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Post by Admin on Feb 9, 2022 17:49:45 GMT
Consciousness and Fundamental Physics Is consciousness fundamental to reality? 8th February 2022 Philip Goff responds to recent critiques of panpsychism by theoretical physicists Sean Carroll and Sabine Hossenfelder, and then explores some implications for the science of consciousness. The Speaker Philip Goff is a philosopher of consciousness at Durham University. His research focuses on integrating consciousness into our scientific worldview. His 2019 book Galileo's Error sets out his defence of panpsychism rooted in an analysis of the work of Arthur Eddington and Bertrand Russell. iai.tv/video/the-many-voices-of-consciousness
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Post by Admin on Mar 22, 2022 21:49:56 GMT
"Many scientists who are still part of the scientific mainstream are no longer afraid to openly state that consciousness / awareness could, in addition to space, time, matter and energy, be a fundamental element of the world - perhaps even more fundamental than space and time."
~ Jeremy Hayward (molecular biologist, Cambridge University)
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Post by Admin on Mar 22, 2022 21:59:50 GMT
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Post by Admin on Apr 6, 2022 20:44:50 GMT
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Post by Admin on Apr 19, 2022 14:33:37 GMT
Alva Noë Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley has said: After decades of concerted effort on the part of neuroscientists, psychologists, and philosophers, only one proposition about how the brain makes us conscious—how it gives rise to sensation, feeling, subjectivity—has emerged unchallenged: we don't have a clue.
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Post by Admin on Apr 20, 2022 13:14:05 GMT
How do our brains make our minds? medium.com/science-uncovered/how-do-our-brains-make-our-minds-9ea1bdb4b1bcIn his new magnus opus, Conscious Mind, Resonant Brain: How Each Brain Makes a Mind, Stephen Grossberg answers some of the biggest queries in the field, such as: How does your mind work? How does your brain give rise to your mind? These are questions that all of us have wondered about at some point in our lives, if only because everything that we know is experienced in our minds. They are also very hard questions to answer. After all, how can a mind understand itself? How can you understand something as complex as the tool that is being used to understand it? Even knowing how to begin this quest is difficult, because our brains look so different from the mental phenomena that they support. How does one make the link between the small lump of meat that we call a brain and the world of vivid percepts, thoughts, feelings, hopes, plans, and actions that we consciously experience every day? How can a visual percept like a brilliantly colored autumn scene seem so different from the sound of beautiful music, or from an intense experience of pleasure or pain? How do such diverse experiences get combined into unified moments of conscious awareness that all seem to belong to an integrated sense of self? What, after all, is consciousness and how does it work in each brain? What happens in each of our brains when we consciously see, hear, feel, or know something? And why, from a deep theoretical perspective, was evolution driven to discover consciousness in the first place? You might immediately wonder: If these discoveries are so simple that they can be turned into stories, then why has it taken so long for them to be made? After all, in one sense, the answer that we are seeking is simple: Our minds emerge from the operations of our brains. Such an answer is, however, profoundly unsatisfying, because our conscious awareness seems so different from the brain’s anatomy, physiology, and biochemistry. In particular, the brain contains a very large number of cells, called neurons, that interact with one another in complex circuits. That is why many people in Artificial Intelligence, or AI, thought for a while that the brain is designed like a digital computer. Some of the greatest pioneers of digital computer design, such as John von Neumann, drew inspiration from what people knew about the brain in the 1940s. Very few people today, however, believe that the brain operates like a digital computer. It is quite a different type of system. Knowing that your brain is not like the computer on your desk, or more recently in your hand, is a comfort. There seems to be more to our mental lives, after all, than just a morass of operating systems and programs. But what we are not does not teach us what we are. It does not, in particular, help us at all to understand how the brain’s networks of neurons give rise to learned behaviors and introspective experience as we know it. How can such different levels of description ever be linked? Knowing that your brain is not like the computer on your desk, or more recently in your hand, is a comfort. I would argue that it has taken so long to begin to understand how a brain gives rise to a mind in a theoretically satisfying way because, to achieve this, one needed to first create a new scientific paradigm. This paradigm concerns how autonomous adaptive intelligence is achieved. As I will discuss throughout the book, this is