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Philosophical Quips Conversations Between Eric Wasiolek and Other Philosophers and Scientists
To artificial intelligence a notion of god really doesn't have any relevance. But for the record, AI systems DO create representations of concepts. God as a concept is a simple universalization of categories such as time and space (this by the way has NOTHING to do with the religions of man). We are finite creatures and exist in particular spaces at particular times. Our existence is finite. But we can universalize the notion of time to eternity (a time that has no begining and no end), likewise we can universalize the notion of space as inifinite (infinitely large, infinite extent). We can universalize the notion of cause to the ultimate cause, the cause of all causes. We are limited in power, but we can universalize the notion of power to omnipotence. We have finite knowledge, but you can universalize the notion of knowledge to omniscience or all knowing. When you combine these universalized notions of eternal (infinite time), omnipresent (infinite space), the prime cause, and all powerful, you get the notion of a being which is eternal, omnipresent, omnipotent, and the first cause or cause of everything, omniscient and hence arrive at the notion of "god." This has nothing to do with religion or the notion of a personal god, it has ONLY to do with the UNIVERSALIZATION OF CONCEPTS. A computer could universalize it's conceptual schema and arrive at a notion like this. The most abstract categories are the Kant categories. You cannot conceive of an object that does not have extent. You cannot conceive of an event that does not have a cause. You cannot conceive of an object that does not exist in time. Therefore time, extent, and cause are the most basic categories. These are the Kantian categories. If you universalize these, time without a begining and end, i.e. eternity or timeless, cause with out a cause, i.e the prima causa, or the cause of all causes, or extent without an object cannot exist you get the infinite categories: eternity, first cause, and endless extent. You get the categories which are attributes of the first being or the universal entity. My original thesis refers to all of these. I will again note that the ideas of which I am speaking are of special status, not like rice pudding. To universalize rice pudding, infinite rice pudding is nonsense. But infinite extent or time is a concept that makes sense and that we can imagine. The Kantian categories of which I speak have special status as they are NECESSARY for experience even to exist. Pudding is not a necessary idea. You cannot have experience without objects, and you cannot conceive of an object without extent, you cannot have experience without events, and you cannot conceive of an event that does not occur in time, or does not have a cause. Therefore extent, time, causation are necessary conditions of experience. So, is knowledge, without a knower you cannot have an experience (a tree falling in a forest with no perceiver is not an experience). Now that I have established the special nature of these Kantian categories, it is by universalizing them that you arrive at the notion of a universal being. You universalize by considering them in their infinite aspect: infinite extent or space, infinite time or eternity, the cause of an infinite chain of causes or the prime cause, the cause that causes all causes. And then I explained in a previous post how you go from the infinite forms of the categorical ideas as qualities to the idea of a universal or infinite entity (the qualfiers must qualify an entity). Now how you do this on a computer is touchy. Artificial intelligence depends heavily on second order predicate calculus, with existential quanitifers ("some") and universal quantifiers ("all"). You can universalize ideas quantitatively by using the universal quantifier (all causes, all time), but representing infinity in a machine is problematic. Its a problem for doing infintesimal calculus on a machine which has to do approximations for a solution, as well as dealing with the mathematics of infinity (in mathematics there is a symbol for infinity but computers can't represent it because they have quantitative limits). But the basic idea in an AI system is you universalize a concept in the concept schema with a universal quantifier and perhaps also an approximation of infinity. In philosophy it is commonly held that knowledge is true justified belief. You can believe anything but it may not be true or justified, just nonsense. Science is generally held to be knowledge, i.e., true justified belief as there is something in reality which corresponds to the belief (i.e. true, although the correspondence theory of truth is debatable) and there is justification, i.e., evidence. All religions are beliefs but they may not be true or justified. I proposed a notion of god which is a universalization of basic categories of thought (of which rice pudding is not) but didn't say it was true or justified, just a belief. ----------- Is it possible to have a rational belief which is not based upon evidence? Evidence comes from latin e-videre or that which can be seen, which is essentially what evidence is, that which can be sensed. Scientific beliefs are based on evidence, i.e., information from our senses or extension of senses (telescopes, microscopes, radiotelescopy etc...). But what about our beliefs that a mathematical proposition is true. This is not based upon the senses and hence not based upon evidence. We don't collect evidence to verify a mathematical truth. The truth is arrived at by reason, by deduction. There are even non-mathematical truths which are like this, i.e., analytical propositions like "all bachelors are male." We don't know this by observing many bachelors, this simply follows analytically and deductively from the "definition" of "bachelor" and "male." So, yes it is possible to have a rational belief which is not based upon evidence. I would say that a rational belief in god, something for example that comes from the universalization of the basic categories of thought is a rational belief not based upon evidence. My beliefs must be rational and consistent with what is currently known in science. What is the difference between a belief in god and a delusion. These are both beliefs which are or may not be true and are unjustified. So what's the difference? A delusion is based upon an untrue or altered perception. ------------------- Is there thought without language? It depends what you mean by thought. If you are counting only abstractions this clearly requires language, natural or mathematical. But if you mean by thought "cognitive activity" then clearly most cognitive activity is pre-linguistic. As a computational biologist I consider it absolutely absurd if you think non-human animals don't have thought in the sense of cognitive activity and abilities (although they don't have language). Homo sapiens existed in social groups long before any language was developed. We know that verbal language has existed for some time (or we suppose it) and we know that written language is a recent development in human history (starting with the pictorial proceeding to the hieroglyphic and eventually to the syllabary and alphabetic languages). This anthropomorphism that only humans have thought because only they have languages strikes me as so ridiculous it makes me somewhat nauseous. Animal (non-linguistic) intelligence: Planning (even the squirrels know to store nuts in their domicile to last throughout the winter). That's planning. Planning requires thought. Wild dogs who surround their prey and work together to cut off escape show coordination of their activities as a part of a plan to catch the prey, this is thought. Like it or not we are part of the animal kingdom, not something created de novo -------------- Invisibility. We believe in many things that are invisible. Scientists believe in things that are invisible. not visible even with instrumentation: i'm not talking just about the invisible, like sound. I am talking about the insensible, not detectable by ANY sense. I'm not just talking about indetectable by our senses, I'm talking about indetectable by ANY instrumentation or extension to our senses. -------------------- @Majda I completely concur. Kant is often misunderstood but the distinction he makes is simple: there is the "phenomena" i.e., things as they appear to our senses and brain, and there is the "noumena" things as they are in themselves, which are unintelligible. If you think about this it is consistent with modern science, we know from neuroscience that our BRAINS create a picture of the world when all that is impinging on them is photons from a small portion of the electromagnetic spectrum and compressions and rarefactions of air molecules (i.e. seeing and hearing) i.e., we create a picture of the world from physical data that come through our sense organs. The brain takes that physical data and organizes it into a "picture" of the world, it is this "picture" that we perceive as reality, not the physical world itself. And so science, even physics, is an organization of these "pictures" from our brains which we come to from results of experiments (the resulting observations are sense data). We can't get past these "pictures," what Kant meant by "phenomena (literally in greek 'that which is showing itself'). We increase our pictures by using instrumentation (that can sense the full electromagnetic spectrum etc...). We even infer things that are not visible, like sub-atomic particles and strings, or even detectible by any sense or instrument, like black holes, dark matter, and dark energy. But even here we rely on our senses and sense data (brain pictures) by inferring their existence from their indirect effects which we can measure and see (with instrumentation), like the effect of the gravitational pull of a black hole on the surrounding matter and light, or the fact that the universe seems to be expanding at an accelerating rate, infering dark energy. My point is that science just corroborates what Kant said, we are hopelessly bound to the pictures created in our brains, i.e., the "phenomena" and hopelessly unable to perceive things outside our perceptions which is how things are in themselves, the noumena.
Donald Zimmerman •It might be worth mentioning
that some characteristics of our "picture" of the world apparently do apply to
Kant's "thing in itself." For example, our perception of the extent of
separation of objects in space, also applies to distances between molecules and
atoms, which makes possible various predictions about chemical reactions. @Donald Zimmerman. Donald, I appreciate your very thoughtful comments. I am still wrestling with to what extent the noumenal world is intelligible at all. We DO have theories about microphenomena which describe a world which is different in some respects to our macrophenomenal experience, and we suppose this world to be true as it seems to explain and predict how matter behaves. I still have a problem, as do some others, with the explanations in Quantuum Mechanics. The description of electrons and other particles seems to be in a probabilistic cloud rather than having a definite position and velocity. This departure from our microphenomenal world view made Einstein question this account as well, as he famously said "God does not play dice with the universe." We have limited ability to detect the ultimate building blocks of matter, we have discovered many sub-atomic particles but its not clear whether they can be resolved into yet smaller units of matter. We have a theory called string theory which is mathematically elegant and purports to claim that the ultimate building blocks of matter are strings, but strings are not observable (probably too small to be detected by any instrumentation). If we are to claim that strings are the ultimate theory (and mathematically it's elegant as it ties Relativity Theory, Newtonian low velocity physics, and Quantuum mechanics together mathematically) is that the "noumena?" There's currently no physical evidence supporting string theory. It seems what is the ultimate basis of physical reality is an unfinished business, and it's not clear it will ever be finished. I'm not sure I can call ever more sophisticated unified theories a window into the noumena. I think we are ultimately bound by our observations (sensations) and the universe, the noumena, may ultimately be quite different than the way we understand it.
@Jimm Jimm I think the
abstracted object and the noumenal object are generally opposed. The abstracted
object comes about by a heirarchical arrangement of our perceptions (the
phenomena) as in concept formation. The noumenal object is something that cannot
be perceived. ------------ @Christine The result of an experiment is an observation (you observe the result). An observation involves sensation (seeing what happened) and the subsequent cognition of this observation (e.g. how it confirms or denies a hypothesis). Yes there is a deeply ordered conceptualization into which we fit our observations, e.g. theories. An entire theory can be confuted by one observation which is a denial of a prediction or hypothesis, or at least the theory needs to be modified. This was the case for General Relativity for example that made specific predictions that could be confirmed or denied by a single observation. Whether space time was bent around a gravitational field as Einstein predicted was to be confirmed or denied by whether the positions of stars (or the star light from them) changed around the gravitational field of the sun (a large mass), an observation made by astronomers during an eclipse. I don't know the specifics of concept formation, I'm sure this is a big area of research in psychology and neuroscience, but I think the essence is this: the brain makes an internal representation of an object (or the sensation of an object), namely an image, and also stores information about that image. The representation is an 'idea' from the greek word that MEANS image. As the concrete concept of a chair involves me 'seeing an image of a chair in my head' and then allows me to answer questions about it, like how many legs does it have, does it have a back? Our concept is fuzzy, like unclear whether a three legged chair is a chair, or if it doesn't have a back whether it is a chair or a stool (i.e. we internally organize information about chairs and other furniture). We strive to make concepts in science less fuzzy or in mathematics not fuzzy at all. The concept is part of a concept heirarchy, involving furniture etc... Concepts very high in the heirarchy tend to be fuzzy, like the concept of happiness, to which many people have many different ideas. @Christine One more comment about concept formation. My sense is we form the concept hierarchy by a process of grouping the concrete concept with other similar concrete concepts and then through 'abstraction,' which means concentrating on the commonalities of the group, the essence of the concrete concepts, leaving out their details. •@Christine Continuation of some comments on concept formation: Hence we move from chairs to furniture by grouping chairs with beds and sofas, etc... and noting their common purpose. Clearly applying names (sounds or symbols that represent the idea) to these concrete and abstract concepts is required to inspire the same 'ideas' to the person that we are communicating with. It's not clear that language is required to have internal images of objects (which it seems even animals have as they dream), but it may be required to organize information around a concrete concept (an internal representation of an object) or to have a concept hierarchy (i.e do abstraction), and it certainly seems required to inspire the same idea in another human animal. That is a good topic for discussion. ----------------------------- Eric Wasiolek, M.S., MBA •@Dr. Stephen Wade. Yes, all of science was once called "Natural Philosophy." In fact when Newton invented most of Physics his treatise was entitled "The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy." But Science is a very particular type of Philosophy. It is empiricism. Everything in science is based upon evidence, observations, i.e., evidence from the senses. This is not true of mathematics, which proceeds by logic and set theory and NOT an appeal to the senses. And the break with science and philosophy is primarily because not everything, in fact most things in Philosophy are not tied closely to evidence if tied at all. I also want to correct one statement that was made by someone else. Mathematics is NOT applied Philosophy. Philosophy is primarily qualitiative reasoning. Mathematics is all quantitative reasoning. Therefore they are quite different. Philosophy in fact is largely unapplied. You can argue that some political theories are applied, like Marxism was applied in communisim. And you can argue that Law is just applied Ethics (a branch of philosophy). But that's about all of the application there is. Philosophy is very theoretical and conceptual, like what theoretical scientists do, but many of them, e.g. theoretical physicists are basically mathematicians. There IS the area of Philosophy of Science, where, as Science is not very good at analyzing its own methods, philosophy looks at the methods of science. Science certainly answers or attempts to answer the questions and big questions about the nature of the physical and natural universe. But it has a much harder time answering the big questions about the mind (there is neuroscience which has made almost no headway on consciousness, why brains produce it) and the big questions about society. This is an area where philosophy has something to say.
Art DiVito •Eric, I beg to differ. You say, “Mathematics is NOT applied Philosophy.” And then you practically prove that it IS by saying, “Philosophy is primarily qualitiative [sic] reasoning. Mathematics is all quantitative reasoning. Therefore they are quite different.” No, this does not make them “quite different,” it makes mathematics a more focused philosophy. Qualitative notions such a smooth, sharp, alike, etc. are moved to quantitative notions such as differentiable, 30°, congruencies, etc. This kind of “advance” of philosophy takes mathematics to a higher level much as assembly takes machine language to a higher level. Science goes a step higher still. It fits phenomena into mathematical descriptions. Sound is carried in waves, Newtonian physics is governed by equations, forces are described by fields, etc. Science is like advancing to C++. Technology and engineering bring little short of the miraculous: HD TVs, microwaves, cell phones, moon landings, Mars rovers, medical cures, prosthetics, ... . Seriously? Man did this stuff!? For me, it is unmistakable that technology and engineering are to science as science to mathematics as mathematics to philosophy as philosophy to consciousness, ... and how a Mars rover came out of neural brain activity is, ... one of the big questions. --------------------------- Eric Wasiolek, M.S., MBA •@Art Just because mathematics has concepts does not make it philosophy. All subjects have concepts. By this reasoning all subjects are the same because they all have concepts. I stand by my comment that Philosophy is primarily QUALITATIVE and mathematics is QUANTITATIVE. That's a very clear distinction. The only area of Philosophy that has anything to do with quantity may be logic, a discipline that underlies both Philosophy and mathematics and for that matter all subjects (especially computer science). Even in Philosophy logic is qualitative unless you get into symbolic logic (I had to take a year of it in my Philosophy program). There is the area of Philosophy of mathematics, but the subject mathematics of philosophy doesn't exist (unless you want to consider symbolic logic the mathematics of philosophy). In Philosophy of mathematics often referred to as the foundations of mathematics people are concerned with that nature of mathematical intuition, incompleteness (as in Godel's theorem), the nature of mathematical truth, higher order mathematical concepts, etc..., i.e., it is largely a conceptual analysis of mathematics, i.e., a qualitiative analysis of a quantitative subject. Philosophy includes logic, ethics, epistemology, political theory and other areas. What does mathematics have to do with ethics? These are clearly very different disciplines. You have your opinion and I have mine, and I have little credibility that either of us is going to convince the other. ----
Art DiVito •Eric, we for sure are not going to
agree, ... especially if you misrepresent my position. : ) ----- Jim Cox •I would have to say that the notion that mathematics is only quantitative in nature is not entirely correct. Much of mathematics is about form, not just number systems. Even one of the most quantitative branches of mathematics, analysis, gives insight into form. Certain differential equations, for example suggest wave forms. Maxwell was able to predict the existence of invisible waves from the form of his equations. Other branches of mathematics deal directly with form and allow for "qualitative" reasoning. mathematical logic (particularly in recent years with theories of belief, common knowledge, etc.) investigates the form of "rational" thought. One can dispute whether the study of form (e.g. in topology) is truly qualitative in nature, but the naive assertion that all math does is quantitative is wrong. Just look at general relativity for an application of math that suggests form. ------------ Eric Wasiolek, M.S., MBA •Science is applied math is also not a true statement. I have a degree in science and in philosophy and I can attest to this. You may be thinking of physics which is very mathematical. But there is much more to science than physics and some sciences, like biology, are not very mathematical (and this comes from me a computational biologist who tries to make biology mathematical). Even in physics our knowledge of the physical world does not come from applying mathematics, it starts with observations about the physical world, i.e., from experiments which are conditioned experiences where sensory data, the observation of the result is giving us the answer as to how the physical world works. Mathematics doesn't come from sensory data, science does. Once we have a sufficient number of observations from experiments we can INDUCT a pattern that we can express mathematically. Your statement has some truth in the sense that in Physics we often apply an area of mathematics to describe our inductions about what we have discovered sensorily. But the whole process starts with observations which are totally absent in mathematics. Outside of physics there isn't a huge amount of application of mathematics to scientific observations. There's some in chemistry, but even areas like Organic Chemistry in theory are quite qualitative (the organic structures). In biology math is largely absent, and in computational biology most of what we do is use mathematical and computer science techniques to simplify and relate the DATA that has been collected on biological phenomena (see my thesis book "A computational platform to analyze the C Elegans nervous system" which uses a graph data structure to analyze the C Elegans nervous system programmatically). ------------------- Eric Wasiolek, M.S., MBA •I don't think I'm saying mathematics is completely quantiative just that the gist of it is. There is a qualitative conceptual component, but even here the concepts are often made less fuzzy or not fuzzy at all by relating them to a formula or equation. And waves are described quantiatively with sine functions. Have you heard of fourier analysis? It's a mathematical technique whereby a complex waveform can be analyzed into its sinusoidal components making the wave completely describable quantitatively. --------------------
jimm wetherbee •Let me start by stating that I
had no intention of separating philosophy from science a couple of comments
back. I was merely pointing out that if the object of life (as in the big
questions of) is whoever is making the evaluation and not life itself (however
it may be construed) then there are no questions of life per se. Donald Zimmerman •Certainly most of the richness of mathematics has developed "on its own momentum," so to speak, apart from what is usually considered to be philosophical inquiry. I do not believe many mathematicians would regard their field as applied philosophy. In fact it seems the influence largely has been the reverse. Familiarity with mathematical concepts has shaped the philosophical views of thinkers such as Descartes, Leibnitz, analytic philosophers, Russell, Whitehead, Wittgenstein, the logical positivists, etc., and many others of the modern period. ------------------
Graham Partis •RE Human language ----- Eric Wasiolek, M.S., MBA •I'm going to side a little more with Graham here. I think the symbolic aspect of thinking, i.e. language (that includes mathematics as a language) is overplayed and came late in animal and human evolution, and that thinking is prior to language and certainly can occur without it. If you watch documentaries on animals it becomes very clear how intelligent they are. They plan. A squirrel doesn't just eat a nut when he sees it like an appetite impulse, he saves the nut in a hole for winter for when food is scarce. That's planning. Beavers bring vegetation underwater in the fall storing it in a type of refridgerator to be eaten throughout the winter. My cat shows a simple act of motor planning when he must jump up on the couch walk to and over the amplifier to get to the table where there is food. Animals know what plants to eat and which are poisonous, which are good to rub on their body to prevent misquitos, which will heal their ailment to some degree, all of this is knowledge without language. Planning, motor planning is thought without language. In fact things like visual object recognition, which animals clearly have to do to survive, identify prey, or avoid predators is thought without language (object recognition is very difficult to teach a computer to do, it takes a lot of thought). When I think about something in silence I often visualize a series of events (that could happen but haven't). This is thought without language. In fact, I don't really see language coming into play until I need to express something I'm thinking (something which is prelinguistic prior to expression). I can "put" my thoughts into language, hence my "thoughts" exist in some form prior to being put in language. I can notice a pattern in nature, when I assign a mathematical function (math language) to that pattern I make it more clear. I think if you look at the complex things and thinking that animals do and call it "instinct," then you are imputing a great deal of thought into the word "instinct." --------------------
Eric Wasiolek, M.S., MBA •@Christine. I think
what you are talking about is BioPhysics, which is a branch of physics that
looks at the physics of biological phenomena. So it is going to be mathematical
like physics. The problem is that it's limited in the aspects of biology that it
looks at, like the effect of radiation biology, but not the whole of how we come
to know what we know about molecular biology. Most of those facts are collected
from observations with little or no mathematical description or from molecular
tests which are verified by an observation of their result. ------------------ Eric Wasiolek, M.S., MBA •And I contend that animals, like humans, have volition, i.e., seem to have free will. Free will is problematic as the universe seems largely determined (physical events are determined) but to have free will your actions cannot be determined. This seems to be a contradiction which Kant has resolved (our society is schizophrenic about this claiming the physical universe is determined and yet people have intention for their acts in a court of law, intention which requires free will, unless they are mentally deranged, in which case a type of determinism is invoked for the act). I'm not going to get into that right now, just to say that animals seem to have free will if we have free will. When free, not caged or trained, they go freely where they want to go although many of their actions that they choose are around avoiding predators, getting prey or vegetation, water, time to sleep, with some time to play. We humans throughout evolution were mostly in this same mode until we freed ourselves somewhat by not just surviving on what nature gave us but on food that we could actually produce (farming and agriculture and animal breeding). When we freed ourselves from what we would eat each day, we freed ourselves to think about the heavens, art, to discover science and do all sorts of wonderful things. Animals are free, their actions aren't determined like a computer or robot's is (robots with sensors are less determined) but more bound to the immediate. --------------
“This off-topic drift does raise an interesting point: that the ‘big questions’
are not necessarily the important questions.’”
