Hi All, I was intrigued when reading a recent post about the "chore" of learning new tunes, and I began to think about that. In particular, how do I describe a learned tune? Is it that I have the notes memorized? My muscle memory has kicked in? Or, when I have mastered some ornamentation? Ususally, I have the notes down in a relatively short amount of time, but I don't think I have learned a tune until I have played it many, many times. I like to think 100 times as the break even point where below 100 the tune still sounds like crap, and more than 100 times it begins to sound and feel very natural. Thanks for letting me spout off.
Lowhistle
It's all relative. Some folk will learn to play a tune well in half a dozen plays, for others even hundreds of plays make little difference.
From my point of view a tune is learned when you can play it to a standard you and others can enjoy. For example if you start it at a session, nobody joins in but you can still comfortably play it on your own.
I'm not at this game that long (in years of playing that is), but I don't think I have learned one tune, when I go back to practice a tune I haven't played for a while, I always want to change it and make it better or different.
I might be able to answer your question in 10 years time.
Don't get big headed or anything, but I actually 100% agree with you on this.
That's not to say that I would'nt like a tune to evolve further after that stage, but to be honest, it probably won't - unless I hear a better version or decide to do a "drains up" job on it.
I agree, you don't really *know* a tune until you can play it ornaments and all on autopilot without having to think about it. If you have to think about what you're doing, you're still learning the tune.
I don't think I ever play a tune "on autopilot without having to think about it". If I did, I wouldn't think I'd be playing the tune, 'cos it wouldn't be music. I'm wondering if I *can* play any tune on autopilot. Probably not, since I've never done it.
There's also an "ornaments are part of the tune" argument lurking in there somewhere ... I'll let someone else. I can't be bothered.
I'm not sure that "autopilot" is quite the right description - but I think I can identify with the sentiment. For me, Its when you get to that stage that you can play it all the way through, with the timing spot on and your mastery of the tune not governed by your mastery of the instrument. When you know you will get through it without "fluffing" anything every time you play it, even if you don't practice it for a few weeks. I suppose you might define it as having reached "concert stage".
Having said that, "autopilot" is pretty good shorthand for the above paragraph of waffle.
As for ornaments and variations, they should, of course, be part of the "concert stage" tune - however and whenever you have introduced them. Even if you don't always stick them in the same places all the time.
What I was trying to get at is being familiar enough with the tune that you can just think about how you want it to sound and it just comes out that way, instead of having to think about how to play the tune itself.
Yes, but its what you do with it after you have learned to play the notes with the right timing and in the right order that you actually start to learn it propperly.
Slavish copying of the midi file won't give you a "concert stage" tune - but it will give you the bones of one. It will give you the ability to play along with it in a session though.
Autopilot is a dreadful term to describe someone playing music, as is the robotic style which comes from playing by rote. Knowing your instrument, very well, being familiar with the various articulations, & using phrasing are always going to be the bits which preferably work in the subconscious (then you're not overthinking) But I'm always listening to the tune. Autopilot, cruise-control, midi ... each is mechanical. But playing, listening to others, & listening to myself is a state of awareness. The ears are engaged & that is what allows me to play variations, something which sounds good. (Not that my variations always sound good) When I'm playing with others I'm listening (I may *know* the tune, but I want to be open) because someone might have an interesting interpretation. Sometimes when I ask about their variations they may not even recognize that they made them, until they play it again.
"Knowing your instrument, very well, being familiar with the various articulations, & using phrasing are always going to be the bits which preferably work in the subconscious"
Yes that's right, but your subconscious can't come through if you have to consciously think about how to play the tune.
Obviously you don't want to play like a robot without listening and shaping the sound, but you also don't want to have to consciously think about what notes are coming up in the next phrase, else your brain will get in the way of your ear.
It's not about being a robot, it's about having enough experience that you don't have to think about the mundane details and can focus on the important things.
Committing a tune to muscle memory does not mean playing it the same way every time. In face, I find that it's only after having played a tune enough to commit it to muscle memory that I can play variations without even thinking about it, that's when emotion can guide the playing with the brain getting in the way.
Let me put it this way: do you know how to do a roll if you have to think about what your fingers are doing? Or does it just happen automatically because you've done it so many times that you've committed it to muscle memory? Is that robotic playing?
The problem with over-practicing is getting so tired of a tune that you stop listening to what you're doing and end up training yourself to play it badly. That's a different thing.
Fair play, Marklar. It may be worth mentioning that my 1st response was not due to your use of any particular term. We cross-posted. I began reading this thread with the comments by ormepipes ... "Having said that, "autopilot" is pretty good shorthand for the above paragraph of waffle." I only read your comments, further up, after posting my bit. Eventually I did read the actual OP. Which I think was well answered by bogman.
& the link I thought was good enough for a complete read, although the end might be most relevant,
"The other point that might be helpful is to register the difference it makes when you are 'learning' a tune rather than just 'practising' it. I personally find that an hour sat down learning the details of a tune that I have in my head (either from a recording or a session) is such an intense and concentrated form of playing, thinking, and learning that it is worth two or three hours of just 'practising'. The danger of just playing through tunes is that you can go into auto-pilot and stop making the mental effort to realize the full potential of the tune. In one way, the effort of practising makes the tunes harder, rather than easier, to play, as you become more familiar with the tune and begin to understand the almost infinite variety with which it can be played."
Dragut Reis
I doubt I have played any tunes reasonably well as many as a hundred times. The oens I sort of know seemm tohave gone throguh stages of knowing, that may be something like:
A. Have it in my head well enough that I can work on it for a while without referring to the source.
B. So long as I can think of the next phrase my fingers find some notes that sound like the tune.
C. My fingers find some notes that sound like the tune without needing to keep the next phrase in my head.
D. Now have spare brain capacity to start realy working on it. Maybe a count of 1 on the way to 100.
E, F, G... dunno.
"C" may be what Marklar means as autopilot (except for me the twiddly bits are sparse). I often warm the flute up whilst noodling and reading posts here and sometimes I accidentaly get through a tune or two without seeming to engage brain. I don't think that muscle memory though, just that I have a basic record of the tune stored so that I don't **have** to think "what comes next" so I can think about what I am doing.
And I was only trying to explain a possible definition for your "autopilot". The paragraph I was refering to as waffle was the one that I had written myself. I hope you did'nt think I was refering to someone elses post.. Sorry if I offended, that was not my intent.
And now you've made me write another paragraph of waffle !
No offense taken, I was just getting frustrated because it seemed like I was being taken to say something that I don't agree with. And I wasn't really commenting on your post, I cross-posted with you.
Oh, I thought you meant "muscle memory" or something like that. Same as "autopilot" in my book. I don't play like that. I don't ever want to play like that. I wasn't playing with words.
Forgive my ignorance, what's your instrument ? - I can't remember from previous posts and your profile is'nt telling me.
I'm wondering how you can possibly operate without muscle memory coming into play. I don't understand - you might be unique - this is interesting - I may learn something else!
Muscle memory comes into it, I guess, although I for one hate the term. I suppose it comes into it in the little things you do, like the way you hold your instrument, where your fingers go to make certain notes etc. But, honestly, when I play a tune, it's not "muscle memory" or "autopilot" that helps me remember the tune. The tune's going in my head. I play it. Will Harmon has described before now very well what he does, which, IIRC, is something like the tune is happening in his head a split second before it comes out of the instrument. That's not muscle memory. I've played with people who play whole tunes on "autopilot", who use "muscle memory" to learn a tune - the thread subject, right? learning a tune? - and who might as well be playing a typewriter for all the music they make.
My understanding, which may be complete tosh, is that it is physically impossible to play tunes at speed by using concious thought, that the reaction speed of a human simply can not cope.
Going on from this initial premise, The reason we can play tunes is down to some unconcious (auto pilot?) ability that we can train ourselves to achieve.
Its a serious question Ethical, not a wind-up, I'm fascinated.
I think I know what you're getting at ethical blend, there's really two things going on, the knowledge of the phrases that you need to play which runs a bit ahead of what you're doing, and the physical ability to pull those phrases off acquired by repetition. You seem to be assuming that it's one or the other, but in reality playing involves both all the time.
You're confusing that with playing by rote like a player piano, but that's not really the same thing. It's like the difference between writing and typing, you can be creative and engaged or not. I think that's more about having your ear turned on and being involved in your own playing.
I heard a juggler say that while he was juggling time seemed to slow down. I find the same happens when I'm playing a tune I know really well. It feels a bit like running along stepping stones -- when you first learn a tune you have to be slow and deliberate. But once you know how it all fits together...
Ben, I read page 94 but page 85 is missing from the free online version for some reason. It looks like a very interesting book, but I don't see what you're getting at in relation to this thread.
What I read seemed to be about how the brain has innate wiring that cannot be easily changed, while it is possible to re-wire the brain in certain ways. And I got a sense about points being made about determinism and free will in relation to ethics.
But I didn't get much more than that, and while I get the sense that the book is supposed to be controversial, I read a bit more and didn't see anything that seems new in philosophy of mind or ethics. But I only read about a dozen pages.
Anyway, what connection were you making to this thread? Can you quote the relevant bits?
"The fact that the brain changes when we learn is not, as some have claimed, a radical discovery with profound implications for nature and nurture or human potential...If thought and action are products of the physical activity of the brain, and if thought and action can be affected by experience, then experience has to leave a trace in the physical structure of the brain.
So there is no scientific question as to whether experience, learning, and practice affect the brain; they surely do if we are even vaguely on the right track. It is not surprising that people who can play the violin have different brains from those who cannot, or that masters of sign language or of Braille have different brains from people who speak and read. Your brain changes when you are introduced to a new person, when you hear a bit of gossip, when you watch the Oscars, when you polish your golf stroke--in short, whenever an experience leaves a trace in the mind...We already knew trained violinists play better than beginners or we would never have put their heads in the scanner to begin with. Neural plasticity is just another name for learning and development, described at a different level of analysis."
pg. 94
"Most demonstrations of plasticity involve remappings within primary sensory cortex. A brain area for an amputated or immobilized finger ... " been there, done that.
Wish I could carry on, maybe later. I'm going home to eat. My brain is tapped.
Someone recently commented that a troll is someone who comes on here now and again and says stuff like you lot just spend your time going round in circles and getting nowhere...or something like that. Well, here's me, Homo sapiens trollosessionus. With the latest monicker to go with the self-styled linnaean classification.
So, what am I on about? This is going round in circles with people throwing in little half-truths; Marklar asking honest questions about a diffuse kind of link, where we would rather have had the poster telling us in his own words what he actually gleaned from Pinker's book.
Anyway that doesn't matter. What might be slightly more useful is a few links to - yes, I'm sorry but it has to be - Wikipedia.
Firstly, so-called "Muscle Memory" , when your fingers do the talking but you could be thinking of anything else, even getting yer nookey; The most likely suspect would be the Cerebellum: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cerebellum
So what about tune memory? the function of your brain which actually "switches on" the memory system...and it's "wired" up to many other conscious brain areas (gawd, I hate the term "wired" it's so reductionist and simplistic, to describe how neurons are interconnected) - for quite a lot of that function I'd plump for the hippocampus: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hippocampus
But by now you're thinking (consciously): Oh fvck I've played the Contradiction Reel 3 times over now, doesn't convention dictate that I should move on to another tune and should I make it a nice easy tune for the numpties or keep it up at the arcane level that we're at? - So that's your higher conscious parts of the brain coming to the rescue, ie the prefrontal cortex: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prefrontal_cortex
Then of course there is the feedback of the noise that you and yer mates are making and that is done by the auditory cortex, including the superior temporal gyrus (Heschl's Gyri) - I think it is the right STG but I'm a bit p!ssed so I could be wrong: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primary_auditory_cortex
And of course why would one bother at all with making music if it weren't fun, or somehow or other emotionally gratifying? Well, there is the limbic system in general (which includes the aforementioned hippocampus) which deals with emotions (the limbic system does contain grey matter [neuronal - not axonal] so is bona fide de facto proper brain cells per se. Ad nauseam...
So, I hope this little will help shine a candle and deter errant circumnavigation.
Oh, I see, you're getting at the fact that learning a tune changes the brain.
Anyway, thanks for linking the book, I may read it some more. Pinker is interesting, he reminds me of Dennett, though I don't really agree with the reduction of consciousness to behavioral effects which are then taken as cause after the fact. But I admit that I'm basing that on intuition and don't have a coherent counter-argument, aside from a sneaking suspicion that causality is a practical ordering of past events which have no hard link to causes, just patterns that are interpreted by human minds to make the world usable through experience. Though I guess I'm falling right into their Darwinism through that. Maybe they're right and I just don't want to admit it.
Not quite sure where Darwinism comes into it - please enlighten me. I did click on the Pinker link but it hung up on me so I may well be missing something.
Neuronal plasticity? Again I may have missed out on some cardinal issue due to a dodgy link. But a while back I did some experiments using transgenic Drosophila larval NMJ's as a model for Alzheimer's.
Please tell me your understanding of neuronal plasticity so we both know at what level we are at. Thanks.
I think llig said a while ago (when he was taking a break from being surly, and in the mood to be profound) that learning a tune was like getting to know a person--you can form an acquaintance in a few minutes or hours, but truly getting to know someone can be the work of a lifetime. There are so many degrees of knowing a tune that it is hard to pin it down.
He's back with anew moniker! See Al I told you he knew stuff! I like him.. Good man Rudall..I hope you are not removed. I think I like these troll fellahs.
Hey Rudall, that's interesting, in debating with ethical blend I realized that at least two things were going on where I had been imagining just one: what I was thinking of as "muscle memory" and the actual memory of how the tune should go seem different things.
It seems from experience that during playing my fingers know what to do completely without conscious thought, while there's some knowledge of the tune going through my head that isn't conscious in the way it is when just learning the tune but not entirely subconscious either.
Not like "first finger then third" but just kind of a pattern template, which isn't conscious in the slow sense of having to think about what to do but conscious enough that I can see ahead and makes decisions on what to play before I actually play the phrase, like "I'm going to drone it this time around on the D."
Is that what you're getting at with the cerubellum vs. the hippocamus? While the prefrontal cortex is more like "that flute player sure is cute" and the auditory cortex is having your ears on for reacting to the feedback loop?
Wow, my brain hurts when contemplating itself, who knew this was so damn complicated and mysterious.
Rudall, the Darwinism comes with the idea that our brains are somewhat hardwired at birth for certain behaviors due to natural selection. I haven't read the whole of the Pinker book but I got that drift from what I read.
Oh, and I don't know a great deal about neuronal plasticity but I wasn't really talking about that. My background is more in philosophy not neuroscience, though I've studied a bit in cognitive science as it relates to philosophy of mind, artificial intelligence and information science.
Rudall is just Danny, back again. And he does something medical in the real world, I think, so I would give him credit for knowing one neuron from the other...
Ah, OK, Gotcha Marklar. But it doesn't even work like that. did you ever hear of the case of Jeanie, a girl in California USA, or feral children brought up by dogs or wolves or gorillas etc?
Let me just briefly outline jeanie. Although she was an absolutely normal child intellectually, during her childhood her parents were abusive and neglectful - her father who was mentally ill had her tied to a chair in the dark for years - etc etc, horrible - but the outcome was she couldn't speak. Blah-de blah - she got rescued and social workers spent a lot of time trying to teach her to speak. Yes, she was able to learn VOCABULARY, just loads of words, but she had missed - or rather, been denied the opportunity - for her brain to develop the capacity for grammar and syntax. Yep. You may have thought grammar was such a pane in the whole when you were at school - but we need it to think as we do in a Chomsky-esque kind of way.
If a Martian philologist landed on Earth tomorrow he would think gawd they are a boring bunch they all speak the same language. All human languages, despite the huge differences perceived by us, have more in common than seperate. they have vocabulary grammar and syntax. And the propensity to integrate these qualities is, as you say, hardwired, but only if they are upregulated at crucial points in time of development. That's why I shy away from the notion of hardwiring - firstly it is time dependent thus potentially transient, but also it most likely is upregulated in different people to different degrees. Thirdly, and OK this is not about hardwiring but about Darwinism - correct me if I'm wrong, I'm an old geezer so I may be behind the times wrt Darwinian theory, but I was of the opinion that sexual selection (as opposed to survival selection) in a human context may be about factors which are determined by, and factors which determine, the course of human social evolution. A simple example would be black skin colour. If a group of people live in a country where there is intense sunlight dark skin containing melanin would be beneficial. It could be argued that eventually all the fairer skinned people would die off from skin cancer (but that would be unlikely), leaving just dark skinned people. But surely, if it got around the neighbourhood as an urban myth that fair skinned people didn't thrive so well in this country, the possession of fair skin would become unnattractive and that trait in that country would eventually die out leaving predominantly dark-skinned people. So it would be societal pressures which would drive evolution. If it was left to just survival selection this process would have taken 10X longer.
Just a thought.
>At some point we're going to need to start talking about tunes again I think.
Yeah OK , but no harm, no harm at all, in going off at tangents and having a good old bark at the moon. Oh, i can talk about tunes, no prob.
OK Rudall, but just to be clear I was objecting to the reduction of consciousness to the Darwinian explanations that Pinker and Dennett champion, I just don't have a good counter-argument.
Still, Darwinism doesn't have to be restricted to sexual selection, societal selection can work too. The mechanism isn't so important, the selection process is the point I think, because that's what leads to adaptation.
And I think Chomsky-ites might argue that language is an innate part of human cognition and your examples are unfortunate aberrations due to faulty mental development rather than examples of normal mental development absent of language. Isn't there a case of siblings who grew up in isolation who invented their own language to communicate with each other? So language acquisition does seem innate somehow.
Er, I meant survival selection, not sexual selection, but whatever. It doesn't matter what the selection process is, as long as the environment determines the genes that survive.
