"Sure, it may have an evolutionary advantage, but so would the ability to shoot laser beams out of our eyes. That's hardly a sufficient explanation of why we are self-aware."
Laser beams were either too complex or too energy inefficient for evolution to develop. Self awareness wasn't.
I could go on but this is but this is pointless because we're each committed to our respective sides. You either don't understand the philosophy of empiricism or your refuse to accept it. Either way, I won't be able to convince you. Suffice to say that the mainstream of scientific discipline, for all its flaws and stubbornness, has lead to the invention of the coffee machine on my desk, and eastern philosophies haven't. So I'll stick with science.
"Well, I'll give you that, it's not really a major point anyway. I was just trying to point out that the way biology views it, there's no reason for us to be aware of our surroundings and ourselves. You've yet to give a response to that point. "
Self awareness has a clear evolutionary advantage in allowing us to evaluate our own actions before we take them, and to evaluate their consequences after we have taken them.
"You're so stubborn....... and classical physics fails horribly at explaining the quantum world, which is really the world we live in."
You misunderstand the utility of a simple theoretical framework if you claim it must explain everything before it can explain anything. We are limited in our ability to understand complex theories because our brains are only the science of a small cantelope. My "stubbornness" is the proper empiricist response to being told I need to use a more complex theoretical framework without sufficient reason.
You have no data to support your assertion that self-awareness is a special quality that can only be explained with QM. What you have are your gut instincts and several millenia of philosophy. That's insufficient background material for the claim you make.
"As for biology, its purpose does not involve answering that question"
Absolutely incorrect. I can tell you for a fact that explaining consciousness is a priority of biological science. Go to Pubmed http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi and search for the term consciousness.
"That's because classical physics is flawed" Not flawed, incomplete. Just because a theoretical framework cannot explain everything does not make it wrong, it's just too simplistic to accomodate all of the data. It may still be a valuable framework for explaining how things work. A computer programmer, for example, does not need to understand QM to write some code. His non-QM (and therefore "flawed") understanding of how the world works is sufficient for him to understand how a computer works.
Is consciousness outside the realm of classical physics? Noone knows, and it is an error on your part to state outright that biology cannot address this question.
We will know the answer at some point, but our understanding of the brain is far too primitive to make assertions of this sort.
In the meantime, Occam's razor tells me to side with the simpler alternative: that everything related to personality and self awareness occurs in the physical substrate of the brain using neurochemical processes that we are studying.
All of these regard consciousness as a "secret" in that they say that classical physics and biological science are incapable of explaining it.
I would say that these more basic disciplines may yet be able to explain it, but we don't yet know enough about the structure of the brain to do so, yet. It is an empirical error on your part to retreat to a form of explanation that cannot fit within the simpler theoretical framework until observed data force you to do so.
There are degrees of self-awareness. We have alot, monkeys have some, ants have none. If I started picking your brain apart one neuron at a time, you wouldn't ever notice a specific point at which self-awareness ceased, you would gradually get less and less aware until you were just a brainstem controlling your heart, lungs and digestive system.
The "secret" of consciousness is that there is no secret. Just because people are fascinated by a problem doesn't make it profound. I myself enjoy picking my nose too, and likely will for the remainder of my days, but that doesn't mean my nose is deeply mysterious.
I suggest you begin with the assumption that the world is a mundane and boring place, rather than that there are deep mysteries that need solving. It's not as depressing as it sounds:)
"Fairly sure. I really didn't say much in my post other than the fact that certain eastern ideas have very strong backing in QM. Now, how is it that from that statement you're able to extract any sort of conclusion on what I mean by it? You can't, you can only assume you know, obviously.:-) "
I can relate your claim to personal experience.
I am a neuroscientist, and people who "know" quantum mechanics have come through my field, claiming that QM is the secret of consciousness.
It is poppycock in my field, and I surmise therefore that it may be in yours as well.
Why do I suspect that this boils down to "mystical things are mysterious and so is Quantum physics, therefore the two are related"?
Q physics gets related to everything that people don't understand. It's often a substitute for the unknowable divine for people who find the concepts of God and the supernatural distasteful but yet want to believe in something beyond the ordinary.
I'm sick to death of people romanticizing the past. Far from being an idyllic life full of good health and hearty laughs, it was, for the average person, a grim and miserable existence by modern standards. Poor health and toothaches were the norm, mixed with a variety of concerns about how this season's dry weather was going to allow the family to survive the winter.
We have it pretty good. Our concerns and stresses about getting ahead in the rat race are a damned sight more tolerable than last century's stresses about simply staying alive.