It has been asked and seconded: <<“What is the fundamental nature of the
universe I live in? Is it physical as widely assumed? Is it the product of
natural laws and a process of evolution driven entirely by chance events and
natural selection, or does it ALSO reflect the intent of a creative
Intelligence? What is my own fundamental nature? Does my brain generate or
implement my thinking? Do I have free will, which makes me responsible for my
actions? Should my actions be judged by absolute imperatives or by societal
conventions?”>> . Eric Wasiolek, M.S., MBA •Just a point from one of Dan's comments. It seems to me in standard physics, one of the most basic tenets of physics is that neither matter nor energy is ever created or destroyed, it is simply converted (and that means according to Einstein's equation matter can be converted into energy and energy can be converted into matter). As far as I know black holes are not exceptions, matter is not lost but enters a black hole due to extreme gravitation (from which light cannot even escape) and the black hole is actually highly dense matter (with an extreme gravitational pull). Particles and anti-particles annihilate eachother, but nothing doesn't come from something, rather the energy is converted into another form. -------- I agree that all normal humans
are born with the CAPACITY for language that does not exist in other animals. In
fact this is borne out by the Wernicke and Broca areas of the left parietal
cortex which have been demonstrated to be brain areas associated with the
learning and use of language. Of course none of us is born speaking a language,
the innate capacity for language has to be used to acquire any language, which
people, early in their development, like children, are particularly adept at. --------------- I do not see all religions as
holding beliefs which are rational. There's much irrationality in religion, much
of it based upon the desire not to die (to have some sort of after life). We
don't KNOW if there is anything other than this life as Kant correctly pointed
out in the antimonies of pure reason. -------------- Christine, I think your comment is indicative of another aspect of philosophy which is at least partially missing from science: the integration of knowledge. Much of science is specialized knowledge and science is often not presented in a coherent picture. This is particularly true if you want to consider the relation between science and religion (which ends up to be quite philosophical as theology is related to philosophy and science is related to philosophy as well), or how science fits into society or ethics. Philosophy by its nature is INTEGRATIVE, it integrates knowledge from disciplines and hence is very interdisciplinary. Science is not as interdisciplinary. There are areas of science which cross some borders, like computational biology which is a mixture of math, computer science, and molecular biology, or molecular biology which is a mixture of biology and chemistry (biochemistry and organic chemistry) or biophysics etc... But usually the integration in science is between two disciplines and not an entire integration of all we know scientifically. That tends to be done by philosophy. ------------- Algorithms, to do anything, require data input, to operate on the data and transform it according to the algorithm. I'm a not sure exactly what is being postulated when one says the universe is algorithmic. But as a scientist and programmer I can say that the physical and natural universe does appear to be somewhat or completely mechanistic. You can see the mechanism in the revolutions of the planets and other physical phenomena that follow mathematically precise laws. Even evolution is a mechanism which spits out individuals and modifies species. A mechanism is not exactly the same as an algorithm. An algorithm is a logical entity, a sequence of statements which involves conditions and loops. A mechanism is physical. But both involve repetitive action. A mechanism, as in a factory, transforms something physically in the same way repetitively, as an algorithm transforms data in the same way repetitively. --------------- @Jimm. I agree that alot of contemporary philosophy has become specialized, a lot of it analytic, the analysis of language and concepts. I would modify my statement that some philosophers and noteably philosophers in the past have attempted grand integrations of knowledge. I would like to state that I consider the integration of knowledge important, and when one does it, in my view, one is doing philosophy. I've seen attempts at this as the history or evolution of the universe, the physical evolution of the universe from the big bang, even the evolution of chemistry from star fusion and supernovas, the evolution of living things from inorganic and eventually organic matter, biological evolution, and the evolution of human thought and society. A lot of this has a scientific flair, but clearly when you're moving into the evolution of human ideas and society you're not clearly doing grand science anymore, the attempt, as far as I am concerned in philosophy. Attempts to do this include LeCompte du Nouy with "Human Destiny," Jeremy Campbell with "Grammatical Man," Lovejoy with the "Great Chain of Being," even Cassirer, and Authur Young with the "Reflexive Universe," as well as Bertrand Russell with "Human Knowledge," and many others. I consider all of these grand integrative works part of Philosophy. I would like to see more attempts at integration, it is personally my favorite type of reading. ----------------
Donald Zimmerman •Matthew, you pointed out that
Roger S. Jones wrote "The pronouncements of scientists are respected and
accepted by today’s public just as the doctrines of the church fathers were
respected and accepted by people a thousand years ago." --------------- @Christine. Okay here I have to disagree. First, computer languages are not associative, computer languages are based upon logic (e.g. connectives, conditionals), plus iterative constructs, not association. Now maybe you can say there is some form of association in constant and variable assignments, a constant is assigned to a value and a variable is assigned to a range of values (doesn't retain the same association). However human language is associative. We learn our first language by associating a sound or a written symbol with a thing in the world (an object) or an action in the world. I learn the sound "chair" means a four legged object with a seat and a back that you sit on because my mother says "chair" and points to the object. I form an association between the object or action and the sound. There's more to language than objects (nouns) and actions (verbs) such as grammar, inflection, which is a set of rules to form sentences with nouns and verbs to indicate tense, function of the word in the sentence etc... I know you constantly want to make this distinction between animals and humans on the point of language (and no animal has symbolic language like or to the extent we do) but animals like humans make associations (this is part of the processing of a brain). When my cat hears the opening of a can on the can opener he comes to the kitchen and meows, he has associated the sound of the can opener with eating. When he hears the medicine bag opening up, he runs away, he has associated the sound of the bag opening up with the unpleasant act of receiving medicine. Animals make associations, so do humans. And a primary language is precisely learned by making associations between sounds and things and events in the world. ------------- Yes there seems to be mission
creep of science into philosophical domains, and I think that's fine as long as
the mission creep is to explain the natural universe. I think however science
has nothing to say about ethics (it is concerned with what was, is, and will be,
but not what ought to be), and hence has nothing to say about political
philosophy which involves ethics. I think neuroscience is making some headway in
understanding how we think but hasn't made any headway in explaining how the
brain produces consciousness. Much of what we know about consciousness is from
our own subjectivity which can be analyzed by philosophy but the contents of
consciousness are not available to objective methods (except by a verbal report
of one's subjectivity during an experiment). Epistemology can be naturalized by
psychology and neuroscience to some extent, but full epistemology is philosophy
as well as an investigation of the methods of science itself. ----------------------------- -Christine. I do not see a connection between volition and conceptualization. I do not see that volition requires conceptualization. Volition is the faculty of willing. It underlies such things as law when we are trying to determine whether an act was intentional or willful as it might be said. Volition is opposed to determinism. If we say something is done non-volitionally or unwillingly an action occurs but not with our consent. In a deterministic universe there is no volition. There is no free will. Our actions are just the determined results of atoms and the laws of physics. I often contend that the universe is largely mechanistic, but I also contend there appears to be free will (volition). Free will or volition and a completely deterministic mechanism as a universe is a contradiction. Yet you will find philosophers like Kant who contend the two co-exist (it's complicated how that is so). But if volition is the faculty of willing, animals certainly possess it. They are not determined mechanisms or robots or programs which must behave in a certain way according to rules or physical laws. They are free to move as they will. They can go left, go right, what they do at a particular moment isn't determined, although some of their movements may be influenced, as in a herd moving to avoid a predator, but not determined. This seems to be true of even the smallest of organisms like an amoeba (how it moves doesn't seem to be determined but rather random although it might be influenced by stimuli) and is one of the fundamental differences between animate and inanimate matter. Clearly animals have volition and they also (the higher ones) have consciousness, so they have volitional consciousness, but they don't have language. So how could language or concepts be required for volitional consciousness (granted that humans have both)? ------------------- I'd like to say a little more about volition. Aristotle simply identified animals from inanimate objects with the description "self-moving." Inanimate objects don't move themselves, biological entities do. An external physical force is required to move an inanimate object, the movement of an animal seems to come from inside the animal itself. Nowadays we have machines that are self-moving (e.g. robots and automobiles, from the greek auto which means self and mobile which means moving, an automobile is literally a self-moving). But there is a difference between the self-movement of an automobile and that of an animal. An automobile's movement is determined by the controls controlled by an animal, us. In an automobile as in a program or robot, output is determined by input. Even in an AI system with sensors, the program will determine the output (actuators) based upon input from the sensors. Given the input, we can say with certainty what the output of the programmed robot will be. But, this is not true of an animal. We cannot DETERMINE from its sensory input what its output will be. When it moves we cannot determine exactly how it will move. Besides what is initiating the movement? In an animal the faculty that initiates the movement is what I call volition. I can decide at any moment to raise my finger, but physical forces outside me don't initiate the movement, I do, my intention does, my volition does. Its the same for animals. Do not confuse deliberation with volition. Deliberation occurs BEFORE volition, before the decision to move. It may be that we do things because we desire them or fear something but we don't HAVE TO do them. We are not determined. This faculty of volition is very strange in that it seems to be able to cause movement but is itself not caused by any external force but by us. For something not to have a prior cause is against all notions of causality, determinism, and scientific explanation. We do deliberate before deciding and research has shown that there is some action planning going on in the brain before we act. But the decision to act or not act on that plan seems to be this faculty of volition. --------- @Jimm and Art: I think as Christine correctly pointed out writing occurred very late in human evolution. Spoken languages were probably (we have no way to prove this) around 10's of thousands if not a 100 thousand years. But the earliest evidence of writing was pictographic writing as in the early civilizations. Written languages seemed to start pictorially (as chinese did, the ideographs were originally pictures and then got modified over time) and then proceeded to become hieroglyphic (as in Egyptian the pictures actually represent syllables) and then later to alphabets and syllabary (an example of a language with a syllabary is Japanese, where the marks in hirigana and katakana indicated syllables not letters, in alphabetic languages the marks indicate letters and it takes a combination of letters to produce a syllable). The point is as far as we know spoken language preceeded written language by 10's of thousands of years and as far as human evolution is concerned written language is a recent development in human history (maybe not even 10,000 years old). Anthropologist have found some current cultures that have spoken languages but no writing system. ---------------
@Art and others: We know that in primate evolution hominids (particularly homo sapiens) experienced termendous brain growth with a brain to body ratio much greater than any of the apes or other primates. Nonetheless, these other primates have most of the same brain areas and many of the same brain functions as us, they have an enlarged (although not as big as ours) cortex. I would suspect that areas of the brain that have to do with language like Wernicke's and Broca's areas in the left parietal cortex are not very large in other primates if they exist at all (although as Art pointed out other primates seem to have some ability to manipulate symbols). Spatial reasoning, such as used in geometry, located in the right hemisphere seems to exist in other primates as well who have to navigate three D forests and be accurate in terms of being able to jump and catch a branch. Also, I think that some aspects of culture, which is mostly missing in other primates, exists in them to some extent. Think of social organization, part of culture. We know that baboons may travel in groups that may have as many as 100 members, and that there is a great degree of social organization in terms of who dominates whom, who gets the food first, who prunes whom to curry favor to advance their status in the group. The aspect of culture called social organization I can very much see in other primate behavior. I think the question is whether the differences between humans and other primates is a difference of kind or a difference in degree. Many "unique" human traits seem to be really great differences in degree, with some rudimentary form existing in other primates. Tool using is an example. We are masters at using tools, but other primates can modify simple twigs and then salivate on them to get at ants in a stump. Even abstraction, largely absent in animals, maybe exists to some degree in the chimps ability to associate a picture on a computer screen with a thing or event; it may exist in very rudimentary form. Many human attributes seem completely distinctive but may not be complete differences of kind, but rather large differences in degree. ------------- Eric Wasiolek, M.S., MBA •I have a great book about 'chemical evolution.' First the atoms evolved from primitive atoms like hydrogen and helium to the hundred plus chemicals that make up the periodic chart by the action of fusion in stars and supernova explosions. One of these chemicals created by fusion was carbon, the basis of all organic molecules and all living things. With carbon on earth, hydrogen and carbon (and nitrogen) created the first organic molecules. How we got from simple organic molecules to cells however is still largely a mystery. We haven't discovered the laws of why chemicals self-assemble into complex chemical systems like a cell. We do know why cell walls form from lipids basically forming a micelle (and the walls of cell organelles), but we do not know why entire cells form. We also have evidence that RNA preceeded DNA as the structure responsible for replication of cells and cellular organisms like bacteria. Until we can explain why cells i.e., complex chemical systems with structure and function self-assemble merely from molecular forces we are not able to explain why or how life evolved from inanimate matter. It doesn't mean we won't, but we haven't so far. ----- Eric Wasiolek, M.S., MBA • @Christine Propositions and language are not exactly the same. First of all a proposition is a statement which is either true or false. This is not true of all language, for example, questions, commands, or exclamations. In language statements occur in a particular language. But the proposition is the IDEA behind the statement independent of any language. It is raining, il pleut, and es regnet are three statements in three different languages but the meaning is the same, and this common meaning IS the proposition. The idea may be expressed in logical symbols as in predicate calculus, or in quantificational predicate calculus as in the statement "all whales are mammals" expressed as For all x, if x is a whale then x is a mammal. And these propositions are connected in arguments, with propositions that are premises and propositions that are conclusions through logical connectives (which can also be expressed through logical symbols to make the idea clear and to avoid any pitfalls with any particular language), i.e. inference. ----------- Bill Powers • Jimm says,"The activity in the hippocampus is not the same property as the recollection of where something is." Suppose that state (however described by some third-person property) of the hippocampus (or whatever third-person entity you choose) changes to some other state with a high degree of correlation when a person self-reports they are remembering something. That third-person description is clearly not the same as the first-person experience because a change in state is a third-person event. Many have claimed they are identical. What do they mean by identical? Is it a token or type identity? A token identity would argue that this state change is always associated with this remembering. Type identity speaks, I suppose, of types of remembering or perhaps of remembering, a certain class of states. I don't know why one would hold to type identity and not to token. Searle has argued that should we be able to find the right description of states, both physical and mental and a correlation between the two, we would conclude that the physical state caused the mental. Nagel is not satisfied with this account. He argues that this tells us nothing about why these physical states produced these mental states. Just as we can try to explain the solvent properties of water from molecular theory, so too we would expect the same of any successful theory of the mind. Nagel believes that given the present understanding of the physical this is not possible. The physical simply lacks the capability to produce first-person properties. Nagel is no dualist. He suggests a number of possibilities. Our mereology is flawed (e.g., atomism requires modification at least), or the notion of the physical must be enlarged. --------------- Eric Wasiolek, M.S., MBA • Okay, I have to respond to, agree with Bill. We have an objective account of neurophysiology on the one hand. And then we have the account of subjective consciousness on the other, i.e., the experience of seeing the color blue. I am a student of neuroscience. In all that neuroscience has accomplished, I must say it has given no objective account of subjective experience. I think this is a crisis in neurophysiology, when it cannot explain the most fundamental function of the human brain, the ability to produce subjective consciousness. -------------
jimm wetherbee • Eric, ------------------ Eric Wasiolek, M.S., MBA • Evolution proceeds by random (chance) mutations which may or may not confer an adaptive advantage to an animal in his circumstances. These mutations may come about because of irradiation of the DNA, purine or pyridamine substitutions, or other copying errors. In most cases these mutations are lethal, in some cases they have no effect, and in some cases they confer an advantage to the animal in his fight for survival. It is this latter case that is propogated in future generations and leads to a modification to a species or even eventually a new species. Since this model has a random chance aspect to it, I would not say it is deterministic.
jimm wetherbee • Eric, Eric Wasiolek, M.S., MBA • @Jimm. Okay, I'll put it this way. The changes in DNA are unpredictable. We can use probability to indicate how many such changes will probably occur over time, but we cannot predict where in the DNA strand they will occur. Copying errors occur, but we do not know on which nucleotide they will occur so we do not know the effect on the DNA strand until it occurs. It's the same with changes due to irradiation. It is unpredictable, hence random.
jimm wetherbee • Eric,
Donald Zimmerman • Eric and Jimm, ----------------
Kali Robson • As a newcomer, I haven't read all
600+ comments in this thread (!), but has anyone mentioned the ideas of Ilya
Prigogine, the chemist who won a Nobel in 1977 for expanding our view of the 2nd
Law of Thermodynamics? Self-organization, he argued, is a general property of
the universe, and he makes a distinction between random and surprising events,
but asserts that they are both expressions of entropy. Water molecules, for
instance, are systems able to capture a flow of energy such as heat, and this
causes convection currents. The current can't be described in terms of the water
molecules because a structure at a different level has been formed - this is
emergence (and is non-deterministic because the higher level of organization
can't be extrapolated from the levels below). Though organized, these structures
aren't fully predictable - much like living things (though a life form has a
self-memory and can capture its own energy, keeping it far from equilibrium
until it dies). I see some discussion of LaPlace's Demon here - the creature
with full knowledge of the past and present, so able to fully predict the
future. Prigogine's ideas suggest the universe may not be so tidy, and maybe
deterministic only in a general sense. You could know every detail of a zygote,
DNA and all, but not be able to fully predict the adult organism - development
is an emergent phenomenon. DNA holds information an organism uses to generate
itself, capture and process energy, etc., but every cell with a nucleus has the
same info - the organism, not the DNA, controls what's expressed where -
epigenetics keeps getting more complicated, not less - let's admit we're not
sure how it all works... ---------------
Dan O'Dea • jimm, radiation is an odd phenomenon. ---------------
jimm wetherbee • All,
Adrian Horodniceanu • You should add to iy that a
change in DNA needs to be reproduced in the next generations in order to be
significant , and maybe meet other changes to give a real result . Considering
that a Human generation is about 20-25 years ( maybe less a few thousands years
ago) , a significant change in DNA might appear in real life after tens or
hundreds of thousands of years . In this period many changes have happened most
of them lost. The problem is much more complicated than the problem of a coin or
even thermodynamics. Eric Wasiolek, M.S., MBA • @Jimm Jimm, if you believe the universe is completely determined then you can't believe in any personal responsibility. If you kill someone, you're not responsible, because you didn't choose to do it, because you cannot choose. There was only the particular configuration of atoms at the time that determinantly resulted in the pulling of the trigger. Completely determined universe: there's no free will and no personal responsibility (our legal system comes crashing down). How do you reconcile complete determinacy with personal responsibility? Or am I reading you wrong? Eric Wasiolek, M.S., MBA • @Adrian No one is arguing that changes in organisms and species doesn't take time, much time. As you correctly pointed out a change in DNA affects the progeny through the division of DNA in the germ cells (meiosis). You can see these changes happening in organisms with short life spans like Drosphilia Melangaster (fruit flies) by experimentally introducing genetic changes and following the progeny. You can also see the changes in DNA by comparing genetic sequences. By calculating a rate of change in the DNA (there are ways of determining this) we can relate DNA from different species by their separation in DNA sequences (DNA differences) and thereby construct evolutionary trees (this is part of bioinformatics). We can also estimate the age of the species and the age of the change from one species to another by combining this knowledge with an infered rate of genetic mutations. ----------------
jimm wetherbee • Eric, -----------------
Adrian Horodniceanu • Jimm ,
jimm wetherbee • Adrian, Bill Powers • An absolutely free decision is an arbitrary one, not something usually esteemed. One might however esteem the one bound by the good. There are, nonetheless, a near infinity of good actions from which to choose. What we imagine of the moral choice is that we are free to choose from amongst the good and the evil, meaning we are capable of doing either; and the moral person chooses the good. But why does he do so if he is not bound in some sense? It would seem that if he is not bound in some sense, he is nor moral. The moral choice appears to require both that we be free to not choose it and bound to choose it. For if he is not bound, then he might just as well have chosen the evil. There is, it seems, a kind of internal struggle wherein we struggle against the binding to the good, as if the good is something greater or external to ourselves. So that we suffer twice, first from the evil that is in the world, and second the evil that is within ourselves, the latter being by far the worse. In the former it is the evil that comes against us; and in the latter the good. Whereas, we expect evil to come against us, we don't know what do do when it is the good. What is required for this moral topology is both a self and consciousness of self, but, more than that, the ability to perceive something greater than greater than the subject, an objective universality. This seems to reflect more than only the Western tradition. Today, as likely at other times, much of this has been either denied or undermined. What I wonder is whether that is possible and that what results instead is a kind of submersion or repression that finds expression in some less recognizable form Eric Wasiolek, M.S., MBA •@Christine and Jimm. You were both talking about meaning. I would like to say that meaning is primarily referential. There are ostensible definitions and analytic definitions. Ostensible definitions are ones where we point to something in the world, utter a sound, and that sound MEANS that thing in the world (thing or event). Analytic definitions are just definitions based upon the definitions of things we have already defined ostensibly, like a "bachelor" is an "unmarried" "male." By primarily referential I am talking about the fact of how we learn a language in the first place (not how we learn our second language, which is in terms of our first, but how we learn our native language). We learn our native language by listening to our mother or others utter a sound while pointing to something in the world, i.e., referential. I would also argue that truth is primarily referential as well (except analytic truth), i.e., this is the correspondence theory of truth, where a statement is true, referentially, if it corresponds to that state of affairs in the world. I say the "apple is on the table" and if there is no apple on the table the statement is false, if there is an apple on the table it is true, i.e., referentially. Eric Wasiolek, M.S., MBA •@Christine and related to meaning. The classical languages like Latin and Greek share something in common with german, they are languages that all have calque. English does NOT have calque. Calque is the feature of some languages that abstract concepts are created out of indigenous roots, so the meaning of the word is related to the etymology. If you take the word "intervention," the etymology of the word is that it means a "coming between," literally between-come. In English you only know the etymology if you have studied latin. But in german, the word for intervention is "das Dazwischentreten." If we decompose this word "da-zwischen-treten," we realize that it is composed of three german words "da" or "dort" meaning 'there," "zwischen" meaning "between" and treten "to come or to tread." Literally das da-zwischen-treten means a "there between coming" the same etymology as intervention if you know latin. But the difference is you don't have to know another or a classical language to understand the etymology and meaning in german, you as a native speaker already know the words that compose the word da-zwishen-treten. In linguistics this feature is called calque. Calque makes a language extremely logical as abstract concepts are built out of indigenous roots, which is true of german and latin but not of english. German is a very logical language with a logical aufbau or buildup of concepts from indigenous roots. English, not so logical. Eric Wasiolek, M.S., MBA •@Christine and others. Now I will say something about English. I mentioned that English doesn't build abstract concepts out of its indigenous roots like german and classical languages do. But English has other powers. Yes English is quite uninflected. Most languages have cases, like genitive, nominative, accusative, and dative. Latin has a few more like locative and ablative. Greek has even more. Russian has these plus instrumental. Inflection makes grammar more difficult. You have to modify words to indicate their cases. Also English has simple conjugations. Verb conjugations in most other languages are much more extensive. Although I am disappointed to see that most english speakers nowadays simply add -ed to everything rather than knowing the conjugations or past tenses. The past tense of hang is hung not hanged. Sing, sang, sung. Know, knew. We have slight conjugations. But the lack of inflections and conjugations in english makes its grammar extremely simple (we use word order rather than inflections to indicate the function of the word in the sentence). Most english speakers would say, oh my native language is difficult, but no, if you study other languages, its grammar is relatively simple. This is one of the reasons that english has become the world's lingua franca (the most prevalent second language). But there is one area where english surpasses all other languages: vocabulary. In Websters dictionary there are about one million words. Compare this to french where most of the language is spoken with about 50,000 words. Why do we have so many words in english? It's partly because english has so many influences: there is the latin, greek, and anglo-saxon influences. If you take a concept like "fore-knowledge," in english we have the word "prescience" from latin, or the word "predict" from latin to say before, or prognosticate, used in medical contexts, from the greek for foreknowledge, or forecast, from the anglo-saxon, used in meterological contexts. We borrow from french as well. There is the word "sheep" from german "Scheife" and there is the word "mutton" from french "mutton." There are so many words in english with so many nuances of meaning that to speak simple english is simple, but to speak english well is a great feat which involves having a big vocabulary. Also, english's grammatical simplicity is a plus in some sense as it allows simple and clear communication, great for business, science, and philosophy. Eric Wasiolek, M.S., MBA •@Christine and others. There is a grammar which is even simpler than English: Chinese. In Chinese there basically are no tenses, there is no inflection, everything is based upon word order. In Chinese you say "I go store," for the past "I go store yesterday," for the future "I go store tomorrow." You have to put in a time word to indicate tense because there is no conjugation. The only thing there is is the particle "le" which indicates completed action. Much meaning is grasped contextually by the presence of other words and sentences. The Chinese grammar is extremely simple, and asian languages in general are not very inflected or inflected at all. What is difficult about chinese is other things. The spoken language is difficult because you have to learn the tones, which are PHONEMIC (i.e., a different tone for the same syllable has a different meaning). In the written language remembering all of the ideographs is difficult. Chinese has some degree of calque. It is claimed that chinese is monosyllabic, but actually many concepts are formed out of multiple ideographs. Eric Wasiolek, M.S., MBA •@Robyn I watched the three minute Kant video which was about the categorical imperative. Although this is a famous maxim I would not say that this is what distinguishes Kant's philosophy. He is most famous for his book "The Critque of Pure Reason," which sets out the boundaries for what is knowable. It is more a work of epistemology and Philosophy of Science than ethics.