Don't know much about Pinker's views - I haven't read anything of his since Language Instinct - but I think it's perhaps missing a point to refer to Dennett as reductionist. Certainly he's a materialist - there's no question of a "soul" or any other metaphysical entity in his writings, so it's all down to the brain. I think he'd characterize consciousness as "brains doing what brains do", and he'd tell you that his business is to explain what it is that brains do, as near as we can tell.
However, I don't think that's quite "reductionist" in my book. For me, "reductionism" is the claim that X "is simply" Y, where Y is a lower-level science, and I don't get that sense from Dennett at all. He's studying consciousness, as a philosopher well-informed in neuroscience, but he's not trying to claim that understanding neuroscience is sufficient to understanding philosophy of mind, or consciousness, any more than he'd claim that understanding physics automatically gives you chemistry.
I suppose this is all rather far from the course, but that's okay. A session is a place where you play tunes and talk about anything, and this is a virtual session. How boring would a session be if you only talked about tunes?
If I can, I'd like to point out that the two of you - Marklar and rudall seem to be arguing strenuously for the same posiiton on the acquisition business. Rudall is claiming that there is feral child evidence to the effect that a child deprived of linguistic input past the critical period was unable to acquire syntax, although some semantic development ocurred, and that this implies that language acquisition is innate.
Marklar is claiming that, no, language acquisition is in fact innate, because there are cases (Nicaraguan sign language is the best example I can come up with) where children in linguistic isolation develop private languages.
So no need to contest this one: you both have presented evidence for the same position.
(As an aside, I know of one such case, but it was a human-induced isolation, not a "raised by wolves" story, as I recall... anyway, child comes to adulthood in extreme poverty of stimulus... if there's an actual "raised by chickens" or whatever story, I'd like a pointer to it, to satisfy my curiousity)
Maybe I missed the point Jon, but I got the clear impression from Consciousness Explained that he was essentially arguing that the concept of self was an illusion that could be explained completely by physical processes in the brain and there was nothing beyond that. No soul, no "me," nothing beyond bio-chemical processes that give rise to a subjective feeling of self for practical purposes. Which fits nicely with a Darwinist explanation of consciousness as a survival mechanism.
I did get the impression that he felt that neuroscience was sufficient to explain conscious thought. But maybe I was missing something.
Jon, I just pulled Consciousness Explained off the bookshelf and he does seem to explicitly reduce consciousness to mechanics, as in his concept of a conscious robot. See chapter 14. That's a pretty radical reduction.
He seems to be arguing very hard for hard AI, which implies that any sufficiently complex arrangement of switches flipped by a sufficiently complex and well-programmed algorithm can give rise to consciousness. You can't reduce consciousness much further than that.
Marklar - Do you accept the distinction between materialism and reductionism? Materialism, undeniably, is central to Dennett's view. If you want an immaterial soul, you won't find a place for it in his philosophy of mind. For me, though, reductionism is something else.
Suppose I were to claim that all of chemistry proceeds from physics - this is not to say that chemistry is reducible to physics. The former claim says that chemistry develops out of (and therefore, in some sense, can be explained in terms of) the laws of physics, were they sufficiently understood.
To say that chemisty is reducible to physics, on the other hand, would be to claim that, knowing physics, one could then proceed to deduce chemistry, as a sort of bonus. Clearly, we want to accept the former and reject the latter.
For the AI, I thnk that is again a basic materialist view. He's saying that the substrate is not important, that the content of the intentional system is what makes it conscious or not. If you want to make a metaphysical claim, that consciousness devolves from something extra-material, that's your privilege, and I won't try to argue the point. But Dennett's claim is more that consciousness can be explained without recourse to such extra-material factors than that it "reduces to" some simpler body of knowledge.
I'll try to take a look at chapter 14 tomorrow and pick up on your specifics when I've done that.
This just occurred to me:
The difference between materialism and reductionism is this: Reductionism is a fallacious claim that ignores the importance of levels of description. Claiming that music is "reducible to physics" would be fallacious because although the material of music - patterns of vibrations in air - can be described in terms of decomposition of waves, this is not a useful approach to understanding a tune.
Materialism, on the other hand, is a philosophical position: it is a rejection of metaphysical explanations, that is explanations which cannot be justified on empirical evidence. If you reject this claim, you reject the possibility of rational argument, because there are no rational arguments to be made about spurious entities. See A. J. Ayer's Language Truth and Logic on the place of the metaphysical in philosophical discussion. If I recall correctly, he attempts to banish the metaphysical from philosophy on the reasonable grounds that nobody can be expected to make a convincing argument about something which cannot affect the material world and therefore cannot be tested.
I think the term "reduction" is getting in the way, but here's the real problem:
The mind gives rise to logic which gives rise to mathematics which gives rise to computer science. Then Dennett wants to claim that the mind can be explained completely in terms of computer science.
Suppose, for the sake of argument, that there is more to mind than just logic. But since mathematics is based on logic alone, you just get a slice of mind there. Then mathematics gives rise to computer science, which is really just a slice of mathematics. Then Dennett claims that the mind--what you started with--is completely encapsulated in computer science. You are "reducing" the mind to a subset of mental processes which can be easily quantified by your higher level models, and ignoring the rest.
The problem is that you start with mind in the first place and then end up equating that with the heavily filtered and simplified conceptualizations that you were able to build into practical machines.
The physics/chemistry thing isn't a good analogy because in this case your foundation is also the exact same thing you are reducing, but instead of reducing all the way back down into what you started from you cop out by equating mind to oversimplified models of that thing you started from.
I'm talking about a reduction upstream while you're talking aobut a reduction downstream, if that makes sense. With philosophy of mind you're starting with the end product.
This is my main problem with Dennett, I feel that there's a bit of slight-of-hand going on here, where he wants to claim that consciousness is explainable with simplified models constructed out of consciousness itself, without really questioning if those models really encapsulate their creators.
I have some details that I'd love to dive into on your last post, but let me ask you two questions:
1) Do you feel that there's a responsible way to study the nature of consciousness? Or is this a lost cause?
2) Do you feel that consciousness can be understood in materialistic terms, or is this in principle impossible?
It sounds to me like your objections are not so much to Dennett as to the enterprise as a whole - if that's the case, we might have to just disagree, which is fine with me.
Looking at your "reduction" I think your objection is to circularity more than to a reductionistic approach. Your claim, if I understand you, is that since the mind creates logic, that any logical approach to understanding the mind is a circular argument, is this roughly correct?
There are some interesting arguments to be had there, but we're talking about something other than Dennett at that point.
To put it in Platonic terms, I think that Dennett is trying to convince us that we can understand the forms completely in terms of the shadows.
You may object that the forms are just metaphysics, but I think that Plato would see that as a cop-out by a prisoner too accustomed to the dark to see the light.
Thought I'm not going to make any claims about the forms, just pointing out the ridiculousness of clinging to shadows of things as if they are the things themselves.
Jon, you kind of hit the nail on the head, I have serious doubts about the ability of the mind to understand itself. It is circular by nature.
But I'm a true skeptic, I doubt my own position as well. You could almost say I have no position at all. I'm open to possibility but I need evidence.
The bottom line is that I need evidence to accept that consciousness can be reduced to mechanics. Like the Turing Test.
Research into hard AI has been going on a long time and at least in terms of natural language processing they have hit a brick wall. Until a machine can be made to convince me that it's a person, I'm just not buying it. I view hard AI in the same light as alien UFOs, show me the evidence, otherwise I don't buy it.
Well, I never found the cave to be a very convincing piece of work. In this case, I don't see it as telling me much of anything. "The mind" is a label we put on a set of phenomena which can be observed. Having observed, we can try to put our observations in line with other observations, possibly from other fields, and draw conclusions. I don't see any forms at all - the phenomena are all. So if you're seeing some "Mind" with the capital M that has to be explained, instead of your mind and my mind and Will's mind, then I think we're talking about different sorts of things, and it's not surprising that we disagree on some things. It's certainly not surprising that you have a hard time with Dennett, I don't think the idea of forms enters into his picture at all.
I see there was a bit of cross-posting there. Anyway, I've got to turn in - I'll pick up on some loose ends in the morning. Thanks for an interesting discussion so far.
Well, I shouldn't have brought Plato into it, I just like the analogy.
But in any case, I don't believe in Mind with a capital M. But I also don't believe in thinking machines. I'm a computer programmer and I know how computers work down to a basic level, they are just arrays of switches which are flipped by software. I don't see how you get to consciousness from there.
But I'd love to be proven wrong, I'd love to see a thinking machine. But I need to see it to believe it, the way computers work is so far removed from actual thought that I don't see how it can be done with anything remotely resembling current technology. They are nothing more than arrays of switches.
Computers can only "seem" smart because of clever switch-flipping by programmers like me, but that makes them exactly as conscious as puppets. I won't believe in a thinking computer until I see one. Believe me, current computers are as conscious as a light switch and just as intelligent.
I tend to go with the theory that consciousness *is* mechanistic, although we don't understand the machine or its processes well at all yet (and may never reach that understanding). Really, our species is just now at the cusp of starting to suss out our own genetic, chemical, and electrical ingredients, let alone the recipes and cooking methods. We have much to learn, if we don't destroy ourselves first.
But it seems to me that the evidence is already mounting for biochemical and electrical processes as the stuff of consciousness. In contrast, there's not much new substantive evidence on the spiritual or magic front. The last person to walk on water was about 80 generations ago, and none of the individuals since, or the 7 billion current copies, have provided any proof that their consciousness will outlast their carbon molecules.
Wow! 46 replies overnight!. And deep, serious ones if I'm not mistaken. I wish I'd stayed up to read Marklar's first reply to me. Cracking reply, which helps me to understand that (probably slight) differences of approach we're bringing to this.
Just to get really serious for a moment on this rather frivolous thread....
Jon Kiparsky says:
"....if there's an actual "raised by chickens" or whatever story, I'd like a pointer to it, to satisfy my curiousity"
Well at least that child would be able to cross the road on his own....
All very interesting. By the way it has been shown that your brain can come to a decision before you do (Subjects in an MRI scanner were asked to select a button or similar, and to say when they had decided which one it was going to be. Meanwhile the researcher outside knew several (I forget how may) seconds before the subject just by watching the scan). Maybe this is what is going on when we play instruments. It is hard to imagine that our brains are doing stuff and not telling us, but it might explain the 'autopilot' feeling, amongst other things.
Jon - it's a few years since I read this book, but I think it included a description of a child who displayed the same behaviour as Jeanie and could only learn vocabulary not syntax; how certain anyone is that such children have really been "raised" by animals is not clear to me.
I went home last night & played tunes for hours. I was going to come back & pick up where I left off, on here. But, it looks like you don't need me. I'll try to read the comments above (minus the Wikipedia links ;)
So, before I try to fathom the mammoth thread above 2 things.
I'm not sure where is my copy of "How the Mind Works" (Pinker) At least I read that book. As far as "The Blank Slate", I have only seen it on Google books. I'm not sure what all he is on to there. A bit of everything? From my brief skimming I think he might be wildly speculating. blah-blah ... woof-woof.
Finally, back to the OP ~ Bogman's response works for me.
Jon, I've been thinking about this mind question a lot and the problem I keep having is that I keep getting forced into a position that I don't think is right, and yet I can't avoid it.
You (or rather my reading of Dennett) seem to be saying that the mind can be completely understood in terms of its mechanics. A crucial point of this, from Dennet anyway, is to dispel the myth that there is some metaphysical aspect of mind that can't be understood or described.
I don't buy the myth but I don't buy it's destruction either.
My main objection is that when you postulate a model of the mind (any model) and then claim that that's all there is to it, you are confusing the sign with what it signifies. The symbolic model is taken as being exactly that which the symbols represent. This is the slight-of-hand that I object to in Dennett.
The problem is that I am now in the position of implying that there is some metaphysical aspect of mind that can't be gotten at through modeling it. I can't bring myself to accept that any more than I accept that a model of a mind can be a mind itself.
My position really comes down to skepticism, not metaphysics. I think that there are limits of what can be known. Philosophers have made heroic efforts at grounding knowledge in certainty for thousands of years and yet uncertainty remains, even at the fundamental levels of logic and mathematics (see Quine's objections to set theory in his essay The Ways of Paradox).
The one thing that is always hidden from phenomenological reflection is that which reflects. It cannot be said what it is, only that it is, in the Cartesian sense.
I don't claim that there is some mystical aspect of mind that is unknowable. I claim that it is impossible to answer the question because knowledge itself is not up to the task. To create a mechanical mind means creating a knowledge machine, however that assumes an ontological grounding for knowledge that hasn't really been achieved (as far as I know). It means knowing how to know, if that makes sense, an understanding of understanding itself.
For this reason, I believe that hard AI is nothing more than puppetry. We can create (theoretically at some point) machines that appear to think, but we can only give the appearance of thought because we have nothing else to give beyond those aspects of mind that we can observe (namely, behavior). This can only be "thought" to the extent that we define thought as the manifestations of it that we can observe and model. But the question of what thought is will remain an open one to the thinker, I believe.
So we can't get at thought due to lack of a proper mirror to observe our thought in. Neuroscience seems to provide such a mirror, but aside from the fact that that involves examining effects and equating them with causes (something else I'm uncertain about), that also requires that you assume that this mirror works before you use it. What criteria can you use to test this mirror, what is it grounded in aside from the assumption that it is correct?
Sorry, thinking about this has kept me up all night, just had to get it off my chest.
or Around the House & Mind the Dresser.
Draw a dot on a chalk board, that is what is known.
Draw a circle around the dot, that is what is unknown.
When you know everything inside the circle draw a larger circle around the 1st circle ...
Sorry, I haven't gotten around to reading any of the posts I missed last night.
Marklar - I think one essential thing that's keeping you from Dennett's view is that you're viewing consciousness as a sort of "secret sauce" that you put on things and make them conscious. People have the secret sauce, computers don't, there you go.
I think the point of the "intentional stance" is precisely to banish the idea of consciousness as "stuff" that things have or don't have, or have in some degree. If you can get behind that, you might find him more palatable.
Yes, Jon, I got that from Dennett, he wants to get rid of the notion of an inner mind, a "consciousness sauce" if you like, that is apart from the actual workings of the mind itself and makes it more than the sum of its parts.
My objection is that he is not really explaining consciousness by doing this, he is actually destroying the idea of consciousness itself. Or, from my point of view, getting rid of it by simply ignoring it and redefining the mind to fit this idea. Which is a neat trick because this definition works just fine from a scientific point of view.
To put it another way, when he says that machines can be conscious, what he's *really* saying is that we *aren't* conscious. We just imagine that we are.
In any case, there's value to what he's saying, because the subjective aspects of consciousness cannot be grasped (at least so far) through science and so should be removed from a scientific model of the mind.
My main objection is taking this scientific model of the mind as literally being mind itself. I think that is going to far. He's really just getting rid of the problem of an ineffable consciousness by ignoring it, which is fine for practical purposes, but philosophically I feel that this is a cop-out.
Marklar
"I have serious doubts about the ability of the mind to understand itself. It is circular by nature."
"The one thing that is always hidden from phenomenological reflection is that which reflects"
I find these philosophical, bordering on the mystical. A long way from neuroscience and the study of behaviour, from the stuff that Danny (if it is he) gave links to. Any model we have now is "work in progress" that explains a few things. Echoing Will, with luck we have thousands of years yet work on it. I am skeptical that a philosophical approach can cut many corners.
Learning to learn tunes makes me read the scientific stuff with a more particular interest.
To be clear, I don't think the mind can necessarily be completely understood through its mechanics - that would be a reductionistic view. I believe that the mind is an emergent property of a brain doing what brains do.
Since you're a programmer, you might like this analogy better: I might understand completely the algorithms driving a chess-playing program, and still have no idea move the program will make next.
I've been doing a lot of speaking on Dennett's behalf, which may be presumptuous of me, but I think he'd take the same position.
"To put it another way, when he says that machines can be conscious, what he's *really* saying is that we *aren't* conscious. We just imagine that we are."
Sure, that's actually a nice way to put it. We aren't "really" conscious, but we take the intentional stance towards ourselves, and treat ourselves as though we had thoughts, beliefs, desires, et cetera.
"I find these philosophical, bordering on the mystical. A long way from neuroscience and the study of behaviour, "
You're right, but I was talking philosophy. Dennett is a philosopher, not a neuroscientist, though he knows a scary amount about neuroscience. He's applying neuroscience to philosophy, not the other way around.
Jon, you may not know the next move the computer will make, but the human programmer could predict it. You could too, given your knowledge of the algorithms, just run the inputs through the algorithms and you will get the answer. Computers are fundamentally predictable, it's a mathematical necessity for their operation.
Displays of intelligence by computers are always reflections of the intelligence of the human programmers. That's why I call it puppetry, it's really like that.
Anyway, I'm going to hang my hat on my last post because that's as clear as I think I'll get with my position, I just fundamentally don't accept the way Dennett dismisses the subjective mind because it is scientifically convenient to do so. Though a lot of analytical philosophers would scoff at me over that.
Thanks for the discussion, it was fun, and it really helped me understand what my problem with Dennett really was.
One sort of learning. I think another is subconcious creation and matching of patterns (can't remember where I read it). So that, for example, we know that some music is 'irish' as opposed to 'bluegrass' by listening to a lot of each rather than analysing them (not that I am sure I would always recognise bluegrass).
Computers are predictable in the sense that the same input should generate the same output, but they are plenty of situations, a lot of simulation for example, where the only way of knowing the output is generating it. That would make for fascinating puppetry.
I'm not sure what you mean David, the output is still determined by the programming and inputs, even if the operator doesn't know the output ahead of time.
To put it another way, you can program a computer to find the area of rectangle by writing an algorithm that plugs the input into a formula to compute the area and display it. The programmer doesn't know the output ahead of time because the inputs are unknown at that time, and the operator may not know the answer ahead of time or he/she wouldn't bother using the program. But the computer is still a puppet doing exactly what the programmer told it to do, and nothing more.
