've waded a little way out, maybe ankle-deep, and the water seems inviting. Some part of our being knows this is where we came from. We long to return, and we can, because the cosmos is also within us . We're made of star stuff. We are a way for the cosmos to know itself.

This is very poetic and inspiring but it's not referring to a Universal Intelligence or Consciousness. I found an article which explains how it's possible for the universe to be aware of itself and how far we can take the idea. Is The Universe Conscious?

Humans are tiny fragments of the universe and we evolved the type of brain which produces consciousness. Our species also has the ability to do scientific investigations in order to gain some understanding of how the universe works. So, we can say that the universe is conscious when taking this point of view. It wasn't conscious before tiny parts of it evolved brains which produce consciousness, though, and it won't stay conscious if all conscious life forms become extinct. As the article points out, how long it stays conscious depends on how many conscious life forms there are in those billions of galaxies with billions of star systems

Cosmologists have come up with more than one model of the universe and some models suggest that everything is connected in some way. There is no evidence that all consciousness producing brains are creating a group mind, though.

That's a great Sagan quote. Good post too. Thanks.

If something like the multiverse theory is in fact the case, I like to think of our Universe as some sort of quasi-organism that is in some Darwinian way competing with other Universes, perhaps to bring about the prevention of it's own death, although that's all very far out and I don't think of it much beyond a place of intrigue.
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#35
RE: Does it make sense to speak of "Universal Consciousness" or "Univer...
(May 14, 2014 at 12:45 pm)Cato Wrote: This is a fucking joke right? Unless you ascribe to some form of dualism, consciousness is an emergent property of the brain by definition.
Not it's not. There are myriad other possibilities, some of them physical monist.

You can say you strongly think the mind is only an emergent property of the brain. But if you want to define it as such, you're just cheating.

(May 14, 2014 at 1:36 pm)Chas Wrote:
(May 13, 2014 at 9:56 pm)bennyboy Wrote: I was not making any claim for which I have no evidence. Only you are, if you claim that emergent materialism is a fact, not just a hypothesis, which has other alternatives, such as the theory of quantum mind.
And the idea of some "supermind" does not follow from quantum mind. Quantum mind is scientific theory, theory of "supermind is" piece of speculative metaphysics. I only maintain that neither such notion of "cosmic intelligent" is no nonsense. Scientific idea -- that it ain't.

In any case, you confuse notions of testability scientificity and reasonability.
Testability is the strongest notion: not all science can be testable, for science has to make some assumptions that are non-testable and at its limits it must include speculative elements. And not all non-science is unreasonable nor "pseudo- science" (unless it prtends to be science), for scope of current scientific knowledge never grasps everything, and one can make reasonabel non-scientific speculations about what is left6 outside (e.g. is universe infinite, are there alternative universes, etc). Such ideas can later insipire science, as it has frequently happened. The question of "supermind" belongs to this last subclass. It ain't science, I never said that.
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My claim is only that the evidence supports a purely materialistic mechanism.

Microtubules are still part of the brain structure, so that does not contradict the hypothesis that consciousness is brain-based and emergent.

I am not the least confused between reasonableness and testability. I am also not going to entertain ideas for which there is not only no evidence but no proposed mechanism, like matter being 'conscious all the way down'. Not reasonable, not testable.
Either I've been making strange posts in my sleep again, or you've misquoted. Tongue

(May 14, 2014 at 7:17 pm)Pickup_shonuff Wrote: That's a great Sagan quote. Good post too. Thanks.

If something like the multiverse theory is in fact the case, I like to think of our Universe as some sort of quasi-organism that is in some Darwinian way competing with other Universes, perhaps to bring about the prevention of it's own death, although that's all very far out and I don't think of it much beyond a place of intrigue.
It's a neat idea, but with one problem: modern physics is at least as woo as the science it's supposed to be replacing.
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#36
RE: Does it make sense to speak of "Universal Consciousness" or "Univer...
(May 12, 2014 at 10:44 pm)bennyboy Wrote: Let me take this further-- as devil's advocate only.