Damn right. There's an enormous amount of hypocrisy when people get outraged about these issues that they read about over the internet (via routers, and cables that were made with slave labor), sitting on a chair (that was made by slave labor), sipping their coffee made from beans (harvested by slave labor) in a plastic mug (you get the idea).
Our entire way of life rests on the back of people making wages like this. We are essentially at the top of a huge pyramid, and this is hardly the first time in history this has happened. Every time you have a labor empire like we do, the people at home get to live it large. This was true with Rome, with England during its heydey of the Victorian era, and it's sure as shit true now with us.
Get over it, because it's not just apple, it's everything you see around you. You can't get to work in the morning without benefitting from our labor empire in some way, whether you're driving, taking the bus or even just walking barefoot (some part of the paint on the crosswalk was probably manufactured or distilled overseas by someone making a wage that you might find uncomfortable).
Just bear in mind that these people probably have it better than their neighbors who aren't making ipods. So don't petition to take away their livelihood with your ignorance of the basic laws of economics, which should tell you that if you're living like a king, someone, somewhere, is paying for it.
Computers can do some science yes, a tiny fraction of the pie. But the idea that computers should be thrown at every branch of science is ludicrous.
Scientists have evolved a reasonably efficient means of communicating over the last few centuries in the form of journal articles and the peer review process. It has its faults but it's working pretty well. The idea that we should abandon all this to translate our work into some machine readable format because some guy thinks it's a good idea is so far beyond silly that I'm glad I was already sitting when I read the article summary.
Incorrect. Single celled organisms began with RNA, as far as we know, and there are still some surviving lines with this simple architecture. DNA was a major upgrade to RNA. There could be other, pre-RNA versions of information storage that we have yet to find evidence of.
The problem is that doing something significant about global warming involves very strict controls which will cripple the economies of developing nations. It's not "do this or nothing", it's "do this or do that".
Take it easy. Soliders are people too. They circumvent the laws in harmless little ways, they get away with it, and life goes on, just like with the rest of us and our various jobs.
This kind of thing is completely believable, the military has a huge proportion of gamers, especially miniature games like Warhammer 40,000.
And what's the big deal with a firewall being military? I'm sure that at the level they're operating it's no different than the firewalls at use in corporations and universities. It's not like he's broadcasting from the NSA headquarters.
They could include an HFS driver. It's not at all beyond the pale. If you're a security conscious professional, you can't assume a virus writer wouldn't do this.
You are right that the Intel CPU won't itself make the mac more vulnerable, however the XP partition on a dual booting system might.
Assuming these two OS's just sit on different partitions of the same hard drive, any executable that compromises the XP half of the drive now has control over the entire computer, including the ability to install whatever it wants into the OS X side without requiring the user to enter their OS X root password. It wouldn't take that much ingenuity to design a virus that slips in through the XP door and delivers an OS X payload. It may have to mount the Mac file system, but that's hardly rocket science.
There are a lot of "counterfieting" operations where the work involved makes you wonder why they didn't go legit
I'm sure these guys, criminal though they may be, have put considerable thought into the alternatives.
The answer must be that they get to capitalize, for free, on Apple's advertising budget and years of reputation.
The benefits are enormous. If you crank out your own knock off ishuffle (assuming you avoid patent and trademark restrictions and good luck with that), it's an uphill battle to get the word out in a cutthroat MP3 market.
In reality if we are honest with ourselves and we work hard to overcome these urges, we can overcome almost any adversity, vice or compulsion.
This is absolute nonsense. Worse, it devalues those people who have these conditions claiming that it's something they can control if they just *try harder*.
Let me throw your statement back to you slightly rephrased:
We don't really need sleep, if we work hard to overcome sleepiness we can overcome it.
See how far philosophy that gets you (I think you die after about 2 weeks). Now yes, some disorders can be overcome with effort, but some cannot because they are hardwired in, just like the need to sleep.
Every neuron "helps you make choices" from your photoreceptors up to your prefrontal cortex.
And to imply that this is the first time we've found the brain doing more than "responding to stimuli" is grossly naive. Neuroscience could tell you what decision you were going to make before you knew what decision you were going to make for probably a decade or two now.
I know I should expect it by now, but it still goes straight up my arse to read it.
Slashdot Mirror
I do not dispute the existence of quantum effects.
I dispute whether it is valid to argue that consciousness relies on them.
"Sure, it may have an evolutionary advantage, but so would the ability to shoot laser beams out of our eyes. That's hardly a sufficient explanation of why we are self-aware."
Laser beams were either too complex or too energy inefficient for evolution to develop. Self awareness wasn't.
I could go on but this is but this is pointless because we're each committed to our respective sides. You either don't understand the philosophy of empiricism or your refuse to accept it. Either way, I won't be able to convince you. Suffice to say that the mainstream of scientific discipline, for all its flaws and stubbornness, has lead to the invention of the coffee machine on my desk, and eastern philosophies haven't. So I'll stick with science.