Interesting point, about simulations. I suppose that's the main purpose of a certain sort of simulations, isn't it - that you don't know what it's going to do, even though you can program in the logic that'll determine what it's going to do.
"you don't know what it's going to do, even though you can program in the logic"
Heh, as a teen I was failing algebra until my teacher told me "Algebra is a system for getting the answer even though you don't know what answer you're looking for." Then it made sense.
Here's a case where a quantitative difference becomes qualitative. There's a big difference between being able to run a simulation of a weather system in infinite time, and being able to run it in real time.
There was a story going around in the 1970's that the UK Met. Office had a new computer that only took 25 hours to predict the weather for 24 hours ahead. As a cheeky student mentioned this to someone who worked there as a programmer. He said if wasn't quite that bad and that it was showing that there were some parts of the system that they *did* understand. Maybe a bit like the brain.
"There was a story going around in the 1970's that the UK Met. Office had a new computer that only took 25 hours to predict the weather for 24 hours ahead. "
Yeah, that's a common story, and I believe it's probably true about most of the systems that did early work on weather forecasting. If you think about it, it makes sense: the researchers would have known that there were hardware limitations that would keep them from developing a practically applicable weather-predicting machine out of the gate, but it would make no sense to wait until you have the hardware to develop the ideas. Instead, they developed the ideas so they'd know what sort of machine they'd need to run it on, and created the next round of computers from the demand side.
And besides, if you're running an experimental program, you don't want to have to wait 24 hours for your results to be confirmed - this way, they were able to check their results as soon as they came in!
"To put it another way, when he says that machines can be conscious, what he's *really* saying is that we *aren't* conscious. We just imagine that we are."
Sure, that's actually a nice way to put it. We aren't "really" conscious, but we take the intentional stance towards ourselves, and treat ourselves as though we had thoughts, beliefs, desires, et cetera.
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Do you think that is right then Jon? Do you believe that you don't have beliefs/
Bernie, I think what Dennett said (and Jon was trying to explain) is that the idea of a subjective consciousness is a meaningless illusion because it can't be gotten at through objective scientific means. If it can't be exlained through objective scientific analysis, then it doesn't really exist, it's just metaphysical garbage.
My response is that I think he (Dennett) is trying to neatly side-step the problem of subjective consciousness by claiming that it doesn't really exist. That's fine and well for neuroscience but I find it troubling as a philosophical stance.
For one thing, the denial of subjective consciousness has serious consequences for ethics. If the subjective, private inner world of the mind that is closed to objective analysis is denied as a mere illusion, are pain and suffering then illusions as well, and actions that cause pain and suffering then as permissible as kicking a machine or turning it off?
I suggest we should focus here on the question of the existence of consciousness. Any discussion of the ethical implications would be better addressed in the thread about How to Clean a 19th Century Flute.
Dennett's views aren't fine and well for neuroscience: consciousness does exist, and it has a physical cause, and a scientific explanation, almost certainly involving neurons! We haven't found the mechanism yet, but we could find it tomorrow, I have people working on it.
I don't understand how Dennett gets taken seriously. How can he both deny and explain consciousness?
It has been shown that your brain can come to a decision before you do (Subjects in an MRI scanner were asked to select a button or similar, and to say when they had decided which one it was going to be. Meanwhile the researcher outside knew several (I forget how may) seconds before the subject just by watching the scan).
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Hi Gam,
Libet's findings may not show what you think.
Firstly, there's something dodgy about the distinction you make between "you" and "your brain". The processes are all happening in the brain, but at different levels. It's not even surprising that a lower level activity, like deciding to make a simple movement and press a button, should be completed earlier than a higher level activity like considering and reporting on the decision. This doesn't really mean that "your brain" is secretly making decisions independent of "you".
Secondly, subsequent research has called into question the nature of the brain activity detected by Libet before the subjects reported their conscious decision. It has been suggested that this activity was merely a general arousal in readiness to act, rather than being associated with a specific action (e.g. push left button).
Time perception of even concious acts is wierd. I read about an experiment with subjects playing a mouse controlled computer game. A delayed response to mouse movements was introduced gradually and players got used to it and could still control the cursor. When the delay was abruptly turned off they reported that the curser was anticipating the mouse moves.
Bernie - it's interesting to see that some of your posts suggest a shock and horror at ideas that proceed directly from other things you take for granted.
For example, if consciousness is an emergent property exhibited by a properly-organized system of neurons (or whatever substrate you choose to use for the purpose) then it follows that we don't "really" have consciousness - nothing does. Consciousness is a set of phenomena that we observe in ourselves and others, and we try to explain it or work with it or, in some cases, to make it go away with drugs or alcohol or television or whatnot. That is, it's a cover term for a group of behaviors - it's not a "thing" that you can "really have".
Now, do I experience the same set of intentional states that you or anyone else does? Of course I do. Do I believe that I'm conscious? Of course I do. I take the intentional stance with regard to myself, as anyone does. Does this change any of the underlying facts about consciousness? No, of course not - it's still a convenient way to refer to a brain doing what brains do.
As for the Libet study, it seems pretty well established that RPs are associated with a conscious intent to commit to a particular action. As you say, this study only raises a problem if you think there's a "you" that's different from "your brain". This is of course a silly idea, so the Libet study doesn't actually cause any major problems for any reasonable theory of consciousness.
"It has been suggested that this activity was merely a general arousal in readiness to act, rather than being associated with a specific action (e.g. push left button)."
Whatever you think readiness potential actually is, it's associated strongly with the action in question (there aren't RPs at random intervals) and it precedes the subjects awareness of their decision by 300-450 msec, consistently. Your interpretations of this might vary from mine, but I'm not aware that anyone's questioning that sequence of events: RP, then subject's reported time of decision.
Again, this seems to square nicely with your belief that consciousness emerges from neurons doing neuron stuff, so I'm confused about what your actual position is.
"I suggest we should focus here on the question of the existence of consciousness. Any discussion of the ethical implications would be better addressed in the thread about How to Clean a 19th Century Flute."
The ethical implications actually matter quite a lot when it comes to reducing consciousness to mechanics in order to explain what consciousness is, or in any discussion of whether consciousness "exists" or not.
Dennett notes this early on in Consciousness Explained (pages 24-25):
"If the concept of consciouness were to "fall to science," what would happen to our sense of moral agency and free will? If conscious experience were "reduced" somehow to mere matter in motion, what would happen to our appreciation of love and pain and dreams and joy? If conscious human beings were "just" animated material objects, how could anything we do to them be right or wrong?"
He goes on to say that he will address these concerns in the book, but he doesn't seem to follow through on this very well. However, he wrote another more recent book addressing these concerns called Freedom Evolves, but I haven't read it yet.
In any case, it does matter, because unless you are ready to throw morality out the window you have to take account of it in any explanation of consciousness.
Marklar - you seem to be suggesting that we should bend our conclusions to suit our preferences. I might find it easier to justify my moral and ethical intuitions if, for example, I believed that there were such a thing as a soul, but that wouldn't make it so.
As it happens, I don't believe any such thing. My ethical intuition tells me that, among other considerations, I must give a high value to avoiding suffering as a consequence of my actions. Since an ability to suffer is one of the hallmarks of any definition of consciousness, it seems that my ethical sense will agree with yours to several decimal places - we may disagree on some details, but I think we'd have to get down into some seriously trivial and fiddling hypotheticals to get to disagreements.
One place where we might disagree is on what sort of basis one requires for an ethical system, but maybe we should hijack a different thread to discuss that...
(I had a hard time with Freedom Evolves - there's a lot of heavy going in there, and he lost me midway in. I might have another look now, it's been a few years and maybe I've gotten smarter)
A bit nearer the original topic. "... it precedes the subjects awareness of their decision by 300-450 msec...". Those are the sorts of times that get talked about for perception and reactions. Early on when learning a new tune I sometimes start to play a wrong note (maybe start lifting one finger rather than two on the whistle), realise and manage to get the correct note in late but still in time to stick with the rhythm on next note. (yes, I know, it may be the wrong thing to do). Even with a waltz at a steady 60 'ones' per minute that has to be happening within the same sort of time frame. I supect I only notice the correction *after* I have made it.
"you seem to be suggesting that we should bend our conclusions to suit our preferences"
No not exactly, I'm saying your conclusions have to fit the facts of our common experiences. If your explanation doesn't fit with everyday experience then it points to a problem with the explanation.
The fact that we can mostly agree on what is and isn't moral is the experience of morality, not an explanation of it, and that is exactly the experience that a theory of consciousness has to square itself with. I think that Dennett would take a Darwinist stance on ethics and I have some counter-arguments to that, but no one seems interested in the ethics angle so I'll leave it alone.
However, please stop attacking metaphysical ideas like a "soul" until someone actually makes those claims. You're building a straw man, and insisting that it's either your view or belief in some sort of mystical hocus-pocus. There are actually a lot of other options.
But anyway, I agree, this is getting to far off from anything remotely resembling the topic.
Marklar - Sorry if you thought I was attaching the idea of a "soul" to your arguments. Since I don't know what it is you're claiming about consciousness, I had to use an example of some sort. I believe that you're espousing a view of consciousness as a unified entity which is indivisible - irreducible to component parts, and originating in the nervous system to which it's attached (and possibly a part of, though I'm not sure where you stand on that). I'm not sure what else this model looks like, or if it has or needs other features, but let's call it "m-consciousness" so that I can stop using nonce arguments which are offensive.
However, I still feel that you haven't answered the objection to your argument from ethics. It still sounds like you want to determine the shape of your theory of consciousness based on what best suits your preferred view of the origins of an ethical theory. That is, it sounds like your argument goes something like this:
"Without 'm-consciousness' there is no basis for ethical behavior, therefore consciousness must be of that sort."
A theory of the origins of ethics ("Ethics arises from human being recognizing each other as containing m-consciousness" or something of that sort) is not an everyday experience, it's an abstraction from that experience, so your explanation above still leaves me mystified.
To me it seems that daily ethical behavior is a product of a number of an individual consciousness, and that a theory of consciousness must be able to account for the ethical decisions. Is this what you're getting at?
Bob - I didn't find that to be all that inspiring a book, honestly, but I do love Hofstadter's writing. Le Tombeau de Marot is one of the best things I've ever read.
Well, it's certainly worth reading if you're interested in this sort of stuff. It's much more about Hofstadter's beliefs than about why you should believe them too, if that makes sense, but Hofstadter is an interesting guy and his beliefs are interesting. In the main, I think he parallels Dennett's ideas, but he comes at them from a more experiential approach, and with less of a concern for analytical rigor. Some people might find that more readable.
But if you're interested in language, translation, that sort of thing, definitely have a look at the Marot book. Fantastic.
Jon, I'm not making any claims as to what consciousness is because I don't really know, beyond the common subjective sense of the term. I'm just skeptical of Dennett's explanation of it.
I do have some solid positions on ethics that make me uncomfortable with the application of evolutionary theories to morality, but I don't really want to continue that line here, I should probably just read Freedom Evolved and see what Dennett has to say about it.
For example, if consciousness is an emergent property exhibited by a properly-organized system of neurons (or whatever substrate you choose to use for the purpose) then it follows that we don't "really" have consciousness - nothing does.
Why does that follow? If something is a property, surely something has the property? Solidity is an emergent property of properly organised groups of atoms, does it somehow follow that nothing is solid?
You also said:
Consciousness is a set of phenomena that we observe in ourselves and others, and we try to explain it or work with it or, in some cases, to make it go away with drugs or alcohol or television or whatnot. That is, it's a cover term for a group of behaviors - it's not a "thing" that you can "really have".
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It's not a cover term for a group of behaviours, it is a different class of phenomenon to "behaviours". It is experience, there being a world for you. Are you really trying to tell me I am not having experiences?
Bernie, As a non-philosopher, non-neurobiologist, I am not competent to comment on the merit of the argument. But just based on normal use of English, I think Jon is telling you that you are assuming that the emergent property is separate from what it emerges from. Because solids are made up of properly organized groups of atoms, then they are the same thing, not different things. They can be described differently, but if there are no organized atoms, there's no solid either. We as humans don't perceive organized atoms, just solids, but that doesn't make solid separate from atoms. Similarly, no neurons, no experience, even if humans don't perceive our own neurons working. I take Jon to mean that it's a mistake to think that the experience is separate from the experience generator.
Oh, and Jon, you're right that I'm attacking Dennett's position on the grounds that it doesn't square with my own position on ethics, so yeah, that's a bit unfair. But he needs to convince me a bit more before I revise my position on ethics to take into account the implications of his position.
Bernie - you've experienced centrifugal force, right? Well, if you've studied physics, you'll know that there's no "centrifugal force" at all, it's actually just inertia in a rotating frame or some such thing - I can visualize it, but I can't verbalize it, and it's not really that important. The important thing is, this force which doesn't exist can support your weight, in certain carnival attractions. You experienced something there, pressed up against the wall of the whirly room, but it wasn't what you thought it was. For most purposes, the naive explanation is sufficient, but you have to be aware that if you're doing actual physics, centrifugal force is not what it seems tobe.
Now the picture I'm trying to paint for you is similar for consciousness: for most purposes, the naive view is sufficient. But if you want to understand the thing, it's necessary to accept that the naive view might not be up to the task.
If centrifugal force doesn't exist, then it can't be that force that supports my weight on the wall of the whirly room. It must be some other force or effect, one that does exist, that makes the difference between sticking to the wall and sliding down it.
Try this then. For most purposes the 'naive' view that if you let go of a ball it will fall because there is nothing holding it up works fine. If you want to understand what is happening and take things further you need to know about gravity.
While strictly speaking, there are only four fundamental forces, in practice however, physicists and engineers often use the term force - in conjunction with Newton's 1st law - to describe particular movements of bodies and balances. For example, it's not centrifugal force that sticks you to the wall in the fairground, it's the balance of centrifugal and crentipetal force.
But this is merely academic.
When we use the naive view of consciousness, we use the practical view. i.e. we know what consciousness is, because it's what happens every time we wake up. Do we need any other view of consciousness in order to understand it? I think not.
However, you could say that our consciousness has created an enquiring mind which therefor demands a deeper meaning? Conversely though, you could say that our enquiring mind created consciousness? But I'm not convinced of either of these arguments.
It seems pretty clear to me that our consciousness and enquiring minds simply evolved together, each pushing each to greater complexities. And the wealth of evidence in the study of live animals and fossils not only supports this theory, it also answers the question of "what is consciousness for?".
"We know what consciousness is, because it's what happens every time we wake up. Do we need any other view of consciousness in order to understand it? I think not."
So you don't think understanding the physical cause of consciousness would add anything?
But when it comes to music, and the OP here, is that the usage of 'consciousness' that is important ? 'Conscious' came up as a sort of opposite of 'autopilot'. I once saw a recovering stroke victim who had only just got use of an arm back very slowly and deliberatly put a biscuit wrapper back on a hospital table and, with difficulty, comment on how slow everything was. The wrapper fell off, his hand shot out and caught it accuratly; then he looked at it in puzzlement, completely unaware of how it had got their.
Are we training our brains to do that sort of thing for us ? Or rather don't we and the animals do that all the time, saving our consciousnes for other aspects of the task at hand ?
Crossed with Bernie. Reading about conciousness is interesting, but being happy with an evolutionary reason for it is all my inquiring mind really needs.
Bernie, While I'm of the view that we don't "need" more than the practical description of consciousness, I'm also of the view that understanding the physical cause of consciousness would be terrific. It's our highly developed enquiring mind that thinks it would be terrific, and what makes me glad to be human.
David, Yes, the joy of this music for me is both the expulsion of the auto pilot in conjunction with the embrace of subconscious creativity. The combination of concentrated consciousness with combining with the bubbling up of what lies beneath.
I once read a study on slip fielders in test cricket. The amount of time it took the ball to travel from the edge of the bat to the hand of the catcher was less than quickest time the brain's neurones could process the movement of the ball via the visual cortex and relay that information to the effective movement of the muscels in the arm and hands. Fascinating
And yes, my enquiring mind needs no more of a reason for consciousness other than the evolutionary one - as the evolutionary reason for it is plainly the only credible theory. But an understanding of the differences between how the brain physically works differently between consciousness, subconsciousness and unconsciousness would be fascinating.
"If centrifugal force doesn't exist, then it can't be that force that supports my weight on the wall of the whirly room. It must be some other force or effect, one that does exist, that makes the difference between sticking to the wall and sliding down it."
Exactly - centrifugal force is a fictitious force, which serves as a better encapsulation of the events you experience than the actual forces underlying it. However, you'll find that it's not exactly a substitute for gravity - for example, if you're on a space ship that produces artificial gravity by rotation, you'll find that objects do not fall straight down, as every science fiction reader knows.
So for most purposes, I treat the folk view of consciousness as correct, because it works for most purposes much more effectively than trying to work out the underlying neuroscience - not that I could in any case! However, when someone makes a claim about what consciousness "really is" or isn't - for example, claiming that computers or cats or bodhran players can't "really" be conscious, then I have to remember that there's an underlying layer to consider.
So I agree with llig (welcome back from limbo) that the naive view is for most purposes the practical view. However, I do think that if you want to understand consciousness, you have to take into account effects like the cricket player's reflexes, which complicate matters severely if you want to maintain a literal centralized "me" in the consciousness. That is, I do think that the practical view of consciousness is insufficient to the job of understanding consciousness.
And if you're interested in how consciousness came about at all - the evolutionary development of it - then it would seem to me essential to at least have some idea of what it is that's developing. It's possible to talk about it in terms of the naive view, but like a cricket player in a rotating frame, your reflexes will lead you wrong, and you'll tend to miss a lot of catches.
I've been interested in consciousness for while and have looked into the evolution of it and there is a strong case that consciousness first evolved to control instinct. But the beauty of evolution is that it never rests with its origins. Characteristics evolve: Limbs for example evolved from flippers to arms and legs and back again to flippers, into wings, have been abandoned completely and, in us, evolved further into dextrous tool building weapon wielders and even communicators of fine art. So it seems natural that consciousness can have its multiple uses, as it must have had its multiple uses in the past, either evolving into different uses or even become redundant.