Eric Wasiolek, M.S., MBA •@Kali Kali, I wanted to
address your statement that you think biology cannot be reduced to chemistry
(and hence to physics). I would like to hear your arguments. When I got my
masters in computational biology the only type of biology that was taught was
MOLECULAR biology. I.e., since for many biological structures we know their
chemical constituents i.e., their molecular make up and for many biological
processes we know the underlying chemical reactions, it does seem that biology
is on a path towards reduction to chemistry. I'm still not thouroughly convinced
however. Is your argument that it can't be reduced one of the whole is greater
than the sum of the parts, if so, why? Or is it possibly also a teleological
argument, that biological entities possess teleology whereas chemicals and
chemical reactions do not (they just balance). I would also propose that
something exists in organisms that doesn't seem to be present in plain
chemistry, volition. Even biological entities as small as bacteria seem to
possess some type of volition where their movements and actions can't be
Kali Robson •Eric, under conditions where a
system, say a weather system, is able to capture energy, the storm itself can't
be described in terms of the molecular behavior of water and other tidbits in
the atmosphere - it transcends itself - this is emergence; more than the sum of
the parts. This was Prigogine's point - he argued that self-organization - the
occurrence of a structure at a "higher" level of organization, a structure that
can't be reduced to/described by its mere components, happens under certain
conditions and is a perfectly normal part of chemical/physical behavior. He
didn't say the 2nd law was wrong; he said we have been misinterpreting it. His
evidence is all from chemistry, of course (there isn't a Nobel for biology
anyway), but some biologists were deeply intrigued, partly because time seems to
be manifested through the 2nd law. To some of us, these ideas provided a more
realistic description of life and its evolution than standard neo-Darwinian
stuff. I'm horrified your profs were all such reductionists!
Kali Robson •Thanks for the great comments on
Aristotle, Eric & Jimm! Yes, biologists avoid some of these questions, but I'm
trying to address them a bit because they bring some clarity. Organisms have
purpose in that they maintain functionality. Evolution has no purpose, but it
certainly has pattern - increasing complexity, for one. Another big pattern is
irreversibility - once Prigogine pointed out that these patterns might be
manifestations of the 2nd law, some biologists, like me, were caught up in his
ideas.
Kali Robson •Back around 1985 a popular sci book
called "Grammatical Man" by lyrical journalist Jeremy Campbell came out - it was
about Information Theory, Prigogine's version of the 2nd law, language, and
other topics I still find fascinating. Language is informative because it has
rules - "..Constrained, yet infinitely variable within its constraints..." says
Campbell. So, I think of infinity in the sense of endless possibilities. At the
one extreme is thermodynamic equilibrium, full-out entropy - there are endless
possibilities, but they are jumbled molecules or noises without pattern. At the
other extreme there is repetition, monotone - a system too constrained to be
informative. All languages (including math) have limited sounds/symbols, words
and rules of grammar, and this is what allows the expression of new information
into the universe. Living things dissipate entropy through unpredictability
instead of randomness in numerous ways. Campbell suggests evolution may be more
like the sentences in a language than rolling dice. "Grammatical man inhabits a
grammatical universe," he says. Eric Wasiolek, M.S., MBA •@Christine The "ability" to learn language is innate, supported by the human unique language centers in the brain like Wernicke's and Broca's areas (I am supposing this is what Chompsky meant). The learning of a particular language, i.e., a mother tongue or a second language involves just that learning and training. Eric Wasiolek, M.S., MBA •@Jimm. Okay I'm going to agree with Chompsky again, I believe there IS a universal grammar. However, by the time you get to the universal aspects of language it doesn't consist of the rules for forming words and sentences that we normally associate with language. Instead it is a LOGICAL language modeled after our world. The reason ALL languages have nouns and verbs is because the world is composed of things and events. The reason all languages can in some way form plurals is because there are multiple objects of the same type in our environment, etc... The universal grammar is more like a grammar of ideas and how they connect to eachother, a language of logic (which is universal like mathematics). You utter a sentence by forming the idea in a type of universal grammar and then applying the rules of a particular language to express the idea in a particular language. Eric Wasiolek, M.S., MBA •We at least all have the 'idea' of infinity. To any series we can suppose that it continues indefinitely and we form the idea of infinity. We have it for mathematical series (as well as the infintesimal in calculus). We note that we are finite. But we can imagine infinite time, infinite in the past and infinite in the future. We can only see so far in the universe and we suppose it to have a finite size but we can imagine infinite space. We see that all events have causes and we can imagine these causes to go on infinitum into the past. We know that we are limited in what we know, but we can imagine omniscience. Yes some concepts of god (again an idea) are that he/she is infinite, timeless, omnipresent, omniscient, and the cause of all causes (prima causa). But again this seems to be an idea that our minds naturally gravitate towards rather than anything we actually know exists.
jimm wetherbee •Eric,
Art DiVito •Eric, I believe your take is
returning us to my assertion that the individual/cooperative duality might be
akin to mind/body. I believe (Christine can correct me if I am mistaken) that
both Christine and I believe the individual should take precedence over the
collective. (Most social-media participants prefer the collective, though I hope
we are not the only two of this thread who feel this way.) But we come at it
from very different perspectives. She believes man evolved out of lucky random
evolutionary mutations that advanced all animals’ language as “identification”
into man’s unique, what I call, “blueprint” (writing upon portable media).
[Eric, I think you are saying, in your post, that you lean towards my view that
language as “communicating instructions” is the essence of man’s advance.]
Although I’ve never been an atheist, I am becoming even more convinced that man
is simply special. Someone or something — no doubt the same that provided the
senses, such as sight (I’m not quite buying into that one day “sensitivity to
light” evolved into the eye, ... call be a yahoo if you wish) — singled out our
strand of primate; and burying the dead, using tools, and instructional writing
is the progression that brought us to our status today: namely, that what we
have is called reasoning and what all other species hold is called instinct. Eric Wasiolek, M.S., MBA •@Christine You hit the nail on the head. Why do ants, who have no language, seem to engage in cooperative work? I would say that they have no language but they do have communication. On closer observation, there seems to be communication in the form of chemical signals sent from ant to ant. We don't know much about how this affects their behavior but I suspect this chemical communication is responsible for their cooperative work. Eric Wasiolek, M.S., MBA •@Christine and Kali. Right, Artistotle's four causes were the material causes, what something is made out of, the formal causes, which relates to Artistotle's theme of categorization, the efficient cause, which is the closes notion we have today to 'cause,' i.e., what event preceeded it for it to come into being, and the final cause or teleology. Modern science in many ways has dispensed with the formal and final causes and discusses things in term of what they are made of (material cause) and what prior event caused them to be or to move in the way that they do (efficient cause). Teleology is still troublesome in biology, as even the notion of adaptation has teleological overtones, and the question of teleology can be raised about the changes and direction of changes of an entire species or evolution itself. An example is why exactly did evolution proceed from the simpler to the more complex and even produce self conscious big brained creatures like ourselves if it didn't serve some purpose (if it wasn't purposive and teleological). In the Ernst Mayer book "Toward a New Philosophy of Biology" he writes "teleological language is frequenstly used in biology in order to make statements about the functions of organs, about physiological processes, and abou the behavior and actions of species and individuals. Such language is characterized by the use of function, purpose, and goal, or 'in order to.' An example is birds migrate south in order to escape low temperatures and find food sources for the winter." Some of the problems is that physico-chemical science does NOT use teleology in its language, and so if biology is reducible to chemistry and physics, teleological explanation would not be appropriate (reducibility is a question in itself). Other problems are that future goals seem in contradiction with the traditional concept of cause, where events PRECEEDing an event cause it. Also teleological explanations may seem anthropomorphic. I could go on but this seemingly problematic teological explanation seems completely necessary to explaining biological phenomena.
jimm wetherbee •I would wish to echo Eric's
comments here. Aristotle's material cause is often mistaken for what we call
"stuff" or "matter," but as the notion was developed is far more passive than
what we would consider matter. Where I might differ from Eric is that when
science does use formal cause, it is in terms of mathematical description. While
Eric is correct that efficient cause is the closest thing to what we more
generally call cause, the Aristotelian idea material cause is the passing of an
actualized form from one object to the potential for that form in another. As
such, the equivalence is only rough. Finally, just as scientists tend to convert
"why" questions into "how" questions, they also tend treat questions of
functions (e.g., "the heart is for pumping blood") as if they simply describe
what things do ("the heart pumps blood."). Functional questions tend to be a
bigger problem in biology than in chemistry or physics. One can ask what quarks
are for, but the question seems a bit strained. Even so, there is nothing
particularly neo-Darwinian is this outlook.
Kali Robson •Thanks for the great comments on
Aristotle, Eric & Jimm! Yes, biologists avoid some of these questions, but I'm
trying to address them a bit because they bring some clarity. Organisms have
purpose in that they maintain functionality. Evolution has no purpose, but it
certainly has pattern - increasing complexity, for one. Another big pattern is
irreversibility - once Prigogine pointed out that these patterns might be
manifestations of the 2nd law, some biologists, like me, were caught up in his
ideas.
jimm wetherbee •About free-will and instinct: ------------------
Eric Wasiolek, M.S., MBA • A lot of big questions
involve a combination of philosophy and science. Eric Wasiolek, M.S., MBA • I've been looking over these comments and think some answers have gone far afield. The best answer that we have is that life consists of a system of organic molecules organized into a water based cell or cells which contain genes and are capable (except for plants) of self-movement, reproduction, that take in energy and hence have a metabolism, grow, adapt to their surroundings and reproduce their kind. None of this is true of an inanimate object. A rock doesn't grow, reproduce, adapt to its surroundings etc... I think this is a very clear definition of life and the definition we use when looking for extraterrestial life (which we may first encounter as microbial). When discussing synthetic life you would have to reproduced all of these attributes of life. You might make it out of something other than organic molecules, but you would somehow have to have it grow, reproduce, adapt to its surroundings, be capable of self-movement and perhaps have a metabolism. Some sort of robot might do these things, or a creature with some sort of altered chemistry. Don't forget that many living things seem to have consciousness. We don't know how to make anything artificial with consciousness. modification: “life consists of a system of organic molecules organized into a water based cell or cells which contain genes and are capable (except for plants) of self-movement, reproduction, that take in food and breath and hence have a metabolism that produces energy, grow, adapt to their surroundings and reproduce their kind.” ------------------ I have been away from the internet and just now returned to reading the discussions. Here's what I read and have to say: Definition of Communication: Signaling --- When you talk about biological signaling, what you are really talking about are chemical events. This is a use of "communication" which has almost nothing to do with reporting our mental state, these are very different defintions. I don't think a chemical event is communication in the sense that Miklos is talking about it. Flow of Information --- I, like Miklos, think this is a pretty good definition. By this definition, humans communicate to others about their mental state, and computers and robots communicate. The mars rover, a real robot that exists today, not something hypothetical, communicates about its percepts (here meant information processing of sensor information), about its internal states (like what systems are functional), and receives instructions (another form of information) from NASA. Ironically, Miklos, by accepting this definition of communication you seem to be agreeing with me that there is something that communicates, even about its own internal events, yet is not conscious and hence not self conscious, namely the mars rover robot (which is a fact, not science fiction). Gesturing --- there even was some talk about non verbal communication such as gesturing (as a definition of signaling) which can become quite elaborate as in the case of deaf language. Christine, no one is saying that our mental makeup is made of communication. Communication is just how we impart our mental state to others and conversely, it is not per se a mental organization too, although language is both a mental organization tool and a tool for communication. Definition of Consciousness and Self Consciousness: There have been some attempts to define consciousness and self-consciousness. Words such as "aware" or "awake" have been used in place of "conscious." Is a computer aware or awake? I think not. Being a student of neurophysiology and philosophy, and haven written my thesis on computational neuroscience, I will say that 'consciousness' (and hence self-consciousness) is still very mysterious. We know that it is a property that only brains exhibit (there is nothing besides a brain in the known universe that is conscious). But that doesn't tell us much. Take sensation and perception for example. The scientific story is that a physical stimulus, like an electromagnetic wave or sound wave (compressions and rarefactions of air) hits the sense organ which translates the signal into a neural signal that ultimately terminates in some part of the brain (as in the occipital lobe for vision). That's where the scientific story ends. But how is a set of neurons firing in the occipital lobe the same as seeing a cat. How does one become the other. We don't know. One is an objective account of the event of seeing a cat (the neurophysiological account) and one is a subjective account. No one seems able to say how the objective account IS the subjective account. Miklos raises the question how can you know someone is conscious or self conscious without a verbal report? This might be quite limiting, as verbal reports can be non-veridical (therefore it doesn't satisfy an objective method) and many animals that seem to be aware and self-aware are not capable of giving verbal reports about their state. Take meerkats for example. They clearly can sense and respond to their environment and hence by their behavior are aware. They know their place in the social hierarchy of meerkats, and hence show some behavior that indicates self-awareness. Yet they cannot communicate in the sense of giving a verbal report about their mental state like we can. Then we turned to the question of what is aware and self-aware. What about a bacterium? Is it aware and self-aware, is a robot aware or self-aware, or do you have to have a nervous system to be aware and self-aware? People have different answers to these questions. I think you need to have a nervous system to be aware or self-aware. That rules out bacteria and robots. ------ To say consciousness is awareness is to say nothing. Conscious and aware are synonyms, so one is essentially saying a is a, which doesn't tell us what consciousness is. We can try and define consciousness subjectively, and we can try and define it biologically. We can't really say how the subjective IS the biological, so we are left with two definitions. The subjective basis of consciousness: we can say from our own experience and infer from the verbal reports of other humans that consciousness is essentially a flow of percepts (external and internal). As in a movie, we move from one scene to another, primarily visual but also auditory and sometimes involving the other senses. Sometimes our attention moves the scene to something internal like a memory. The biological basis of consciousness: The brain stem seems to be involved in consciousness. People with damage to the brain stem lose consciousness and stay in a coma. Also anesthetics that render a patient unconscious at the operating table seem to work on the brain stem or reticular formation. Once there is consciousness its contents are often sensory, and so the areas in the cortex associated with sensation and perception such as the occipital lobe for visual information are relevant to consciousness. Once conscious, neural activity seems to be at many places in the brain and cortex simultaneously. Also, the thalamic intralaminar nuclei, which project axons widely to all cortical areas, are notable in that their destruction can result in a permanent loss of consciousness. The chemical basis of consciousness: We can infer also that consciousness is chemical, dependent on the chemicals of the brain. We know this as when someone takes LSD and chemically alters their brain (no anatomical alteration whatsoever), their subjective conscious experience changes dramatically (altered sensations and perceptions and even thought processes). We know also in the case of mentally ill patients that chemical problems such as insufficient or over active neurotransmitters can alter conscious experience as well, and can be set back to normal again in many cases with a CHEMICAL, namely a psychiatric drug. We can also say why robots seem not to be conscious: they are not made out of the right stuff, they are not organic and they are not chemical. ---------- Anticipatory systems theory --- present change of state depends upon future circumstances. This has elements of teleology in it. Goal seeking behavior. Aristotle's four causes for scientific explanation, one of which is teleological (the final cause). Some of what you are describing others would call instinct, which may be neurally encoded behavior (determined through genetics). the material cause --- that out of which something is made (in the case of biology this would be the organic molecules). the efficient cause --- similar to our current use of 'cause,' that because of which something is as it is, i.e,. the preceeding event or events. what produced it the formal cause --- what kind of thing x is ( it is a so and so, partly because of its genetics) the final cause --- what is it for? robots, goal seeking behavior, current behavior will depend upon goal (teleological) Judith, I do not fully understand anticipatory systems theory, but here is what I gathered and my comments on the matter. In anticipatory systems theory the present change of state depends upon future circumstances. I.e. the system is goal oriented. This theory launches me into the question of teleology in biology, which may be a correct thing to introduce, but in the last century has fallen out of favor with scientists. Aristotle, in his theory of scientific explanation, talks about four causes to explain something, one of them, the final cause, being teleological. There is the material cause or that out of which something is made (in the case of biology for example this might be the organic molecules), the formal cause, or what kind of thing x is (this today might be defined by genetics, it is what it is because of its genetic makeup and its development follows the genetic program, the efficient cause, which is the closest to what we now call 'cause,' that because of which something is as it is (i.e., because of the preceeding events that caused it), and the final cause, or what is something for (which is the teleological component). Some of the examples you gave, e.g. , animals knowing what to eat, what to avoid, how to interpret signals of their species, seems to me to be what most people would call instinct, i.e., which is probably a genetically caused neurally encoded capability that is species and environment specific. Also, it seems to me that artificial systems, not just living things, would be part of anticipatory systems theory, as a robot may be programmed to engage in goal seeking behavior, modifying its current behavior expecting to find something in the future. Maybe I'm off base and don't have a good grasp of what you are talking about, but those are my initial comments. Maybe you can launch a little more into the THEORY and DEFINE exactly what anticipatory systems theory is. ------------ Definition of Consciousness and Self Consciousness: There have been some attempts to define consciousness and self-consciousness. Words such as "aware" or "awake" have been used in place of "conscious." Is a computer aware or awake? I think not. Being a student of neurophysiology and philosophy, and haven written my thesis on computational neuroscience, I will say that 'consciousness' (and hence self-consciousness) is still very mysterious. We know that it is a property that only brains exhibit (there is nothing besides a brain in the known universe that is conscious). But that doesn't tell us much. Take sensation and perception for example. The scientific story is that a physical stimulus, like an electromagnetic wave or sound wave (compressions and rarefactions of air) hits the sense organ which translates the signal into a neural signal that ultimately terminates in some part of the brain (as in the occipital lobe for vision). That's where the scientific story ends. But how is a set of neurons firing in the occipital lobe the same as seeing a cat. How does one become the other. We don't know. One is an objective account of the event of seeing a cat (the neurophysiological account) and one is a subjective account. No one seems able to say how the objective account IS the subjective account. Miklos raises the question how can you know someone is conscious or self conscious without a verbal report? This might be quite limiting, as verbal reports can be non-veridical (therefore it doesn't satisfy an objective method) and many animals that seem to be aware and self-aware are not capable of giving verbal reports about their state. Take meerkats for example. They clearly can sense and respond to their environment and hence by their behavior are aware. They know their place in the social hierarchy of meerkats, and hence show some behavior that indicates self-awareness. Yet they cannot communicate in the sense of giving a verbal report about their mental state like we can. Then we turned to the question of what is aware and self-aware. What about a bacterium? Is it aware and self-aware, is a robot aware or self-aware, or do you have to have a nervous system to be aware and self-aware? People have different answers to these questions. ------------- Mukund, there is something in western philosophy similar to chetana, introduced by Henri Bergson , the French philosopher: “l’elan vital (the vital spark).” However most scientists have discounted the idea of a vital spark distinguishing the living from the non living. It might be useful to ponder the difference between a cell and a single-celled organism. The cell is not self-moving (Aristotle’s definition of an animal is that it is self-moving), but the single celled bacterium is. The bacterium seems to move towards food sources and responds to stimuli. Does this mean that it has some type of consciousness or volition? Maybe not. A robot can move towards certain objects by itself for which it has a goal to interact, and with sensors it can respond to stimuli, and it is neither living nor conscious. You say that consciousness has something to do with brains (the human brain yes but animal brains too). You are right that the only entity with which consciousness seems to be associated in the universe is a brain, it is associated with nothing else. So does the electrophysiology of neurons have to do with consciousness (it seems that this is active when a subject is conscious and not active when they are unconscious, as in the reticular formation)? Is the brain producing consciousness, or does consciousness exist independently somehow and initiate the electrophysiological events. All we know is that there is a correlation between the two, not necessarily an identity, but perhaps an identity. I take the view that since consciousness is correlated with brains, if you don’t have a brain or a nervous system, like a robot or a bacterium, you do not have consciousness. But that is an intelligent guess and not the final word on the matter. Convince me why I should believe that something without a nervous system like a bacterium should have consciousness? Life and consciousness are at least related by this: all conscious things are also living things (there is no non-living conscious thing like a robot), but not all living things may be conscious. EW ---- I’ve thought a bit about your comment and believe that a biological definition of consciousness would be good. Unfortunately no one has a truly good one. Here is my attempt at one: To say consciousness is awareness is to say nothing. Conscious and aware are synonyms, so one is essentially saying a is a, which doesn't tell us what consciousness is. We can try and define consciousness subjectively, and we can try and define it biologically. We can't really say how the subjective IS the biological, so we are left with two definitions. The subjective basis of consciousness: we can say from our own experience and infer from the verbal reports of other humans that consciousness is essentially a flow of percepts (external and internal). As in a movie, we move from one scene to another, primarily visual but also auditory and sometimes involving the other senses. Sometimes our attention moves the scene to something internal like a memory. The biological basis of consciousness: The brain stem seems to be involved in consciousness. People with damage to the brain stem lose consciousness and stay in a coma. Also anesthetics that render a patient unconscious at the operating table seem to work on the brain stem or reticular formation. Once there is consciousness its contents are often sensory, and so the areas in the cortex associated with sensation and perception such as the occipital lobe for visual information are relevant to consciousness. Once conscious, neural activity seems to be at many places in the brain and cortex simultaneously. Also, the thalamic intralaminar nuclei, which project axons widely to all cortical areas, are notable in that their destruction can result in a permanent loss of consciousness. The chemical basis of consciousness: We can infer also that consciousness is chemical, dependent on the chemicals of the brain. We know this as when someone takes LSD and chemically alters their brain (no anatomical alteration whatsoever), their subjective conscious experience changes dramatically (altered sensations and perceptions and even thought processes). We know also in the case of mentally ill patients that chemical problems such as insufficient or over active neurotransmitters can alter conscious experience as well, and can be set back to normal again in many cases with a CHEMICAL, namely a psychiatric drug. We can also say why robots seem not to be conscious: they are not made out of the right stuff, they are not organic and they are not chemical. ---- There is no doubt that experience changes our brain chemically and even anatomically (by changing our synaptic connections). Take association for example. We form associations when a percept is associated with a word for example synaptically (synapses that fire together wire together). Our brain