BothAndBlog Forum

The Measure of MInd

↪TheMadFool

Is the mind in what is understood, or in the way in which it understands? — Pantagruel

Both. Mind is not an object, but a subject; not a thing, but a process. Specifically, processing Meaning. And Meaning is a relationship to Me. What is understood is Memes : units (bytes) of meaning. And the way memes are understood is by connections to other memes (memeplexes ; concepts). So Mind is both the process (thinking), and the stuff processed (data), plus the output (thoughts, meanings, consciousness). So, just as Mind (process) without Brain (processor) is useless, What without the Way is sterile. One without the Other is meaningless. It takes two to tango ; to understand. to know.

Integrated Information Theory (IIT) is an attempt to measure the Mind in terms of Wholeness (Phi). It adds-up the unit parts and computes the degree of interconnectedness. That holistic function of the Brain/Mind complex is Consciousness : the ability to extract personal meaning from inputs of data from the environment. It converts concrete Quanta (physical sensations) into abstract Qualia (meta-physical feelings).

Unfortunately, the Real physical stuff is easy to measure, but to measure the Ideal abstractions would require direct mind-reading. IOW, You would have to be Me. So, at this point in time, the only technology for knowing the world through someone else's eyes, is the old-fashioned method of converting mental abstractions (ideas, concepts) into material metaphors (words, memes). And in order to understand those memes, You would have to imagine what it's like to be Me. Which, as social animals, we do intuitively all the time.

However, Psychology is a formal attempt to rationally reduce those ethereal personal thoughts into realistic generalized meanings that we can all share. It converts private feelings into public symbols of common emotional states. So, it seems that the only way to measure a mind is to transform its hidden contents into conventional representations that all members of our verbal species can relate to. To Under-Stand is to put Your-Self in My position.

What is it like to be Me? :
Nagel believes reductionism is the most unlikely of all the current philosophical beliefs to shed life on consciousness.
http://www.esalq.usp.br/lepse/imgs/cont ... at--2-.pdf

https://slideplayer.com/slide/15067794/ ... +a+Bat.jpg

I suppose you're referring to paradigm shifts and I see one on the horizon but not in my lifetime though. — TheMadFool

Me too! But, instead of laughing or crying, I try to stay ahead of the curve leading to a civil war in Philosophy and Science. The shift has already begun, and I chronicle some of its tectonic effects in my BothAnd blog. But Rome didn't fall in a day. So I expect the overthrow-of-authority to be long and messy. Although I advocate a Copernican Revolution --- from Materialism and Spiritualism to an Information-Centric worldview --- I don't want to be there when the shooting starts. :joke:


quote from TPF . . . .
Uniting CEMI and Coherence Field Theories of Consciousness :
"The Enformationism thesis is my amateur synopsis of another new paradigm : an "information theoretic" worldview. As one writer put it, this is another "Copernican Revolution" in perspective."
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussi ... ent/622840

Introduction to Enformationism :
http://bothandblog6.enformationism.info/page80.html

I suppose there's room enough in IIT for a lot of weird conclusions: crystals e.g. by virtue of the "interconnectedness" of their molecules/atoms and the worldwide website, for the same reason, should be considered conscious. — TheMadFool

Yes. That's why I spend a lot of time on this forum denying that my Enformationism worldview is Mystical or Magical in it's implications. Everything is indeed interconnected by causal links, but not all nodes are causes in themselves, or self-aware. Instead, there is a hierarchy of Enformation organization.

For example, even though I have concluded that EnFormAction is universal in its effects, that doesn't mean that atoms are conscious in the human sense. Atoms and crystals may be "sentient" in the primitive sense of action & reaction, cause & effect. But, in order for anything to be Self-Conscious, it must have internal information feed-back loops, that result in novel outputs & behaviors, instead of just direct pass-thru of energy.

Ironically, the typical human ape-mind seems to automatically jump to human-like intentional interpretations of natural events. For example, a book falling off a shelf, may be attributed to a mischievous ghost, instead of a breeze or gravity. Many people are also overly dramatic & imaginative. It's more interesting, when you hear hoof-beats in Houston, to look for exotic Zebras, instead of mundane Horses. :joke:

Where do you draw the line? How can you tell the difference between an interconnectedness that's conscious and one that isn't? I guess such questions expose the weak spots in IIT. — TheMadFool

Well, there's no empirical test for consciousness, although IIT was intended to be a step in that direction. So, we draw the line via philosophical inference. We try to establish a baseline from observation of a hierarchy of intelligent behaviors. For example, scientists searching for signs of life or extra-terrestrial intelligence (ETI) make lists of criteria, based on our understanding of terran biology & psychology.

As I noted in the previous post, I look for indicators of feedback loops between inputs and outputs of energy. Life itself is one kind of loop, which makes use of the incoming energy, before it eventually returns the waste, in the form of entropy. And since Entropy has been equated by Shannon with Information, it's also a sign of minimal intelligence. Since we can't draw a hard line between Chimps & Dophins & Robots and Humans, we may have to give them the benefit of the doubt. And to assume that their behavior is consciously directed, with some minimal degree of Self-Consciousness. But the final arbiter may be feelings instead of reasons.

