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Re: Simplistic models

John M. wrote: I think you misunderstood my 'model': it was referring
to the ways science formulates: is not what we "are".
I still remember the ridiculous position that only ~4%
of our genetic DNA stuff is relevant - the rest is
garbage. I always represented the need to know more
and that DNA-functions only "build organs" the
activity of which is part of a complexity so far
undiscovered (eg. the neuronal (mental?)
connectivities and other functional balances in the
body)

Yes; the head-scratching over the fact that certain species of salamander have "more" genes than humans do... as if the size of the number means something important... and the tag "junk DNA" given to any genetic material they can't see the expected, direct cause-and-effect activity with... it's rather frustrating for me, too, watching all that. But, what really bothers me is that if one is a student in university right now, trying to learn medicine or physics or biology, one is currently being taught "the rules". If one is a law-abiding citizen of the planet who has been raised to follow the rules, then the rules of the universe, as taught by science, become the bedrock upon which new careers in these disciplines will be built. As soon as someone begins building a career on a set of ideas, then those ideas tend to become something which needs to be protected from any perceived attack or significant change. The behavior is one of survival and it's a pattern which echoes the entailments of living organism behaviors in relation to protecting ecosystem niche and ensuring continued system stability, etc.

Once again, the question I have about all that is: How much of human behavior is hard-wired and how much is open to various forms of imposition by human will? My basic position is that we are safer assuming that most of it is open and learning as much as possible about the relations between. Among those relations is the relation with time, because the answers are clearly going to be different depending on the time line. Even hard-wired aspects are malleable in evolutionary time.

The following passage includes two paragraphs from my previous post and John M.'s comments. My new comments follow the whole:
The second issue raised in the above paragraph is
one of human identity
as a species. This is a real "toughie"-- human
beings have been arguing
about this particular subject amongst ourselves
since the dawn of our
species' ability to perceive and argue at the same
time. My view is
that the human mind is what defines us as human.

JM: (I suppose you have a good definition of it....)
It's not just our
"living-organism-ness"-- shoot even a slime mold has
that. It's not
just intelligence-- plenty of other species are
intelligent.

JM: (Are we using the same definition of it?)


New comments:
You're right. I should define my terms here. I have previously done so on this list, but perhaps not all together in one place. It matters, so I'll take the time to do it.

>From my point of view, intelligence can be defined as an ability to think and learn, which also implies the existence of some form of memory as well. Using this definition, there are vast numbers of species which are intelligent, including insects. Intelligence is more directly correlated with the relative size, activity, and the organization of the brain than is the next quality to be defined, namely human "consciousness". The way I use this word, it is not something that we lose when we go to sleep or faint. It's a capability. We retain the capability, regardless of whether we are actively using it or not-- and it is not necessarily dependent on the level of intelligence, either. There are cases of mentally retarded people who are, nonetheless, extremely creative. They are also considered to be fully human, regardless of the decreased level of intelligence. So intelligence, per se, doesn't correlate to the existence of human conscious mind. Robert Rosen regarded it as a capability that emerges from the corporeal organization (meaning the complex organization which supports life in the organismal sense), including the brain, but the capability of "mind" is as distinct from brain as life is from body. This capability is what I have said I regard as the aspect which defines humanity. It is also the capability that the field of medicine tries to measure and then bases the diagnosis of "brain death" on, when deciding whether it is legal to turn off life support/nutritional support for a person in a coma. In a sense, they are saying that if this capability is irretrievably damaged or gone, then the human aspect of life in the person is also gone.

[I think I need to find a better word than consciousness or mind for what I'm referring to, because those words are used in many different ways and I have the opportunity to develop my own terminology, here (since Dad didn't really pick a clear-cut word of his own, the way he did with "complexity"). If I come up with one, I'll post it. Until then, at least you know what I mean when I use the words consciousness, conscious awareness, or mind.]

In trying to define what it means, I consider what this capability can achieve that so few other species demonstrate any capability for. I come up with a lot of things on that list. For example: The ability to think outside of time or in multiple levels of abstract time simultaneously; The ability to imagine things we have no actual experience with (which includes but goes way beyond imagining novel approaches to solve problems and then imagining methods by which to turn those ideas into material reality and apply them to the problems); The ability to generate an "inner life" which is capable of subsuming the corporeal... It all hinges on a capability for abstract creativity. (Incidentally... I've always regarded that as the only way in which biblical teachings of "created us in His own image" could ever be interpreted as true. But, just for the record, in my own personal opinion the truth of it all hinges on a huge "IF-THEN equation"... as in: IF there is such a Creator of all things, THEN....." and I have fairly major doubts about that "IF".)

In any case, using these definitions, it seems clear to me that the spectacular success of the human species in terms of survival and population growth can be directly attributed to this capability of ours, and the fact that no other species has tried to take us out (exterminate us) suggests to me that the only species who can save the rest of Earth's organisms from us.... is US. I think we are the only species currently native to Earth with this level of capability, although I would stop short of saying no other species has a consciously aware mind... I tend to think that, like intelligence, there are gradations possible. Certain cetaceans and primates, octopods, birds like parrot species, and a few other species all seem to have something either approaching what we experience or even already possess a limited version of the capability. But no other species has as much range to choose what they do and how they do it. There is more range in the type of home we build than there is between most different species. Our instinctive behaviors are already atrophied due to lack of use. I think human beings started evolving away from those behaviors as soon as we began using our intelligence to specialize into different job expertise (away from hunter/gatherer societies and into fixed, agriculture-based communities).