is dynamic. I have a friend who is a psychiatrist, and his comment is that our brain is constantly changing chemical, even a simple conversation changes the chemistry and micro-architecture of our brain. So there is no doubt that identical twins with essentially the same nervous system and brain upon birth become different persons due to different experiences and hence eventually have brains that differ. If the empiricists are correct, our knowledge and understanding is built out of our percepts (our experiences of sensations), so the chemistry and synaptic micro-architecture of our brain is based upon our experiences. ------- I am not in total disagreement with your position, although I wouldn’t word it so strongly that study of the brain tells us NOTHING about consciousness. However, there is a big gulf between the knowledge of neurophysiology and the knowledge of consciousness. The first is studied by objective measures, the second we study subjectively, as philosophers do. Philosophers have told us interesting things about consciousness like that it is ‘intentional’ (meaning the theory of intentionality, that most mental states have an object, you don’t just believe, you believe that x, you don’t desire, you desire that x, ‘that x’ is the object) yet we have no idea how intentionality is encoded in the brain, it just arises from an analysis of our mental states and of language. What we have nowadays as Radoslav correctly pointed out is “correlation.” When someone performs a mental task we can follow the live imagery of the blood flow in the brain to figure out which processing centers of the brain are involved in that mental task. That is some sort of mapping between a mental task (a mental phenomenon) and a physical event (namely blood flow to a certain area of the brain). This sort of information is a correlation. It doesn’t tell us whether the mind is causing the blood flow or the blood flow is causing the mental event. We also have the Penfield experiments. Penfield, a neurosurgeon electrostimulated the memory cortex of brains of conscious patients and asked them to verify what they were experiments (as in much neurosurgery the patient is awake during the surgery). The patient would state that they are now hearing a symphony they heard years ago or they are now smelling bread. I.e., the physical event, the electrostimulation of memory cortex, produced a mental event along the lines I described. So you can’t say that physical research into the brain has NO connection with the mind, I’ve just shown that it does. Still the relation between the mind and the brain is mysterious. We know a lot about neurophysiology, and we know a lot about the mind, but we have a very thin grasp on how the two are related or how they are possibly the same. It is completely unclear how electrophysiological neuron firings in the occipital lobe IS the subjective experience of seeing a cat. We also know that chemicals affect mental states, such as LSD, or abnormal neurotransmitter activity resulting in mental illness. We have drugs (chemicals) to treat mental illness caused by a chemical imbalance, but frankly we don’t know to any extent why they work. Neuropharmacology is a black box science. We know if you put a chemical (drug) into a person at a certain dose it affects their mental behavior in a certain way, but we don’t know how, i.e., we know very little about what’s going on in the brain as a result of introducing the chemical that would alter the mental state. There is the brain and there is the mind. We are not sure about how the two are related but we know somehow they are. Brains are the only thing in the known universe which produce or at least contain consciousness, when they stop functioning there is no consciousness, when we alter them chemically consciousness changes, but the exact relation between the two is very mysterious. ------------------- I also forgot to talk about lesion/dysfunction studies. When a certain area of the brain gets damaged, there is a mental dysfunction that occurs. In some cases this is permanent, in other cases the mental function is slowly taken over by other areas of the brain (neuroplasticity). Take for example lesions of the left parietal cortex. These result in language dysfunctions. People lose their ability to produce language or to understand language when the left parietal cortex is damaged. So, neuroanatomists correctly reason that the left parietal cortex houses language function. This is an example of something physical, namely a particular anatomical part of the brain, being correlated with something mental, namely language processing and understanding. Back to the Penfield experiments. If a particular memory can be elicited by electrostimulation of a certain part of the memory cortex then we know that something mental, namely a memory, has a physical attribute, namely a spatial LOCATION in the brain. If you hold a theory of mind which ignors all of these scientific facts and just posits that mind is completely separate from the brain, I cannot consider that a rational theory of mind. -------------- Since you appear to be a type of dualist perhaps you will like the following analogy (made by my father, a Harvard Ph.d. and generally intelligent guy). The brain is the wire and the mind the electricity that flows on it. I don’t know if I exactly accept the analogy but let’s analyze it. When confronted with the physicalist statement that the mind IS the brain, his response is the wire is not the electricity. Some people liken this to the analogy that the brain is the hardware and the mind the software that runs on it. Back to the wire/electricity, both are still physical. One is matter and the other energy. So maybe you want to say that the brain is matter and mind is some type of energy? (Don’t forget that in physics matter and energy are intercontroverible). Clearly if you damage the wire the electricity cannot flow properly, just as if you damage the brain the mind cannot function properly (in many cases). Your analogy is more questionable. The car is a physical mechanism, but where the driver drives involves the intention of a living person to direct the mechanism. Are you saying that studying the car cannot tell us where the driver will drive it? Of course not. But perhaps you have something there in that you may not be able to determine by studying the brain the intention of the subject. There is one experiment that attempts to do this and seems to show some sort of brain functioning prior to intentionally looking at a certain dot on a screen. I am not completely convinced by this experiment. It is not clear whether the brain causes the electrochemical activity associated with the intention or whether the intention causes the electrochemical activity associated with the brain. I think if anything is not subject to physical law (which claims that every event is caused by and preceeded by another event in a type of causal determinism) it is intention or volition (but that is a separate but important philosophical topic). It may be that mind is physical but volition is not (something which causes but is not caused). But since consciousness is volitional, this is still imputing an important non-physical aspect to mind. Note that if you impute something non-physical to mind, that does not necessarily mean there is any survival of mind when the physical substrate on which it depends, namely the brain, ceases to function as upon death. Some aspects of mind could be aphysical but still dependent on the physical such as in an epiphenomenal account. ---------------- Amram, since you seem to be a dualist, along the lines of Rene Descartes who said that there is matter (body including the brain) and mind and that the two are completely different substances, I would like to pose a few problems with dualism. If you adopt a dualist stance you still have to say how the physical affects the mental and the mental affects the physical. I.e., you have to posit some type of interactionism. If I raise my arm, I first form an intention to raise my arm (a volition) which is a mental event and then I raise my arm (which is a physical event). Somehow the mental event has to be translated into a physical event. The dualist has to explain how this is possible. Rene Descartes had the answer that it occurred via the pineal gland of the brain, which is kind of a ridiculous answer which doesn’t have any scientific or other type of reason behind it. The dualist has to also explain interactionism in the opposite direction from sensation and perception to a mental event. Photons hit my eye (a physical event) and this causes changes in my retina (a physical event) which sends an electrical signal through my optic nerve to my occipital lobe (a physical event) and then I see a cat (a mental event). How does the physical event (neural firings in the occipital lobe) become a mental event (seeing a cat)? We have to posit some sort of physical/mental interactionism and it can’t be something ridiculous like the pineal gland. If you adopt a monism (like identity theory or physicalism which says the mind IS the brain) (or even a mental monism like Berkeley has in which there is no physical world only the world of ideas) at least you avoid the pitfalls of interactionism. -------------------- I think looking at life from the standpoint of entropy is interesting. Certainly life has features of low or even anti-entropy until we die and disintegrate again resuming the disorder of entropy. Also, I proposed this definition of life, which is based upon life as we know it on earth, but not necessarily the only life that could exist. “life consists of a system of organic molecules organized into a water based cell or cells which contain genes and are capable (except for plants although this was disputed) of self-movement, reproduction, that take in food and produce energy and hence have a metabolism, grow, adapt to their surroundings and reproduce their kind.” This definition does not claim that DNA is necessary but does consider reproduction necessary for the definition of a living thing. In our search for extra-terrestial life (which is mostly the search for extraterrestrial microbes) we use these parameters to search for life, water because of the water based cells, organic molecules because this is what life on earth is made of, etc… Finally, I can’t say that I agree that thermostats are sentient. You seem to equate sentience with information processing. My own view is that they are not the same. May things that perform quite a bit of information processing don’t appear to be sentient, like the mars rover robot, and in fact that only things that seem to be sentient in the known universe are brains (animal and human). We don’t know why brains produce sentience but they appear to. Even biological organisms that respond to stimuli may not be sentient, as a bacterium, as even a robot with its sensors can respond to stimuli in sophisticated ways but I would not say is sentient. ---------------- There’s a lot of evidence now in biology that life at first did NOT have DNA, rather it used RNA to transfer information. RNA is now the scaffolding and the intermediate form between DNA and protein, but it appears that RNA proceeded DNA in organisms that appeared to be alive. --------------- I believe the current model of evolution includes the features you are talking about. The basic theory is that evolution proceeds by the natural selection of random mutations (i.e., it is a random process not teleological). Mutuations occur spontaneously by irradiation of DNA or by copying errors. In most cases these errors are either silent (have no effect) or lethal. In a few cases they impute an advantage to the organism in its environment which is then transferred to the next generation and hence a mutation was successful and evolution proceeds (by an adaptive process). Energy certainly plays in evolution in the role of food necessary for the continued life of the organism, which is converted into energy, to live, catch prey, ingest more food, and reproduce. In animals this is the respiration process, taking in sugars and oxygen (through breathing) and converting it into carbon dioxide and water with a great release of energy by breaking the bonds of sugar. In plants the process is the reverse, taking in sunlight energy, carbon dioxide (also nitrogen) and converting this to sugars (as stored in the plants fruits). There is already a model for organisms and evolution which seems pretty correct. What new model are you proposing? The ENCODE project appears to be a project to characterize the functional elements in DNA. The big order before biology after sequencing organisms is to identify those elements in DNA which actually code something (whereas most don’t) either coding protein or regulatory elements (which are themselves encoding of proteins such as transcription factors, i.e., regulatory elements that switch genes on and off). ---------------------- On Maupertuis. “Maupertuis proposed a theory of generation (i.e., reproduction) in which organic matter possessed a self-organizing “intelligence” that was analogous to the contemporary chemical concept of affinities. I have to say there is some sense in this and this is an area of biochemistry that needs to be greatly expanded. We do not know why in many cases organic structures self-assemble. But if we are going to give a physico-chemical account of life we have to assume somehow that chemical affinities (bonding) accounts for why macro molecular entities such as cells self assemble. We know why membranes self assemble as micelles in water organize themselves into a ball with a polar and non-polar head. But we do not know exactly why all the organelles of the cell and their intricate biochemical pathways to perform the functions they do self assemble from genetically induced elements such as proteins. -------------------- I would like to return to the question of teleology in biology. You characterized teleology as something to be avoided as it smacks of the metaphysical and theological and doesn’t belong in scientific (biologic) explanation. I agree that some treatments of biology as teleological, such as Pierre Teillhard de Chardin’s in Human Destiny appear theological. But teleological explanation in biology isn’t necessarily metaphysical or theological, in fact I think it is necessary, in a reasonable form as a part of biological explanation. Many features of biological life are goal driven and hence naturally teleological. Take migration, food getting, courtship, ontogeny. Consider some examples of biological explanation. “One of the functions of the kidney is to eliminate the end products of protein metabolism.” “Birds migrate to warm climates IN ORDER TO avoid cold temperatures and food shortages associated with winter.” The predator chases the prey in order to catch and eat it. These are all natural explanations of biological behavior and function which involve teleological explanations. These have nothing to do with metaphysics. A tapered down form of teleology may be telenomy. A telenomic explanation sounds like a teleological explanation but the explanation is supposed to be based upon goal driven behavior based upon a program. So the birds fly south for the winter because they have a program which activates in cold weather to cause them to do so. I think much of what we call instinctive behavior is really genetically caused neutrally encoded programs. Another objection to teleological language is that it is used exclusively in biology (and cybernetics) which makes biological reduction to physic-chemical explanation not possible. Yet there is a general belief and big movement (based upon biology becoming MOLECULAR) that much biological phenomena can be reduced to chemical explanations. Also there is the objection that teleological explanations are in conflict with causality, which explains on the basis of a prior not future event. Given all of these objections, I think there is still a place for teleological or telenomic explanation in biology. ---------------------- We only know (to some degree) the answers to when life began and when consciousness emerged on our own planet. When it happened in the universe requires knowing about life and consciousness in the universe outside of our planet, which we do not. Here, life seemed to emerge about 2 billion years ago. We don’t know exactly how it emerged (there must have been organic molecules and there was of course water, and the first life appears to have been microbial i.e. bacterial). Life then persisted for a long time only in the oceans. It eventually moved onto land (I’m not sure of the date) but no earlier than 500 million years ago. What life existed on land initially existed at the waters edge. Consciousness, depending upon what you believe, but I will go with what I believe, awaited the development of nervous systems. A bacterium doesn’t have a nervous system. Since creatures in the oceans prior to life on land had nervous systems (the more advanced life forms), consciousness was born in the water with first shell fish and then fish. ------------- Don, The best we can tell, and we can't go back billions of years to see what actually happened, things happened in the following way. First in water (and we're not even sure where earth's water came from but the predominant theory is from comets in the earth's early heavy bombardment) there was an accumulation of carbon based molecules (organics). Some of this seems to have come from meterorites (the following materials have been found in meteorites: lipids, sugars, polysaccharides, amino acids, phosphates, nitrogenous bases). And of course carbon was already abundant on earth coming from the sun's fusion and other supernovae. Nucleic acids like RNA (and eventually DNA) came from the polymerization of sugars, phosphates, and nitrogenous bases (i.e., a biochemical reaction that would be catalyzed by salt water). Proteins were achieved through the polymerization of amino acids. Some biochemical pathways exist to convert one amino acid into other(s). Energy sources to drive these reactions included the earth's early atmosphere which was reducing as opposed to oxidizing, UV solar radiation, radioactivity, electrical discharges as from lightning, thermal activity from volcanic vents. Some of these reactions occurred in water other in clays (many peptide bonds and RNA can be synthesized in clays) which are abundant on earth and on mars. At some point we had the self assembly of bubbles (water droplets). This occurred as the hydrophobic tails and hydrophilic heads of phospholipids formed a double membrane into a micelle or vesical (this can be show experimentally in the lab that this self assembly occurs spontaneously). This creates a semi-permeable membrane and the basis of a cell with an inside and an outside. I have a great book you should read called "Chemical Evolution" which talks about the evolution of life from the chemical perspective, after all, as molecular biology has shown, most of what we call life is chemical (molecular and biochemical). The whole first half of this book talks about the development of the phospholipid based semipermeable membrane which creates the basis of the first cell. From the components which are believed to have existed in the early earth experimentally we have been able to spontaneously synthesize proteinoid microspheres and bilayers from the organic material found in meterorites. Once you have a bilipid membrane you have the basis for chemical reactions occuring within the membrane being seperated from chemical reactions occurring outside it, and with a semi permeable membrane you also have the capability of selective movement of chemicals from the inside to outside and outside to inside environment. I.e., you have a primitive "cell." The development of RNA. RNA is believed to arisen first before DNA because RNA is easier to synthesize than DNA, the component from meterorites are sufficient to polymerize RNA under the correct conditions, DNA can be synthesized from RNA (hence DNA came later) as in from retroviruses. When the genetic code developed (and that's another story), RNA could synthesize protein, the building blocks of all cell components, like the organelles. Prebiotic life could arise if RNA could replicate without proteins and could later catalyze all steps in protein synthesis. RNA enzymes call ribozymes can catalyze protein synthesis. RNA can be created in abiotic environments. This is a good account of what happened to create the first primitive "cells" and eventually single celled organisms. The first organism may have contained information only, material and machinery for replication provided by the environment. ---------------- My answer to where life started is much the same as my answer about chemical evolution. We started with an inanimate planet. We now have an animate planet. At some point the inanimate had to become the animate. This started with the arrival and polymerization of organic molecules from inorganic molecule synthesis or from meterorites known to be necessary for life: lipids, sugars, polysaccharides, amino acids, phosphates, nitrogenous bases (from phosphates and nitrogenous bases we get RNA). Once the organic molecules existed the next development was the creation of bubbles or droplets based upon the ambiphilic phospholipid arrangement that occurs spontaneously in water. Once you had a compartment or a “cell” and organic molecules inside you may have had the beginning of something we call a single celled organism. How you get from a simple cell to a single celled organism like a bacterium is less clear, but once you had that life started. That seems to be a couple of billion years ago. -------------- I will make another comment why I think life perhaps MUST have a membrane. The only thing that defines YOU and distinguishes you from other people and your environment is your MEMBRANE, i.e., your skin. Likewise a bacterium is not another bacterium or other organism or part of its environment because it has a membrane, i.e., a lipid bilayer. I think you can make the argument that having a membrane is part of the definition of being an organism. ----------- Amram, What you are saying is completely wrong and unscientific. We’ve already shown how INORGANIC chemicals can give rise to ORGANIC chemical in the famous Urey Miller experiment done in 1953. Using just the chemicals believed to have existed on the primitive earth (long before there was any life), an electric discharge simulating lightning was used to create the first organic chemicals, the organic chemicals needed for living systems like amino acids, sugars, fatty acids, and nucleic acids. Read this from http://biology.clc.uc.edu/courses/bio106/origins.htm “The first step is thought to have been the abiotic synthesis (syn = with, together; thesis = an arranging) of organic monomers, in other words, putting inorganic chemicals like methane, carbon dioxide, and ammonia together to form simple organic chemicals like amino acids, simple sugars, fatty acids, and nucleic acids. This portion of the hypothesis was later tested by an experiment done by Stanley Miller as a grad student under Harold Urey in 1953. He used a sterile, enclosed system consisting of a flask over a heat source, a spark chamber, and various other tubing (see illustration). He added sterile H2O, H2, CH4, and NH3 to the sealed system. Heat was applied under the flask to simulate volcanic action, and this was enough to turn a significant portion of the water into steam. A spark chamber periodically discharged electricity into the gasses to simulate lightening. In the return tube, the mixture was cooled to condense the water back into liquid, along with any organic compounds that might have formed from the mixture. Water and all the gasses Miller included are all “clear,” thus his experiment started out with transparent water and transparent gasses. However, after only one week, Miller had a brown, murky soup. Subsequent chemical analysis showed the presence of a number of amino acids and other organic compounds. Other researchers have since tried similar experiments with slight variations in the initial mix of chemicals added, and by now, all 20 amino acids, and a number of sugars, lipids, and nucleotides have been obtained in this manner. From this experiment, scientists generalize that if this can happen in a lab, it could have happened in a similar way on early Earth. Note that ALL that was made here was simple organic chemicals! “ We can’t go back 3 billion years and see what happened but we know recreating the conditions on earth at that time that experimentally we can show how organics spontaneously arise from inorganics. ---- Ian, I agree. I don’t find any inconsistency between Darwin’s theory of survival of the fittest and the social nature of many animals, after all it is in societies that we find protection and survive. Those that can’t run with the pack don’t survive. Knowing to run with the pack is part of what is encoded in the animal brain as a result of evolution. I was just responding to some points in Abraham’s blog. ------ Abraham, I read most of your blog and you raise many good questions about the theory of Natural Selection. Some of your points about biology are true, like animals survive often from the protection that derives from packs, and that mother’s sacrifice to raise their young, and isn’t this contrary to survival of the fittest. Darwin recognized all of this as part of the animal kingdom and didn’t feel that it interfered with his basic thesis. Also, it spells trouble when people attempt to extend Darwin’s thesis to the social sphere: Social Darwinism. This was never Darwin’s intention, it was ONLY intended as a biological theory. Of course survival of the fittest doesn’t extend into the social sphere in many respects, we don’t kill those who are handicapped, companies put eachother out of business but there’s no loss of life involved, etc… And also you say that Darwinism can’t explain many of the developments of the human mind, I don’t think it was intended to. It might explain why our brains grew dramatically as we spread throughout the world, i.e., bigger brains for more behavioral complexity to adapt to diverse environments in sophisticated ways, like tool using, but it may not explain why we developed symphonies and scientific theories as these are less although not completely unconnected to survival. Whether evolution is just blind chance mutations having a survival value is a good question, probably, but maybe not. ---------- I agree that biology doesn’t have a theory that currently explains all of the facts. Darwin’s evolutionary theory is a good start, and is backed up strongly by today’s genetic studies (Darwin himself did not know the mechanism, genetics, behind evolution). For example in bioinformatics, by analyzing genetic sequences, and factoring in the average time for mutations to occur, we can not only reconstruct the tree of evolutionary changes, but also give a good estimate about the time over which they occurred. But, biology, a very complex science, is still in its infancy. It is not like physics, mature, with mathematically precise theories (not to say that everything has been explained about the physical universe, but we are much further along). Biology still doesn’t have a good theory about how DEVELOPMENT occurs in organisms (certainly not at the chemical level except in very sketchy ways), and we don’t have a good explanation of why chemicals self organize into SYSTEMS, and why systems of cells organize into tissues and tissues organize into organs and organs into organ systems, i.e., we don’t understand self organization and we don’t understand systematization. So evolution tells us something important about biology but many important features of biology are largely unexplained by evolution. ------- I think you make several excellent points. And so rather than assuming the proposition that life tends towards greater complexity over time, we should question this. I can see both sides. Here’s why I think there may be a tendency towards complexity: we started off with single cell organisms like bacteria and moved to multi-cellular organisms, ie., organisms with many different TYPES of cells that work together in systems (that isn’t to say that a bacterium isn’t a system too, it is, of subcellular components like organelles). We moved from animals with smaller brains towards animals with bigger brains increasing behavioral complexity. But here’s why I think that there isn’t really much of a tendency towards complexity: natural selection isn’t really a theory towards greater complexity. It simply says that random mutations occur with a certain frequency and some of these mutations have a greater survival value. It doesn’t mean that the change by the mutation necessarily results in more complex structures or more complex behavior, just better adapted behavior. We can question the relationship between natural selection and a movement towards complexity. ----------- There’s an interesting article in this month’s Scientific American (I think August 2013 issue actually) about COMPLEXITY in Biology. Can it all be explained by Darwin’s Natural Selection. We have this fact that over time lifeforms have become more complex. Why? Life started off as single celled organisms like bacteria and evolved into something like us. It’s not a straight path towards complexity, with lots of twists