We know mind exists, because here we are. Whether we believe in substance dualism or not, it's clear that the minds we have are somehow related the brain, specifically the flow of information among the cells of the brain. Well, we have a complex flow of information among people, especially on the internet. It's possible to think of humanity now as a unified entity in some degree, as we are (almost) all interfaced through the internet-- our ideas, preferences, changing beliefs, etc. are represented in that context. Somehow, the Internet has an identity of its own that transcends our own reality.

So is the Internet a living thing? Does it have its own awareness, somehow greater than the sum of the individual human minds which contribute to it? I think somehow you could say it does. While some individuals contribute greatly to certain causes, there's a kind of cloud processing there which produces actual results that nobody could predict. In that sense, we are tools of the Internet rather than vice versa.

The invention of the internet is not very far off from Pierre's Tielhard de Chardin's writings from the 1930s in which he put forth the notion of the "Noosphere," a "sphere of human thought" that "emerges through and is constituted by the interaction of human minds. The noosphere has grown in step with the organization of the human mass in relation to itself as it populates the Earth. As mankind organizes itself in more complex social networks, the higher the noosphere will grow in awareness. This concept extends Teilhard's Law of Complexity/Consciousness, the law describing the nature of evolution in the universe. Teilhard argued the noosphere is growing towards an even greater integration and unification, culminating in the Omega Point - an apex of thought/consciousness - which he saw as the goal of history."

Noosphere

(May 13, 2014 at 9:52 am)whateverist Wrote: Do you have in mind some sort of centralized mega-entity comprising us all? If so, do you think that it has intentions and volition? I don't personally believe so in either case.

IMO there may be a universal substrate to each individual's consciousness. But it would be universal in a topological/thematic sense, not in a linked/collaborative way.

No, I don't think so. I agree with whoever said consciousness is localized in individual brains...it's interesting to ponder that we essentially all originate from the same quantum event, so in some sense it seems like we're all One...also in the sense that all electrons are identical. But I don't really take it past the initial thought, too much philosophical speculation. I suppose some physicists with Eastern leanings find it appealing and argue that physics supports something like that. But in terms of evidence, the only thing that seems to support that view is telepathy. I'm not willing to rule it out yet because it does seem like a lot of humans claim to have telepathic experiences in terms of strong intuitions, but eh. It's something I have to look deeper into.

(May 14, 2014 at 7:21 pm)bennyboy Wrote: It's a neat idea, but with one problem: modern physics is at least as woo as the science it's supposed to be replacing.

Whose definition of woo though? I wouldn't call the spooky nature and behavior of fundamental particles or the origins of matter "wooy" even if they do sound totally absurd, as long as they're supported by concrete evidence. To paraphrase Nietzsche, one must see reason in reality, not in more reason.
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#37
RE: Does it make sense to speak of "Universal Consciousness" or "Univer...
(May 14, 2014 at 7:21 pm)bennyboy Wrote: Not it's not. There are myriad other possibilities, some of them physical monist.

You can say you strongly think the mind is only an emergent property of the brain. But if you want to define it as such, you're just cheating.

What myriad of possibilites? Nobody takes seriously ideas similar to the claim that consciousness comes from the pineal gland. If you believe the mind comes from the brain it must be an emergent property. If it weren't we would have found the source by now, like the pineal gland.

Understanding the definition of emergence and observing what we do know of the brain today is hardly cheating.
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#38
RE: Does it make sense to speak of "Universal Consciousness" or "Universal Intelligence"?
To answer the question in the TITLE of the thread. NO, science is pointing away from any type of cognition doing all this. Our cognition is something that arises out of evolution, it is not something bigger than us, and regardless of mythical god claims, even a generic concept of a cognition as a starting point would still have the problem of infinite regress.

Stephen Hawkins "A God is not required", so why would any type of cognition be required?
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#39
RE: Does it make sense to speak of "Universal Consciousness" or "Univer...
(May 14, 2014 at 12:45 pm)Cato Wrote: This is a fucking joke right? Unless you ascribe to some form of dualism, consciousness is an emergent property of the brain by definition.

That is simply as far from truth as it possibly can be.

And to say "c. is emergent prop. by def" is getting close to non-sense. I am not going to explain this to you, for others have proven it. Read, e.g. David Chalmers' argument.

Quote:Not understanding this you ask how emergent materialism is testable. You then immediately foist on us Hameroff's unsupported microtubule claims. Doesn't it bother you that those claims are impossible to test?