"Well, I'll give you that, it's not really a major point anyway. I was just trying to point out that the way biology views it, there's no reason for us to be aware of our surroundings and ourselves. You've yet to give a response to that point. "
Self awareness has a clear evolutionary advantage in allowing us to evaluate our own actions before we take them, and to evaluate their consequences after we have taken them.
"You're so stubborn....... and classical physics fails horribly at explaining the quantum world, which is really the world we live in."
You misunderstand the utility of a simple theoretical framework if you claim it must explain everything before it can explain anything. We are limited in our ability to understand complex theories because our brains are only the science of a small cantelope. My "stubbornness" is the proper empiricist response to being told I need to use a more complex theoretical framework without sufficient reason.
You have no data to support your assertion that self-awareness is a special quality that can only be explained with QM. What you have are your gut instincts and several millenia of philosophy. That's insufficient background material for the claim you make.
"As for biology, its purpose does not involve answering that question"
Absolutely incorrect. I can tell you for a fact that explaining consciousness is a priority of biological science.
Go to Pubmed
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi
and search for the term consciousness.
"That's because classical physics is flawed"
Not flawed, incomplete. Just because a theoretical framework cannot explain everything does not make it wrong, it's just too simplistic to accomodate all of the data. It may still be a valuable framework for explaining how things work. A computer programmer, for example, does not need to understand QM to write some code. His non-QM (and therefore "flawed") understanding of how the world works is sufficient for him to understand how a computer works.
Is consciousness outside the realm of classical physics? Noone knows, and it is an error on your part to state outright that biology cannot address this question.
We will know the answer at some point, but our understanding of the brain is far too primitive to make assertions of this sort.
In the meantime, Occam's razor tells me to side with the simpler alternative: that everything related to personality and self awareness occurs in the physical substrate of the brain using neurochemical processes that we are studying.
All of these regard consciousness as a "secret" in that they say that classical physics and biological science are incapable of explaining it.
I would say that these more basic disciplines may yet be able to explain it, but we don't yet know enough about the structure of the brain to do so, yet. It is an empirical error on your part to retreat to a form of explanation that cannot fit within the simpler theoretical framework until observed data force you to do so.
Something can be a complex problem worth studying without being a deep and mysterious secret. You know what the difference is, stop playing semantics.
Hmm, if you are living above the mean, someone else is living below the mean.
So fair enough, I suppose it's not economics per se, but rather the mathematical definition of "average" that makes this necessarily true.
There are degrees of self-awareness. We have alot, monkeys have some, ants have none. If I started picking your brain apart one neuron at a time, you wouldn't ever notice a specific point at which self-awareness ceased, you would gradually get less and less aware until you were just a brainstem controlling your heart, lungs and digestive system.
:)
The "secret" of consciousness is that there is no secret. Just because people are fascinated by a problem doesn't make it profound. I myself enjoy picking my nose too, and likely will for the remainder of my days, but that doesn't mean my nose is deeply mysterious.
I suggest you begin with the assumption that the world is a mundane and boring place, rather than that there are deep mysteries that need solving. It's not as depressing as it sounds
"Fairly sure. I really didn't say much in my post other than the fact that certain eastern ideas have very strong backing in QM. Now, how is it that from that statement you're able to extract any sort of conclusion on what I mean by it? You can't, you can only assume you know, obviously. :-) "
I can relate your claim to personal experience.
I am a neuroscientist, and people who "know" quantum mechanics have come through my field, claiming that QM is the secret of consciousness.
It is poppycock in my field, and I surmise therefore that it may be in yours as well.
"very strong backing in Quantum Physics"
Why do I suspect that this boils down to "mystical things are mysterious and so is Quantum physics, therefore the two are related"?
Q physics gets related to everything that people don't understand. It's often a substitute for the unknowable divine for people who find the concepts of God and the supernatural distasteful but yet want to believe in something beyond the ordinary.
Are you sure that isn't the case for you?
Great Post.
I'm sick to death of people romanticizing the past. Far from being an idyllic life full of good health and hearty laughs, it was, for the average person, a grim and miserable existence by modern standards. Poor health and toothaches were the norm, mixed with a variety of concerns about how this season's dry weather was going to allow the family to survive the winter.
We have it pretty good. Our concerns and stresses about getting ahead in the rat race are a damned sight more tolerable than last century's stresses about simply staying alive.
Damn right. There's an enormous amount of hypocrisy when people get outraged about these issues that they read about over the internet (via routers, and cables that were made with slave labor), sitting on a chair (that was made by slave labor), sipping their coffee made from beans (harvested by slave labor) in a plastic mug (you get the idea).