and turns, and some regressions, but a general trend towards complexity? If we take evolution, the natural selection of random mutations, we notice there are three types of mutations: mutations that confer an advantage and are passed on, silent mutations which have neither an advantageous nor deleterious effect, and deleterious and often lethal mutations which are not passed on. One thing happens in mutation which is related to complexity, you get DIFFERENTIATION. When you get differentiation, you end up with more different types of parts, more different types of proteins. Complexity is both something with many different types of parts that work together as a system, something simple has only a few types of parts. This differentiation is helped by silent mutations which do not have a deleterious or lethal effect, yet are not really a part of natural selection, i.e,., they may have no outward manifestation which is tested by the environment. They may be inward changes to the constitution of the animal. What is missing in this puzzle is why chemicals (notably proteins) and biological parts form SYSTEMS? This is poorly understood and is part of the question of complexity and why we evolve towards it. Even at the protein level there are things like protein pumps which spin, basically form biological motors out of a complex form of proteins working together, why do these systems develop? Can we explain this development towards systematization merely from chemical bonds? What do you think? ----------- Chris, it’s good to hear a physicist defending Philosophy. Hawking’s statement reveals a lot about him. He clearly has to be a reductionist. If he believes you don’t need philosophy, which is largely about analyzing our mind and mental data, then he must believe that mind and consciousness can be reduced to neuroscience. I’m not saying it can or it can’t, just the jury is out, so far we have very little idea in neuroscience what consciousness is and how the brain produces it. At this point all we have is correlations between mental phenomena (like a cognitive task someone is given) and neurophysiological events, like blood flow to a certain area in the brain. Clearly these are related but not necessarily identical. Secondly Hawking must believe that biology (namely neuroscience) can be reduced to physics. Again there are problems with this, there may be systemic aspects of biology or even emergent properties which are not true of physical systems, i.e., maybe we can reduce biology to physics and maybe we can’t. There is one score on which I think Hawking is right, the movement from natural philosophy to science. It used to be that philosophers like Aristotle theorized about the nature of the physical world, but many of their ideas were incorrect. When it comes to the natural world, we have done much better by observation and experiment, i.e., science. I would say that science has replaced natural philosophy (note when Newton wrote his treatise on Physics it was entitled “The Mathematical Principles of Natural PHILOSOPHY.”). I.e., it used to be all science was just a branch of philosophy, natural philosophy. But this is no longer the case. Also he has a point about epistemology. Ala Quine’s Epistemology Naturalized, Psychophysics (or physics along with psychology) is making headway on the question of how we come to have knowledge. So there are some areas of philosophy which are partly or completely (theorizing about the physical world) replaced by science. Being someone with a degree BOTH in Philosophy AND Science, I can truly say that Hawking doesn’t really know what Philosophy is about. Is he saying that areas like Ethics can be reduced to Physics? This is ridiculous as science is concerned with what is, not what should be. I.e., there are some areas of philosophy which simply can’t be replaced with science or physics. ------------- Agreed Christine, you cannot separate mind from matter. If they are not identical they certainly are related. As I indicated if you try to separate the two as Descartes does you end upon which the problem of interactionism. We form an intention (something mental) to raise our arm, and then our arm goes up (something physical). For this event to occur, there has to be some interaction between the mental and the physical (material). Descartes absurdly said this was done through the pineal gland. You have the same problem with sensation and perception. When photons hit our eye and translate the light into electrical impulses in the brain at the retina which terminate in firings in the occipital lobe we have a mental event, purely describable by objective science. But as a result we have the sensation of SEEING (say a cat) which is a mental event. Again for the physical event to become a mental event there must be some interaction between the physical and mental. You’re back to interactionism, which is the problem for dualism. If you posit a monism, like identify theory or materialism you avoid the problem but still can’t explain how the firings in the occipital lobe ARE the experience of seeing the cat. So either you posit mind and matter are the same and avoid the pitfalls of interactionism but can’t explain how these two seemingly different things are one and the same, or you posit dualism (mind and matter are different) but invoke the problems of interactionism. ----------- No doubt what you say is true, some psychological disorders are social or psychological disorders and are not based upon faulty brain chemistry, other such disorders ARE based upon brain chemistry. That’s why one sees a psychologist for something not biologically based and a psychiatrist or neurosurgeon for something biologically or chemically based. Although I have to say there are increasing attempts to deal with psychosocial disorders with pills for better or for worse. ---------- I don’t agree that viruses are alive just because they have DNA. They cannot even copy themselves, they need the genetic code machinery of an invaded host cell to do this. Hence viruses cannot reproduce on their own. They are unlike living things in MANY respects, i.e., even unlike single celled organisms like bacteria. Here was my definition of life: “life consists of a system of organic molecules organized into a water based cell or cells which contain genes and are capable (except for plants although this was disputed) of self-movement, reproduction, that take in food and produce energy and hence have a metabolism, grow, adapt to their surroundings and reproduce their kind.” Viruses don’t reproduce by themselves, they don’t take in food and produce energy hence they don’t have a metabolism, they don’t have a standard lipid membrane although maybe you can consider their protein coat a membrane etc… I.e., they LACK many of the attributes of living things. DNA isn’t all there is to life. ----------- That’s why we need both philosophy and science to understand things like mind. We have the science of neuroscience to tell us what is going on in the brain when we think about certain things (e.g. blood flow studies that show which areas of the brain are active during a cognitive task) and we have philosophy to study the mind from a subjective perspective, as in how we think and understand (Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason etc…). ------------- On the brain and the mind, I think the jury is out whether the two are the same or fundamentally different but connected. They clearly are connect otherwise how would an intention (something mental) to raise my arm result in something physical, raising my arm. Likewise how would something physical like the electromagnetic radiation off of a flow (something physical) result in my mental picture of a flower? I think one of the main problems is methodological. We give a ‘scientific’ ‘objective’ account of a sensation or a percept, but it always results in electrical firings in neurons in a certain part of the brain. On the other hand we see a flower. How are the two the same. One is an objective account (the neuroscientific account), and one is a subjective account ‘seeing the flower.’ We can even CORRELATE the two and say WHERE is the brain (location is physical) the brain is active in terms of blood flow and electrical activity when we see the flower, while (subjective) seeing the flower, but we can’t reason that a correlation is an identity. There’s clearly a close relationship between the brain and the mind. When chemicals are introduced (something physical) such as LSD it alters the MENTAL experience of the subject. Does that mean consciousness is chemical? Perhaps. It certainly is affected by chemicals. When someone has a definiciency or over production of a neurotransmitter (something physical) that results in schizophrenia (something mental) and this can be restored to normal mentality with a drug in some cases, we have more evidence that the mind is chemical or is at least affected by chemicals. And in physical lesions to the brain there is concomitant loss of mental function, which is sometimes recovered by another area of the brain due to neuroplasticity. Whatever the relationship between the mind and the brain it is very close. ---------------------- It seems that Quine stated something significant in his article “Epistemology Naturalized.” Today, with the marriage of physics and psychology in the discipline of ‘psychophysics,’ we are able to trace the sensation from the physical event (compression and rarefraction of air to produce a sound wave or visible electromagnetic frequency to produce a color) to the percept through understanding how the sense organs work (the eye, the ear, skin transducers etc…) through to the neural messages sent to the brain. This is the epistemology naturalized. Unfortunately the scientific story ends with neural impulses in a certain locus of the brain (for example the occipital lobe for vision). We cannot say (and this is the mind/body or mind/brain problem) how the electrophysiological events in a certain area of the brain IS the same thing as seeing a colorful flower, we just know that the two are correlated. Kant didn’t have this science at his disposal when he wrote the Critique of Pure Reason and so he started with an analysis of our subjective experience which involved sensations. In fact, from the subjective point of view, I would call ‘consciousness’ primarily a ‘flow of percepts.’ That is much of our consciousness is connected to sensation and the processing of sensation. Yes we have thought and memories and imagination etc… but many of these are connected to our percepts (related to the empiricist’s theory). And again, the point I made before is that even the sciences of physics, psychophysics, and neuroscience are based upon experiments which use observations (sensations) themselves to substantiate the theory. --------------- On creating life you raise the ethical question ‘should we.’ If we can, should we. But the fact is that we can’t and we possibly may never, as we don’t really know what is required for something to be living. I again ask the question what is the difference between a cell, like a skin cell, and a single celled organism, like a bacterium? That seems is a question that can be answered and sheds some light on what is required to be an organism (as opposed to just a cell). Anyone want to comment on this? Also, much of biology has become molecular biology, so we are understanding more and more about biology and organisms chemically (the chemical structures and the function or biochemical reactions). But it’s not clear that it follows from this that you can suppose reductionism (that we can just explain biology as chemistry). We don’t know yet. There seem to be systemic factors in organisms that may not be explainable simply as a sum of their parts. -------------- If I understand what your objection is, you do not need to know everything there is to know about life or living organisms to give a definition of them. You can give a preliminary definition based upon what we do know at this time. That is all I did. As I said, again the restrictions are that this is a definition that is life AS WE KNOW IT AT THIS TIME ON THIS PLANET. It doesn’t preclude possible lifeforms we might find elsewhere. Computational biology is extremely new and somewhat primitive itself. Much of the computation is just of genomic and proteomic sequences, for example computationally identifying segments of DNA that might contain genes (protein coding sequences). Some of the computation (ala my thesis) is simulation of biological entities or aspects of biological entities (mine was computation of the nervous system of a worm, C. Elegans). All such simulations are abstractions and hence only partial representations of the biological phenomena they simulate. --------------- I think we need to reinterpret Kant in the light of modern neuroscience and physics. At the time he wrote he was try to refute part of the thesis of the empiricists (John Locke and Hume) and to explain how we could have a mathematical science of nature ala Newton’s physics. His philosophy, as you know, involved a type of idealism mixed with empiricism which maintained that what we know is the “phenomena (from greek ‘that which appears or that which shows itself’) or the action of our mind (Kantian categories) on our sense data. His primary refutation of the empiricist is that there must be these a priori categories of mind into which sense data fit for experience even to be possible. Nowadays we have to reinterpret that formula to neuroscience, that there must be brain structures and processing (is the mind the same as the brain? Open question) that operate on raw sense data to make experience possible. In terms of modern physics, we clearly have theoretic entities in physics which are not observable and hence do not come strictly from sense data. But in some sense they do. The experiments upon which we base these theories do involve observables and sense data, in fact, there is no experiment which does not appeal to the senses for corroboration. Our theories are the action of the mind to organize the observations or sense data from the physics experiments into theoretic entities and models (as Judith says, the mind makes models of reality). One experiment, or one observation, or one bundle of sense data can derail an entire theory. Take Einstein’s general theory of relativity, particularly his statement that masses could extert a gravitational pull (actually a push due to the deformation of space time) on light so that light would bend around a mass. This was only proven during an eclipse in which the stars around the sun, their light, appeared in a slightly different position bent to exactly the degree Einstein’s theory predicted. Note this was an OBSERVATION, or a bundle of sense data, that confirmed or denied Einstein’s general theory of relativity (and his theory that masses bend space time and that is what gravitation is). So, I think, in a modern and slightly more contorted way we are back where Kant said we were: we cannot get past the senses or the sense data observations of our physics experiments to create, confirm, or deny physics theories. ------------- Your comments are right on. What Judith and I are saying is that as much as we know about biology there is much more that we don’t know. Biology is not like physics (Amram’s discipline), we don’t have precise mathematical knowledge of the phenomena. What we can do today is only modify existing organisms, like inserting a gene in an existing organism to create a protein like insulin (which is how most insulin is now produced). We have even modified bacteria to be oelphagic (oil eating). But certainly can’t create an organism from scratch. We know some of the molecular structure and biochemistry of organisms (the new discipline of MOLECULAR biology which explains biological phenomena at the chemical level, food for thought for reductionists) but we don’t know the whole story. Very undeveloped areas of biology I have pointed out like developmental biology, where we don’t know how a zygote creates an organism, except in very sketchy ways, i.e, we don’t know the precise program of sequential gene expression that creates all of the differentiated cells of the multicellular organism. -------------- On the ability to create life. Clearly we cannot, or have not yet. Some people say it’s too complex. I would simply say we don’t know enough. In engineering (and we are talking about engineer a living thing) you have to know everything about your artificial creation, up to a mathematical description. Clearly we don’t know this much about biology. I have talked about the fact that we don’t know much about the development of an organism. This involves successive gene expression, for the cells to differentiate at the proper times (differentialtion meaning controlled gene expression) there must be a ‘program’ of the sequence of gene expression perhaps controlled by the non coding regions of DNA which we have not decoded, which determines this. Does nobody in this thread know enough about biology that they don’t know what I’m talking about. I have a degree in computational biology which is half molecular biology, I know what I’m talking about, but the dead silence I get indicates that nobody here gets it. ------------- ---- You didn’t seem to grasp my argument which was that viruses don’t fit the definition of a living thing in MANY respects, not just that they aren’t cells. Here are some of the others: they aren’t really a ‘system’ of organic molecules (i.e., they lack the organelles of a bacterium that produce energy like the mitochondria or that handle waste like the lysosomes etc…), they cannot convert their genes into protein like a bacterium can, i.e., they require using the genetic code machinery of the infected host cell to do this, they don’t take in food and produce energy, i.e., they lack a metabolism that a bacterium has, and they don’t independently reproduce their kind, i.e., they require the machinery of the infected host cell to reproduce. In other respects (as I delineated) they are like bacterium and living organisms. So my argument stands. ------------ I am not in complete agreement that viruses are organisms or that they are even completely alive. Unfortunately they are a case of something that has some characteristics of organisms and living things and also lacks some characteristics of organisms and living things. I will go back to my definition of an organism or living thing: “life consists of a system of organic molecules organized into a water based cell or cells which contain genes and are capable (except for plants although this was disputed) of self-movement, reproduction, that take in food and produce energy and hence have a metabolism, grow, adapt to their surroundings and reproduce their kind.” Okay now let’s evaluate viruses under this definition. They consist of organic molecules like DNA, RNA, and proteins, but there isn’t as much of a ‘system’ as a bacterium which has organelles that provide particular functions such as the production of energy and management of waste products. They aren’t a cell in the common definition as they lack a biopolar phospholipid membrane, yet they have a membrane of some sort, i.e., the protein coating. They contain genes, but they cannot by themselves convert those genes into protein, they have to hijack the genetic code machinery of a host cell to do this and hence, unlike the definition, cannot reproduce by themselves. They are capable of self-movement perhaps, but they don’t take in food and produce energy, as in by the process of respiration (converting oxygen and sugar into carbon dioxide and water with a huge release of energy by breaking the bonds of the sugars) and hence they don’t have a metabolism. I’m not sure I would say they grow, but they do adapt to their surroundings in the sense of sensing and attaching to the correct type of host cell, and as I said they don’t independently reproduce their kind. So clearly by this definition they have some but not all of the characteristics of a living thing. I think strangely you have to consider viruses on the fringe of the living and the dead, where dead or alive, organism or non organism may not be mutually exclusive categories. Something seems to have developed which is partly living partly dead, not a full organism but with some of the characteristics of an organism. This again shows that life as it proceeded from the inorganic (and our planet clearly started as inorganic) to the organic may have gone through a transition phase of the semi-organism (which I know Amram will object to). ------------- Andre, you make a good point about self assembly in the artificial world. But, I’m not sure the analogy completely holds up. With a robot that can manufacture other robots, someone has to build and design the first robot in the first place. We (humans) build and design a robot to assemble robots. But this isn’t true of a cell. We don’t design or build a cell at all to design and build other cells. Rather the cell (zygote or fertilized egg) exists and has the potential to divide into other cells and differentiate those cells into different types of cells which then migrate to their correct places in the multicellular complex to create an organism (remember that every cell, including the zygote, has the DNA blueprint for the entire organism and every cell in the organism which is only realized based upon gene expression). In biology we have a long way to go to understand the “program” of development from a zygote to a multicellular organism, but it must be a program of some sort which switches on and off gene expression at the correct time to produce the different types of cells that are needed as the organism develops. Its gene expression control, but gene expression control in a sequence which indicates some sort of “program.” --------------- I would like to understand your use of the term “self-organization” in biology and explain how it relates to my notion of self-organization given below. I think the “self-organization” of living things is an interesting topic and perhaps one of the qualities that defines them. In the case of genetic material that is translated into protein in the cell, once the protein exists it needs to perform its function which is, for example, either to be a structural elements such as part of the membrane that houses an organelle, or to catalyze a biochemical reaction such as a protein that acts as an enzyme. But once created the protein needs to take its place in the structure or function of the cell. We are supposing, but don’t have a huge amount of evidence about this, that it does so due to molecular forces (chemical bonds) which pull the protein into place in a structure or draw it to a particular biochemical reaction. This is a type of self assembly. Again things like cell walls themselves self assemble due to the amphiphilic nature of the phospholipids involves, naturally forming a bilayer or micelle or vesicle. I think much more can be said about “self-assembly in living organisms” There is also the “self assembly” of the development of a living thing. We start off as one cell, a zygote (a fertilized egg). That cell then begins to divide. The cells differentiate and migrate to different ends of the multicellular complex. Eventually a much more complex multicellular organism develops. How is this self-assembly achieved. We don’t know that much about it. Part of it is again molecular forces (chemical bonds and signals) which cause the divided cells to differentiate into different types of cells (every cell has the genetic makeup to create any sort of cell, but the signals it receives affect which genes are expressed and turned into the proteins that create a particular type of cell), and migration of cells also seems to involve chemical signaling. So much for self assembly or self-organization, I’d like to hear what others have to say on the subject as I think this is one characteristic of life or of living things. Artificial things like cars don’t self assemble. ------------ Ian, I agree with your statement that my definition of life might be somewhat restrictive. It is the classic definition of “life” AS WE KNOW IT ON THIS PLANET. Perhaps it doesn’t cover cases of extremophiles such as exist in volcanic vents. In the search for extraterrestrial life, we work from what we know, i.e., life on this planet. Most of the search astrobiologists have been conducting has to do with search for liquid water. As far as we know life started in water, and it is still water based (cells are a large percentage water based in the cytoplasm) which is also the basis for many if not most biochemical reactions. When you start talking of “virtual life” such as exists in various computer programs, that’s a very different thing. As a computational biologist I am familiar with writing programs that simulate aspects of living things, and all I can say is a simulation is a set of symbols and operations that REPRESENT aspects of living things. The symbol and what it represents is not the same thing. It is certainly not composed of the same thing (up or down voltages in circuits versus organic chemicals) ala Aristotle’s material cause. And a simulation is always a simplification as well, not representing the entire object or in this case organism but only those aspects of it which we wish to symbolize (i.e. it is an abstraction). In short I have a hard time seeing anything living in the operation of computer code, but enlighten me as to why you might call a virtual organism living? -------------- Viruses are an interesting topic when discussing the definition of life. They are clearly on the boundry of living versus not living. Basically they are DNA or RNA surrounded by a protein coat. The cannot truly reproduce without the machinery of a host cell (so they are not independently reproducing), to do things such as use the genetic code to produce the protein coat. If you take my definition of life: “life consists of a system of organic molecules organized into a water based cell or cells which contain genes and are capable (except for plants although this was disputed) of self-movement, reproduction, that take in food and produce energy and hence have a metabolism, grow, adapt to their surroundings and reproduce their kind.” Clearly viruses don’t meet all of the specifications of this definition of life. They do not have a cell membrane (lipid bilayer), but they have a membrane of a sort, a protein coat. They cannot truly reproduce on their own. They don’t really have their own metabolism and use features of the host cell’s metabolism. I think it’s interesting to ponder viruses place in the evolution of life. Maybe they preceeded bacteria as the first semi-lifeform (that is half living and half dead). There are several theories on their origin. There is the regressive hypothesis that they were once cell based life forms that parasite other cells and eventually lost many of their cell features. The Cellular Origin hypothesis: some viruses may have been bits of DNA or RNA that escaped from cells or single cellular organisms, much as transposons or plasmids that can move about in a cell and affect the nuclear material. There is the co-evolution hypothesis that they co-evolved with cellular based life in a symbiotic or parasitic relationship. This discussion of viruses also has ramnifications of a discussion we had earlier about symbiosis. Clearly there is a type of symbiosis or parasitism going on with viruses and cells or single cellular organisms. --------------- Mukund, the reason I used the term “biomolecule” is because we needed a term that describes “a molecule that occurs in a living system. “ That’s my definition of a “biomolecule.” It needs to be contradistinguished from “organic molecule” as some organic molecules are not biomolecules. Take for example a plastic. It is an organic molecule, but it doesn’t occur in any living system, so it is not a “biomolecule.” Again, all biomolecules are organic molecules but not all organic molecules are biomolecules. Maybe someone can poke fun at that as well. Amram, now that I know you are a Ph.d in Physics I cannot call you unscientific. We disagree on whether the Urey Miller experiments are representative of what happened in the early earth and whether organic molecules can be spontaneously synthesized for inorganics. I say they can, and it is a pretty realistic recreation, you say they cannot and all organic molecules are separate. It is possible all organic molecules came from outer space, i.e., meterorites, but this begs the question what happened in space (other planets or stars) that created the organic molecules. ------------ Amram, your analogy is no good. If you put a set of engine parts in a closed case and add an electric charge they don’t self assemble into something else. But if you put certain inorganic molecules in a closed case and add electric charges they DO self assemble into biomolecules. (note all biomolecules are organic molecules but not all organic molecules are biomolecules). This is what the Urey Miller experiment proves. They self assemble because of the chemical bonds and forces involved. In fact no artificial thing we have built self assembles, but self assembly (due to chemical forces) occurs all of the time in nature and biology. Cells are basically self assemblies of biomolecules (we don’t know all of the specifics but we know for example how the lipid bilayer