Well, emergent materialism must be testable, if it's science.
But you just seemed to claim it's "by definition". That's bullshit, not science, like ontological proof of God: its Gods def that it exists, so it exists!
So, you found emergent materialism on an ontological, not empirical argument! Worship (large)

If you want me to take emregent materialism seriously as SCIENCE, tell me, how you test your theory.


Quote: I suppose you also don't realize that all the microtubule baseless speculation does is attempt to give a materialistic explanation for the rise of emergent consciousness that you are trying to replace.

No. MIcrotubule hypothesis does not take any standpoint as such on the ontological question; it is a theory of material correlates of C. What I wrote was not to claim that quantum-mind implies that emergent materialism is false; what it does is that it gives a way of understanding rationally an alternative viewpoint.

The question was: DOES IT MAKE SENSE TO SPEAK OF UNIVERSAL C. OR UNIVERSAL INTELLIGENCE, not whether there is scientific evidence for it. I have proven only what the opening post asked, nothing more thatn that.

Quote: If on the other hand you are claiming that actual computation occurs at the microtubule level, you are suffering from the fallacy of division.

I am not really claiming anything, and certainly
I am not claiming that "actual computation takes place on microtubule level". I think the bulk or of the computations of our mind appear on neuronal level. But that's not all; the basic idea of Penrose is that mind is not exhausted by computation. To begin with, you should read Penrose's work.

Quote: Decoherence is a bitch.

Surely, but it does not show that Penrose is wrong. That's a fact, I am sorry.

(May 14, 2014 at 11:18 am)pocaracas Wrote: Well, I think the neural level is enough.

Most folks think like that and I am not claiming it ain't possible.

But what bugs me is the dogmatic attitude of many of the proponents of this metaphysics (for that's really what it is). Look how Cato just gave an argument of the form of ontological proof of God for it!

Dogmatism bugs me, that's all. I am not a Believer in anything.

Quote: Each time I think that I once created an Artificial Neural Network (fully software based) that, with only some 50 neurons, could perform tomography, I wonder what could be achieved with millions of neurons that are always tweaking their own pathways.

Sure its magic what software can do ... but why should it give rise to awareness? And on what level of complexity, if you dont' believe in conscious thermostats, in case of which you're back in some sort of universal mind stuff.


Quote:To me, it seems unnecessary, and the testing of that hypothesis will be far more difficult than the "simple" neural activity.
"proto-consciousness" on all matter? really? I can't wait to see this published!

But a non-testable hypothesis is not science. And thus, the ultimate argument against different views is not that they are not scientific, but that they are too "odd", too far from "common intuition". I think that's always a bad argument knowing what we know about physics, etc.
& I think if I tried to publish it they'd say this has been said a thousand times ... Leibniz was the guy to invent the idea. He was not an idiot. Also the grandfather of computer, btw. Whitehead, David Bohm, etc have given their versions.

(May 15, 2014 at 7:52 am)Cato Wrote: What myriad of possibilites? Nobody takes seriously ideas similar to the claim that consciousness comes from the pineal gland.

AI is also based on dualism.
What causes somehow magically the consciousness is the non-material algorithmic processes that the brain implements and -- as some believe -- can even in future be downloaded into computer.
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#40
RE: Does it make sense to speak of "Universal Consciousness" or "Universal Intelligence"?
wiki Wrote:Sir Roger Penrose OM FRS (born 8 August 1931), is an English mathematical physicist, mathematician and philosopher of science.

Not a biologist, not a neurologist...
Maybe you are aware that, if you have some ailment and go to a doctor, you have several outcomes:
- If you go to an endocrinologist, you have some problem with your hormones.
- If you go to an orthopedic doctor, you have something wrong with your bones.
- If you go to a cardiologist, you have something wrong with your heart.
- If you go to a dermatologist, you have something wrong with your skin
- and so on and so on...

This Penrose fellow is a mathematical physicist, so deals mostly with theoretical physics and quantum is everywhere for him... So it makes sense that he'd come up with something involving his field of work... or else he'd just shut up.
He's biased.
His notion of computer processing on the algorithmic level does not correlate with the kind of processing done on a neurological brain. He strawmans the brain with that algorithmic processing and then claims it can't be like that... well whoopedidah!
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