Notes from meeting of April 26, 2011

This posting are the notes taken by Jonathan Foerster on April 26 of the individuals philosophy club.

The meeting opened with a subject brought up by Seanchan Owen. It was pasted on the whiteboard and went like this.

Network of interrelated sensual symbols

Intelligence is based upon

sensual symbolic stimulation of the brain,

either internally or externally,

which causes the brain to produce,

from it's trained vocabulary,

more personally recognizable symbols

with varying relationships to the subject at hand

which in turn,

causes more relationships within the brain.

The following outline of the discussion as produced by Jonathan Foerster follows.

S… There is no such thing as the unconscious mind.

We have direct contact with the brain.

John T… What would that change?

Rob… Mind is a lot of interacting parts.

Rob… Memory is proof that the conscious exists

John P… Memory is synonymous with consciousness

if you had no memory do you lose consciousness?

The feeling of having the memory is the feeling of consciousness.

S… Memory is a cascade that comes about by stimulus.

It is a trust exercise, like falling.

Rob… Does this relate to the stream of consciousness and maybe consciousness is a selective memory (arranging thereof)

John P… Consciousness as inner voice

or inner conversation.

A byproduct of memory

Rob… Gerald Ettleman Distinguied

higher order consciousness

primary consciousness

Rob… Animal behaviorists

Association versus memory

S… Is memory Association

Bryce… In a seizure; you have no access to memory even if you feel the presence of it.

S… Is the world perceptual or conceptual

John T… It is both

Rob… There is a continuum:

Association–rich memory

S… The animal response to stimulus.

The larger your vocabulary, the smarter you are.

Bryce… Outside speaking to the inside

or arbitrary assemblage

Primitives: more complexity, more primitives

more interaction; more relenstruotion

Rob… People who have a lot of tools know how to use them.

S… Words are sociological symbology.

“My car” is both standardized, portable which is different than the internal conception of it.

Rob… Internal representation; Wittgenstein

John Tate… We have been talking as if there is only one set of systems; two people with different systems might have comparative advantages.

Mark… What is significant to understanding the world.

S… “We are all solipsists.”–Wittgenstein (according to Shanahan)

Bryce… If you were to imagine a density of connections or nodes.

Rob… It communicates well enough.

Bryce… Communication is sufficient if it alters the recipient in the appropriate way.

S… On increase in social vocabulary:

does it make you more intelligent, or does it modify your inner vocabulary

John T… Your inner vocabulary is dependent on the social vocabulary.

Mark… There are different types of intelligence

it's one thing to know fax; it's another thing to know the meaning and the relationship between facts

S… Social vocabulary: what I communicate

internal vocabulary: metaphors/symbols which I may not be able to convert to social vocabulary

we received on unlimited amount of data, internally, but we cannot convey all of it through social vocabulary.

John T… Memory is reconstructed from parts.

No one is working with photographic imagery from memory.

Bryce… a dynctoctic; never get perfect; but you can get close enough.

Earl… We spend a lot of time talking about psychology.

Memory is deeply flawed; it is untrustworthy.

S… When we think internally, do we think with words or images?

John T... we can manipulate symbols without language.

Rob… Goodall's chimps: stripped branches; feed on and that's.

This is a trained behavior.

Decision-making is largely influenced by sense data.

Bryce… Trial and error; you come to understand when the ball has left your hand

S… By stabilizing your internal vocabulary

standardization of internal symbols to ourselves.

Thus improving our intelligence?

John T… inteat and decisions

(If few things were missed at this point because of a call from Malcolm)

Mark… Doing something–understanding through trial and error

communicating–learning from others

mind works digitally: memory is analog

mind–Contreras–fast response quickly

Rob… Body is analog; mind Language Digitally; catalogued.

John T… It's all analog

meaning is variant and changing

Bryce… Fractal dimensions: you're only specifying detail, not length.

John T… You can convey information without saying something.

James Joyce: much of what he's trying to convey is often what is not written.

S… Meaning and definition could be described by what they exclude.

You can improve your own internal vocabulary.

Rob… Feedback between internal and social vocabulary.

Languages utility is in its ability to transfer meaning.

S… How does one go about improving one's internal vocabulary?

Rob… Personal growth and development.

One is scaffolding for the other.

past To live in hearts we love....

Apropos of Seanchan's discussion, I would add from the Scottish Enlightenment, works of a fellow named Campbell--

"To live in hearts we love is not to die."

I have passed this on to several friends in recent years and they seemed to find it quite helpful.

This process of transforming archaic metaphors and revised historical narratives, seems to me very important. This week with Passover and Easter is a good illustration. I know that I found this past Christmas very trying. A couple of services left me in the same state as a confusing movie, like the one Marcella and I walked out on last week at the Tiburon International Film Festival. Had to drink a can of ginger ale to recover.

We are going to a Seder tonight. I thought I would raise the same question I raised last week about the Global Jewish Community support of settlements in Palestine. Mark's comment about the implications once there is a Palestinian state was very helpful. I enjoyed the Jewish Community Center twice this week--a real first.