What are internal information feedback loops? Are you talking about learning? — TheMadFool

Yes, the ability to learn, and to adapt behavior is a sign of Information loops, that use some of the incoming Information (EnFormAction) for the selfish*1 benefit of the organism. Atoms exchange energy and change electron orbits temporarily, but they show no signs of long-term learning. And yes, learning makes those entities somewhat unpredictable. Which is why psychology is not an exact science.

*1. Selfish, in the Dawkins sense

I'm about 90% confident we're not living in a computer simulation. — TheMadFool

I do sometimes use the metaphor of a Computer Simulation to describe how the origin and evolution of our world works, But, I don't take it literally. Gaia, as a self-regulating & self-improving system, works like a goal-driven program in some ways, but the processing is not limited to silicon logic gates. The Operating System was preset by initial conditions, while the Logic was encoded in natural laws, and Natural Selection serves as a high-level logic gate.

Programmer God :
A competent computer programmer doesn’t have to make frequent corrections to the operation of the program. Likewise, an omniscient Creator shouldn’t have to make special interventions in order to keep the world running properly. A world-wide flood would be a sign of gross incompetence.
http://blog-glossary.enformationism.info/page13.html

threshold network complexities that divide the conscious from the unconscious; — TheMadFool

Perhaps, those complexities (uncertainties) don't really divide Consciousness neatly into Awareness & Nescience, but are merely a foggy phase in a continuum of sensation from rock to rocket scientist.

Don't you think feedback loops defined in terms of just energy is too broad a definition for consciousness? — TheMadFool

Of course. It was just a concrete metaphor for something meta-physical.

Information then underpins consciousness. I thought IIT was was designed specifically to divorce/delink information from consciousness. — TheMadFool

I suppose IIT was a reductive attempt to quantify a mushy quality that is otherwise hard to pin down. To arbitrarily divide a Platonic continuum, that has no natural joints to carve. In my view, Generic Information is at one end of the evolutionary hierarchy, and evolved Consciousness is at the other. No gaps in the chain of emergence.

We have no idea what's going on, do we? — TheMadFool

We philosophers are free to speculate from ignorance, because we practice Nescience (why?) instead of Science (what). :joke:

Then the question is what exactly is it that flows through the posited feedback loops? Unclear! — TheMadFool

From behind the speculating spectacles of Nescience, it's clear to me : It's all EnFormAction all the time.

EnFormAction :
Metaphorically, it's the Will-power of G*D, which is the First Cause of everything in creation. Aquinas called the Omnipotence of God the "Primary Cause", so EFA is the general cause of everything in the world. Energy, Matter, Gravity, Life, Mind are secondary creative causes, each with limited application.
All are also forms of Information, the "difference that makes a difference". It works by directing causation from negative to positive, cold to hot, ignorance to knowledge. That's the basis of mathematical ratios (Greek "Logos", Latin "Ratio" = reason). A : B :: C : D. By interpreting those ratios we get meaning and reasons.
The concept of a river of causation running through the world in various streams has been interpreted in materialistic terms as Momentum, Impetus, Force, Energy, etc, and in spiritualistic idioms as Will, Love, Conatus, and so forth. EnFormAction is all of those.
http://blog-glossary.enformationism.info/page8.html

Nothing has infinite potentiality.
[Infinite potentiality = (God's) omnipotence!] — TheMadFool

Yes. That equation works, if you define "nothing" as "no-real-thing but all-ideal-possibilities". Of course, empirical scientists don't believe in Ideals, such as Plato's Forms. For example, pragmatic skeptics find "something-from-something" to be logical, and "nothing-comes-from-nothing" as a fact. And that's true in our imperfect real world. But philosophers are theorists, who are not bound by pragmatic reality. For example, Einstein could envision riding on a photon at light speed. So, just as we can imagine the concepts of Zero & Infinity --- which are never found in Reality, but are useful in the Ideal Realm of Mathematics --- the notions of unlimited Possibility and infinite Potential are serviceable only for hypothetical purposes. That's why we eventually have to make our liberal hypotheses conform to conservative reality.

Unfortunately, for those who expect their "omnipotent God" to intervene on their behalf in the Real World, that hypothetical hope can only be fulfilled in imagination, in the form of idealized Faith. Even Plato's ideal Forms lose their perfection when transformed into real Things. That's because there is a logical categorical barrier between Ideal and Real ; between Idealism and Realism. Ideals are perfect immaterial meta-physical models, while Reality is an imperfect physical system. So, just as the Map is not the Terrain, our possible mental models are not actual physical things. Each realm has its own set of rules & laws.

The Relative laws of physical Reality are derivatives of Thermodynamics : the fractional ratio between this & that, hot & cold, simple & complex. But the Holistic laws of meta-physical Ideality are logical : 1 or 0, all or nothing, and-or-not. So, there is no imperfect in-between. The Ideal Omnipotent God either is (ideally) or is not (really). Yet, that black & white logic doesn't apply in the fractal Real world, where things may approach infinite perfection, but never reach that impossible dream. Reality always remains asymptotic to its boundary (the imaginary line between Real & Ideal ; Finite & Infinite ; Defined Order & Undefined Chaos). Perhaps that's why Fractals always fade to black before reaching infinity --- no matter how far in-or-out you zoom.


FRACTAL ZOOM : animated link
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