What's interesting to me lately is the notion that physical fitness is trumped by intellectual fitness; to the point that most human females would generally choose brains over brawn in a husband/father of children. It's currently "in" to be a geek and that word is no longer the put-down it used to be. So the sickly, skinny boy with glasses, asthma, and a limp who aces all his calculus and econ classes in high school has a far greater chance of being class president and getting the girl than the tall, handsome idiot who wins the football games but has already repeated two grade levels and is struggling to pass his courses again. It may not be politically correct to put it so honestly... but I have three daughters. I've SEEN it.

I also can attest to the fact that, when my third child was born with medical handicaps which amount to permanent physical disabilities, we were more relieved to find out that she is a very bright, whole-minded child than we would have been at the prospect of a physically perfect, intellectually disabled child. This way, there is a self-sustaining future possible. But able-bodied-ness is not much use if one doesn't have the mind to navigate with. So, these are issues that have been on MY mind, a lot, the past few years.

JM:
I think you simplified 'knowledge' to the (denied) AI
stuff. We 'use' dimensions (mental, emotional, goa; -
oriented, anticipatory (!!!) etc.,) without clues so
far for digitalization. The "Implications (validity?)
of a legal argument" or "the joy of listening to
music"
"laugh at a good joke" "raising adrenalin level (male)
by a pretty girl" (or vice versa) are in domains of
knowledge which fortunately so far are not
computerized

I would argue that most of what you call "knowledge" here is what I would call either "data" (in the case of AI) or "information" (in the case of rising adrenalin levels). They aren't the same things. Some of the concepts you mention have to do with aspects generated by intelligence, some are aspects of "mind", and some correlate to purely encoded information of the sort that any living organism (including single-celled species) has. For example, goal orientation is one of the hallmarks of life: it has to do with the nature of being an anticipatory system which presumes a continued future (survival) and therefore a new concept exists which is not visible to any other kind of system, regardless of complexity: the concept of OPTIMALITY. I would say that the rising adrenalin levels in response to a prospective mate are of that variety, too. The validity of a legal argument is in the domain of intelligence, which is where knowledge comes in.

Joy and laughter.... these are much harder to categorize. Joy is something that is often purely physiological in nature and animals are capable of both feeling and expressing emotions. However, sometimes joy is purely intellectual in origin and in those cases, which listening to music (and especially creating music) refer to, I would say we are talking about a quality of the conscious mind but it's up for debate. Laughter is even harder to categorize; it's partly emotional but there is a larger mind-aspect to it. I tend to consider a sense of humor a much higher level concept than joy, but there are different types of humor. One doesn't need much intelligence to "get" slapstick humor, for example, and I couldn't say it's unlikely other animals have a sense of humor of some type. I tend to suspect they probably do. But humanity has elevated the realm of humor to an artform and developed it into a wide-ranging mini-universe of its own. We create humor out of everything.

Data can be "digitized" easily. Information of certain types can be also, but there are forms of information which cannot be. Simple systems contain the types of information which are computable whereas complex systems have both computable and non-computable types of information in their organization. "Knowledge" is a whole other animal: in my definition of it, knowledge requires the context of learning and memory. Therefore, it requires intelligence. Since I've already stated that I don't consider computers to be intelligent, it shouldn't be any surprise that I think "knowledge" is in the brain of the beholder. I don't think plants "know" anything and I don't think they "learn" or "remember" anything either. I think all their anticipatory behavior is based on instinctive reaction to encoded information.

JM wrote: I like the hint to define 'hive-behavior' so far it
was not clear to me. However:
1. We don't know how information spreads and even
rules in insects the ways of a 'collective
consciousness' may exceed our physical physiological
measurement domains. (We don't even know our own
ways).

With many species of organism, there is a distinct difference between how individuals behave in isolation, and how those same animals behave when part of a unified group. Ants are of this type. All herding or flocking animals, pack animals, schooling fish, and hive-building insects would be other examples, including human beings. The types of behavior we see in a group may not even exist in single individuals and vice versa. For instance: bees in a hive are differentiated from one another in their functional roles, in much the same way that cells in a multi-cellular organism are differentiated. Most of the functional requirements of survival are achieved in the collective activities of the entire hive. Reproduction is a hive activity and requires the involvement of the entire hive, which either survives or perishes as a unit. The "self" protein and/or scent that the individual members recognize is a hive-wide thing and the notion of "self" is a collective "we" instead of a conglomerated bunch of individual "I". Individual bees behave differently (far more aggressively) when near their hive than they do when out freely foraging, and people learn pretty quickly that one is far more likely to get stung by bees if their hive is nearby.

2. Internet spreads and acts by ways which are NOT
present in the human individuals (Who is a telephone -
line or a Windows?) Show the internet to a higly
educated person of the 19th c., would he differentiate
it from the 'hive-behavior' as you defined it?


I think there's a radical difference between the behavior of a crowd (or mob) of human beings and the human behavior we see on the internet. The internet represents vast numbers of individuals, without any means by which to unify into a mob. There is no way for a "crowd mentality" to take over or snowball into a riot. This is partly what fascinates me about the internet. It also tends to suggest that physical proximity is required for crowd mentality to set in. Is it a hormonal thing? A brainwave thing? I'm curious as to whether there have been any studies on it.

Judith
PS: John-- thanks for the good wishes for Rachel's birthday!