which is the cell’s membrane self assembles due to chemical forces, etc…) ------------- Again I think we need to distinguish between “organic” which means composed of hydrocarbons and “biomolecules” which are molecules in living organisms. You are using the former for the latter. Just use the term “biomolecule” when you want to talk about the organic molecules in living things. That being said, biomolecules seem to have come from meterorites and also to have been synthesized from inorganic molecules in the primitive atmosphere and oceans. I know you don’t agree with me on that point, but as best we can tell, that’s what the science indicates. ----------- Actually the fact that any experiment involves an experimenter is kind of a ridiculous comment. Of course. But it misses the point. The point is that these organic biomolecules occured SPONTANEOUSLY in a closed glass vial that included originally only inorganic molecules. There was no human being synthesizing the biomolecules. This occurred spontaneously (with simulated lightning i.e, an electronic pulse). That’s the whole point of the experiment, which Amram’s comment clearly misses. The vial contains the inorganic molecules assumed to be on earth (from other scientific evidence) in the early oceans and atmosphere. The vial is a simulation of those early conditions. Of course we can’t know for sure, because we can’t travel back in time 3 billion years to see how the first biomolecules came into being. Obviously some biomolecules like amino acids came here on meteors. I get this objection from a lot of religious people who claim that life is sacred and occurred by a miracle and has nothing to do with the physical world (abiotic world), or that consciousness is sacred and has nothing to do with the brain. It’s all wrong and ridiculous. ----------- What you are saying is completely wrong and unscientific. We’ve already shown how INORGANIC chemicals can give rise to ORGANIC chemical in the famous Urey Miller experiment done in 1953. Using just the chemicals believed to have existed on the primitive earth (long before there was any life), an electric discharge simulating lightning was used to create the first organic chemicals, the organic chemicals needed for living systems like amino acids, sugars, fatty acids, and nucleic acids. Read this from http://biology.clc.uc.edu/courses/bio106/origins.htm “The first step is thought to have been the abiotic synthesis (syn = with, together; thesis = an arranging) of organic monomers, in other words, putting inorganic chemicals like methane, carbon dioxide, and ammonia together to form simple organic chemicals like amino acids, simple sugars, fatty acids, and nucleic acids. This portion of the hypothesis was later tested by an experiment done by Stanley Miller as a grad student under Harold Urey in 1953. He used a sterile, enclosed system consisting of a flask over a heat source, a spark chamber, and various other tubing (see illustration). He added sterile H2O, H2, CH4, and NH3 to the sealed system. Heat was applied under the flask to simulate volcanic action, and this was enough to turn a significant portion of the water into steam. A spark chamber periodically discharged electricity into the gasses to simulate lightening. In the return tube, the mixture was cooled to condense the water back into liquid, along with any organic compounds that might have formed from the mixture. Water and all the gasses Miller included are all “clear,” thus his experiment started out with transparent water and transparent gasses. However, after only one week, Miller had a brown, murky soup. Subsequent chemical analysis showed the presence of a number of amino acids and other organic compounds. Other researchers have since tried similar experiments with slight variations in the initial mix of chemicals added, and by now, all 20 amino acids, and a number of sugars, lipids, and nucleotides have been obtained in this manner. From this experiment, scientists generalize that if this can happen in a lab, it could have happened in a similar way on early Earth. Note that ALL that was made here was simple organic chemicals! “ We can’t go back 3 billion years and see what happened but we know recreating the conditions on earth at that time that experimentally we can show how organics spontaneously arise from inorganics. ------------- Ian, thanks for the clarification. What you said is correct: “Numerous experiments have shown that organic molecules can be made out of inorganic precursors by various means including electric discharges, UV light and ionising radiation. For that matter, organic material has been found in four-billion-year-old meteorites.” ------------- Amram, with all due respect, you need to learn something about organic chemistry. All organic molecules DO NOT come from living organisms. The gas in your car is an organic molecule. I suggest you look up organic chemistry on the internet if not get an organic chemistry book. Plastics are organic chemicals, they are not living. By organic (your first lesson in organic chemistry) is meant hydrocarbon based. It’s very clear that organic chemicals existed BEFORE there was any living organism, some of these came from meterorites, some were synthesized from the carbon and carbon dioxide and nitrogen in the atmosphere and other places on earth (the water for example). I said “lipids, sugars, polysaccharides, amino acids, phosphates, nitrogenous bases (from phosphates and nitrogenous bases we get RNA),” we got from meterorites, these were already organic chemicals, but this predated anything living. ---------------- I will make another comment why I think life perhaps MUST have a membrane. The only thing that defines YOU and distinguishes you from other people and your environment is your MEMBRANE, i.e., your skin. Likewise a bacterium is not another bacterium or other organism or part of its environment because it has a membrane, i.e., a lipid bilayer. I think you can make the argument that having a membrane is part of the definition of being an organism. ------------- One thing you said sounds probably correct and quite plausible: that some of the organelles may have been digested organisms that maintained a symbiotic relationship with the ingester. Note that organelles have membranes just as the cell or a single celled organism does and organelles like mitochondria even have their own DNA! More on symbiosis. We’ve been talking about bacteria as the simplest type of life form (single celled). But how did we get from single celled organisms to multi cellular organisms? Single celled organisms reproduce along the lines of mitosis, just as cells in a multi-celled organism split by mitosis or meiosis to support grow, development and renewal. How do cells (and we start out with one cell, a zygote or fertilized egg) specialize or differentiate and become all the cells of the body. And how do they know how to migrate and take their proper place and function among the other cells? There is something like symbiosis going on here or cell signaling. Cells send chemical signals to eachother to induce certain cell fates or to migrate in certain ways. Every cell in your body contains the complete blueprint of every protein and cell in your body, yet becomes a particular type of cell. This is done through gene expression. A neuron is a cell in which the genes expressed encode the proteins to make a neuron. A cardiac cell is a cell in which the genes expressed encode the proteins to make a heart muscle cell, etc… yet the dna of every cell is identical. It’s gene expression that determines cell type. Any way I introduced it. So far we’ve been talking about single celled organisms like bacteria, but most animals are multicelled. How do we get from one to the other? --------------- I appreciate your comments. I will however say that a mechanistic view of the universe would not be the same as the one in Descartes day. And by the way it’s the material universe including life that he was considering a mechanism (he was a dualist, mind versus matter). Nowadays some mechanisms have goals. This is clearly the case for robots developed in AI such as the mars rover. In the current context we are more likely to make analogies to intelligent and goal driven mechanisms or mechanisms with information flows and states than the clock like mechanisms of Descartes’ time. I myself like to do this in calling instinctual behavior a type of “program.” -------------- My answer to where life started is much the same as my answer about chemical evolution. We started with an inanimate planet. We now have an animate planet. At some point the inanimate had to become the animate. This started with the arrival and polymerization of organic molecules from inorganic molecule synthesis or from meterorites known to be necessary for life: lipids, sugars, polysaccharides, amino acids, phosphates, nitrogenous bases (from phosphates and nitrogenous bases we get RNA). Once the organic molecules existed the next development was the creation of bubbles or droplets based upon the ambiphilic phospholipid arrangement that occurs spontaneously in water. Once you had a compartment or a “cell” and organic molecules inside you may have had the beginning of something we call a single celled organism. How you get from a simple cell to a single celled organism like a bacterium is less clear, but once you had that life started. That seems to be a couple of billion years ago. --------------- I am also saying that the only example and information we have about “life” is what exists and the forms in which it exists on this planet. On this planet anything we call life is cell based. That isn’t to say that some form of non cell based life couldn’t exist elsewhere in the universe. ------------- The best we can tell, and we can't go back billions of years to see what actually happened, things happened in the following way. First in water (and we're not even sure where earth's water came from but the predominant theory is from comets in the earth's early heavy bombardment) there was an accumulation of carbon based molecules (organics). Some of this seems to have come from meterorites (the following materials have been found in meteorites: lipids, sugars, polysaccharides, amino acids, phosphates, nitrogenous bases). And of course carbon was already abundant on earth coming from the sun's fusion and other supernovae. Nucleic acids like RNA (and eventually DNA) came from the polymerization of sugars, phosphates, and nitrogenous bases (i.e., a biochemical reaction that would be catalyzed by salt water). Proteins were achieved through the polymerization of amino acids. Some biochemical pathways exist to convert one amino acid into other(s). Energy sources to drive these reactions included the earth's early atmosphere which was reducing as opposed to oxidizing, UV solar radiation, radioactivity, electrical discharges as from lightning, thermal activity from volcanic vents. Some of these reactions occurred in water other in clays (many peptide bonds and RNA can be synthesized in clays) which are abundant on earth and on mars. At some point we had the self assembly of bubbles (water droplets). This occurred as the hydrophobic tails and hydrophilic heads of phospholipids formed a double membrane into a micelle or vesical (this can be show experimentally in the lab that this self assembly occurs spontaneously). This creates a semi-permeable membrane and the basis of a cell with an inside and an outside. I have a great book you should read called "Chemical Evolution" which talks about the evolution of life from the chemical perspective, after all, as molecular biology has shown, most of what we call life is chemical (molecular and biochemical). The whole first half of this book talks about the development of the phospholipid based semipermeable membrane which creates the basis of the first cell. From the components which are believed to have existed in the early earth experimentally we have been able to spontaneously synthesize proteinoid microspheres and bilayers from the organic material found in meterorites. Once you have a bilipid membrane you have the basis for chemical reactions occuring within the membrane being seperated from chemical reactions occurring outside it, and with a semi permeable membrane you also have the capability of selective movement of chemicals from the inside to outside and outside to inside environment. I.e., you have a primitive "cell." The development of RNA. RNA is believed to arisen first before DNA because RNA is easier to synthesize than DNA, the component from meterorites are sufficient to polymerize RNA under the correct conditions, DNA can be synthesized from RNA (hence DNA came later) as in from retroviruses. When the genetic code developed (and that's another story), RNA could synthesize protein, the building blocks of all cell components, like the organelles. Prebiotic life could arise if RNA could replicate without proteins and could later catalyze all steps in protein synthesis. RNA enzymes call ribozymes can catalyze protein synthesis. RNA can be created in abiotic environments. This is a good account of what happened to create the first primitive "cells" and eventually single celled organisms. The first organism may have contained information only, material and machinery for replication provided by the environment. --------------- My biological definition of life includes reproduction but quite a number of other things. “life consists of a system of organic molecules organized into a water based cell or cells which contain genes and are capable (except for plants although this was disputed) of self-movement, reproduction, that take in food and produce energy and hence have a metabolism, grow, adapt to their surroundings and reproduce their kind.” As molecular biologists we have biochemically reproduced some aspects of cells and living things but not entire cells (I am a computational biologist which is in part a molecular biologist). It doesn’t mean we won’t. But I would like to ask you what is the difference between a cell and a single celled organism (like a bacterium)? That’s an interesting question which has some bearing on the question of what biologically is life? The two have similar components, but single celled organisms show self movement and behavioral response to stimuli whereas this isn’t as clear about a cell, which in some cases moves, and changes its constitution due to external signals or signals from other cells. Cells reproduce by mitosis or meiosis as do single celled organisms. So to you what is the difference between a cell and a single celled organism that we would call living? ---------------- Okay, Ian, now that you have defined “sentience,” and have indicated to me how it is different from my concept of consciousness this makes more sense. Yes, there are varying degrees of sentience, and if you are defining sentience has the ability to detect outside stimuli and to engage in some behavior in response to stimuli, then perhaps you can say a bacterium is sentient. However, you would also have to describe a robot with sensors as sentient by this definition as it is able to detect outside stimuli and modify its behavior based upon that stimuli. This is what the mars rover robot does. Sapience as you define it “self-awareness and reasoning ability” is clearly true of humans but I would also say there is a continuum of self awareness and reasoning abilities from animals to humans. Meerkats, as I’ve described, know their place in the social order, they know who the dominant male or female is, they know what their responsibilities are to the group, like babysitting the pups etc.. so they clearly show some type of self awareness. Cats show some rudiments of reasoning or at least planning ability. When my cat wants to get to its food on the table (that has no chair access) it reasons that it has to jump on the couch and then walk over the amplifier in order to get there when there is no direct access to the table. Apes have been shown to understand up to 2000 symbols which they can touch on a computer screen to indicate what they want and what they perceive by constructing sentences out of the symbols. Sapience it seems is a continuum too, it exists mostly in humans, but some rudimentary forms of it exist in other animals. ---------------- Okay, good to know that your believe and understand that consciousness is related to the brain. Perhaps I misjudged you. If you take your analogy then you end up with the objective/subjective predicament that I talked about earlier in trying to study the biological basis of consciousness. The electric current in the television produces a pattern of pixels that represent a scene or moving seen to the human eye. The content of the moving is the percept that we have when those pixels are illuminated and any thoughts we might have associated with that percept (or those percepts). We’re back to the problem. The television pixels light up, a pattern of photons are sent to our eye, our retina converts these into electrochemical signals that travel up the optic nerve to the occipital lobe of the brain. This is where the physical story of the television and its electronic currents end, with electrochemical events in the occipital lobe of the brain. Yet subjectively we are seeing a car crash during a car chase as a part of the movie. How are the electrochemical events the SAME as the subjective experience of seeing a car crash during a car chase in the movie. We don’t know. There I agree with you. We can CORRELATE what is going on in the brain (ie what brain centers are active while seeing this car chase/car crash) while the crash takes place but we don’t know how this produces the subjective experience of seeing the car crash. It is mysterious. There I agree with you. We have an objective (neurophysiological account) subjective (the content of the movie) correlation. That’s all we have. ---------------- We clearly do not have the same definition of teleology. You say “it is a reference to where the entailment for life came from.” I don’t call this teleology I just call this a question or answer about the origin of life. You also say “the teleological explanation was that the universe itself is alive and somehow that life force is concentrated in organisms, or else it comes from some other external source … as in created by some other intelligence, for purposes that also exist outside of us like god.” This to me is not teleology, this is “vitalism” such as the type Henri Bergson spoke of when he talked about the “elan vital (vital spark).” By teleology I simply mean a form of scientific explanation in which a behavior or function is related to a goal. “The birds fly south in the winter to avoid the cold temperatures and waning food sources.” “to avoid” or “in order to avoid” (paraphrasing) is the teleological component. There is nothing vitalistic about this, nothing about the origin of life, nothing metaphysical or theological. But your comment: “living behavior is generated by the system itself and in fact, all system behavior is entailed by system organization,” is something I agree with and something the whole area of systems biology agrees with. Yes, a cell, a living organism is a system, a system of systems actually. In a cell or a single celled organism there is already a system, mitochondria for producing energy, lysosomes for handling waste, there are many organelles with separate and specific functions which are interconnected by a large set of biochemical pathways. It’s a macromolecular and biochemical system. Its “behavior” is based upon understanding the SYSTEM. Things arise from the system which are predictable from its parts. ------------- Interestingly your account of consciousness is similar to mine (this is not an exhaustive definition), consciousness as the flow of percepts (which you call images of external objects held for chosen time periods, which many involve memory as well). Where the human reasoning ability came from is less clear. Some of it is based upon language which helps us organize our concepts and perform analysis of those concepts and words (as in definitions). Since the language ability only appears in humans this begs the question why did we develop language? Clearly many animals have some ability to communicate in a primitive form. We probably started out that way and our communications became more specific. Grunts didn’t just mean danger, sounds began to mean “lion” and “grass” and we began to form sentences “there’s a lion in the grass!” From a biological standpoint we know that after we stood upright (as apparently some apes did) our brains began to grow tremendously (indicated by the volume calculation of prosimian and hominid skull casings). Also, the portion of the brain that grew the most was the cortex (primitive brains such as lizards don’t really have a cortex). We know from brain studies that the cortex is associated with reasoning capabilities. Is reason a sense organ? My guess is no. If you are asking is reason the same as the flow of percepts we get from our sense organs, I would say no. Reason seems to be more involved in organizing these percepts even into abstract categories through language. ---------------- Most evidence indicates that RNA based cells preceeded DNA based cells. These were the first form of life. Anything that we would consider life first consisted of a cell (single celled organisms like bacteria). The self with its lipid based permeable membrane is what seperates the organism from its environment with which it interacts. Also some form of reproduction, even if this was only mitosis (cell splitting) seemed to be part of the first living organisms along with transmission of some RNA material. ------------ I agree that there are varying degrees of sentience from a worm with a simple nervous system to a human being (and perhaps types of sentience as well as what sensory organs we have affect the type of consciousness we have). I’m still not convinced that something without a nervous system is sentient at all. I am using sentience in the same sense I use consciousness. Perhaps you are not. What is your definition of sentience and your definition of consciousness? The fact that a bacterium can sense stimuli from its environment and respond to them doesn’t automatically mean to me sentience. It seems to me a robot with sensors can sense its environment and respond to stimuli as well and I would impute to it no consciousness. ------------- We only know (to some degree) the answers to when life began and when consciousness emerged on our own planet. When it happened in the universe requires knowing about life and consciousness in the universe outside of our planet, which we do not. Here, life seemed to emerge about 2 billion years ago. We don’t know exactly how it emerged (there must have been organic molecules and there was of course water, and the first life appears to have been microbial i.e. bacterial). Life then persisted for a long time only in the oceans. It eventually moved onto land (I’m not sure of the date) but no earlier than 500 million years ago. What life existed on land initially existed at the waters edge. Consciousness, depending upon what you believe, but I will go with what I believe, awaited the development of nervous systems. A bacterium doesn’t have a nervous system. Since creatures in the oceans prior to life on land had nervous systems (the more advanced life forms), consciousness was born in the water with first shell fish and then fish. ------------- I would like to return to the question of teleology in biology. You characterized teleology as something to be avoided as it smacks of the metaphysical and theological and doesn’t belong in scientific (biologic) explanation. I agree that some treatments of biology as teleological, such as Pierre Teillhard de Chardin’s in Human Destiny appear theological. But teleological explanation in biology isn’t necessarily metaphysical or theological, in fact I think it is necessary, in a reasonable form as a part of biological explanation. Many features of biological life are goal driven and hence naturally teleological. Take migration, food getting, courtship, ontogeny. Consider some examples of biological explanation. “One of the functions of the kidney is to eliminate the end products of protein metabolism.” “Birds migrate to warm climates IN ORDER TO avoid cold temperatures and food shortages associated with winter.” The predator chases the prey in order to catch and eat it. These are all natural explanations of biological behavior and function which involve teleological explanations. These have nothing to do with metaphysics. A tapered down form of teleology may be telenomy. A telenomic explanation sounds like a teleological explanation but the explanation is supposed to be based upon goal driven behavior based upon a program. So the birds fly south for the winter because they have a program which activates in cold weather to cause them to do so. I think much of what we call instinctive behavior is really genetically caused neutrally encoded programs. Another objection to teleological language is that it is used exclusively in biology (and cybernetics) which makes biological reduction to physic-chemical explanation not possible. Yet there is a general belief and big movement (based upon biology becoming MOLECULAR) that much biological phenomena can be reduced to chemical explanations. Also there is the objection that teleological explanations are in conflict with causality, which explains on the basis of a prior not future event. Given all of these objections, I think there is still a place for teleological or telenomic explanation in biology. -------------------- On Maupertuis. “Maupertuis proposed a theory of generation (i.e., reproduction) in which organic matter possessed a self-organizing “intelligence” that was analogous to the contemporary chemical concept of affinities. I have to say there is some sense in this and this is an area of biochemistry that needs to be greatly expanded. We do not know why in many cases organic structures self-assemble. But if we are going to give a physico-chemical account of life we have to assume somehow that chemical affinities (bonding) accounts for why macro molecular entities such as cells self assemble. We know why membranes self assemble as micelles in water organize themselves into a ball with a polar and non-polar head. But we do not know exactly why all the organelles of the cell and their intricate biochemical pathways to perform the functions they do self assemble from genetically induced elements such as proteins. -------------- I believe the current model of evolution includes the features you are talking about. The basic theory is that evolution proceeds by the natural selection of random mutations (i.e., it is a random process not teleological). Mutuations occur spontaneously by irradiation of DNA or by copying errors. In most cases these errors are either silent (have no effect) or lethal. In a few cases they impute an advantage to the organism in its environment which is then transferred to the next generation and hence a mutation was successful and evolution proceeds (by an adaptive process). Energy certainly plays in evolution in the role of food necessary for the continued life of the organism, which is converted into energy, to live, catch prey, ingest more food, and reproduce. In animals this is the respiration process, taking in sugars and oxygen (through breathing) and converting it into carbon dioxide and water with a great release of energy by breaking the bonds of sugar. In plants the process is the reverse, taking in sunlight energy, carbon dioxide (also nitrogen) and converting this to sugars (as stored in the plants fruits). There is already a model for organisms and evolution which seems pretty correct. What new model are you proposing? The ENCODE project appears to be a project to characterize the functional elements in DNA. The big order before biology after sequencing organisms is to identify those elements in DNA which actually code something (whereas most don’t) either coding protein or regulatory elements (which are themselves encoding of proteins such as transcription factors, i.e., regulatory elements that switch genes on and off). ------------- There’s a lot of evidence now in biology that life at first did NOT have DNA, rather it used RNA to transfer information. RNA is now the scaffolding and the intermediate form between DNA and protein, but it appears that RNA proceeded DNA in organisms that appeared to be alive. ------------ I think looking at life from the standpoint of entropy is interesting. Certainly life has features of low or even anti-entropy until we die and disintegrate again resuming the disorder of entropy. Also, I proposed this definition of life, which is based upon life as we know it on earth, but not necessarily the only life that could exist. “life consists of a system of organic molecules organized into a water based cell or cells which contain genes and are capable (except for plants although this was disputed) of self-movement, reproduction, that take in food and produce energy and hence have a metabolism, grow, adapt to their surroundings and reproduce their kind.” This definition does not claim that DNA is necessary but does consider reproduction necessary for the definition of a living thing. In our search for extra-terrestial life (which is mostly the search for extraterrestrial microbes) we