Our entire way of life rests on the back of people making wages like this. We are essentially at the top of a huge pyramid, and this is hardly the first time in history this has happened. Every time you have a labor empire like we do, the people at home get to live it large. This was true with Rome, with England during its heydey of the Victorian era, and it's sure as shit true now with us.
Get over it, because it's not just apple, it's everything you see around you. You can't get to work in the morning without benefitting from our labor empire in some way, whether you're driving, taking the bus or even just walking barefoot (some part of the paint on the crosswalk was probably manufactured or distilled overseas by someone making a wage that you might find uncomfortable).
Just bear in mind that these people probably have it better than their neighbors who aren't making ipods. So don't petition to take away their livelihood with your ignorance of the basic laws of economics, which should tell you that if you're living like a king, someone, somewhere, is paying for it.
Computers can do some science yes, a tiny fraction of the pie. But the idea that computers should be thrown at every branch of science is ludicrous.
Scientists have evolved a reasonably efficient means of communicating over the last few centuries in the form of journal articles and the peer review process. It has its faults but it's working pretty well. The idea that we should abandon all this to translate our work into some machine readable format because some guy thinks it's a good idea is so far beyond silly that I'm glad I was already sitting when I read the article summary.
All life on Earth has DNA as far as we know
Incorrect. Single celled organisms began with RNA, as far as we know, and there are still some surviving lines with this simple architecture. DNA was a major upgrade to RNA. There could be other, pre-RNA versions of information storage that we have yet to find evidence of.
The problem is that doing something significant about global warming involves very strict controls which will cripple the economies of developing nations. It's not "do this or nothing", it's "do this or do that".
It was called UO, it didn't work. They turned it off.
Take it easy. Soliders are people too. They circumvent the laws in harmless little ways, they get away with it, and life goes on, just like with the rest of us and our various jobs.
This kind of thing is completely believable, the military has a huge proportion of gamers, especially miniature games like Warhammer 40,000.
And what's the big deal with a firewall being military? I'm sure that at the level they're operating it's no different than the firewalls at use in corporations and universities. It's not like he's broadcasting from the NSA headquarters.
Do you think you have some moral right to own your house? To expect that it isn't robbed every night?
"No matter what"?
They could include an HFS driver. It's not at all beyond the pale. If you're a security conscious professional, you can't assume a virus writer wouldn't do this.
You are right that the Intel CPU won't itself make the mac more vulnerable, however the XP partition on a dual booting system might.
Assuming these two OS's just sit on different partitions of the same hard drive, any executable that compromises the XP half of the drive now has control over the entire computer, including the ability to install whatever it wants into the OS X side without requiring the user to enter their OS X root password. It wouldn't take that much ingenuity to design a virus that slips in through the XP door and delivers an OS X payload. It may have to mount the Mac file system, but that's hardly rocket science.
There are a lot of "counterfieting" operations where the work involved makes you wonder why they didn't go legit
I'm sure these guys, criminal though they may be, have put considerable thought into the alternatives.
The answer must be that they get to capitalize, for free, on Apple's advertising budget and years of reputation.
The benefits are enormous. If you crank out your own knock off ishuffle (assuming you avoid patent and trademark restrictions and good luck with that), it's an uphill battle to get the word out in a cutthroat MP3 market.
Um buddy... patch clamps *kill* the neuron within hours.
And you'd need an apparatus the size of a telescope attached to your brain.
And you couldn't move a muscle.
and you would need a hole drilled through your skull.
No, the correct analogy would be someone letting his leg muscles go slack because, after all, eventually gravity is going to win. Why fight it?
No the analogy is you managing to stand, him failing to stand because he's carrying a 10 ton boulder, and you asking him why he can't just get up.
In reality if we are honest with ourselves and we work hard to overcome these urges, we can overcome almost any adversity, vice or compulsion.
This is absolute nonsense. Worse, it devalues those people who have these conditions claiming that it's something they can control if they just *try harder*.
Let me throw your statement back to you slightly rephrased:
We don't really need sleep, if we work hard to overcome sleepiness we can overcome it.
See how far philosophy that gets you (I think you die after about 2 weeks). Now yes, some disorders can be overcome with effort, but some cannot because they are hardwired in, just like the need to sleep.
Every neuron "helps you make choices" from your photoreceptors up to your prefrontal cortex.
And to imply that this is the first time we've found the brain doing more than "responding to stimuli" is grossly naive. Neuroscience could tell you what decision you were going to make before you knew what decision you were going to make for probably a decade or two now.
I know I should expect it by now, but it still goes straight up my arse to read it.