So it seems that an other answer to the original question of ‘what is consciousness for?’ could be ‘what ever we have wanted or want’. Or at this stage in our evolution, covering probably the last sixty thousand years or so, our ability to manipulate our own minds to our own or altruistic ends has been the driving force in shaping the ‘ascent of man’ – to borrow from Jacob Bronowski.
But there is another form of consciousness that hasn't been mentioned yet and that is collective consciousness.
We are defining the concept through our discussions of it. As we said, when the psychiatrist Giulio Tonino suggested that “Everybody knows what consciousness is: it’s what abandons you every night when you fall into dreamless sleep and returns next morning when you wake up.” (I looked it up) we agreed that this wasn't good enough.
What I was getting at is that the term "consciousness" may mean something different in psychology than it does in neuroscience or philosophy, especially when you start talking about things like "collective consciousness."
Michael - not only does evolution never rest on its origins, it's never aware of those origins, even as it retains so many traces of them. Evolution is an endless "now" - and for some of us, and endless "wow".
I'd love to dig down into the evolution of consciousness stuff, but unfortunately I'm at work at the moment, and I don't think I can really lay out even a sketch of what I think I think there. Put simply, I would look for it in predator/prey dynamics, the place where it's most evolutionarily advantageous to be able to anticipate another organism's next action. This would require projection ("If I were that mouse, I would be trying to get to that hole over there...") and a degree of recursion ("...because there's a predator, me, nearby"). Becoming conscious in the human sense, to my mind, then requires an ability to look at ourselves, at our own internal states, and treat them in the same way, in a sense. That's badly put, but I'll let it stand for now.
Marklar - I think that in lieu of a"definition" of consciousness, which is a tall order, I'd settle for some agreement on the boundaries of the problem at hand. What are the phenomena that our ideas of consciousness are expected to address?
Good posts. For me the idea of collective conciousness lets the philosophy back in, not least because we don't, I think, have a naive view of it that we could agree on. And I am only pushing the philosphy out because I find the scientific one (as exemplified by llig above) more interesting and likely to provide more stable stepping stones - and some wobbly ones.
So if playing catch while on a playground roundabout confers an evolutionary advantage by impressing the opposite sex should we study physics or just practise ? Flashy skateboarding must involve a heck of a lot of newtonian mechanics
All of those sorts of skills, David, are routinely discussed as means of demonstrating an overplus of physical capabilities. "Look what I can do" -> "Look what a good provider of stuff I'd be".
Humor and elocution are likewise signals of abundant mental capacity - "Look at how well I manipulate symbols and think in multiple levels simultaneously".
You might (or might not) be interested in this link - http://mythosandlogos.com/Sartre.html - which provides an excellent summation of Sartre's views on consciousness. It was his separation of 'being-for-itself' and 'being-in-itself' which inspired R.D. Laing, David Cooper and others to apply Existentialism to psychology, most notably in Laing's 'The Divided Self' and 'The Self and Others'.
This takes me back - I wrote my dissertation on Sartre's influence on Laing's work.
Crossed. In a predator prey situation what is more useful - knowing how I feel about the situation of knowing how the opponent feels about it ?
I wonder if that sudden need to look over ones shoulder when walking through the wooods or by a babbling brook is due to a sub-concious 'background process' needing updated surveillance data. Feeling creepy about it might make one supersitious...
Jon, as I've said I'm a bit agnostic on the subject, but for the sake of argument and to try to narrow things down a bit I'll go with "self-awareness."
That fits nicely with your view of consciousness as a by-product of internal modeling for practical survival purposes.
However, explaining how something comes about is not the same as saying what it is. That B follows A is not a definition of B.
Crossed again Jon. Yes but one needs a more complex view of evolution and the activities of the concious mind to see any advantage (or not) in old wives retaining their inquisitiveness beyond child bearing age.
Thanks MacCruiskeen, but I'll stick with the naive view Except if I ever get cast on a desert island I might consider taking a history of philosophy book.
Ah, but David, I'm not sure what you mean by the 'naive view'.
The fundamental philosophical view was set out by Descartes, but not thoroughly examined until the phenomenologists of the 20th century (Husserl, first, then Sartre) got to work on it.
I agree, Marklar, that defining the scope of the definition required is not at all the same as coming up with the definition itself, but I suspect that it's a good starting place. And I agree that self-awareness is certainly the key to what we're trying to capture here. I would add an ability to project that self-awareness onto others.
The primary phenomena, I suppose it should be said, are the set of intentional phenomena I've cited before: thoughts, beliefs, desires, needs, hopes, and so forth. We go from a neurochemical state of the sort any organism can respond to (low blood sugar, perhaps) to a belief about our own internal state (I'm hungry) and predictions about our future state (if I don't eat, I'll become more uncomfortable, and eventually my functionality will diminish) to a desire (I would like to eat something) and we can assume that others might feel the same way and act on that assumption ("It's lunch time, maybe we should knock off and go for a sandwich"). All of that seems to be in the scope of what we're talking about. Collective unconscious, I'm not sure about.
"The fundamental philosophical view was set out by Descartes"
It's interesting you should bring that up, Cartesian duality is exactly the view that Dennett attacks in Consciousness Explained. By reducing consciousness to mechanics he dismisses the dualism as a myth.
Ha, nice try MacCruiskeen. I'll stick with "self-awareness".
My question spoiled by the typo up there ('of' for 'or') was because I was wondering if the ability to recognise that "I am tired" is a spin-off from the advatage of being able to target the third prey animal from the left because "it looks tired".
Also, I realize that Sarte doesn't propose a mind/body dualism like Descarte, his take is a lot more sophisticated. Dennett attacks all of this under the umbrella term "Cartesian theatre," however. You'll have to read him to see what I mean.
But I can't talk much more about Sartre until I get home from work and can pull Being and Nothingness off the shelf. I haven't read it in a good 15 years.
@OP "... more than 100 times it begins to sound and feel very natural."
A respected fiddle player (and a good teacher, too) in my town reckons he needs to play a tune about 200 times before he's nailed it.
So for most purposes, I treat the folk view of consciousness as correct, because it works for most purposes much more effectively than trying to work out the underlying neuroscience - not that I could in any case! However, when someone makes a claim about what consciousness "really is" or isn't - for example, claiming that computers or cats or bodhran players can't "really" be conscious, then I have to remember that there's an underlying layer to consider.
_+_+_+_+_+_+_+_+_+_+_+_+_+_+_+_+_+_
I'm not sure whether or why you are treating me as a proponent of the naive or folk view of consciousness. For what it's worth, my view is that consciousness does exist, in the same sense that digestion exists. It is caused by physical processes in the brain and nervous system which we don't yet understand.
Very similar processes go on in the nervous systems of cats and bodhran players, and while we are unable to communicate with them about it, it seems extremely likely that they are conscious in a quite similar way to ourselves. They see, hear, feel, experience pain.
No such processes are going on in computers, and they are not conscious.
The view that I'm opposed to is Dennett's, which is a denial of the existence of consciousness. I can't really tell if you are saying the same thing.
So I agree with llig (welcome back from limbo) that the naive view is for most purposes the practical view. However, I do think that if you want to understand consciousness, you have to take into account effects like the cricket player's reflexes, which complicate matters severely if you want to maintain a literal centralized "me" in the consciousness. That is, I do think that the practical view of consciousness is insufficient to the job of understanding consciousness.
I've been thinking to myself for quite a while about the time delay business. I think about it when I am playing badminton. Sometimes the shuttle gets fired at you very fast. I started to notice that I was getting a visual image of the shuttle, very close up, some time after I had dodged it or hit it back. One time I noticed I had the visual experience of the shuttle when my back was already turned. The highly demanding visual processing of the fast-moving shuttle must take noticeably longer than the proprioceptive processing that tells us where our body is in space.
But we don't normally notice the gap, and in fact it's hard for me to be sure what is happening in my own experience. The brain must have mechanisms to make it so everything seems to happen in the right sequence.
But even when the system breaks down, as I think it does with the shuttlecock, the delayed perception still happens to my centralised "me".
Libet, who did the interesting delay experiments, thinks that our unified subjective experience is caused by a Conscious Mental Field. He thinks this CMF explains mental phenomena that aren't caused by neurons firing.
Bernie. I think your experience with the shutlecock is part of the naive view of conciousness. Its like when you wet your foot in a puddle then hear your mate say "mind the puddle" and think he is making a joke after the event until a second mate says that he heard the words before the splash. Stuff like that is used by stage magicians and maybe has been for millenia. Its accessible to observation, can be reported, so passed on and build up within a cutlure.
Thanks for that Marklar. That's the sort of stuff I may take to the desert island. As it was my eyebrows went up when I got to "This natural belief Husserl terms the “natural attitude,” under which label he includes dogmatic scientific and philosophical beliefs, as well as ..." but by then the flute was warmed up.
In his book "Intentionality", John Searle distinguishes between aspects of consciousness which display intentionality in this sense (e.g. beliefs) and others which do not, for example "undirected anxiety". "Intentionality" is "aboutness": a belief is always about something, it doesn't make sense to say "I have a belief, but it's not about any specific thing". Whereas it does make sense to say "I am anxious, but not about any specific thing".
Learning a Tune
Learning a Tune
Hi All, I was intrigued when reading a recent post about the "chore" of learning new tunes, and I began to think about that. In particular, how do I describe a learned tune? Is it that I have the notes memorized? My muscle memory has kicked in? Or, when I have mastered some ornamentation? Ususally, I have the notes down in a relatively short amount of time, but I don't think I have learned a tune until I have played it many, many times. I like to think 100 times as the break even point where below 100 the tune still sounds like crap, and more than 100 times it begins to sound and feel very natural. Thanks for letting me spout off.
Lowhistle
# Posted on November 6th 2010 by LoWhistle
Re: Learning a Tune
It's all relative. Some folk will learn to play a tune well in half a dozen plays, for others even hundreds of plays make little difference.
From my point of view a tune is learned when you can play it to a standard you and others can enjoy. For example if you start it at a session, nobody joins in but you can still comfortably play it on your own.
# Posted on November 6th 2010 by bogman
Re: Learning a Tune
Is a tune ever really learned ?
I'm not at this game that long (in years of playing that is), but I don't think I have learned one tune, when I go back to practice a tune I haven't played for a while, I always want to change it and make it better or different.
I might be able to answer your question in 10 years time.
# Posted on November 6th 2010 by Theirlandais
Re: Learning a Tune
bogman,
Don't get big headed or anything, but I actually 100% agree with you on this.
That's not to say that I would'nt like a tune to evolve further after that stage, but to be honest, it probably won't - unless I hear a better version or decide to do a "drains up" job on it.
# Posted on November 6th 2010 by ormepipes
Re: Learning a Tune
I agree, you don't really *know* a tune until you can play it ornaments and all on autopilot without having to think about it. If you have to think about what you're doing, you're still learning the tune.
# Posted on November 6th 2010 by Marklar
Re: Learning a Tune
I don't think I ever play a tune "on autopilot without having to think about it". If I did, I wouldn't think I'd be playing the tune, 'cos it wouldn't be music. I'm wondering if I *can* play any tune on autopilot. Probably not, since I've never done it.
There's also an "ornaments are part of the tune" argument lurking in there somewhere ... I'll let someone else. I can't be bothered.
# Posted on November 6th 2010 by ethical blend
Re: Learning a Tune
I'm not sure that "autopilot" is quite the right description - but I think I can identify with the sentiment. For me, Its when you get to that stage that you can play it all the way through, with the timing spot on and your mastery of the tune not governed by your mastery of the instrument. When you know you will get through it without "fluffing" anything every time you play it, even if you don't practice it for a few weeks. I suppose you might define it as having reached "concert stage".
Having said that, "autopilot" is pretty good shorthand for the above paragraph of waffle.
As for ornaments and variations, they should, of course, be part of the "concert stage" tune - however and whenever you have introduced them. Even if you don't always stick them in the same places all the time.
# Posted on November 6th 2010 by ormepipes
Re: Learning a Tune
What I was trying to get at is being familiar enough with the tune that you can just think about how you want it to sound and it just comes out that way, instead of having to think about how to play the tune itself.
# Posted on November 6th 2010 by Marklar
Re: Learning a Tune
It is possible to learn to play a tune on autopilot if you simply learn it start to finish with a midi file.
# Posted on November 6th 2010 by Ben Steen
Re: Learning a Tune
Ben,
Yes, but its what you do with it after you have learned to play the notes with the right timing and in the right order that you actually start to learn it propperly.
Slavish copying of the midi file won't give you a "concert stage" tune - but it will give you the bones of one. It will give you the ability to play along with it in a session though.
# Posted on November 6th 2010 by ormepipes
Re: Learning a Tune
Ah, the mustard board just wouldn't be the same without nit-picking words and deliberate misunderstandings.
I think you guys know very well what I mean. I was getting at muscle memory, and I think you know that.
# Posted on November 6th 2010 by Marklar
Re: Learning a Tune
Autopilot is a dreadful term to describe someone playing music, as is the robotic style which comes from playing by rote. Knowing your instrument, very well, being familiar with the various articulations, & using phrasing are always going to be the bits which preferably work in the subconscious (then you're not overthinking) But I'm always listening to the tune. Autopilot, cruise-control, midi ... each is mechanical. But playing, listening to others, & listening to myself is a state of awareness. The ears are engaged & that is what allows me to play variations, something which sounds good. (Not that my variations always sound good) When I'm playing with others I'm listening (I may *know* the tune, but I want to be open) because someone might have an interesting interpretation. Sometimes when I ask about their variations they may not even recognize that they made them, until they play it again.
# Posted on November 6th 2010 by Ben Steen
Re: Learning a Tune
"Knowing your instrument, very well, being familiar with the various articulations, & using phrasing are always going to be the bits which preferably work in the subconscious"
Yes that's right, but your subconscious can't come through if you have to consciously think about how to play the tune.
Obviously you don't want to play like a robot without listening and shaping the sound, but you also don't want to have to consciously think about what notes are coming up in the next phrase, else your brain will get in the way of your ear.
It's not about being a robot, it's about having enough experience that you don't have to think about the mundane details and can focus on the important things.
Committing a tune to muscle memory does not mean playing it the same way every time. In face, I find that it's only after having played a tune enough to commit it to muscle memory that I can play variations without even thinking about it, that's when emotion can guide the playing with the brain getting in the way.
# Posted on November 6th 2010 by Marklar
Re: Over practising
Posted on October 29th 2010 by Dragut Reis
http://www.thesession.org/discussions/display/25873#comment545321
# Posted on November 6th 2010 by Ben Steen
Re: Learning a Tune
Let me put it this way: do you know how to do a roll if you have to think about what your fingers are doing? Or does it just happen automatically because you've done it so many times that you've committed it to muscle memory? Is that robotic playing?
# Posted on November 6th 2010 by Marklar
Re: Learning a Tune
The problem with over-practicing is getting so tired of a tune that you stop listening to what you're doing and end up training yourself to play it badly. That's a different thing.
# Posted on November 6th 2010 by Marklar
Re: Learning a Tune
Fair play, Marklar. It may be worth mentioning that my 1st response was not due to your use of any particular term. We cross-posted. I began reading this thread with the comments by ormepipes ... "Having said that, "autopilot" is pretty good shorthand for the above paragraph of waffle." I only read your comments, further up, after posting my bit. Eventually I did read the actual OP. Which I think was well answered by bogman.
# Posted on November 6th 2010 by Ben Steen
& the link I thought was good enough for a complete read, although the end might be most relevant,
"The other point that might be helpful is to register the difference it makes when you are 'learning' a tune rather than just 'practising' it. I personally find that an hour sat down learning the details of a tune that I have in my head (either from a recording or a session) is such an intense and concentrated form of playing, thinking, and learning that it is worth two or three hours of just 'practising'. The danger of just playing through tunes is that you can go into auto-pilot and stop making the mental effort to realize the full potential of the tune. In one way, the effort of practising makes the tunes harder, rather than easier, to play, as you become more familiar with the tune and begin to understand the almost infinite variety with which it can be played."
Dragut Reis
# Posted on November 6th 2010 by Ben Steen
Re: Learning a Tune
I get you, I was doing some cross-posting myself. I just felt like I was being taken too literally and needed to explain what I meant.
# Posted on November 6th 2010 by Marklar
Re: Learning a Tune
I doubt I have played any tunes reasonably well as many as a hundred times. The oens I sort of know seemm tohave gone throguh stages of knowing, that may be something like:
A. Have it in my head well enough that I can work on it for a while without referring to the source.
B. So long as I can think of the next phrase my fingers find some notes that sound like the tune.
C. My fingers find some notes that sound like the tune without needing to keep the next phrase in my head.
D. Now have spare brain capacity to start realy working on it. Maybe a count of 1 on the way to 100.
E, F, G... dunno.
"C" may be what Marklar means as autopilot (except for me the twiddly bits are sparse). I often warm the flute up whilst noodling and reading posts here and sometimes I accidentaly get through a tune or two without seeming to engage brain. I don't think that muscle memory though, just that I have a basic record of the tune stored so that I don't **have** to think "what comes next" so I can think about what I am doing.
# Posted on November 6th 2010 by David50
Re: Learning a Tune
Marklar,
And I was only trying to explain a possible definition for your "autopilot". The paragraph I was refering to as waffle was the one that I had written myself. I hope you did'nt think I was refering to someone elses post.. Sorry if I offended, that was not my intent.
And now you've made me write another paragraph of waffle !
# Posted on November 6th 2010 by ormepipes
Re: Learning a Tune
No offense taken, I was just getting frustrated because it seemed like I was being taken to say something that I don't agree with. And I wasn't really commenting on your post, I cross-posted with you.