use these parameters to search for life, water because of the water based cells, organic molecules because this is what life on earth is made of, etc… Finally, I can’t say that I agree that thermostats are sentient. You seem to equate sentience with information processing. My own view is that they are not the same. May things that perform quite a bit of information processing don’t appear to be sentient, like the mars rover robot, and in fact that only things that seem to be sentient in the known universe are brains (animal and human). We don’t know why brains produce sentience but they appear to. Even biological organisms that respond to stimuli may not be sentient, as a bacterium, as even a robot with its sensors can respond to stimuli in sophisticated ways but I would not say is sentient. ----------------- Amram, since you seem to be a dualist, along the lines of Rene Descartes who said that there is matter (body including the brain) and mind and that the two are completely different substances, I would like to pose a few problems with dualism. If you adopt a dualist stance you still have to say how the physical affects the mental and the mental affects the physical. I.e., you have to posit some type of interactionism. If I raise my arm, I first form an intention to raise my arm (a volition) which is a mental event and then I raise my arm (which is a physical event). Somehow the mental event has to be translated into a physical event. The dualist has to explain how this is possible. Rene Descartes had the answer that it occurred via the pineal gland of the brain, which is kind of a ridiculous answer which doesn’t have any scientific or other type of reason behind it. The dualist has to also explain interactionism in the opposite direction from sensation and perception to a mental event. Photons hit my eye (a physical event) and this causes changes in my retina (a physical event) which sends an electrical signal through my optic nerve to my occipital lobe (a physical event) and then I see a cat (a mental event). How does the physical event (neural firings in the occipital lobe) become a mental event (seeing a cat)? We have to posit some sort of physical/mental interactionism and it can’t be something ridiculous like the pineal gland. If you adopt a monism (like identity theory or physicalism which says the mind IS the brain) (or even a mental monism like Berkeley has in which there is no physical world only the world of ideas) at least you avoid the pitfalls of interactionism. ---------------- Since you appear to be a type of dualist perhaps you will like the following analogy (made by my father, a Harvard Ph.d. and generally intelligent guy). The brain is the wire and the mind the electricity that flows on it. I don’t know if I exactly accept the analogy but let’s analyze it. When confronted with the physicalist statement that the mind IS the brain, his response is the wire is not the electricity. Some people liken this to the analogy that the brain is the hardware and the mind the software that runs on it. Back to the wire/electricity, both are still physical. One is matter and the other energy. So maybe you want to say that the brain is matter and mind is some type of energy? (Don’t forget that in physics matter and energy are intercontroverible). Clearly if you damage the wire the electricity cannot flow properly, just as if you damage the brain the mind cannot function properly (in many cases). Your analogy is more questionable. The car is a physical mechanism, but where the driver drives involves the intention of a living person to direct the mechanism. Are you saying that studying the car cannot tell us where the driver will drive it? Of course not. But perhaps you have something there in that you may not be able to determine by studying the brain the intention of the subject. There is one experiment that attempts to do this and seems to show some sort of brain functioning prior to intentionally looking at a certain dot on a screen. I am not completely convinced by this experiment. It is not clear whether the brain causes the electrochemical activity associated with the intention or whether the intention causes the electrochemical activity associated with the brain. I think if anything is not subject to physical law (which claims that every event is caused by and preceeded by another event in a type of causal determinism) it is intention or volition (but that is a separate but important philosophical topic). It may be that mind is physical but volition is not (something which causes but is not caused). But since consciousness is volitional, this is still imputing an important non-physical aspect to mind. Note that if you impute something non-physical to mind, that does not necessarily mean there is any survival of mind when the physical substrate on which it depends, namely the brain, ceases to function as upon death. Some aspects of mind could be aphysical but still dependent on the physical such as in an epiphenomenal account. ------------------- I also forgot to talk about lesion/dysfunction studies. When a certain area of the brain gets damaged, there is a mental dysfunction that occurs. In some cases this is permanent, in other cases the mental function is slowly taken over by other areas of the brain (neuroplasticity). Take for example lesions of the left parietal cortex. These result in language dysfunctions. People lose their ability to produce language or to understand language when the left parietal cortex is damaged. So, neuroanatomists correctly reason that the left parietal cortex houses language function. This is an example of something physical, namely a particular anatomical part of the brain, being correlated with something mental, namely language processing and understanding. Back to the Penfield experiments. If a particular memory can be elicited by electrostimulation of a certain part of the memory cortex then we know that something mental, namely a memory, has a physical attribute, namely a spatial LOCATION in the brain. If you hold a theory of mind which ignors all of these scientific facts and just posits that mind is completely separate from the brain, I cannot consider that a rational theory of mind. -------------- I am not in total disagreement with your position, although I wouldn’t word it so strongly that study of the brain tells us NOTHING about consciousness. However, there is a big gulf between the knowledge of neurophysiology and the knowledge of consciousness. The first is studied by objective measures, the second we study subjectively, as philosophers do. Philosophers have told us interesting things about consciousness like that it is ‘intentional’ (meaning the theory of intentionality, that most mental states have an object, you don’t just believe, you believe that x, you don’t desire, you desire that x, ‘that x’ is the object) yet we have no idea how intentionality is encoded in the brain, it just arises from an analysis of our mental states and of language. What we have nowadays as Radoslav correctly pointed out is “correlation.” When someone performs a mental task we can follow the live imagery of the blood flow in the brain to figure out which processing centers of the brain are involved in that mental task. That is some sort of mapping between a mental task (a mental phenomenon) and a physical event (namely blood flow to a certain area of the brain). This sort of information is a correlation. It doesn’t tell us whether the mind is causing the blood flow or the blood flow is causing the mental event. We also have the Penfield experiments. Penfield, a neurosurgeon electrostimulated the memory cortex of brains of conscious patients and asked them to verify what they were experiments (as in much neurosurgery the patient is awake during the surgery). The patient would state that they are now hearing a symphony they heard years ago or they are now smelling bread. I.e., the physical event, the electrostimulation of memory cortex, produced a mental event along the lines I described. So you can’t say that physical research into the brain has NO connection with the mind, I’ve just shown that it does. Still the relation between the mind and the brain is mysterious. We know a lot about neurophysiology, and we know a lot about the mind, but we have a very thin grasp on how the two are related or how they are possibly the same. It is completely unclear how electrophysiological neuron firings in the occipital lobe IS the subjective experience of seeing a cat. We also know that chemicals affect mental states, such as LSD, or abnormal neurotransmitter activity resulting in mental illness. We have drugs (chemicals) to treat mental illness caused by a chemical imbalance, but frankly we don’t know to any extent why they work. Neuropharmacology is a black box science. We know if you put a chemical (drug) into a person at a certain dose it affects their mental behavior in a certain way, but we don’t know how, i.e., we know very little about what’s going on in the brain as a result of introducing the chemical that would alter the mental state. There is the brain and there is the mind. We are not sure about how the two are related but we know somehow they are. Brains are the only thing in the known universe which produce or at least contain consciousness, when they stop functioning there is no consciousness, when we alter them chemically consciousness changes, but the exact relation between the two is very mysterious. -------------- I do not fully understand anticipatory systems theory, but here is what I gathered and my comments on the matter. In anticipatory systems theory the present change of state depends upon future circumstances. I.e. the system is goal oriented. This theory launches me into the question of teleology in biology, which may be a correct thing to introduce, but in the last century has fallen out of favor with scientists. Aristotle, in his theory of scientific explanation, talks about four causes to explain something, one of them, the final cause, being teleological. There is the material cause or that out of which something is made (in the case of biology for example this might be the organic molecules), the formal cause, or what kind of thing x is (this today might be defined by genetics, it is what it is because of its genetic makeup and its development follows the genetic program, the efficient cause, which is the closest to what we now call 'cause,' that because of which something is as it is (i.e., because of the preceeding events that caused it), and the final cause, or what is something for (which is the teleological component that would be related to anticipatory systems theory). Some of the examples you gave, e.g. , animals knowing what to eat, what to avoid, how to interpret signals of their species, seems to me to be what most people would call instinct, i.e., which is probably a genetically caused neurally encoded capability that is species and environment specific. Also, it seems to me that artificial systems, not just living things, would be part of anticipatory systems theory, as a robot may be programmed to engage in goal seeking behavior, modifying its current behavior expecting to find something in the future. Maybe I'm off base and don't have a good grasp of what you are talking about, but those are my initial comments. Maybe you can launch a little more into the ----------- There is no doubt that experience changes our brain chemically and even anatomically (by changing our synaptic connections). Take association for example. We form associations when a percept is associated with a word for example synaptically (synapses that fire together wire together). Our brain is dynamic. I have a friend who is a psychiatrist, and his comment is that our brain is constantly changing chemical, even a simple conversation changes the chemistry and micro-architecture of our brain. So there is no doubt that identical twins with essentially the same nervous system and brain upon birth become different persons due to different experiences and hence eventually have brains that differ. If the empiricists are correct, our knowledge and understanding is built out of our percepts (our experiences of sensations), so the chemistry and synaptic micro-architecture of our brain is based upon our experiences. ------------ I’ve thought a bit about your comment and believe that a biological definition of consciousness would be good. Unfortunately no one has a truly good one. Here is my attempt at one: To say consciousness is awareness is to say nothing. Conscious and aware are synonyms, so one is essentially saying a is a, which doesn't tell us what consciousness is. We can try and define consciousness subjectively, and we can try and define it biologically. We can't really say how the subjective IS the biological, so we are left with two definitions. The subjective basis of consciousness: we can say from our own experience and infer from the verbal reports of other humans that consciousness is essentially a flow of percepts (external and internal). As in a movie, we move from one scene to another, primarily visual but also auditory and sometimes involving the other senses. Sometimes our attention moves the scene to something internal like a memory. The biological basis of consciousness: The brain stem seems to be involved in consciousness. People with damage to the brain stem lose consciousness and stay in a coma. Also anesthetics that render a patient unconscious at the operating table seem to work on the brain stem or reticular formation. Once there is consciousness its contents are often sensory, and so the areas in the cortex associated with sensation and perception such as the occipital lobe for visual information are relevant to consciousness. Once conscious, neural activity seems to be at many places in the brain and cortex simultaneously. Also, the thalamic intralaminar nuclei, which project axons widely to all cortical areas, are notable in that their destruction can result in a permanent loss of consciousness. The chemical basis of consciousness: We can infer also that consciousness is chemical, dependent on the chemicals of the brain. We know this as when someone takes LSD and chemically alters their brain (no anatomical alteration whatsoever), their subjective conscious experience changes dramatically (altered sensations and perceptions and even thought processes). We know also in the case of mentally ill patients that chemical problems such as insufficient or over active neurotransmitters can alter conscious experience as well, and can be set back to normal again in many cases with a CHEMICAL, namely a psychiatric drug. We can also say why robots seem not to be conscious: they are not made out of the right stuff, they are not organic and they are not chemical. ----------- Mukund, there is something in western philosophy similar to chetana, introduced by Henri Bergson , the French philosopher: “l’elan vital (the vital spark).” However most scientists have discounted the idea of a vital spark distinguishing the living from the non living. It might be useful to ponder the difference between a cell and a single-celled organism. The cell is not self-moving (Aristotle’s definition of an animal is that it is self-moving), but the single celled bacterium is. The bacterium seems to move towards food sources and responds to stimuli. Does this mean that it has some type of consciousness or volition? Maybe not. A robot can move towards certain objects by itself for which it has a goal to interact, and with sensors it can respond to stimuli, and it is neither living nor conscious. You say that consciousness has something to do with brains (the human brain yes but animal brains too). You are right that the only entity with which consciousness seems to be associated in the universe is a brain, it is associated with nothing else. So does the electrophysiology of neurons have to do with consciousness (it seems that this is active when a subject is conscious and not active when they are unconscious, as in the reticular formation)? Is the brain producing consciousness, or does consciousness exist independently somehow and initiate the electrophysiological events. All we know is that there is a correlation between the two, not necessarily an identity, but perhaps an identity. I take the view that since consciousness is correlated with brains, if you don’t have a brain or a nervous system, like a robot or a bacterium, you do not have consciousness. But that is an intelligent guess and not the final word on the matter. Convince me why I should believe that something without a nervous system like a bacterium should have consciousness? Life and consciousness are at least related by this: all conscious things are also living things (there is no non-living conscious thing like a robot), but not all living things may be conscious. ------------- Definition of Consciousness and Self Consciousness: There have been some attempts to define consciousness and self-consciousness. Words such as "aware" or "awake" have been used in place of "conscious." Is a computer aware or awake? I think not. Being a student of neurophysiology and philosophy, and haven written my thesis on computational neuroscience, I will say that 'consciousness' (and hence self-consciousness) is still very mysterious. We know that it is a property that only brains exhibit (there is nothing besides a brain in the known universe that is conscious). But that doesn't tell us much. Take sensation and perception for example. The scientific story is that a physical stimulus, like an electromagnetic wave or sound wave (compressions and rarefactions of air) hits the sense organ which translates the signal into a neural signal that ultimately terminates in some part of the brain (as in the occipital lobe for vision). That's where the scientific story ends. But how is a set of neurons firing in the occipital lobe the same as seeing a cat. How does one become the other. We don't know. One is an objective account of the event of seeing a cat (the neurophysiological account) and one is a subjective account. No one seems able to say how the objective account IS the subjective account. Miklos raises the question how can you know someone is conscious or self conscious without a verbal report? This might be quite limiting, as verbal reports can be non-veridical (therefore it doesn't satisfy an objective method) and many animals that seem to be aware and self-aware are not capable of giving verbal reports about their state. Take meerkats for example. They clearly can sense and respond to their environment and hence by their behavior are aware. They know their place in the social hierarchy of meerkats, and hence show some behavior that indicates self-awareness. Yet they cannot communicate in the sense of giving a verbal report about their mental state like we can. Then we turned to the question of what is aware and self-aware. What about a bacterium? Is it aware and self-aware, is a robot aware or self-aware, or do you have to have a nervous system to be aware and self-aware? People have different answers to these questions. ------------ I have been away from the internet and just now returned to reading the discussions. Here's what I read and have to say: Definition of Communication: Signaling --- When you talk about biological signaling, what you are really talking about are chemical events. This is a use of "communication" which has almost nothing to do with reporting our mental state, these are very different defintions. I don't think a chemical event is communication in the sense that Miklos is talking about it. Flow of Information --- I, like Miklos, think this is a pretty good definition. By this definition, humans communicate to others about their mental state, and computers and robots communicate. The mars rover, a real robot that exists today, not something hypothetical, communicates about its percepts (here meant information processing of sensor information), about its internal states (like what systems are functional), and receives instructions (another form of information) from NASA. Ironically, Miklos, by accepting this definition of communication you seem to be agreeing with me that there is something that communicates, even about its own internal events, yet is not conscious and hence not self conscious, namely the mars rover robot (which is a fact, not science fiction). Gesturing --- there even was some talk about non verbal communication such as gesturing (as a definition of signaling) which can become quite elaborate as in the case of deaf language. Christine, no one is saying that our mental makeup is made of communication. Communication is just how we impart our mental state to others and conversely, it is not per se a mental organization too, although language is both a mental organization tool and a tool for communication. ---------- I have been away from the internet and just now returned to reading the discussions. Here's what I read and have to say: Definition of Communication: Signaling --- When you talk about biological signaling, what you are really talking about are chemical events. This is a use of "communication" which has almost nothing to do with reporting our mental state, these are very different defintions. I don't think a chemical event is communication in the sense that Miklos is talking about it. Flow of Information --- I, like Miklos, think this is a pretty good definition. By this definition, humans communicate to others about their mental state, and computers and robots communicate. The mars rover, a real robot that exists today, not something hypothetical, communicates about its percepts (here meant information processing of sensor information), about its internal states (like what systems are functional), and receives instructions (another form of information) from NASA. Ironically, Miklos, by accepting this definition of communication you seem to be agreeing with me that there is something that communicates, even about its own internal events, yet is not conscious and hence not self conscious, namely the mars rover robot (which is a fact, not science fiction). Gesturing --- there even was some talk about non verbal communication such as gesturing (as a definition of signaling) which can become quite elaborate as in the case of deaf language. Christine, no one is saying that our mental makeup is made of communication. Communication is just how we impart our mental state to others and conversely, it is not per se a mental organization too, although language is both a mental organization tool and a tool for communication. Definition of Consciousness and Self Consciousness: There have been some attempts to define consciousness and self-consciousness. Words such as "aware" or "awake" have been used in place of "conscious." Is a computer aware or awake? I think not. Being a student of neurophysiology and philosophy, and haven written my thesis on computational neuroscience, I will say that 'consciousness' (and hence self-consciousness) is still very mysterious. We know that it is a property that only brains exhibit (there is nothing besides a brain in the known universe that is conscious). But that doesn't tell us much. Take sensation and perception for example. The scientific story is that a physical stimulus, like an electromagnetic wave or sound wave (compressions and rarefactions of air) hits the sense organ which translates the signal into a neural signal that ultimately terminates in some part of the brain (as in the occipital lobe for vision). That's where the scientific story ends. But how is a set of neurons firing in the occipital lobe the same as seeing a cat. How does one become the other. We don't know. One is an objective account of the event of seeing a cat (the neurophysiological account) and one is a subjective account. No one seems able to say how the objective account IS the subjective account. Miklos raises the question how can you know someone is conscious or self conscious without a verbal report? This might be quite limiting, as verbal reports can be non-veridical (therefore it doesn't satisfy an objective method) and many animals that seem to be aware and self-aware are not capable of giving verbal reports about their state. Take meerkats for example. They clearly can sense and respond to their environment and hence by their behavior are aware. They know their place in the social hierarchy of meerkats, and hence show some behavior that indicates self-awareness. Yet they cannot communicate in the sense of giving a verbal report about their mental state like we can. Then we turned to the question of what is aware and self-aware. What about a bacterium? Is it aware and self-aware, is a robot aware or self-aware, or do you have to have a nervous system to be aware and self-aware? People have different answers to these questions. I think you have to have a nervous system to be aware and self-aware, but I do not think that only humans are self-aware. ------------ Thanks Dan. Here again was my definition of “life” (a biological definition) which may have gotten lost as the discussion went on to other topics “life consists of a system of organic molecules organized into a water based cell or cells which contain genes and are capable (except for plants) of self-movement, reproduction, that take in food and breath and hence have a metabolism that produces energy, grow, adapt to their surroundings and reproduce their kind.” ---------- I will also say that a computer or robot such as the mars rover can communicate, can even sense its internals states and communicate on them, yet clearly has no consciousness and certainly if it has no consciousness it has no self-consciousness. Maybe I’m missing something but I don’t see how communication is connected to or important to consciousness or self consciousness. Clearly there are self conscious creatures who communicate, us, and there are conscious and self conscious (like apes) creatures who don’t communicate or communicate on a very rudimentary scale next to us (symbolic non-vocal communication), and there are entities that communicate and aren’t conscious or self conscious (robots). ------------- It’s not clear that the ability to respond to a stimulus (like bacteria do) is indicative of consciousness. In fact, much of the evidence suggests that consciousness only exists where there is a developed nervous system or at least some nervous system (not existent in bacteria). A robot responds to stimuli through its sensors but I would not say that it is conscious. ------------ The problem is you are not using a biological definition of “life.” There’s a lot of meanings of the word “life.” What we are doing here is giving a BIOLOGICAL definition. The definition I have given is: “life consists of a system of organic molecules organized into a water based cell or cells which contain genes and are capable (except for plants) of self-movement, reproduction, that take in food and breath and hence have a metabolism that produces energy, grow, adapt to their surroundings and reproduce their kind.” This definition does NOT include consciousness or need consciousness. Yes some living things are conscious and some are not, so consciousness cannot be definitive of life. ---------- In discussing crystals, I will refer again to my definition of life to show that these are not living. My definition: life consists of a system of organic molecules organized into a water based cell or cells which contain genes and are capable (except for plants) of self-movement, that take in energy and hence have a metabolism, grow, adapt to their surroundings and reproduce their kind. Crystals are not composed of organic molecules, they are not composed of water based cells, they do not contain genes, they are not capable of self-movement, they do not adapt to their surroundings. All they do is grow and reproduce in some fashion. As they are missing MOST of the attributes of living things, you cannot possibly consider them living. No one has shown me yet how my definition is in any way deficient or not a perfectly good definition of a living thing. I am a computational biologist, I think I have a pretty good handle on this. The only entity which is problematic is viruses, which use hosts to reproduce and hence have some but not all of the attributes of a living thing. ------------ Dan I never said consciousness was necessary for life. In fact it is not a part of my definition of life. My definition again is: “life (on earth as we know it) consists of a system of organic molecules organized into a water based cell or cells which contain genes and are capable (except for plants) of self-movement, reproduction, that take in food and produce energy and hence have a metabolism, grow, adapt to their surroundings and reproduce their kind.” What I said about consciousness is that “many (but not all, therefore not definitive) living things seem to have consciousness.” I’m not going to decide whether a bacterium has consciousness, it clearly can respond to stimuli and is capable of self-movement. It may be that you have to have a developed nervous system to have consciousness (which covers a lot of animals). What plants are capable of self-movement? And I am not considering the spreading of seeds movement of the plant. ------------- Although I don’t object to your characterization of my approach (defining a minimum set of attributes that life must have to be considered living), some of your comments don’t seem right.