a topic that is just as important for understanding our own minds as it is for the design of intelligent devices in multiple areas of computer science, engineering, and technology, including AI. The discoveries that contribute to this paradigm have required new design principles that unify multiple disciplines, new mathematical concepts and methods, major computer resources, and multiple experimental techniques. I will write more about what this paradigm is below, when it began, and why it has taken so long to develop. In brief, this paradigm has to do with properties of our lives that we take for granted, like your ability to continue learning at a remarkably fast rate throughout life, without your new learning washing away memories of important information that you learned before. I have called this fundamental property the stability- plasticity dilemma. Many gifted colleagues and I have been vigorously developing the theoretical and mathematical foundations of this new paradigm since I began in 1957, as summarized in my YouTube lecture for SEP. However, if a brain were just a bag of tricks, then it would be difficult, if not impossible, to discover unifying theories of how brains make mind. The difficulty of solving the mind-body problem, which ranks with the greatest problems ever considered by scientists and philosophers, has led many distinguished thinkers to despair of ever being able to explain how a mind emerges from a brain, despite overwhelming experimental evidence that it does. Some distinguished scientists have suggested that the brain is a “bag of tricks” that has been discovered during many cycles of trial and error during millions of years of natural selection (Buckner, 2013; Ramachandran, 1985). Natural selection has indeed been understood to be the dominant force in shaping the evolution of all living things since the epochal work of Charles Darwin (1859) on the origin of species. However, if a brain were just a bag of tricks, then it would be difficult, if not impossible, to discover unifying theories of how brains make mind. The work that my colleagues and I have done contributes to a growing understanding that, in addition to opportunistic evolutionary adaptations in response to changing environments, there is also a deeper level of unifying organizational principles and mechanisms upon which coherent theories of brain and mind can securely build. Stephen Grossberg is the world’s foremost pioneer and current researcher who introduces and develops neural network models and mathematical methods for both biological and artificial intelligence. More generally, Grossberg is the world’s leading scientist/engineer who discovers and models neural design principles and mechanisms that enable the behavior of individuals, or machines, to adapt autonomously in real time to unexpected environmental challenges. To acknowledge these contributions, Grossberg received the 2015 Norman Anderson Lifetime Achievement Award of the Society of Experimental Psychologists, the 2017 Frank Rosenblatt Award of the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society, and the 2019 Donald O. Hebb Award of the International Neural Network Society.
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Post by Admin on Apr 25, 2022 10:12:47 GMT
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Post by Admin on Apr 29, 2022 8:56:23 GMT
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Post by Admin on May 7, 2022 16:00:13 GMT
"If I swallow the scientific cosmology as a whole, then not only can I not fit in religion, but I cannot even fit in science. If minds are wholly dependent on brains, and brains on biochemistry, and biochemistry on the meaningless flux of atoms,...I cannot understand how the thought of minds should have any more significance than the sound of the wind in trees " - C.S.Lewis
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Post by Admin on May 12, 2022 21:55:39 GMT
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Post by Admin on May 30, 2022 16:26:55 GMT
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Post by Admin on Jun 26, 2022 19:02:19 GMT
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Post by Admin on Jun 26, 2022 19:06:12 GMT
A very brief introduction to Immaterialism ian-wardell.blogspot.com/2014/03/a-very-brief-introduction-to-subjective.htmlWe very strongly feel the world exists out there, independently of us. We feel it is solid, has colours, that sounds are out there etc. However, the scientific story holds that we are profoundly mistaken in this. The apparent solidity of objects is -- scientists allege -- merely the repulsive force between the electrons in the tips of our fingers and the electrons near the surface of the "touched" object. Colours, in reality, are merely a certain wavelength of light that objects reflect. Sounds are merely rarefactions and compressions of the air. Smells merely molecules in motion. So reality is entirely divest of colours, sounds, and smells, and really nothing is solid either. These qualitative experiences are supposedly entirely a creation of the mind. The world out there is wholly quantitative and devoid of anything qualitative. And hence unimaginable. The greenness you experience when looking at a green object is entirely a creation of your mind. The perceived object is not actually green at all in the