# Posted on November 6th 2010 by Marklar
Re: Learning a Tune
Oh, I thought you meant "muscle memory" or something like that. Same as "autopilot" in my book. I don't play like that. I don't ever want to play like that. I wasn't playing with words.
# Posted on November 7th 2010 by ethical blend
Re: Learning a Tune
Ethical blend, you do play with muscle memory, all musicians do. I think you may have a different understanding of the term.
http://www.wisegeek.com/what-is-muscle-memory.htm
# Posted on November 7th 2010 by Marklar
Re: Learning a Tune
Now we have that cleared up.
Ethical,
Forgive my ignorance, what's your instrument ? - I can't remember from previous posts and your profile is'nt telling me.
I'm wondering how you can possibly operate without muscle memory coming into play. I don't understand - you might be unique - this is interesting - I may learn something else!
# Posted on November 7th 2010 by ormepipes
Re: Learning a Tune
It's not really the muscles, is it? The wiring now ...
# Posted on November 7th 2010 by Ben Steen
Re: Learning a Tune
Muscle memory comes into it, I guess, although I for one hate the term. I suppose it comes into it in the little things you do, like the way you hold your instrument, where your fingers go to make certain notes etc. But, honestly, when I play a tune, it's not "muscle memory" or "autopilot" that helps me remember the tune. The tune's going in my head. I play it. Will Harmon has described before now very well what he does, which, IIRC, is something like the tune is happening in his head a split second before it comes out of the instrument. That's not muscle memory. I've played with people who play whole tunes on "autopilot", who use "muscle memory" to learn a tune - the thread subject, right? learning a tune? - and who might as well be playing a typewriter for all the music they make.
# Posted on November 7th 2010 by ethical blend
Re: Learning a Tune
My understanding, which may be complete tosh, is that it is physically impossible to play tunes at speed by using concious thought, that the reaction speed of a human simply can not cope.
Going on from this initial premise, The reason we can play tunes is down to some unconcious (auto pilot?) ability that we can train ourselves to achieve.
Its a serious question Ethical, not a wind-up, I'm fascinated.
# Posted on November 7th 2010 by ormepipes
Re: Learning a Tune
I think I know what you're getting at ethical blend, there's really two things going on, the knowledge of the phrases that you need to play which runs a bit ahead of what you're doing, and the physical ability to pull those phrases off acquired by repetition. You seem to be assuming that it's one or the other, but in reality playing involves both all the time.
You're confusing that with playing by rote like a player piano, but that's not really the same thing. It's like the difference between writing and typing, you can be creative and engaged or not. I think that's more about having your ear turned on and being involved in your own playing.
# Posted on November 7th 2010 by Marklar
Re: Learning a Tune
"It's not really the muscles, is it? The wiring now ..."
Well, it's really about training neural pathways to use the muscles in certain ways.
# Posted on November 7th 2010 by Marklar
Re: Learning a Tune
I heard a juggler say that while he was juggling time seemed to slow down. I find the same happens when I'm playing a tune I know really well. It feels a bit like running along stepping stones -- when you first learn a tune you have to be slow and deliberate. But once you know how it all fits together...
# Posted on November 7th 2010 by gam
Re: Learning a Tune
"something like the tune is happening in his head a split second before it comes out of the instrument"
Is that
1/ A prior physical knowledge of the required finger positioning and speed of movement that will give you the effect your after.
2/ prior knowledge of how the notes in the tune will sound as you hit them.
3/ Both 1 and 2 ?
4/ Something else I'm missing
Deep stuff this - for me at any rate !
# Posted on November 7th 2010 by ormepipes
Re: Learning a Tune
http://books.google.com/books?id=7rJ5gI1LbXoC
"The Blank Slate"
Steven Pinker
page 85 & 94
# Posted on November 7th 2010 by Ben Steen
Re: Learning a Tune
Ben, I read page 94 but page 85 is missing from the free online version for some reason. It looks like a very interesting book, but I don't see what you're getting at in relation to this thread.
What I read seemed to be about how the brain has innate wiring that cannot be easily changed, while it is possible to re-wire the brain in certain ways. And I got a sense about points being made about determinism and free will in relation to ethics.
But I didn't get much more than that, and while I get the sense that the book is supposed to be controversial, I read a bit more and didn't see anything that seems new in philosophy of mind or ethics. But I only read about a dozen pages.
Anyway, what connection were you making to this thread? Can you quote the relevant bits?
# Posted on November 7th 2010 by Marklar
Re: Learning a Tune
Dunno, I've got pages 85-6;
"The fact that the brain changes when we learn is not, as some have claimed, a radical discovery with profound implications for nature and nurture or human potential...If thought and action are products of the physical activity of the brain, and if thought and action can be affected by experience, then experience has to leave a trace in the physical structure of the brain.
So there is no scientific question as to whether experience, learning, and practice affect the brain; they surely do if we are even vaguely on the right track. It is not surprising that people who can play the violin have different brains from those who cannot, or that masters of sign language or of Braille have different brains from people who speak and read. Your brain changes when you are introduced to a new person, when you hear a bit of gossip, when you watch the Oscars, when you polish your golf stroke--in short, whenever an experience leaves a trace in the mind...We already knew trained violinists play better than beginners or we would never have put their heads in the scanner to begin with. Neural plasticity is just another name for learning and development, described at a different level of analysis."
pg. 94
"Most demonstrations of plasticity involve remappings within primary sensory cortex. A brain area for an amputated or immobilized finger ... " been there, done that.
Wish I could carry on, maybe later. I'm going home to eat. My brain is tapped.
# Posted on November 7th 2010 by Ben Steen
BTW
Steven Pinker is a wild man. This is not his best stuff, it drifts around plenty. But he is always fun to read.
Ben
# Posted on November 7th 2010 by Ben Steen
Re: Learning a Tune
Someone recently commented that a troll is someone who comes on here now and again and says stuff like you lot just spend your time going round in circles and getting nowhere...or something like that. Well, here's me, Homo sapiens trollosessionus. With the latest monicker to go with the self-styled linnaean classification.
So, what am I on about? This is going round in circles with people throwing in little half-truths; Marklar asking honest questions about a diffuse kind of link, where we would rather have had the poster telling us in his own words what he actually gleaned from Pinker's book.
Anyway that doesn't matter. What might be slightly more useful is a few links to - yes, I'm sorry but it has to be - Wikipedia.
Firstly, so-called "Muscle Memory" , when your fingers do the talking but you could be thinking of anything else, even getting yer nookey; The most likely suspect would be the Cerebellum:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cerebellum
So what about tune memory? the function of your brain which actually "switches on" the memory system...and it's "wired" up to many other conscious brain areas (gawd, I hate the term "wired" it's so reductionist and simplistic, to describe how neurons are interconnected) - for quite a lot of that function I'd plump for the hippocampus: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hippocampus
But by now you're thinking (consciously): Oh fvck I've played the Contradiction Reel 3 times over now, doesn't convention dictate that I should move on to another tune and should I make it a nice easy tune for the numpties or keep it up at the arcane level that we're at? - So that's your higher conscious parts of the brain coming to the rescue, ie the prefrontal cortex: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prefrontal_cortex
Then of course there is the feedback of the noise that you and yer mates are making and that is done by the auditory cortex, including the superior temporal gyrus (Heschl's Gyri) - I think it is the right STG but I'm a bit p!ssed so I could be wrong:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primary_auditory_cortex
And of course why would one bother at all with making music if it weren't fun, or somehow or other emotionally gratifying? Well, there is the limbic system in general (which includes the aforementioned hippocampus) which deals with emotions (the limbic system does contain grey matter [neuronal - not axonal] so is bona fide de facto proper brain cells per se. Ad nauseam...
So, I hope this little will help shine a candle and deter errant circumnavigation.
# Posted on November 7th 2010 by Rudall the time
Re: Learning a Tune
Oh yeah - Limbic system wiki link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limbic_system
# Posted on November 7th 2010 by Rudall the time
Re: Learning a Tune
Oh, I see, you're getting at the fact that learning a tune changes the brain.
Anyway, thanks for linking the book, I may read it some more. Pinker is interesting, he reminds me of Dennett, though I don't really agree with the reduction of consciousness to behavioral effects which are then taken as cause after the fact. But I admit that I'm basing that on intuition and don't have a coherent counter-argument, aside from a sneaking suspicion that causality is a practical ordering of past events which have no hard link to causes, just patterns that are interpreted by human minds to make the world usable through experience. Though I guess I'm falling right into their Darwinism through that. Maybe they're right and I just don't want to admit it.
# Posted on November 7th 2010 by Marklar
Re: Learning a Tune
Sorry, cross-posted, I was replying to Ben.
# Posted on November 7th 2010 by Marklar
Re: Learning a Tune
Not quite sure where Darwinism comes into it - please enlighten me. I did click on the Pinker link but it hung up on me so I may well be missing something.
Neuronal plasticity? Again I may have missed out on some cardinal issue due to a dodgy link. But a while back I did some experiments using transgenic Drosophila larval NMJ's as a model for Alzheimer's.
Please tell me your understanding of neuronal plasticity so we both know at what level we are at. Thanks.
# Posted on November 7th 2010 by Rudall the time
Re: Learning a Tune
I think llig said a while ago (when he was taking a break from being surly, and in the mood to be profound) that learning a tune was like getting to know a person--you can form an acquaintance in a few minutes or hours, but truly getting to know someone can be the work of a lifetime. There are so many degrees of knowing a tune that it is hard to pin it down.
# Posted on November 7th 2010 by AlBrown
Re: Learning a Tune
He's back with anew moniker! See Al I told you he knew stuff! I like him.. Good man Rudall..I hope you are not removed. I think I like these troll fellahs.
# Posted on November 7th 2010 by big_tab
Re: Learning a Tune
Hey Rudall, that's interesting, in debating with ethical blend I realized that at least two things were going on where I had been imagining just one: what I was thinking of as "muscle memory" and the actual memory of how the tune should go seem different things.
It seems from experience that during playing my fingers know what to do completely without conscious thought, while there's some knowledge of the tune going through my head that isn't conscious in the way it is when just learning the tune but not entirely subconscious either.
Not like "first finger then third" but just kind of a pattern template, which isn't conscious in the slow sense of having to think about what to do but conscious enough that I can see ahead and makes decisions on what to play before I actually play the phrase, like "I'm going to drone it this time around on the D."
Is that what you're getting at with the cerubellum vs. the hippocamus? While the prefrontal cortex is more like "that flute player sure is cute" and the auditory cortex is having your ears on for reacting to the feedback loop?
Wow, my brain hurts when contemplating itself, who knew this was so damn complicated and mysterious.
# Posted on November 7th 2010 by Marklar
Re: Learning a Tune
Rudall, the Darwinism comes with the idea that our brains are somewhat hardwired at birth for certain behaviors due to natural selection. I haven't read the whole of the Pinker book but I got that drift from what I read.
# Posted on November 7th 2010 by Marklar
Re: Learning a Tune
Oh, and I don't know a great deal about neuronal plasticity but I wasn't really talking about that. My background is more in philosophy not neuroscience, though I've studied a bit in cognitive science as it relates to philosophy of mind, artificial intelligence and information science.
# Posted on November 7th 2010 by Marklar
Re: Learning a Tune
At some point we're going to need to start talking about tunes again I think.
# Posted on November 7th 2010 by Marklar
Re: Learning a Tune
Rudall is just Danny, back again. And he does something medical in the real world, I think, so I would give him credit for knowing one neuron from the other...
# Posted on November 7th 2010 by AlBrown
Re: Learning a Tune
Oh.. Dissappointing! No offence Danny..I thought it was the "Sessions are sh*te" fellah back.
# Posted on November 7th 2010 by big_tab
Re: Learning a Tune
Ah, OK, Gotcha Marklar. But it doesn't even work like that. did you ever hear of the case of Jeanie, a girl in California USA, or feral children brought up by dogs or wolves or gorillas etc?
Let me just briefly outline jeanie. Although she was an absolutely normal child intellectually, during her childhood her parents were abusive and neglectful - her father who was mentally ill had her tied to a chair in the dark for years - etc etc, horrible - but the outcome was she couldn't speak. Blah-de blah - she got rescued and social workers spent a lot of time trying to teach her to speak. Yes, she was able to learn VOCABULARY, just loads of words, but she had missed - or rather, been denied the opportunity - for her brain to develop the capacity for grammar and syntax. Yep. You may have thought grammar was such a pane in the whole when you were at school - but we need it to think as we do in a Chomsky-esque kind of way.
If a Martian philologist landed on Earth tomorrow he would think gawd they are a boring bunch they all speak the same language. All human languages, despite the huge differences perceived by us, have more in common than seperate. they have vocabulary grammar and syntax. And the propensity to integrate these qualities is, as you say, hardwired, but only if they are upregulated at crucial points in time of development. That's why I shy away from the notion of hardwiring - firstly it is time dependent thus potentially transient, but also it most likely is upregulated in different people to different degrees. Thirdly, and OK this is not about hardwiring but about Darwinism - correct me if I'm wrong, I'm an old geezer so I may be behind the times wrt Darwinian theory, but I was of the opinion that sexual selection (as opposed to survival selection) in a human context may be about factors which are determined by, and factors which determine, the course of human social evolution. A simple example would be black skin colour. If a group of people live in a country where there is intense sunlight dark skin containing melanin would be beneficial. It could be argued that eventually all the fairer skinned people would die off from skin cancer (but that would be unlikely), leaving just dark skinned people. But surely, if it got around the neighbourhood as an urban myth that fair skinned people didn't thrive so well in this country, the possession of fair skin would become unnattractive and that trait in that country would eventually die out leaving predominantly dark-skinned people. So it would be societal pressures which would drive evolution. If it was left to just survival selection this process would have taken 10X longer.
Just a thought.
# Posted on November 7th 2010 by Rudall the time
Re: Learning a Tune
>At some point we're going to need to start talking about tunes again I think.
Yeah OK , but no harm, no harm at all, in going off at tangents and having a good old bark at the moon. Oh, i can talk about tunes, no prob.
# Posted on November 7th 2010 by Rudall the time
Re: Learning a Tune
Great stuff Rudall....I think.
# Posted on November 7th 2010 by big_tab
Re: Learning a Tune
OK Rudall, but just to be clear I was objecting to the reduction of consciousness to the Darwinian explanations that Pinker and Dennett champion, I just don't have a good counter-argument.
Still, Darwinism doesn't have to be restricted to sexual selection, societal selection can work too. The mechanism isn't so important, the selection process is the point I think, because that's what leads to adaptation.
And I think Chomsky-ites might argue that language is an innate part of human cognition and your examples are unfortunate aberrations due to faulty mental development rather than examples of normal mental development absent of language. Isn't there a case of siblings who grew up in isolation who invented their own language to communicate with each other? So language acquisition does seem innate somehow.
Also, paragraph breaks are nice now and again.
# Posted on November 7th 2010 by Marklar
Re: Learning a Tune
Er, I meant survival selection, not sexual selection, but whatever. It doesn't matter what the selection process is, as long as the environment determines the genes that survive.
# Posted on November 7th 2010 by Marklar
Re: Learning a Tune
Don't know much about Pinker's views - I haven't read anything of his since Language Instinct - but I think it's perhaps missing a point to refer to Dennett as reductionist. Certainly he's a materialist - there's no question of a "soul" or any other metaphysical entity in his writings, so it's all down to the brain. I think he'd characterize consciousness as "brains doing what brains do", and he'd tell you that his business is to explain what it is that brains do, as near as we can tell.
However, I don't think that's quite "reductionist" in my book. For me, "reductionism" is the claim that X "is simply" Y, where Y is a lower-level science, and I don't get that sense from Dennett at all. He's studying consciousness, as a philosopher well-informed in neuroscience, but he's not trying to claim that understanding neuroscience is sufficient to understanding philosophy of mind, or consciousness, any more than he'd claim that understanding physics automatically gives you chemistry.
I suppose this is all rather far from the course, but that's okay. A session is a place where you play tunes and talk about anything, and this is a virtual session. How boring would a session be if you only talked about tunes?
# Posted on November 7th 2010 by Jon Kiparsky
Re: Learning a Tune
If I can, I'd like to point out that the two of you - Marklar and rudall seem to be arguing strenuously for the same posiiton on the acquisition business. Rudall is claiming that there is feral child evidence to the effect that a child deprived of linguistic input past the critical period was unable to acquire syntax, although some semantic development ocurred, and that this implies that language acquisition is innate.
Marklar is claiming that, no, language acquisition is in fact innate, because there are cases (Nicaraguan sign language is the best example I can come up with) where children in linguistic isolation develop private languages.
So no need to contest this one: you both have presented evidence for the same position.
(As an aside, I know of one such case, but it was a human-induced isolation, not a "raised by wolves" story, as I recall... anyway, child comes to adulthood in extreme poverty of stimulus... if there's an actual "raised by chickens" or whatever story, I'd like a pointer to it, to satisfy my curiousity)
# Posted on November 7th 2010 by Jon Kiparsky
Re: Learning a Tune
Maybe I missed the point Jon, but I got the clear impression from Consciousness Explained that he was essentially arguing that the concept of self was an illusion that could be explained completely by physical processes in the brain and there was nothing beyond that. No soul, no "me," nothing beyond bio-chemical processes that give rise to a subjective feeling of self for practical purposes. Which fits nicely with a Darwinist explanation of consciousness as a survival mechanism.
I did get the impression that he felt that neuroscience was sufficient to explain conscious thought. But maybe I was missing something.
# Posted on November 7th 2010 by Marklar
Re: Learning a Tune
"So no need to contest this one: you both have presented evidence for the same position. "
Maybe so, I had a hard time reading Rudall's post and may have misunderstood it.
# Posted on November 7th 2010 by Marklar
Re: Learning a Tune
Jon, I just pulled Consciousness Explained off the bookshelf and he does seem to explicitly reduce consciousness to mechanics, as in his concept of a conscious robot. See chapter 14. That's a pretty radical reduction.
