Supervenience, Transcendence, and Mind

[Mudhammam]

Perhaps it's somewhat off the main point of a supervenient or trascendent property but what I meant was, wouldn't it be fair to say that the shape and size of any given objects, or secondary properties, such as the wetness of water, are effects of supervenience interacting with the--assuming you're somewhere in Kant's ball park--noumenal reality?

Please elaborate if you could. I don't understand what you're trying to say.

Well, if mind is a superveniening property of brain--I take that to be your suggestion--and mind is responsible for all of our phenomenal experiences (objects and their primary properties such as size, shape, etc. and secondary properties such as liquidity, solidity, etc.), then aren't we really saying something to the effect that colored, Euclidean-geometrical reality and all its apparently given sensations are actually an effect of a supervenient property rather than a cause (the cause being whatever physicists mean by "cosmic music resonating through 11 dimensional hyperspace")?

[MusicLovingAtheist]

I often wonder if my actions and thoughts are the result of my own jurisdiction or the result of uncontrollable chemical reactions, if my actions are responsible ones or if they're the result of the laws of nature. It's an interesting question that I can't wrap my head. Perhaps I just have a strong illusion of being in control of my actions. I'm not sure if it really makes a difference. Either way, effort is required and consequences for actions is a justifiable method of maintaining order. You wouldn't punish a computer for making bad decisions, but you would punish a human for it. I wonder how a machine could ever feel emotions. If machines ever did feel emotions then it would be justifiable to punish them. I think at that point you might as well consider a machine a living being with the right to exist as well as be liable to the same punishments of humans. I kind of think of myself as a programmed machine sometimes though. I wonder how someone could ever build a machine complex enough to experience sentience and a full range of human senses. I think that plenty of movies have already tackled this concept (blade runner, iRobot, terminator). I really wanna go watch blade runner again. I have a feeling a lot of the ideas of the movie went over my head when I was like 16.

[The Grand Nudger]

Ask an addict about that "control", and how quickly the illusion can fade MLA. Don't watch Blade Runner, btw, read the book. PKD FTW!
(read all of his books - do eeeet....there's one about control and addicts as well...hehehehehe, they made a decent rotoscope out of it, Scanner Darkly)


Just a few points for you Benny, you know my line on alot of this so there's no need rehashing those parts- here we go.

Let's say I'm looking at lights at an intersection. I observe the red one, wait until it turns off and the green one turns on, and then proceed to drive. How important is the specific mechanism which produced lights of those colors?

In context? Not all that important. We had streetlights before we were capable of constructing them the way that we do now.

Surely, you need some kind of mechanism capable of producing light. But ultimately, what is the source of that green light? It is in the intentionality of the designers. If the LED lights at the intersection had not been invented, the designers would have used light bulbs, or colored lamps with oil fires inside them, or whatever. The green-ness was inevitable, but the mechanism on which it supervenes is arbitrary.

The green-ness wasn't any more inevitable that the mechanism that produces it. The colors are a standardized scheme so that we all know wtf to do when we approach an intersection with a dangling red light. Was a time when we didn't use colors, btw, lever action arrows - sucked....lots of crashes (and we still have the odd traffic cop waving his begloved dickbeaters at oncoming traffic). Before that, nothing. The color scheme we use has it's roots in the railroad industry, iirc, btw. Pretty sure the green, particularly, is a recent innovation. Railroads used to use white for go - caused accidents.

I would term this "transcendence"-- the greenness is independent of the mechanism underlying it, because it doesn't matter HOW the greenness occurs, only that it does.

But it isn't, the "green-ness" comes from the mechanism to begin with (a different mech would give us purple). The fact that we use green (instead of purple) comes from a standard scheme. There's nothing transcendent about this green-ness at all..........

Let's say we have a brain and a computer which function identically, i.e. that the computer perfectly simulates all the functions of the brain, and that we choose to accept as true that the computer is actually "sentient." What does this mean, when two very different mechanisms are capable of producing sentience?

-That both mechanisms function identically.......as you just said. Nothing more, nothing less.

We isolate the most immediate causal context as though it is isolated from the universe.

In the same way that we don't factor in the guys who grow the coffee beans that the factory workers grind into coffee which facilitates their building a computer mouse........sure. Doesn't mean that it isn't actually a rabbit hole, just that we don't find it useful to go -all the way down the rabbit hole- when discussing one particular thing.

So here is the rule I'd like to discuss: "A supervenient property, once supervened, should be considered transcendent-- independent of the mechanical structure/function upon which it supervenes."

So, vanilla is transcendent, yes?

[bennyboy]

Please elaborate if you could. I don't understand what you're trying to say.

Well, if mind is a superveniening property of brain--I take that to be your suggestion--and mind is responsible for all of our phenomenal experiences (objects and their primary properties such as size, shape, etc. and secondary properties such as liquidity, solidity, etc.), then aren't we really saying something to the effect that colored, Euclidean-geometrical reality and all its apparently given sensations are actually an effect of a supervenient property rather than a cause (the cause being whatever physicists mean by "cosmic music resonating through 11 dimensional hyperspace")?