The momentum of our March>April dialogue has meant a great deal to me, since Seanchan kicked it off with the session on imagination. Last week's session bubbled in my imagination all week. I thought Rob's combining historical reflection with our personal efforts was particularly useful.

Look forward to today.

--Malcolm

Eternal Life

This post is placed by Seanchan for Marc Krizack -

Can you be a materialist (or at least a skeptic who requires that there be scientifically verifiable information) and still believe in "eternal life" or "life after death"?" Well, certainly if you define life after death in a materialist way.

We know that if you have children, your DNA, or at least half of your DNA randomly mixed with the other biological parent's DNA, is passed on, and as long as each succeeding generation has at least one offspring, then parts of your DNA will continue on forever. In that sense one can sense that there is life after death. And certainly, the minerals and elements of your body return to the earth or become smoke and ashes ready to be recycled at the first opportunity.

Now, if you raise your children well and they do good things, or if you raise them badly and they do bad things, then it can be said that you live on after death in what your children do. And of course, this can also be said of what you do in your own life.

Chaos Theory says that a butterfly can flap its wings in the Amazon jungle and it can cause a hurricane a half a world away. Assuming in general that every act you do in the world has a direct effect, and that that direct effect then has further effects that ripple out, one can say that anything you do in life causes changes that make the world irrevocably different than it was before you did the act, even if it may be difficult to measure the differences.

Now, can we say that what you DON'T do has effects that live on forever? Suppose you have the ability to push the button and start a nuclear war. Suppose that it's the Cuban Missile Crisis and pushing the button is a legitimate, even if horrifying, option. If you choose NOT to push the button, it can be fairly said that that decision has ramifications, like the continued existence of mankind, that last on into the indefinite future.

Now, suppose you DON'T do something, not because you consciously choose not to do it, but simply that you don't do it. In fact, every time we do something, we are also not doing everything else. So, does it matter whether there is a consciousness or a motive behind our choosing NOT to act if NOT ACTING has an effect on the world?

Let's choose another example. A very self-aware guy gets picked on by another macho guy who wants to "take away" the first guy's woman. The first guy, being smart, knows that no good can result from a fight. So, he humors the other guy, builds up his ego, buys him a beer and calms him down. No fight ensues and therefore no consequences from that fight. However, there are consequences that result from not fighting. A second guy, totally unaware, kind of a nerdy guy who is totally out of it when it comes to interpersonal relationships, is talking to this girl (probably about computers) when the macho guy comes over to him in a threatening manner in order to "take away" the nerd's "girlfriend." The nerd, being totally out of it, doesn't recognize this as a threat, both because he is so out of it socially and because the girl isn't even his girlfriend. He responds in the exact same way as the first guy, and no fight ensures. Is there any difference? Can we say then that both action and inaction have effects in the real world, which effects have their own subsequent effects that ripple out into infinity? And if this is so, then can't we say that by the mere fact of our existence, everything we DON'T DO, as much as everything we DO DO, has effects that continue on into eternity? So, once we are born, do we not continue to live on forever whether we are kings and conquerors or couch potatoes?

symbolic foundation of our conscious mind

I have been discussing, with a few of my friends here in visalia, the idea of symbol and the “real world” that we live in. One might call it the symbolic foundation of our conscious mind. This is how I see it at this point.

First there is undefined spectrum of energy/matter.

When there is a life form that has evolved with the ability to recall images and a desire to convey these personal images to others, these life forms isolates a part of the undefined spectrum of energy/matter and attaches a social symbol to that selection. Since there are an infinite number of selections that can be isolated, the selections of these symbols are drived by the needs of that life form.

If all life forms become extinct, all distinctions of the spectrum of energy/matter will cease to be.

Let me give an example of a random life form. Humanity comes along and has a limited ability to perceive (energy/matter) light waves. Right there, we have an artificial limiting of the undefined spectrum of energy/matter.

(Let me insert here that the ability to recall personal images is a trained behavior and that if a human child is not trained the difference between X and Y, it (the child) will not have the ability to recall the personal images of X and Y even though it will have a stimuli repose to the difference between X and Y. We can pick this idea up in another post.)

So, one of the humans realizes that every time it (the human) eats a certain kind of flower it (the flower) makes it (the human) sick. It (the human) notices that color (light waves) being admitted by this flower is different then the color (light waves) being admitted by the other flowers and so the human creates a sound symbol “blue” which it (the human) connects to the visual stimuli of the flower. It (the human) has a hard time getting the other humans to make the connection between the stimuli and the sound symbol, but eventually every one goes around not eating the blue flowers. The section of the spectrum of light would never have been isolated into “blue” if there had not been a need for that distinction.

I am going to take a chance here and say that all energy/matter is a spectrums. That life forms are a spectrum of the combination of matter and energy. Humanity is within the same spectrum as amoebas, volcanic gases and lighting, mud, gold and any other isolated part of the energy/matter spectrum that you wish to make.

A “chair” is only one shape in the spectrum of shapes that can given an artificial boundary. There is no natural isolation of any section of any spectrum other then that which is artificially applied by a symbolic being. The distinction is artificially placed upon the spectrum by a being in the development of a symbolic language.