He seems to be arguing very hard for hard AI, which implies that any sufficiently complex arrangement of switches flipped by a sufficiently complex and well-programmed algorithm can give rise to consciousness. You can't reduce consciousness much further than that.
# Posted on November 7th 2010 by Marklar
Re: Learning a Tune
Marklar - Do you accept the distinction between materialism and reductionism? Materialism, undeniably, is central to Dennett's view. If you want an immaterial soul, you won't find a place for it in his philosophy of mind. For me, though, reductionism is something else.
Suppose I were to claim that all of chemistry proceeds from physics - this is not to say that chemistry is reducible to physics. The former claim says that chemistry develops out of (and therefore, in some sense, can be explained in terms of) the laws of physics, were they sufficiently understood.
To say that chemisty is reducible to physics, on the other hand, would be to claim that, knowing physics, one could then proceed to deduce chemistry, as a sort of bonus. Clearly, we want to accept the former and reject the latter.
For the AI, I thnk that is again a basic materialist view. He's saying that the substrate is not important, that the content of the intentional system is what makes it conscious or not. If you want to make a metaphysical claim, that consciousness devolves from something extra-material, that's your privilege, and I won't try to argue the point. But Dennett's claim is more that consciousness can be explained without recourse to such extra-material factors than that it "reduces to" some simpler body of knowledge.
I'll try to take a look at chapter 14 tomorrow and pick up on your specifics when I've done that.
# Posted on November 7th 2010 by Jon Kiparsky
Re: Learning a Tune
This just occurred to me:
The difference between materialism and reductionism is this: Reductionism is a fallacious claim that ignores the importance of levels of description. Claiming that music is "reducible to physics" would be fallacious because although the material of music - patterns of vibrations in air - can be described in terms of decomposition of waves, this is not a useful approach to understanding a tune.
Materialism, on the other hand, is a philosophical position: it is a rejection of metaphysical explanations, that is explanations which cannot be justified on empirical evidence. If you reject this claim, you reject the possibility of rational argument, because there are no rational arguments to be made about spurious entities. See A. J. Ayer's Language Truth and Logic on the place of the metaphysical in philosophical discussion. If I recall correctly, he attempts to banish the metaphysical from philosophy on the reasonable grounds that nobody can be expected to make a convincing argument about something which cannot affect the material world and therefore cannot be tested.
# Posted on November 7th 2010 by Jon Kiparsky
Re: Learning a Tune
In short, "what is asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence."
# Posted on November 7th 2010 by Will Harmon
Re: Learning a Tune
I think the term "reduction" is getting in the way, but here's the real problem:
The mind gives rise to logic which gives rise to mathematics which gives rise to computer science. Then Dennett wants to claim that the mind can be explained completely in terms of computer science.
Suppose, for the sake of argument, that there is more to mind than just logic. But since mathematics is based on logic alone, you just get a slice of mind there. Then mathematics gives rise to computer science, which is really just a slice of mathematics. Then Dennett claims that the mind--what you started with--is completely encapsulated in computer science. You are "reducing" the mind to a subset of mental processes which can be easily quantified by your higher level models, and ignoring the rest.
The problem is that you start with mind in the first place and then end up equating that with the heavily filtered and simplified conceptualizations that you were able to build into practical machines.
The physics/chemistry thing isn't a good analogy because in this case your foundation is also the exact same thing you are reducing, but instead of reducing all the way back down into what you started from you cop out by equating mind to oversimplified models of that thing you started from.
I'm talking about a reduction upstream while you're talking aobut a reduction downstream, if that makes sense. With philosophy of mind you're starting with the end product.
This is my main problem with Dennett, I feel that there's a bit of slight-of-hand going on here, where he wants to claim that consciousness is explainable with simplified models constructed out of consciousness itself, without really questioning if those models really encapsulate their creators.
# Posted on November 7th 2010 by Marklar
Re: Learning a Tune
"See A. J. Ayer's Language Truth and Logic on the place of the metaphysical in philosophical discussion"
I have that on my bookshelf too. But I'm not making metaphysical arguments, I'm making skeptical arguments.
# Posted on November 7th 2010 by Marklar
Re: Learning a Tune
Oh, and I have Quine on my bookshelf too, if you really want to get into logic and language.
# Posted on November 7th 2010 by Marklar
Re: Learning a Tune
I have some details that I'd love to dive into on your last post, but let me ask you two questions:
1) Do you feel that there's a responsible way to study the nature of consciousness? Or is this a lost cause?
2) Do you feel that consciousness can be understood in materialistic terms, or is this in principle impossible?
It sounds to me like your objections are not so much to Dennett as to the enterprise as a whole - if that's the case, we might have to just disagree, which is fine with me.
Looking at your "reduction" I think your objection is to circularity more than to a reductionistic approach. Your claim, if I understand you, is that since the mind creates logic, that any logical approach to understanding the mind is a circular argument, is this roughly correct?
There are some interesting arguments to be had there, but we're talking about something other than Dennett at that point.
# Posted on November 7th 2010 by Jon Kiparsky
Re: Learning a Tune
To put it in Platonic terms, I think that Dennett is trying to convince us that we can understand the forms completely in terms of the shadows.
You may object that the forms are just metaphysics, but I think that Plato would see that as a cop-out by a prisoner too accustomed to the dark to see the light.
Thought I'm not going to make any claims about the forms, just pointing out the ridiculousness of clinging to shadows of things as if they are the things themselves.
# Posted on November 7th 2010 by Marklar
Re: Learning a Tune
Jon, you kind of hit the nail on the head, I have serious doubts about the ability of the mind to understand itself. It is circular by nature.
But I'm a true skeptic, I doubt my own position as well. You could almost say I have no position at all. I'm open to possibility but I need evidence.
The bottom line is that I need evidence to accept that consciousness can be reduced to mechanics. Like the Turing Test.
Research into hard AI has been going on a long time and at least in terms of natural language processing they have hit a brick wall. Until a machine can be made to convince me that it's a person, I'm just not buying it. I view hard AI in the same light as alien UFOs, show me the evidence, otherwise I don't buy it.
# Posted on November 7th 2010 by Marklar
Re: Learning a Tune
Well, I never found the cave to be a very convincing piece of work. In this case, I don't see it as telling me much of anything. "The mind" is a label we put on a set of phenomena which can be observed. Having observed, we can try to put our observations in line with other observations, possibly from other fields, and draw conclusions. I don't see any forms at all - the phenomena are all. So if you're seeing some "Mind" with the capital M that has to be explained, instead of your mind and my mind and Will's mind, then I think we're talking about different sorts of things, and it's not surprising that we disagree on some things. It's certainly not surprising that you have a hard time with Dennett, I don't think the idea of forms enters into his picture at all.
# Posted on November 7th 2010 by Jon Kiparsky
Re: Learning a Tune
I see there was a bit of cross-posting there. Anyway, I've got to turn in - I'll pick up on some loose ends in the morning. Thanks for an interesting discussion so far.
# Posted on November 7th 2010 by Jon Kiparsky
Re: Learning a Tune
Well, I shouldn't have brought Plato into it, I just like the analogy.
But in any case, I don't believe in Mind with a capital M. But I also don't believe in thinking machines. I'm a computer programmer and I know how computers work down to a basic level, they are just arrays of switches which are flipped by software. I don't see how you get to consciousness from there.
But I'd love to be proven wrong, I'd love to see a thinking machine. But I need to see it to believe it, the way computers work is so far removed from actual thought that I don't see how it can be done with anything remotely resembling current technology. They are nothing more than arrays of switches.
Computers can only "seem" smart because of clever switch-flipping by programmers like me, but that makes them exactly as conscious as puppets. I won't believe in a thinking computer until I see one. Believe me, current computers are as conscious as a light switch and just as intelligent.
# Posted on November 7th 2010 by Marklar
Re: Learning a Tune
I tend to go with the theory that consciousness *is* mechanistic, although we don't understand the machine or its processes well at all yet (and may never reach that understanding). Really, our species is just now at the cusp of starting to suss out our own genetic, chemical, and electrical ingredients, let alone the recipes and cooking methods. We have much to learn, if we don't destroy ourselves first.
But it seems to me that the evidence is already mounting for biochemical and electrical processes as the stuff of consciousness. In contrast, there's not much new substantive evidence on the spiritual or magic front. The last person to walk on water was about 80 generations ago, and none of the individuals since, or the 7 billion current copies, have provided any proof that their consciousness will outlast their carbon molecules.
# Posted on November 7th 2010 by Will Harmon
Re: Learning a Tune
And for the life of me, neural plasticity aside, I have no idea what this has to do with learning a tune.
# Posted on November 7th 2010 by Will Harmon
Re: Learning a Tune
Wow! 46 replies overnight!. And deep, serious ones if I'm not mistaken. I wish I'd stayed up to read Marklar's first reply to me. Cracking reply, which helps me to understand that (probably slight) differences of approach we're bringing to this.
Now to read the rest ...
# Posted on November 7th 2010 by ethical blend
Re: Learning a Tune
Er ... OK ... I've read 'em. All beyond me. I'll stick to tunes.
# Posted on November 7th 2010 by ethical blend
Re: Learning a Tune
Just to get really serious for a moment on this rather frivolous thread....
Jon Kiparsky says:
"....if there's an actual "raised by chickens" or whatever story, I'd like a pointer to it, to satisfy my curiousity"
Well at least that child would be able to cross the road on his own....
# Posted on November 7th 2010 by Rudall the time
Re: Learning a Tune
All very interesting. By the way it has been shown that your brain can come to a decision before you do (Subjects in an MRI scanner were asked to select a button or similar, and to say when they had decided which one it was going to be. Meanwhile the researcher outside knew several (I forget how may) seconds before the subject just by watching the scan). Maybe this is what is going on when we play instruments. It is hard to imagine that our brains are doing stuff and not telling us, but it might explain the 'autopilot' feeling, amongst other things.
# Posted on November 7th 2010 by gam
Re: Learning a Tune
P.S. You may find this interesting :
http://www.bloomsburyacademic.com/view/SciencesFirstMistake_9781849662697/book-ba-9781849662697.xml
It's free online (or 50 quid!)
# Posted on November 7th 2010 by gam
Re: Learning a Tune
"Well at least that child would be able to cross the road on his own ..." ... but would never command much of a salary.
# Posted on November 7th 2010 by ethical blend
Re: Learning a Tune
Jon - it's a few years since I read this book, but I think it included a description of a child who displayed the same behaviour as Jeanie and could only learn vocabulary not syntax; how certain anyone is that such children have really been "raised" by animals is not clear to me.
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Savage-Girls-Wild-Boys-Children/dp/0571214606/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1289144112&sr=1-1
# Posted on November 7th 2010 by Slightly Mad Scientist
Re: Learning a Tune
I went home last night & played tunes for hours. I was going to come back & pick up where I left off, on here. But, it looks like you don't need me. I'll try to read the comments above (minus the Wikipedia links ;)
So, before I try to fathom the mammoth thread above 2 things.
I'm not sure where is my copy of "How the Mind Works" (Pinker) At least I read that book. As far as "The Blank Slate", I have only seen it on Google books. I'm not sure what all he is on to there. A bit of everything? From my brief skimming I think he might be wildly speculating. blah-blah ... woof-woof.
Finally, back to the OP ~ Bogman's response works for me.
# Posted on November 7th 2010 by Ben Steen
Re: Learning a Tune
Jon, I've been thinking about this mind question a lot and the problem I keep having is that I keep getting forced into a position that I don't think is right, and yet I can't avoid it.
You (or rather my reading of Dennett) seem to be saying that the mind can be completely understood in terms of its mechanics. A crucial point of this, from Dennet anyway, is to dispel the myth that there is some metaphysical aspect of mind that can't be understood or described.
I don't buy the myth but I don't buy it's destruction either.
My main objection is that when you postulate a model of the mind (any model) and then claim that that's all there is to it, you are confusing the sign with what it signifies. The symbolic model is taken as being exactly that which the symbols represent. This is the slight-of-hand that I object to in Dennett.
The problem is that I am now in the position of implying that there is some metaphysical aspect of mind that can't be gotten at through modeling it. I can't bring myself to accept that any more than I accept that a model of a mind can be a mind itself.
My position really comes down to skepticism, not metaphysics. I think that there are limits of what can be known. Philosophers have made heroic efforts at grounding knowledge in certainty for thousands of years and yet uncertainty remains, even at the fundamental levels of logic and mathematics (see Quine's objections to set theory in his essay The Ways of Paradox).
The one thing that is always hidden from phenomenological reflection is that which reflects. It cannot be said what it is, only that it is, in the Cartesian sense.
I don't claim that there is some mystical aspect of mind that is unknowable. I claim that it is impossible to answer the question because knowledge itself is not up to the task. To create a mechanical mind means creating a knowledge machine, however that assumes an ontological grounding for knowledge that hasn't really been achieved (as far as I know). It means knowing how to know, if that makes sense, an understanding of understanding itself.
For this reason, I believe that hard AI is nothing more than puppetry. We can create (theoretically at some point) machines that appear to think, but we can only give the appearance of thought because we have nothing else to give beyond those aspects of mind that we can observe (namely, behavior). This can only be "thought" to the extent that we define thought as the manifestations of it that we can observe and model. But the question of what thought is will remain an open one to the thinker, I believe.
So we can't get at thought due to lack of a proper mirror to observe our thought in. Neuroscience seems to provide such a mirror, but aside from the fact that that involves examining effects and equating them with causes (something else I'm uncertain about), that also requires that you assume that this mirror works before you use it. What criteria can you use to test this mirror, what is it grounded in aside from the assumption that it is correct?
Sorry, thinking about this has kept me up all night, just had to get it off my chest.
# Posted on November 7th 2010 by Marklar
My Mind will never be easy
or Around the House & Mind the Dresser.
Draw a dot on a chalk board, that is what is known.
Draw a circle around the dot, that is what is unknown.
When you know everything inside the circle draw a larger circle around the 1st circle ...
Sorry, I haven't gotten around to reading any of the posts I missed last night.
# Posted on November 7th 2010 by Ben Steen
Re: Learning a Tune
Marklar - I think one essential thing that's keeping you from Dennett's view is that you're viewing consciousness as a sort of "secret sauce" that you put on things and make them conscious. People have the secret sauce, computers don't, there you go.
I think the point of the "intentional stance" is precisely to banish the idea of consciousness as "stuff" that things have or don't have, or have in some degree. If you can get behind that, you might find him more palatable.
# Posted on November 7th 2010 by Jon Kiparsky
Re: Learning a Tune
Cross-posting again. This was a response to your postings from last night, not the long one that just appeared...
# Posted on November 7th 2010 by Jon Kiparsky
Re: Learning a Tune
Think I'll clean my chalkboard & dust the erasers.
# Posted on November 7th 2010 by Ben Steen
Re: Learning a Tune
Yes, Jon, I got that from Dennett, he wants to get rid of the notion of an inner mind, a "consciousness sauce" if you like, that is apart from the actual workings of the mind itself and makes it more than the sum of its parts.
My objection is that he is not really explaining consciousness by doing this, he is actually destroying the idea of consciousness itself. Or, from my point of view, getting rid of it by simply ignoring it and redefining the mind to fit this idea. Which is a neat trick because this definition works just fine from a scientific point of view.
To put it another way, when he says that machines can be conscious, what he's *really* saying is that we *aren't* conscious. We just imagine that we are.
In any case, there's value to what he's saying, because the subjective aspects of consciousness cannot be grasped (at least so far) through science and so should be removed from a scientific model of the mind.
My main objection is taking this scientific model of the mind as literally being mind itself. I think that is going to far. He's really just getting rid of the problem of an ineffable consciousness by ignoring it, which is fine for practical purposes, but philosophically I feel that this is a cop-out.
# Posted on November 7th 2010 by Marklar
Re: Learning a Tune
Marklar
"I have serious doubts about the ability of the mind to understand itself. It is circular by nature."
"The one thing that is always hidden from phenomenological reflection is that which reflects"
I find these philosophical, bordering on the mystical. A long way from neuroscience and the study of behaviour, from the stuff that Danny (if it is he) gave links to. Any model we have now is "work in progress" that explains a few things. Echoing Will, with luck we have thousands of years yet work on it. I am skeptical that a philosophical approach can cut many corners.
Learning to learn tunes makes me read the scientific stuff with a more particular interest.
# Posted on November 7th 2010 by David50
Re: Learning a Tune
To be clear, I don't think the mind can necessarily be completely understood through its mechanics - that would be a reductionistic view. I believe that the mind is an emergent property of a brain doing what brains do.
Since you're a programmer, you might like this analogy better: I might understand completely the algorithms driving a chess-playing program, and still have no idea move the program will make next.
I've been doing a lot of speaking on Dennett's behalf, which may be presumptuous of me, but I think he'd take the same position.
# Posted on November 7th 2010 by Jon Kiparsky
Re: Learning a Tune
"To put it another way, when he says that machines can be conscious, what he's *really* saying is that we *aren't* conscious. We just imagine that we are."
Sure, that's actually a nice way to put it. We aren't "really" conscious, but we take the intentional stance towards ourselves, and treat ourselves as though we had thoughts, beliefs, desires, et cetera.
# Posted on November 7th 2010 by Jon Kiparsky
Re: Learning a Tune
Skepticism is good.
Unlike mysticism, science doesn't claim to have all (or even all that many) of the answers. But it does ask much better questions.
Our capacity to learn stems mostly from our willingness to doubt, to ask questions.
# Posted on November 7th 2010 by Will Harmon
Re: Learning a Tune
"I find these philosophical, bordering on the mystical. A long way from neuroscience and the study of behaviour, "
You're right, but I was talking philosophy. Dennett is a philosopher, not a neuroscientist, though he knows a scary amount about neuroscience. He's applying neuroscience to philosophy, not the other way around.