These statements are making me a little dizzy, but I won't let that stop me from trying to answer!

I think what you are doing is kind of an interesting mix of idealism and physicalism. I believe you're saying that the mind creates the universe as we experience it, even though it itself may be dependent on the brain, and the raw data it is processing may come from a non-idealistic source. So "redness," shapes, and all the qualia are supervenient ONLY the interpretations of the mind, and not really on any properties that the objects themselves possess. Am I reading you right?

___

This thread is kind of an "EVEN IF" position, given Rhythm's view: 1) the existence of brains pretty much as real objects with minds; 2) that there's nothing magispecial about the brain's specific makeup that would allow it to have a mind, and any other data processing structure not to. If these are true then what would that mean?

The position I'm taking in this thread is that the properties of objects we perceive are expressions of the interactions between principles underlying the objects, rather than on the objects themselves. So IF we are looking at mind as a supervenient property, it would be supervenient on principles embedded in reality at a deeper level than the brain. I'm tempted to write another 1000 words to explain it all in great detail, but I realize my posts have already become too long and pedantic, so I'll wait for some feedback from you before I say more.

[The Grand Nudger]

My position is not "brains -with- minds"...but that "brains -are- minds". As such, "any other data processing structure" doesn't fit the bill, as a brain is not just "any" data processing structure.

The objects -themselves- are also expressions of the underlying principles. Reductionism. That said, the principle may -allow- for mind, but it (mind) certainly doesn't seem to express itself in a vacuum on principle alone. The principle gives potential, the object actualizes the potential. Aluminum, for example, has the potential to fly, but we don't see flying chunks of aluminum until they get hammered into aircraft (or thrown across my lawn).

[bennyboy]

But it isn't, the "green-ness" comes from the mechanism to begin with (a different mech would give us purple). The fact that we use green (instead of purple) comes from a standard scheme. There's nothing transcendent about this green-ness at all..........

It's transcendent in the sense that its existence isn't ultimately dependent on the SPECIFIC mechanism involved, but rather on the intentions of the people who formed that mechanism. That green-ness was going to happen, with or without that particular arrangement of LED lights.

I should think you'd find this idea highly compatible with your gate-logic model: mind is going to happen wherever there's a possibility of the evolution of systems which compare data in consistent ways: but the specific mechanism (brain vs. electronic computer vs. quantum computer etc.) isn't really that important.

Let's say we have a brain and a computer which function identically, i.e. that the computer perfectly simulates all the functions of the brain, and that we choose to accept as true that the computer is actually "sentient." What does this mean, when two very different mechanisms are capable of producing sentience?

-That both mechanisms function identically.......as you just said. Nothing more, nothing less.

We isolate the most immediate causal context as though it is isolated from the universe.

In the same way that we don't factor in the guys who grow the coffee beans that the factory workers grind into coffee which facilitates their building a computer mouse........sure. Doesn't mean that it isn't actually a rabbit hole, just that we don't find it useful to go -all the way down the rabbit hole- when discussing one particular thing.

You imply this is a fact of convenience, but I don't think that's quite right. The fact is that we CAN'T go all the way down the rabbit hole. We can't determine, ultimately, why things exist rather than not, or why mind exists rather than not.

So here is the rule I'd like to discuss: "A supervenient property, once supervened, should be considered transcendent-- independent of the mechanical structure/function upon which it supervenes."

So, vanilla is transcendent, yes?

In the sense that on might consider the qualia of vanilla, "vanilla-ness" a supervenient property, maybe.

---

My position is not "brains -with- minds"...but that "brains -are- minds". As such, "any other data processing structure" doesn't fit the bill, as a brain is not just "any" data processing structure.

The objects -themselves- are also expressions of the underlying principles. Reductionism. That said, the principle may -allow- for mind, but it (mind) certainly doesn't seem to express itself in a vacuum on principle alone. The principle gives potential, the object actualizes the potential. Aluminum, for example, has the potential to fly, but we don't see flying chunks of aluminum until they get hammered into aircraft (or thrown across my lawn).

Okay, if you are defining brain as any structure which has a mind, and you are defining mind as the ability to perform logical comparisons on data, then I'd say that mind is the expression of the principle of logical comparison, rather than of the specific mechanism of the brain (be it biological or electronic). And I'd definitely say that "plane-ness" isn't a property of a hunk of aluminum, but rather the aluminum is the medium through which the idea of planeness was manifested.

[Mudhammam]

These statements are making me a little dizzy, but I won't let that stop me from trying to answer!

I think what you are doing is kind of an interesting mix of idealism and physicalism. I believe you're saying that the mind creates the universe as we experience it, even though it itself may be dependent on the brain, and the raw data it is processing may come from a non-idealistic source. So "redness," shapes, and all the qualia are supervenient ONLY the interpretations of the mind, and not really on any properties that the objects themselves possess. Am I reading you right?