commonsensical use of the word green. This scientific picture not only applies to materialism but any position which holds that science depicts a literal state of affairs. I want now to take a very brief look at the metaphysical ideas of the 18th Century philosopher, George Berkeley. He subscribed to a metaphysical view of the world called immaterialism, commonly referred to as subjective idealism. This rejects the notion that science depicts a literal state of affairs and, with commonsense, affirmed that colours really are out there in the world, as are sounds and smells. They are not merely entirely a creation of our own minds. The world is as it seems. But, in another respect, his immaterialism radically departs from commonsense. He is notorious for denying the existence of a mind-independent reality. Normally, we think that a coloured object is wholly independent of our minds, or indeed any minds whatsoever. But Berkeley held that our very perceptions constitute reality. Now, consider that when I see grass and I see it is green, this is clearly not entirely a creation of my own mind. There is, after all, a difference between my perceiving grass and when I think and hold an image in my mind of grass. So, if there is no mind-independent reality, and what we think of as the external world doesn't have a mind-independent existence, but yet what we perceive is not entirely conjured from our own minds, then why do we have any perceptions of an external world like grass, trees, houses, stars etc at all? The answer is that Berkeley held that when I see something I am participating in God's conception of the world. Our various perceptual experiences -- vision, sounds, smell, tastes, sense of touch --is a result of God directly conveying to us his conception. Our perceptual experiences of the external world are a direct communication with God. Of course, one need not follow Berkeley all the way here. Perhaps all sentient minds somehow create physical reality. It is this collective mind which we are participating in when we experience "physical" reality. It might be thought that immaterialism profoundly contradicts what science has discovered about the world. This is a mistake. We can never break out of our world of perceptions. Science is purely in the business of describing the connections between our various perceptual experiences. There is no requirement that we hypothesize a reality forever beyond what we can in principle perceptually experience. So, does this mean that something like atoms do not exist since they are in principle unperceivable? Let's step back a bit and consider a normal everyday macroscopic object. Let's consider an apple. What we call an apple has a certain physical appearance (which shifts according to perspective), a certain feel, and a certain taste. But, according to George Berkeley, the apple I see and the apple I touch are not literally caused by a mind-independent apple out there causing both. Rather certain visual appearances, and certain tactile (touch) sensations are constantly conjoined together. It is a family of associated perceptual experiences which we label an "apple". So the apple itself and all physical objects are an implicit hypothesis we all hold about the world. The existence of objects serves to explain the course of our perceptual experiences The existence of unobservable entities such as atoms, although more hypothetical or theoretical, also play a fruitful role in our hypotheses and theories about the world and therefore can be said to exist in a comparable manner to the common objects of our experience. Why does the external world exhibit uniformity? If there is no mind-independent reality what accounts for the fact that the tree outside remains there regardless of whether I look towards it or look away? The answer for Berkeley resides in the fact that the world is governed by physical laws. Compare to the environment in a computer game. The character I control might be facing towards a tree. I can turn the character a full revolution through 360 degrees and the tree will still be there. The tree is still there because the computer game environment is governed by rules implemented by a computer programmer. Likewise our external world exhibits uniformity due to physical laws, with physical laws simply being directly caused by God. I'm not sure I would follow Berkeley in everything he says, but he provides much food for thought and I would gravitate towards some type of idealism, even if not subjective idealism.
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Post by Admin on Jul 2, 2022 15:36:35 GMT
The Matrix of Four : The Philosophy of The Duality of Polarity by Ethan Indigo Smith
The Matrix of Four is a paradigm book and an inspiration instigation. The Matrix of Four expands observations skills, overall comprehension potential and is a tool toward consciousness enhancement.
The Matrix of Four is at the base of many sacred systems and symbols; Kabbalah, Yin Yang, Aum, The Cross, and The Wise Monkeys Adage to name a few. To comprehend The Matrix of Four is to better comprehend entirety.
For example, there are four aspects of The Taiji or Yin Yang symbol.
1.Major Yin 2.Major Yang 3.Minor Yin 4.Minor Yang
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Post by Admin on Jul 7, 2022 14:01:53 GMT
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