Jon, you may not know the next move the computer will make, but the human programmer could predict it. You could too, given your knowledge of the algorithms, just run the inputs through the algorithms and you will get the answer. Computers are fundamentally predictable, it's a mathematical necessity for their operation.
Displays of intelligence by computers are always reflections of the intelligence of the human programmers. That's why I call it puppetry, it's really like that.
Anyway, I'm going to hang my hat on my last post because that's as clear as I think I'll get with my position, I just fundamentally don't accept the way Dennett dismisses the subjective mind because it is scientifically convenient to do so. Though a lot of analytical philosophers would scoff at me over that.
Thanks for the discussion, it was fun, and it really helped me understand what my problem with Dennett really was.
# Posted on November 7th 2010 by Marklar
Re: Learning a Tune
One sort of learning. I think another is subconcious creation and matching of patterns (can't remember where I read it). So that, for example, we know that some music is 'irish' as opposed to 'bluegrass' by listening to a lot of each rather than analysing them (not that I am sure I would always recognise bluegrass).
# Posted on November 7th 2010 by David50
Re: Learning a Tune
Nice talking to you, Marklar. Very interesting stuff.
# Posted on November 7th 2010 by Jon Kiparsky
Re: Learning a Tune
Crossed, that was to Wiil.
Computers are predictable in the sense that the same input should generate the same output, but they are plenty of situations, a lot of simulation for example, where the only way of knowing the output is generating it. That would make for fascinating puppetry.
# Posted on November 7th 2010 by David50
Re: Learning a Tune
I'm not sure what you mean David, the output is still determined by the programming and inputs, even if the operator doesn't know the output ahead of time.
To put it another way, you can program a computer to find the area of rectangle by writing an algorithm that plugs the input into a formula to compute the area and display it. The programmer doesn't know the output ahead of time because the inputs are unknown at that time, and the operator may not know the answer ahead of time or he/she wouldn't bother using the program. But the computer is still a puppet doing exactly what the programmer told it to do, and nothing more.
# Posted on November 8th 2010 by Marklar
Re: Learning a Tune
Interesting point, about simulations. I suppose that's the main purpose of a certain sort of simulations, isn't it - that you don't know what it's going to do, even though you can program in the logic that'll determine what it's going to do.
# Posted on November 8th 2010 by Jon Kiparsky
Re: Learning a Tune
"you don't know what it's going to do, even though you can program in the logic"
But you could work it out with pencil and paper, given infinite time. The computer can just do it much faster.
# Posted on November 8th 2010 by Marklar
Re: Learning a Tune
"you don't know what it's going to do, even though you can program in the logic"
Heh, as a teen I was failing algebra until my teacher told me "Algebra is a system for getting the answer even though you don't know what answer you're looking for." Then it made sense.
# Posted on November 8th 2010 by Will Harmon
Re: Learning a Tune
Here's a case where a quantitative difference becomes qualitative. There's a big difference between being able to run a simulation of a weather system in infinite time, and being able to run it in real time.
# Posted on November 8th 2010 by Jon Kiparsky
Re: Learning a Tune
There was a story going around in the 1970's that the UK Met. Office had a new computer that only took 25 hours to predict the weather for 24 hours ahead. As a cheeky student mentioned this to someone who worked there as a programmer. He said if wasn't quite that bad and that it was showing that there were some parts of the system that they *did* understand. Maybe a bit like the brain.
# Posted on November 8th 2010 by David50
Re: Learning a Tune
Skepticism is good, Will Harmon ygbkm wht du u mean
# Posted on November 9th 2010 by Oeidipus
Re: Learning a Tune
And we move from scientific speculation to sheer gibberish...
# Posted on November 9th 2010 by AlBrown
Re: Learning a Tune
SSEWBA Someday Soon, Everything Will Be AcronymsYGBKM. You gotta be kidding me. UKTR. You know that's right ...
# Posted on November 9th 2010 by Oeidipus
Re: Learning a Tune
"There was a story going around in the 1970's that the UK Met. Office had a new computer that only took 25 hours to predict the weather for 24 hours ahead. "
Yeah, that's a common story, and I believe it's probably true about most of the systems that did early work on weather forecasting. If you think about it, it makes sense: the researchers would have known that there were hardware limitations that would keep them from developing a practically applicable weather-predicting machine out of the gate, but it would make no sense to wait until you have the hardware to develop the ideas. Instead, they developed the ideas so they'd know what sort of machine they'd need to run it on, and created the next round of computers from the demand side.
And besides, if you're running an experimental program, you don't want to have to wait 24 hours for your results to be confirmed - this way, they were able to check their results as soon as they came in!
# Posted on November 9th 2010 by Jon Kiparsky
Re: Learning a Tune
"And we move from scientific speculation to sheer gibberish..."
There wasn't much of a move there, my friend.
# Posted on November 9th 2010 by Marklar
Re: Learning a Tune
"To put it another way, when he says that machines can be conscious, what he's *really* saying is that we *aren't* conscious. We just imagine that we are."
Sure, that's actually a nice way to put it. We aren't "really" conscious, but we take the intentional stance towards ourselves, and treat ourselves as though we had thoughts, beliefs, desires, et cetera.
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Do you think that is right then Jon? Do you believe that you don't have beliefs/
# Posted on November 9th 2010 by Bernie 29
Re: Learning a Tune
Bernie, I think what Dennett said (and Jon was trying to explain) is that the idea of a subjective consciousness is a meaningless illusion because it can't be gotten at through objective scientific means. If it can't be exlained through objective scientific analysis, then it doesn't really exist, it's just metaphysical garbage.
My response is that I think he (Dennett) is trying to neatly side-step the problem of subjective consciousness by claiming that it doesn't really exist. That's fine and well for neuroscience but I find it troubling as a philosophical stance.
For one thing, the denial of subjective consciousness has serious consequences for ethics. If the subjective, private inner world of the mind that is closed to objective analysis is denied as a mere illusion, are pain and suffering then illusions as well, and actions that cause pain and suffering then as permissible as kicking a machine or turning it off?
# Posted on November 9th 2010 by Marklar
Re: Learning a Tune
I suggest we should focus here on the question of the existence of consciousness. Any discussion of the ethical implications would be better addressed in the thread about How to Clean a 19th Century Flute.
Dennett's views aren't fine and well for neuroscience: consciousness does exist, and it has a physical cause, and a scientific explanation, almost certainly involving neurons! We haven't found the mechanism yet, but we could find it tomorrow, I have people working on it.
I don't understand how Dennett gets taken seriously. How can he both deny and explain consciousness?
# Posted on November 10th 2010 by Bernie 29
Re: Learning a Tune
It has been shown that your brain can come to a decision before you do (Subjects in an MRI scanner were asked to select a button or similar, and to say when they had decided which one it was going to be. Meanwhile the researcher outside knew several (I forget how may) seconds before the subject just by watching the scan).
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Hi Gam,
Libet's findings may not show what you think.
Firstly, there's something dodgy about the distinction you make between "you" and "your brain". The processes are all happening in the brain, but at different levels. It's not even surprising that a lower level activity, like deciding to make a simple movement and press a button, should be completed earlier than a higher level activity like considering and reporting on the decision. This doesn't really mean that "your brain" is secretly making decisions independent of "you".
Secondly, subsequent research has called into question the nature of the brain activity detected by Libet before the subjects reported their conscious decision. It has been suggested that this activity was merely a general arousal in readiness to act, rather than being associated with a specific action (e.g. push left button).
# Posted on November 10th 2010 by Bernie 29
Re: Learning a Tune
Time perception of even concious acts is wierd. I read about an experiment with subjects playing a mouse controlled computer game. A delayed response to mouse movements was introduced gradually and players got used to it and could still control the cursor. When the delay was abruptly turned off they reported that the curser was anticipating the mouse moves.
# Posted on November 10th 2010 by David50
Re: Learning a Tune
Bernie - it's interesting to see that some of your posts suggest a shock and horror at ideas that proceed directly from other things you take for granted.
For example, if consciousness is an emergent property exhibited by a properly-organized system of neurons (or whatever substrate you choose to use for the purpose) then it follows that we don't "really" have consciousness - nothing does. Consciousness is a set of phenomena that we observe in ourselves and others, and we try to explain it or work with it or, in some cases, to make it go away with drugs or alcohol or television or whatnot. That is, it's a cover term for a group of behaviors - it's not a "thing" that you can "really have".
Now, do I experience the same set of intentional states that you or anyone else does? Of course I do. Do I believe that I'm conscious? Of course I do. I take the intentional stance with regard to myself, as anyone does. Does this change any of the underlying facts about consciousness? No, of course not - it's still a convenient way to refer to a brain doing what brains do.
As for the Libet study, it seems pretty well established that RPs are associated with a conscious intent to commit to a particular action. As you say, this study only raises a problem if you think there's a "you" that's different from "your brain". This is of course a silly idea, so the Libet study doesn't actually cause any major problems for any reasonable theory of consciousness.
"It has been suggested that this activity was merely a general arousal in readiness to act, rather than being associated with a specific action (e.g. push left button)."
Whatever you think readiness potential actually is, it's associated strongly with the action in question (there aren't RPs at random intervals) and it precedes the subjects awareness of their decision by 300-450 msec, consistently. Your interpretations of this might vary from mine, but I'm not aware that anyone's questioning that sequence of events: RP, then subject's reported time of decision.
Again, this seems to square nicely with your belief that consciousness emerges from neurons doing neuron stuff, so I'm confused about what your actual position is.
# Posted on November 10th 2010 by Jon Kiparsky
Re: Learning a Tune
"I suggest we should focus here on the question of the existence of consciousness. Any discussion of the ethical implications would be better addressed in the thread about How to Clean a 19th Century Flute."
The ethical implications actually matter quite a lot when it comes to reducing consciousness to mechanics in order to explain what consciousness is, or in any discussion of whether consciousness "exists" or not.
Dennett notes this early on in Consciousness Explained (pages 24-25):
"If the concept of consciouness were to "fall to science," what would happen to our sense of moral agency and free will? If conscious experience were "reduced" somehow to mere matter in motion, what would happen to our appreciation of love and pain and dreams and joy? If conscious human beings were "just" animated material objects, how could anything we do to them be right or wrong?"
He goes on to say that he will address these concerns in the book, but he doesn't seem to follow through on this very well. However, he wrote another more recent book addressing these concerns called Freedom Evolves, but I haven't read it yet.
In any case, it does matter, because unless you are ready to throw morality out the window you have to take account of it in any explanation of consciousness.
# Posted on November 10th 2010 by Marklar
Re: Learning a Tune
Marklar - you seem to be suggesting that we should bend our conclusions to suit our preferences. I might find it easier to justify my moral and ethical intuitions if, for example, I believed that there were such a thing as a soul, but that wouldn't make it so.
As it happens, I don't believe any such thing. My ethical intuition tells me that, among other considerations, I must give a high value to avoiding suffering as a consequence of my actions. Since an ability to suffer is one of the hallmarks of any definition of consciousness, it seems that my ethical sense will agree with yours to several decimal places - we may disagree on some details, but I think we'd have to get down into some seriously trivial and fiddling hypotheticals to get to disagreements.
One place where we might disagree is on what sort of basis one requires for an ethical system, but maybe we should hijack a different thread to discuss that...
(I had a hard time with Freedom Evolves - there's a lot of heavy going in there, and he lost me midway in. I might have another look now, it's been a few years and maybe I've gotten smarter)
# Posted on November 10th 2010 by Jon Kiparsky
Re: Learning a Tune
A bit nearer the original topic. "... it precedes the subjects awareness of their decision by 300-450 msec...". Those are the sorts of times that get talked about for perception and reactions. Early on when learning a new tune I sometimes start to play a wrong note (maybe start lifting one finger rather than two on the whistle), realise and manage to get the correct note in late but still in time to stick with the rhythm on next note. (yes, I know, it may be the wrong thing to do). Even with a waltz at a steady 60 'ones' per minute that has to be happening within the same sort of time frame. I supect I only notice the correction *after* I have made it.
# Posted on November 10th 2010 by David50
Re: Learning a Tune
"you seem to be suggesting that we should bend our conclusions to suit our preferences"
No not exactly, I'm saying your conclusions have to fit the facts of our common experiences. If your explanation doesn't fit with everyday experience then it points to a problem with the explanation.
The fact that we can mostly agree on what is and isn't moral is the experience of morality, not an explanation of it, and that is exactly the experience that a theory of consciousness has to square itself with. I think that Dennett would take a Darwinist stance on ethics and I have some counter-arguments to that, but no one seems interested in the ethics angle so I'll leave it alone.
However, please stop attacking metaphysical ideas like a "soul" until someone actually makes those claims. You're building a straw man, and insisting that it's either your view or belief in some sort of mystical hocus-pocus. There are actually a lot of other options.
But anyway, I agree, this is getting to far off from anything remotely resembling the topic.
# Posted on November 10th 2010 by Marklar
Re: Learning a Tune
Jon, are you a strange loop?
# Posted on November 10th 2010 by Bob himself
Re: Learning a Tune
Marklar - Sorry if you thought I was attaching the idea of a "soul" to your arguments. Since I don't know what it is you're claiming about consciousness, I had to use an example of some sort. I believe that you're espousing a view of consciousness as a unified entity which is indivisible - irreducible to component parts, and originating in the nervous system to which it's attached (and possibly a part of, though I'm not sure where you stand on that). I'm not sure what else this model looks like, or if it has or needs other features, but let's call it "m-consciousness" so that I can stop using nonce arguments which are offensive.
However, I still feel that you haven't answered the objection to your argument from ethics. It still sounds like you want to determine the shape of your theory of consciousness based on what best suits your preferred view of the origins of an ethical theory. That is, it sounds like your argument goes something like this:
"Without 'm-consciousness' there is no basis for ethical behavior, therefore consciousness must be of that sort."
A theory of the origins of ethics ("Ethics arises from human being recognizing each other as containing m-consciousness" or something of that sort) is not an everyday experience, it's an abstraction from that experience, so your explanation above still leaves me mystified.
To me it seems that daily ethical behavior is a product of a number of an individual consciousness, and that a theory of consciousness must be able to account for the ethical decisions. Is this what you're getting at?
# Posted on November 10th 2010 by Jon Kiparsky
Re: Learning a Tune
Bob - I didn't find that to be all that inspiring a book, honestly, but I do love Hofstadter's writing. Le Tombeau de Marot is one of the best things I've ever read.
# Posted on November 10th 2010 by Jon Kiparsky
Re: Learning a Tune
I haven't read it. Just happened to run into a (very negative) review today.
# Posted on November 10th 2010 by Bob himself
Re: Learning a Tune
Well, it's certainly worth reading if you're interested in this sort of stuff. It's much more about Hofstadter's beliefs than about why you should believe them too, if that makes sense, but Hofstadter is an interesting guy and his beliefs are interesting. In the main, I think he parallels Dennett's ideas, but he comes at them from a more experiential approach, and with less of a concern for analytical rigor. Some people might find that more readable.
But if you're interested in language, translation, that sort of thing, definitely have a look at the Marot book. Fantastic.
# Posted on November 10th 2010 by Jon Kiparsky
Re: Learning a Tune
Jon, I'm not making any claims as to what consciousness is because I don't really know, beyond the common subjective sense of the term. I'm just skeptical of Dennett's explanation of it.
I do have some solid positions on ethics that make me uncomfortable with the application of evolutionary theories to morality, but I don't really want to continue that line here, I should probably just read Freedom Evolved and see what Dennett has to say about it.
# Posted on November 10th 2010 by Marklar
Re: Learning a Tune
Hi Jon, you wrote:
For example, if consciousness is an emergent property exhibited by a properly-organized system of neurons (or whatever substrate you choose to use for the purpose) then it follows that we don't "really" have consciousness - nothing does.
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Why does that follow? If something is a property, surely something has the property? Solidity is an emergent property of properly organised groups of atoms, does it somehow follow that nothing is solid?
You also said:
Consciousness is a set of phenomena that we observe in ourselves and others, and we try to explain it or work with it or, in some cases, to make it go away with drugs or alcohol or television or whatnot. That is, it's a cover term for a group of behaviors - it's not a "thing" that you can "really have".
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It's not a cover term for a group of behaviours, it is a different class of phenomenon to "behaviours". It is experience, there being a world for you. Are you really trying to tell me I am not having experiences?
# Posted on November 11th 2010 by Bernie 29
Re: Learning a Tune
Bernie, As a non-philosopher, non-neurobiologist, I am not competent to comment on the merit of the argument. But just based on normal use of English, I think Jon is telling you that you are assuming that the emergent property is separate from what it emerges from. Because solids are made up of properly organized groups of atoms, then they are the same thing, not different things. They can be described differently, but if there are no organized atoms, there's no solid either. We as humans don't perceive organized atoms, just solids, but that doesn't make solid separate from atoms. Similarly, no neurons, no experience, even if humans don't perceive our own neurons working. I take Jon to mean that it's a mistake to think that the experience is separate from the experience generator.
Cheers,
Hugh
# Posted on November 11th 2010 by flutefry
Re: Learning a Tune
When you put it like that it's easy to understand why one would think of this as a chore.
# Posted on November 11th 2010 by Ben Steen
Re: Learning a Tune
Oh, and Jon, you're right that I'm attacking Dennett's position on the grounds that it doesn't square with my own position on ethics, so yeah, that's a bit unfair. But he needs to convince me a bit more before I revise my position on ethics to take into account the implications of his position.
# Posted on November 11th 2010 by Marklar
Re: Learning a Tune
Bernie - you've experienced centrifugal force, right? Well, if you've studied physics, you'll know that there's no "centrifugal force" at all, it's actually just inertia in a rotating frame or some such thing - I can visualize it, but I can't verbalize it, and it's not really that important. The important thing is, this force which doesn't exist can support your weight, in certain carnival attractions. You experienced something there, pressed up against the wall of the whirly room, but it wasn't what you thought it was. For most purposes, the naive explanation is sufficient, but you have to be aware that if you're doing actual physics, centrifugal force is not what it seems tobe.