Something like that. Although brain is itself in this case a phenomenal object that exists as it does only in the mind. I suppose a fair criticism of the physicalism injected into my idealistic speculation is why we should ever consider ANY amount of conceptual data applying to something that is "outside of the mind," even abstractions such as mathematics. To avoid solipsism, I suppose we would have to assume something objective to exist outside of the mind, physical or non, and this might be where idealists posit the "Dinge-an-sich," which is utterly unknowable. To the degree that we can distinguish a difference between the internal structure and mechanisms of thoughts and things, however, I suppose it's sensible to hold onto something like the physical as distinct from the mental.

Quite a bit of this is admittedly just bullshit abstractionism on my part...so my apologies for distracting from the topic. :-)
___

This thread is kind of an "EVEN IF" position, given Rhythm's view: 1) the existence of brains pretty much as real objects with minds; 2) that there's nothing magispecial about the brain's specific makeup that would allow it to have a mind, and any other data processing structure not to. If these are true then what would that mean?

The position I'm taking in this thread is that the properties of objects we perceive are expressions of the interactions between principles underlying the objects, rather than on the objects themselves. So IF we are looking at mind as a supervenient property, it would be supervenient on principles embedded in reality at a deeper level than the brain. I'm tempted to write another 1000 words to explain it all in great detail, but I realize my posts have already become too long and pedantic, so I'll wait for some feedback from you before I say more.

That's interesting and something I've wondered about as well. I hope you'll get around to those additional 1000 words!

[The Grand Nudger]

It's transcendent in the sense that its existence isn't ultimately dependent on the SPECIFIC mechanism involved, but rather on the intentions of the people who formed that mechanism. That green-ness was going to happen, with or without that particular arrangement of LED lights.

No it wasn't, and...for a very long time, didn't ( I had to look it up...I knew there was a good story in there but couldn't remember it. Railroads used white for go until a design flaw in their signaling lanterns caused the red "stop" lenses to fail sending a white "go" signal to oncoming trains sharing tracks in switching yards and, importantly, over bridges) . The existence of that green-ness is directly dependent on the specific mechanism. Different mechanism, different color (even different shades of green). Our intention to create a "green light" means nothing -without- a specific mechanism to achieve it. I'm not sure I understand..........maybe traffic lights are a poor analogy?

I should think you'd find this idea highly compatible with your gate-logic model: mind is going to happen wherever there's a possibility of the evolution of systems which compare data in consistent ways: but the specific mechanism (brain vs. electronic computer vs. quantum computer etc.) isn't really that important.

You may have misunderstood my model. The specific mechanism is -incredibly- important. Different mechanism, different mind (mind -is- mech).

You imply this is a fact of convenience, but I don't think that's quite right. The fact is that we CAN'T go all the way down the rabbit hole. We can't determine, ultimately, why things exist rather than not, or why mind exists rather than not.

42

In the sense that on might consider the qualia of vanilla, "vanilla-ness" a supervenient property, maybe.

Huh? Wait a minute now......why isn't vanilla an entity in it's own right like mind?

Okay, if you are defining brain as any structure which has a mind, and you are defining mind as the ability to perform logical comparisons on data, then I'd say that mind is the expression of the principle of logical comparison, rather than of the specific mechanism of the brain (be it biological or electronic).

I wouldn't define brain that way, or mind- but...

It has to be one or the other? Can't be both? Both appear to be required. Logic has to be possible (lol) and there has to be a system leveraging that. Without one or the other you don't seem to get the pudding. Computation was possible for eons before we ever came up with my quad core. It's not like the universe bent to accommodate the invention of the micro processor. It was possible long before it was realized - but just because it was possible...that doesn't mean that it occurred. There are no medieval microprocessors.

And I'd definitely say that "plane-ness" isn't a property of a hunk of aluminum, but rather the aluminum is the medium through which the idea of planeness was manifested.

Flight, "flight-ness", more accurately. Aluminum -can fly- because it's material properties -allow it to fly- (it's light, here)...but it doesn't fly until we arrange it into the proper structure (and the structure would not matter if the properties of aluminum were not such - and the properties of aluminum are meaningless regarding flight unless the proper structure is present). We cannot manifest flight or "plane-ness" out of whatever we wish as a medium. Hence the question "Why don't they build the plane out of the same stuff they build the black box out of?".

I'm trying to get a grip on your position here......is fiber and beta c just the medium through which the idea of carrot-ness is manifested?

[Surgenator]

Trans = across, beyond
Scend = climb

My point is that supervened properties have a reality unique to the mechanism on which they supervene, i.e. they go beyond those mechanisms. I couldn't think of a more perfect word to express my idea.

I don't think they go beyond anything or climb anywhere. It's just that there is multiple ways of getting the samething. For example, I can drive multiple routes to Las Vegas. That doesn't mean Las Vegas is some transcended place.

If you want to a better word, how about pluraemanio.
plura = many
emanio = to flow out, spread / arise, emanate, originate.

And yes, I did just make it up. However, I provided the definition.

[dissily mordentroge]

I think you're one of those people who likes to make up his own definitions for words.

As do most philosophers.