Now the picture I'm trying to paint for you is similar for consciousness: for most purposes, the naive view is sufficient. But if you want to understand the thing, it's necessary to accept that the naive view might not be up to the task.
# Posted on November 11th 2010 by Jon Kiparsky
Re: Learning a Tune
This argument doesn't make sense to me Jon.
If centrifugal force doesn't exist, then it can't be that force that supports my weight on the wall of the whirly room. It must be some other force or effect, one that does exist, that makes the difference between sticking to the wall and sliding down it.
# Posted on November 11th 2010 by Bernie 29
Re: Learning a Tune
Try this then. For most purposes the 'naive' view that if you let go of a ball it will fall because there is nothing holding it up works fine. If you want to understand what is happening and take things further you need to know about gravity.
# Posted on November 11th 2010 by David50
Re: Learning a Tune
While strictly speaking, there are only four fundamental forces, in practice however, physicists and engineers often use the term force - in conjunction with Newton's 1st law - to describe particular movements of bodies and balances. For example, it's not centrifugal force that sticks you to the wall in the fairground, it's the balance of centrifugal and crentipetal force.
But this is merely academic.
When we use the naive view of consciousness, we use the practical view. i.e. we know what consciousness is, because it's what happens every time we wake up. Do we need any other view of consciousness in order to understand it? I think not.
However, you could say that our consciousness has created an enquiring mind which therefor demands a deeper meaning? Conversely though, you could say that our enquiring mind created consciousness? But I'm not convinced of either of these arguments.
It seems pretty clear to me that our consciousness and enquiring minds simply evolved together, each pushing each to greater complexities. And the wealth of evidence in the study of live animals and fossils not only supports this theory, it also answers the question of "what is consciousness for?".
# Posted on November 11th 2010 by ...
Re: Learning a Tune
"We know what consciousness is, because it's what happens every time we wake up. Do we need any other view of consciousness in order to understand it? I think not."
So you don't think understanding the physical cause of consciousness would add anything?
# Posted on November 11th 2010 by Bernie 29
Re: Learning a Tune
But when it comes to music, and the OP here, is that the usage of 'consciousness' that is important ? 'Conscious' came up as a sort of opposite of 'autopilot'. I once saw a recovering stroke victim who had only just got use of an arm back very slowly and deliberatly put a biscuit wrapper back on a hospital table and, with difficulty, comment on how slow everything was. The wrapper fell off, his hand shot out and caught it accuratly; then he looked at it in puzzlement, completely unaware of how it had got their.
Are we training our brains to do that sort of thing for us ? Or rather don't we and the animals do that all the time, saving our consciousnes for other aspects of the task at hand ?
# Posted on November 11th 2010 by David50
Re: Learning a Tune
Crossed with Bernie. Reading about conciousness is interesting, but being happy with an evolutionary reason for it is all my inquiring mind really needs.
# Posted on November 11th 2010 by David50
Re: Learning a Tune
Bernie, While I'm of the view that we don't "need" more than the practical description of consciousness, I'm also of the view that understanding the physical cause of consciousness would be terrific. It's our highly developed enquiring mind that thinks it would be terrific, and what makes me glad to be human.
David, Yes, the joy of this music for me is both the expulsion of the auto pilot in conjunction with the embrace of subconscious creativity. The combination of concentrated consciousness with combining with the bubbling up of what lies beneath.
I once read a study on slip fielders in test cricket. The amount of time it took the ball to travel from the edge of the bat to the hand of the catcher was less than quickest time the brain's neurones could process the movement of the ball via the visual cortex and relay that information to the effective movement of the muscels in the arm and hands. Fascinating
# Posted on November 11th 2010 by ...
Re: Learning a Tune
And yes, my enquiring mind needs no more of a reason for consciousness other than the evolutionary one - as the evolutionary reason for it is plainly the only credible theory. But an understanding of the differences between how the brain physically works differently between consciousness, subconsciousness and unconsciousness would be fascinating.
# Posted on November 11th 2010 by ...
Re: Learning a Tune
"If centrifugal force doesn't exist, then it can't be that force that supports my weight on the wall of the whirly room. It must be some other force or effect, one that does exist, that makes the difference between sticking to the wall and sliding down it."
Exactly - centrifugal force is a fictitious force, which serves as a better encapsulation of the events you experience than the actual forces underlying it. However, you'll find that it's not exactly a substitute for gravity - for example, if you're on a space ship that produces artificial gravity by rotation, you'll find that objects do not fall straight down, as every science fiction reader knows.
So for most purposes, I treat the folk view of consciousness as correct, because it works for most purposes much more effectively than trying to work out the underlying neuroscience - not that I could in any case! However, when someone makes a claim about what consciousness "really is" or isn't - for example, claiming that computers or cats or bodhran players can't "really" be conscious, then I have to remember that there's an underlying layer to consider.
So I agree with llig (welcome back from limbo) that the naive view is for most purposes the practical view. However, I do think that if you want to understand consciousness, you have to take into account effects like the cricket player's reflexes, which complicate matters severely if you want to maintain a literal centralized "me" in the consciousness. That is, I do think that the practical view of consciousness is insufficient to the job of understanding consciousness.
And if you're interested in how consciousness came about at all - the evolutionary development of it - then it would seem to me essential to at least have some idea of what it is that's developing. It's possible to talk about it in terms of the naive view, but like a cricket player in a rotating frame, your reflexes will lead you wrong, and you'll tend to miss a lot of catches.
# Posted on November 11th 2010 by Jon Kiparsky
Re: Learning a Tune
That's a good post Jon, interesting.
I've been interested in consciousness for while and have looked into the evolution of it and there is a strong case that consciousness first evolved to control instinct. But the beauty of evolution is that it never rests with its origins. Characteristics evolve: Limbs for example evolved from flippers to arms and legs and back again to flippers, into wings, have been abandoned completely and, in us, evolved further into dextrous tool building weapon wielders and even communicators of fine art. So it seems natural that consciousness can have its multiple uses, as it must have had its multiple uses in the past, either evolving into different uses or even become redundant.
So it seems that an other answer to the original question of ‘what is consciousness for?’ could be ‘what ever we have wanted or want’. Or at this stage in our evolution, covering probably the last sixty thousand years or so, our ability to manipulate our own minds to our own or altruistic ends has been the driving force in shaping the ‘ascent of man’ – to borrow from Jacob Bronowski.
But there is another form of consciousness that hasn't been mentioned yet and that is collective consciousness.
# Posted on November 11th 2010 by ...
Re: Learning a Tune
The word "consciousness" is being used in so many different ways here that I feel that you guys need to back up and start defining your terms.
# Posted on November 11th 2010 by Marklar
Re: Learning a Tune
We are defining the concept through our discussions of it. As we said, when the psychiatrist Giulio Tonino suggested that “Everybody knows what consciousness is: it’s what abandons you every night when you fall into dreamless sleep and returns next morning when you wake up.” (I looked it up) we agreed that this wasn't good enough.
# Posted on November 11th 2010 by ...
Re: Learning a Tune
You're right, it's not good enough.
What I was getting at is that the term "consciousness" may mean something different in psychology than it does in neuroscience or philosophy, especially when you start talking about things like "collective consciousness."
# Posted on November 11th 2010 by Marklar
Re: Learning a Tune
Michael - not only does evolution never rest on its origins, it's never aware of those origins, even as it retains so many traces of them. Evolution is an endless "now" - and for some of us, and endless "wow".
I'd love to dig down into the evolution of consciousness stuff, but unfortunately I'm at work at the moment, and I don't think I can really lay out even a sketch of what I think I think there. Put simply, I would look for it in predator/prey dynamics, the place where it's most evolutionarily advantageous to be able to anticipate another organism's next action. This would require projection ("If I were that mouse, I would be trying to get to that hole over there...") and a degree of recursion ("...because there's a predator, me, nearby"). Becoming conscious in the human sense, to my mind, then requires an ability to look at ourselves, at our own internal states, and treat them in the same way, in a sense. That's badly put, but I'll let it stand for now.
# Posted on November 11th 2010 by Jon Kiparsky
Re: Learning a Tune
Marklar - I think that in lieu of a"definition" of consciousness, which is a tall order, I'd settle for some agreement on the boundaries of the problem at hand. What are the phenomena that our ideas of consciousness are expected to address?
# Posted on November 11th 2010 by Jon Kiparsky
Re: Learning a Tune
Good posts. For me the idea of collective conciousness lets the philosophy back in, not least because we don't, I think, have a naive view of it that we could agree on. And I am only pushing the philosphy out because I find the scientific one (as exemplified by llig above) more interesting and likely to provide more stable stepping stones - and some wobbly ones.
So if playing catch while on a playground roundabout confers an evolutionary advantage by impressing the opposite sex should we study physics or just practise ? Flashy skateboarding must involve a heck of a lot of newtonian mechanics
# Posted on November 11th 2010 by David50
Re: Learning a Tune
All of those sorts of skills, David, are routinely discussed as means of demonstrating an overplus of physical capabilities. "Look what I can do" -> "Look what a good provider of stuff I'd be".
Humor and elocution are likewise signals of abundant mental capacity - "Look at how well I manipulate symbols and think in multiple levels simultaneously".
# Posted on November 11th 2010 by Jon Kiparsky
Re: Learning a Tune
You might (or might not) be interested in this link - http://mythosandlogos.com/Sartre.html - which provides an excellent summation of Sartre's views on consciousness. It was his separation of 'being-for-itself' and 'being-in-itself' which inspired R.D. Laing, David Cooper and others to apply Existentialism to psychology, most notably in Laing's 'The Divided Self' and 'The Self and Others'.
This takes me back - I wrote my dissertation on Sartre's influence on Laing's work.
# Posted on November 11th 2010 by MacCruiskeen
Re: Learning a Tune
Crossed. In a predator prey situation what is more useful - knowing how I feel about the situation of knowing how the opponent feels about it ?
I wonder if that sudden need to look over ones shoulder when walking through the wooods or by a babbling brook is due to a sub-concious 'background process' needing updated surveillance data. Feeling creepy about it might make one supersitious...
# Posted on November 11th 2010 by David50
Re: Learning a Tune
Jon, as I've said I'm a bit agnostic on the subject, but for the sake of argument and to try to narrow things down a bit I'll go with "self-awareness."
That fits nicely with your view of consciousness as a by-product of internal modeling for practical survival purposes.
However, explaining how something comes about is not the same as saying what it is. That B follows A is not a definition of B.
# Posted on November 11th 2010 by Marklar
Re: Learning a Tune
Crossed again Jon. Yes but one needs a more complex view of evolution and the activities of the concious mind to see any advantage (or not) in old wives retaining their inquisitiveness beyond child bearing age.
# Posted on November 11th 2010 by David50
Re: Learning a Tune
Thanks MacCruiskeen, but I'll stick with the naive view Except if I ever get cast on a desert island I might consider taking a history of philosophy book.
# Posted on November 11th 2010 by David50
Re: Learning a Tune
Ah, but David, I'm not sure what you mean by the 'naive view'.
The fundamental philosophical view was set out by Descartes, but not thoroughly examined until the phenomenologists of the 20th century (Husserl, first, then Sartre) got to work on it.
# Posted on November 11th 2010 by MacCruiskeen
Re: Learning a Tune
I agree, Marklar, that defining the scope of the definition required is not at all the same as coming up with the definition itself, but I suspect that it's a good starting place. And I agree that self-awareness is certainly the key to what we're trying to capture here. I would add an ability to project that self-awareness onto others.
The primary phenomena, I suppose it should be said, are the set of intentional phenomena I've cited before: thoughts, beliefs, desires, needs, hopes, and so forth. We go from a neurochemical state of the sort any organism can respond to (low blood sugar, perhaps) to a belief about our own internal state (I'm hungry) and predictions about our future state (if I don't eat, I'll become more uncomfortable, and eventually my functionality will diminish) to a desire (I would like to eat something) and we can assume that others might feel the same way and act on that assumption ("It's lunch time, maybe we should knock off and go for a sandwich"). All of that seems to be in the scope of what we're talking about. Collective unconscious, I'm not sure about.
# Posted on November 11th 2010 by Jon Kiparsky
Re: Learning a Tune
"The fundamental philosophical view was set out by Descartes"
It's interesting you should bring that up, Cartesian duality is exactly the view that Dennett attacks in Consciousness Explained. By reducing consciousness to mechanics he dismisses the dualism as a myth.
# Posted on November 11th 2010 by Marklar
Re: Learning a Tune
Ha, nice try MacCruiskeen. I'll stick with "self-awareness".
My question spoiled by the typo up there ('of' for 'or') was because I was wondering if the ability to recognise that "I am tired" is a spin-off from the advatage of being able to target the third prey animal from the left because "it looks tired".
# Posted on November 11th 2010 by David50
Re: Learning a Tune
'By reducing consciousness to mechanics he dismisses the dualism as a myth.'
You obviously haven't read Sartre.
# Posted on November 11th 2010 by MacCruiskeen
Re: Learning a Tune
"You obviously haven't read Sartre."
Yes I have, and Heidegger and Husserl as well. You obviously haven't read Dennett. Also, don't confuse his position with my own.
# Posted on November 11th 2010 by Marklar
Re: Learning a Tune
Well, be fair, Mac - he's talking about what Dennett's up to, not expounding his own beliefs. For all we know, Marklar's well up on Sartre.
# Posted on November 11th 2010 by Jon Kiparsky
Re: Learning a Tune
Also, I realize that Sarte doesn't propose a mind/body dualism like Descarte, his take is a lot more sophisticated. Dennett attacks all of this under the umbrella term "Cartesian theatre," however. You'll have to read him to see what I mean.
But I can't talk much more about Sartre until I get home from work and can pull Being and Nothingness off the shelf. I haven't read it in a good 15 years.
# Posted on November 11th 2010 by Marklar
Re: Learning a Tune
@OP "... more than 100 times it begins to sound and feel very natural."
A respected fiddle player (and a good teacher, too) in my town reckons he needs to play a tune about 200 times before he's nailed it.
# Posted on November 11th 2010 by Trevor Jennings
Re: Learning a Tune
Hi Jon, you wrote;
So for most purposes, I treat the folk view of consciousness as correct, because it works for most purposes much more effectively than trying to work out the underlying neuroscience - not that I could in any case! However, when someone makes a claim about what consciousness "really is" or isn't - for example, claiming that computers or cats or bodhran players can't "really" be conscious, then I have to remember that there's an underlying layer to consider.
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I'm not sure whether or why you are treating me as a proponent of the naive or folk view of consciousness. For what it's worth, my view is that consciousness does exist, in the same sense that digestion exists. It is caused by physical processes in the brain and nervous system which we don't yet understand.
Very similar processes go on in the nervous systems of cats and bodhran players, and while we are unable to communicate with them about it, it seems extremely likely that they are conscious in a quite similar way to ourselves. They see, hear, feel, experience pain.
No such processes are going on in computers, and they are not conscious.
The view that I'm opposed to is Dennett's, which is a denial of the existence of consciousness. I can't really tell if you are saying the same thing.
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So I agree with llig (welcome back from limbo) that the naive view is for most purposes the practical view. However, I do think that if you want to understand consciousness, you have to take into account effects like the cricket player's reflexes, which complicate matters severely if you want to maintain a literal centralized "me" in the consciousness. That is, I do think that the practical view of consciousness is insufficient to the job of understanding consciousness.
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I've been thinking to myself for quite a while about the time delay business. I think about it when I am playing badminton. Sometimes the shuttle gets fired at you very fast. I started to notice that I was getting a visual image of the shuttle, very close up, some time after I had dodged it or hit it back. One time I noticed I had the visual experience of the shuttle when my back was already turned. The highly demanding visual processing of the fast-moving shuttle must take noticeably longer than the proprioceptive processing that tells us where our body is in space.
But we don't normally notice the gap, and in fact it's hard for me to be sure what is happening in my own experience. The brain must have mechanisms to make it so everything seems to happen in the right sequence.
But even when the system breaks down, as I think it does with the shuttlecock, the delayed perception still happens to my centralised "me".
Libet, who did the interesting delay experiments, thinks that our unified subjective experience is caused by a Conscious Mental Field. He thinks this CMF explains mental phenomena that aren't caused by neurons firing.
# Posted on November 11th 2010 by Bernie 29
Re: Learning a Tune
Bernie. I think your experience with the shutlecock is part of the naive view of conciousness. Its like when you wet your foot in a puddle then hear your mate say "mind the puddle" and think he is making a joke after the event until a second mate says that he heard the words before the splash. Stuff like that is used by stage magicians and maybe has been for millenia. Its accessible to observation, can be reported, so passed on and build up within a cutlure.
# Posted on November 12th 2010 by David50
Re: Learning a Tune
Bernie, I think you might find this interesting:
http://www.iep.utm.edu/phe-time/
# Posted on November 12th 2010 by Marklar
Re: Learning a Tune
Thanks for that Marklar. That's the sort of stuff I may take to the desert island. As it was my eyebrows went up when I got to "This natural belief Husserl terms the “natural attitude,” under which label he includes dogmatic scientific and philosophical beliefs, as well as ..." but by then the flute was warmed up.
# Posted on November 12th 2010 by David50
Re: Learning a Tune
Thank you Marklar. I will read that, but I'm afraid I disagree with it, right from the first sentence:
Phenomenology maintains that consciousness, in its very nature as activity, is intentional.
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I don't believe consciousness is intentional in its very nature, in the sense used here. See http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/intentionality/
In his book "Intentionality", John Searle distinguishes between aspects of consciousness which display intentionality in this sense (e.g. beliefs) and others which do not, for example "undirected anxiety". "Intentionality" is "aboutness": a belief is always about something, it doesn't make sense to say "I have a belief, but it's not about any specific thing". Whereas it does make sense to say "I am anxious, but not about any specific thing".
# Posted on November 12th 2010 by Bernie 29