1.
“Remarks:
If this was a fact (in the natural world) that Sa is indeed MSa then there is no
Why would you say there is no need for my definition. There are many things that are true or characteristic of living systems, you have to identify which of those characteristics (or attributes as you call them) are required for something to be living, this involves definition, definining that minimum set and excluding other attributes which are not required. “Nature is not forced to follow your definition.” Insofar as nature exists on this planet it does follow my definition, the definition stands until such time as we discover a living thing which does not have this minimum set of attributes here or elsewhere in the universe in which case the minimum set needs to be modified. This is a minimum set based upon life as we know it here on earth. You say that 4 is not a conclusion, but it is. If Something is living then it meets the minimum set. Viruses don’t meet the minimum set. Therefore they are not living. This is modus tollens in logic (if A then B, not B, therefore not A). This is completely logical. Also may I point out that quantifying over a set is completely logical according to Fregian logic. There is the minimum set of characteristics of living things. I can use an existential or universal quantifier over this set. I could say (but I didn’t) that something is living if it has one or more of these characteristics. Or I could say, as I did, that something is living if it has all of these characteristics. You say that “you have defined that viruses are not alive, you have not concluded it from natural facts.” What do you think my attributes are? They are the natural facts of any living thing. “It is composed or organic molecules,” “it reproduces,” etc… these are ALL natural facts. So concluding that viruses are not alive because they don’t meet all of the minimum characteristics of living things is the same as making the conclusion because they are missing certain natural attributes (facts of natural living things). I might state this as a logical equivalence (biconditional). “x is a living thing (on earth as we know it)” if and only if “x consists of all of the following: x is a system of organic molecules organized into a water based cell or cells which contain genes and are capable (except for plants) of self-movement, reproduction, that take in food and produce energy and hence have a metabolism, grow, adapt to their surroundings and reproduce their kind.” Someone may complain that “only if” makes the definition restrictive and rules out other life forms that we may find that don’t have these characteristics. But again what I am doing here is working only with a definition that fits life on earth as we know it. If we find life elsewhere that doesn’t meet this definition then there would be a requirement to refine the definition. I am the ONLY one on this entire forum that HAS offered a definition of life, which some people, like Ian, think is quite good, which answers your original question, and all you do is complain about it. ---------------- Yeah I think the language you use affects how you think. Although until you know a language well you don’t really think in it very much, you pretty much think in your native language and then translate into a sentence of the foreign language. But after enough usage you do start to think in that language. I think German is a great example because it has a feature that English does not: zusammensetzung or ‘putting together.’ To build concepts in german you put words together. Take the word ‘ZeitGeist’ which we loosely translate as ‘the spirit of the times.’ It literally is ‘time ghost’ or ‘time spirit.’ This becomes more apparent when you analyze words in german. German has a feature that linguists call ‘calque,’ the ability to use indigenous roots to build concepts. Take the concept of ‘intervention.’ In English we know what this means but we don’t, unless we have studied latin, know what the parts of the word meaning. In latin, intervention literally means a ‘coming between’ (inter = between) and (vention or venire to come). Intervention means ‘between coming.’ In German, since it has calque this is obvious to the native german speaker. The word for intervention in german is ‘das DaZwischenTreten,’ which literally means the ‘there between treading,’ or loosely, like the latin version of English the ‘there between coming.’ But the difference is the native german speaker knows the word ‘da’ or ‘dort’ (there), ‘zwischen’ (between) and ‘treten’ to tread. By putting these simple words together they develop the concept of intervention. This makes german a very logical and transparent language in the way that English is not. I have no doubt the germans are so good in engineering and science and philosophy because they have a very logical language with this property of calque. This is especially useful in philosophy where concepts are constantly created by zusammensetzuung, like ‘Weltanschauung’ which means a world view, which has the words ‘Welt’ (world) and the verb ‘anschauen’ in it (to look at, but also metaphorically to contemplate). Yes the language you use affects how you think. But we also share the same world with the same objects and events in it, which, in whatever language you use, is describing and referring to (and by the reference theory, meaning) the same thing. So, I guess I back tracked a little, some aspects of language are universal, and some are language specific. ------------- What you seem to be talking about is ambiguity, where one word has multiple meanings or picks out multiple objects in the world and is usually resolved in context. Different languages have different ambiguous words. I speak several foreign languages, including French, german, Russian, and some Chinese and Spanish and know that when you speak in these languages you to some extent think in those languages which have unique features not true of other languages. If you talk about ambiguity you should talk about Chinese where there are no plurals, no articles, no tenses (except a completed action particle “le”) yet people communicate. The understand from context from other words in the sentence. Chinese say “I go to store.” This can mean I went to the store, I will go to the store, I am going to the store, you can’t tell from the words themselves. But there’s usually a helper word in the sentence or from another sentence that clarifies the meaning in context. If you’re talking about things you did yesterday “I go to store” means I went to the store, if you add the word “ming” meaning tomorrow, then you know it means I will go to the store. None of this detracts from the understanding that “store” is an object or location which is understood in all languages that have stores, just as “to go” is understood (although verbs of movement vary greatly between languages). Despite the unique feature of the languages, the MEANING (which is a deeper aspect of language) is the same. At the syntactic level languages are quite different, but at the semantic level they are quite similar. I learned when speaking foreign languages that if there is a concept in English that doesn’t exist in another language, you can always circumlocute, i.e., use other words that are familiar to the foreign speaker to convey the meaning of the foreign concept. Syntactics and vocabulary differs but meanings are largely the same. Now what is meaning? That is another topic altogether. That is the topic of the philosophy of language or of the theory of meaning, both topics in philosophy. One simple thing meaning may mean is reference. I.e., when I make a noise in my language and point to or refer to an object in the room, namely a table, I can convey the meaning of the noise to a non-speaker who uses a different noise to refer to the same object. We understand eachother due to the common reference. The noise “means” what it refers to. There are problems with this theory that I’m not going to get into. A common perception of the world and its objects and events makes meaning common even though the words and syntax we use to describe it are different. ------------ If the question that some of us are pondering here is whether you think in a particular language or whether thinking is more universal than a particular language (done with some sort of universal language), I have the following to say. I would refer people to Noam Chompsky’s concept of ‘deep structures.’ As a linguist he pretty much showed how as you construct the grammar tree from a sentence in any particular language you arrive at a universal structure. All languages have nouns (to refer to objects), verbs (to refer to events), adjectives (to qualify the objects of which we speak), etc… All languages have a way of putting these together to form sentences or more complex thoughts involving persons, objects, and actions, i.e., a grammar. When I say “il jette le boule” I am thinking in French but I am thinking about the same event as you do when you say “he throws the ball.” At a superficial level there are the grammar rules, third person conjugation of jeter in french and add an ‘s’ to the third person verb in English. But represented abstractly Throw(He, ball) is the same concept. In fact when you are building a natural language understanding system in computing, you have to translate the text in the particular language into a metalanguage (which would be the same for all particular languages) to create a semantic net so that the computer can ask and answer questions about the text. The concept in our thought is the same regardless of the language (granted that some language specific concepts are hard to translate and need circumlocution) because the world that we are describing regardless of our native language is the same, it has subjects, it has balls, it has events like throwing, all of which can be expressed in any language. In symbolic logic you can resymbolize sentences in particular language like English into quantificational predicate calculus, i.e., logic sentences. Logic is not the property of any particular language but of all languages. It is universal. You can give, for most sentences in English or any other language a set of propositions which state the same thing. Again this is a universal language. So, I would say in some more superficial sense we speak in different language and think in those language when constructing sentences according to particular grammar rules and with a vocabulary particular to the language, but in some deeper sense the meaning of our sentences speaking of things common to experience and speakers of all languages are universal. ------------ Okay, in light of Donald and Andres’ comments I feel compelled to explain and qualify my pronouncement that language is unique to humans. I will distinguish between language and communication, in that a machine can communicate with electronic signals and many species can communicate with grunts and calls which have general meanings like stay away or is there a mate there? Yes we use language to communicate meaning or ideas in our head and attempt to create the same idea in another’s head. But when I say ‘language’ in the sense that humans have it, I am talking about a full fledged language, with a GRAMMAR, and extensive VOCABULARY with both CONCRETE AND ABSTRACT concepts conveyed by words. This is true of all human languages and doesn’t seem true of any non-human language. I’m sure that language existed for a very long time in hominids, long before there was any writing system to record it. Even among linguists today, verbal language is primary and not all verbal languages have a writing system. But I am pretty sure language, as I’ve defined it, did not exist in organisms other than hominids, because besides having a special area of our brain, the left parietal cortex, specialized for speech and not in existence in other animals, we also have speech organs (for vocalization) that do not exist in non-hominids. There are of course the famous chimpanzee symbolic language experiments, where some chimpanzees have been taught over 2000 symbols which they can point to on a computer screen putting symbols together to essentially request things and make statements and convey some sort of meaning. It’s pretty clear from these experiments that there is no abstract thinking going on, but the use of symbols for concrete things exists. So, what does one say here. Clearly the symbolic capability which is part of language exists in something non human, so that is why I say I QUALIFY my statement that language is unique to humans. ---------------------- On whether living organisms are machines or mechanisms first perhaps we should define what a machine or mechanism is. A machine or mechanism is an assemblage of parts that move and work together in a system (sometimes with subsystems) given an energy source to perform some work or operation. A machine automates a process, so the process can be performed without human involvement or with minimal human involvement. By such a definition living organisms are somewhat like machines but also somewhat not like machines. There is an analogy and dis-analogy. Take a car, for example, which has parts, the radiator for example, which are parts of subsystems, like the cooling system, where some of these parts move, like the pistons, when given energy, gas and a spark, to perform some work, drive a drive shaft and turn the wheels. Once the key is turned on the system is automated in terms of the engine running, the pistons pumping, and when in drive, the wheels turning. There is a driver, so the system has minimal human involvement, but some systems, like robotic systems in factories have virtually no human involvement (any artificial mechanism is going to have some minimal human involvement as in supplying a power source or winding a clock). Living organisms clearly have parts, cells and proteins that make up the cell structures, they have moving parts, namely the organic chemical reactions that drive such processes as energy production in the organism, they are given an energy source, food and water or sunlight, and they perform many automated processes, like digestion, respiration, and self-movement (like a car) etc… In this way they are like machines. But in other ways organisms are not like machines. They repair themselves, machines don’t do this. Their parts self organize (proteins form organelles by their own bonding properties without any human or outside involvement), and they develop and grow (machines don’t do this), and reproduce themselves (machines don’t do this either). So, if we are to call an organisms a machine or mechanism, we are stretching the definition of machine or mechanism beyond the artificial ones built by humans. An organism may be a type of CHEMICAL MECHANISM or machine, which engages in automated processes, which are really chemical processes which are automated by the predictable reactions involved, they self-organize, grow, reproduce by the chemical processes which are automated sequences of chemical events. In this way you MIGHT call an organism a mechanism or machine. I’m not even going to talk about a computing machine, which is a specific type of machine which uses binary numbers, up or down voltages to processes data, organisms certainly don’t seem to be like computing machines, except for the brain, which may be considered to be a type of computing machine. ---------- My computer argument was just against a certain conception of free will, it was not an argument that people or biological entities are machines. Machines are artificial, they are man made inventions. In being so, we know everything about them. We built every part. We know how every part interacts with every other part, we can state this in a diagram, we know the energy introduced to make it work, and we know the result, the revolutions per minute of the wheels etc… A car is an example of a physical machine we have complete knowledge of. A computer is another type of machine (more of a logical machine) that we theoretically have complete knowledge of. When I went from a degree in philosophy into the world of computing what I found so refreshing was that, although nothing is ever resolved in philosophy (whatever argument you present can always be met with counter arguments) there was a definite answer to any question you could compose about a computer, as it is an artificial entity. I do not suppose the same for natural entities or natural science. We do not know, as we do in an artificial system, the answer to how everything works. There is much we don’t know. In this way biological entities and certainly a complex one like a person is not like a machine (from the epistemological viewpoint). Biological entities have parts which work together in processes, and have systems and subsystems, and are in that respect like a machine, but there are a different type of machine, a biological entity is more of a chemical machine if it is any sort of machine which is a very different sort of machine than a car. It’s a machine in the sense that it has very many automatic processes, the process of digestion, the process of the brain (homoculus) controlling muscles (although initiated by a volition which is not machine like), the processes of antibodies forming to ward off infectious intruders, the process of self repair, the process of reproduction, the process of development, all of these are AUTOMATIC processes which make them somewhat machine like. Volition or free will, which both humans and animals seem to possess is patently NOT machine like. A machine, given energy, acts automatically. Volition is not automatic, there is nothing which forces or causes a volition, it is instead the origination of a cause, such as to cause the movement of a muscle (or impulses in the homoculus of the brain to cause a movement of a muscle) like raising one’s arm. It is not buried in a chain of causation, which is characteristic of an automatic operation. By ‘automatic’ I mean one thing causing another in some sort of sequence, without any person intervening. --------- I totally agree. I would never say volition is unique to humans. It seems that all animals have it (at least those with nervous systems). ------------ I am not a convinced reductionist. The fact is reductionism is not a completed project and it’s not clear that it’s going to succeed. It seems to me that there are systemic aspects to biology where some of the features of the system may not be reducible to their parts (i.e., there COULD be something like emergent properties or if reducible to chemistry there may be things about chemistry that explain biology that are not currently in the chemical paradigm). We still largely don’t know why chemicals self organize into complex structures like cells. We also don’t know at a chemical level, largely, how development proceeds (there seems to be some sort of program of successive expressions, turning on and turning off, of genes to make this happen). On the mind and the brain the jury is still out. While parts of Cartesian dualism were just ridiculous, like the mind and the brain communicate through the pineal gland, some type of dualism is still a tenable hypothesis, although not fashionable among scientists and philosophers. The relation between the mind and brain is complex. We know that if you destroy an area of the brain there are mental dysfunctions, sometimes permanent and sometimes partially recovered by neuroplasticity. We know that chemicals affect the mind, such as introducing LSD to the brain which results in altered perceptions (perceptions being part of the mind). We also know mental dysfunctions such as schizophrenia can be partly or completely solved by introducing a chemical to the brain (a drug) which affects the neurotransmitters, yet why this is the case is not clear (neuropharmacology is pretty much a black box science, we put in a drug of this dosage and this is the effect on the mind, but we don’t know the MECHANISM which makes this so). So we know from these points that the mind and brain are closely intertwined, perhaps the same thing, perhaps not. -------------- My point was that there IS something which chooses among alternatives which is determined (a computer program with no random functions). The fact that you can write a program where the program randomly chooses between alternatives doesn’t negate the first point or the first type of program. And as you said, if you delve a little deeper it’s not clear that any programs are truly random as they are using a pseudo-random number generator. I am both a programmer and a scientist (molecular biologist and computational biologist) and someone with a philosophy degree and from my investigations I would say nature is rather mechanical. We can increasingly explain what happens in biology by chemistry (organic structures for biological structures and biochemical reactions for biological processes) hence the discipline of MOLECULAR biology. The only arguments I’ve heard that says it isn’t is the one you advanced from quantum mechanics, and I don’t know what your point is about Carl Jung. You might make the argument that there are some random events in nature like the irradiation of DNA to cause mutations. We would say that decisions or choices are implemented in the brain of any body structure. The brain is computational (read Patricia Churchland’s book on the Computational Brain) although not in the way a Von Neumann machine is computational. Nonetheless I believe there are types of algorithms operating in the brain. The question is whether the brain is a deterministic machine like other things in nature or if not, why not. I’d like to hear your ideas on why not. Is the mind something different from the brain, in which case a deterministic machine like the brain doesn’t affect mental functions like decisions. What is the model you are proposing? --------------- I will make a quick point about your idea of introducing a random function to randomly select an antecedent to ‘choose’ among the alternatives. In this way you are not modeling free choice. Our choices are not random but intentional. Random and intentional are not the same. ----------- On what grounds do you hold that the natural world is not determined (determinist)? I’m not saying there aren’t any such grounds, I would just like to know what your grounds are. By ‘determined’ I mean cannot be otherwise, and by ‘determined nature’ I mean every event in nature is caused by a prior event and so cannot be otherwise. ----------- I decided to send this again to you as you seemed to completely miss the point. Selecting among alternatives is not necessarily free it can be completely determined and unfree as in a computer program. “As another example of how choosing among options is determined, consider a computer program which has a number of conditional branches. If x do a, if y do b, if z do c. x, y, and z certainly are alternatives, and a “choice” is made to do either a, b, or c. So is the computer program “free” if it can choose between alternatives? Of course not. A computer program is DETERMINED, its output is determined by its input and the algorithm that processes the input. When it reaches the conditional branch, the data presented will determine the choice (the branch to follow), if neither x, nor y, nor z is presented, the program can have an else clause, else do d, which is also determined. As a natural being where everything in us, included our will (as just a part of our brain) is determined by prior events, our choices between alternatives are no different and no less determined than that of the computer program. To be free our choice cannot be caused by a prior event.” There is no way around talking about “free” except in contradistinction to “determined.” Something that is “free” is “undetermined,” something which is “determined” is “unfree.” The natural world is completely determined, therefore unfree. Every event in the natural world has a prior cause. If it has a prior cause it’s existence is determined by the prior cause. It is unfree. The ONLY thing that can be undetermined and therefore free in nature is something which does not have a prior cause. This is what I say about free will. If you disagree you have to show me how my computer analogy of selecting among alternatives is NOT a free choice. ------------- As another example of how choosing among options is determined, consider a computer program which has a number of conditional branches. If x do a, if y do b, if z do c. x, y, and z certainly are alternatives, and a “choice” is made to do either a, b, or c. So is the computer program “free” if it can choose between alternatives? Of course not. A computer program is DETERMINED, its output is determined by its input and the algorithm that processes the input. When it reaches the conditional branch, the data presented will determine the choice (the branch to follow), if neither x, nor y, nor z is presented, the program can have an else clause, else do d, which is also determined. As a natural being where everything in us, included our will (as just a part of our brain) is determined by prior events, our choices between alternatives are no different and no less determined than that of the computer program. To be free our choice cannot be caused by a prior event. ------------ Andre, you talk of free will as a will to select among a number of alternatives. And you and others have also stated, as I have, that there is no event in nature that does not have a prior cause (chain of causation), i.e., everything is determined. You are not addressing the hundred pound gorilla in the room, how can we even “choose” an option if every event has a prior cause. Whatever option you choose could not have been otherwise, your choice was just determined by a prior cause according to the nature of nature (every event has a prior cause). You come back to my point that unless you suppose lack of a prior event to cause the choice the choice is not free and hence is not a choice. There is no way around what I have said, that in order for a choice to be FREE It cannot have a prior cause. Hence free will is volition that causes but is not caused. There’s no way around it. Many philosophers have characterized free will as choosing in accordance with reason. I reject this explanation as we have the ability to choose something completely unreasonable. Given a set of reasonable alternatives, we CAN do none of them, CAN not choose any reasonable alternative and CAN act unreasonably or irrationally. Free will allows us to act irrationally, and anyone who has studied human nature can recognize that part and parcel of human behavior is irrational behavior. We can be irrational only because we are free, even free of reason if we choose to be. ---------- Will is free of what is your question. Free will is free of causation, in the sense that it causes yet is not caused. Everything in nature is caused. Every event is caused by some prior event. In other words, in nature we have determinism (unless you want to get into quantum mechanics and its implications in non determinism). Hence free will is the only thing in the universe which is contrary to nature. I define free will as a will which causes but is not caused. I can will to raise my arm, hence my volition must cause my arm to go up. Hence volition can cause. But the same volition is also not caused. There is no prior event in nature which causes me to will to raise my arm. You must either reason that such is nonsense and everything is caused hence we have no free will (determinism as found in nature) or you must reason that there is something, namely volition which is not caused (but causes). If you reason determinism then our whole legal system is worthless. No one is ever responsible for anything, because whatever they did, as will nature, is determined. We actually live in an age where there is a great contradiction, we say nature is deterministic yet people are responsible for their actions (which is only possible if you are not determined and have free will). Hence the contradiction is that everything is determined yet a free will is not determined. There have been attempts to claim that there is no free will. Insanity defenses are based upon this, that some chemical condition in the brain CAUSED the defendant to pull the trigger so they are not responsible for pulling the trigger. There have been experiments which attempt to show that there is brain activity prior to a volition, i.e., that something causes a volition, again to argue complete determinism. I don’t exactly buy these, these events might have some influence on our decision but do not cause it. If you believe in free will, as I do, as it SEEMS that we have free will (some will argue this is an illusion), then you hold essentially a contradiction that everything in the universe is determined, but a free will is not determined. Many philosophers have attempted to resolve this contradiction, as far as I’m concerned, not with much success. ------------- Okay, Amram, I might accept what you are saying. Nature acts according to forces which exhibit regularities (law like regularities) which we capture in mathematical statements. Perhaps I was not careful the way I described things. ------------ I agree somewhat with Donald. Nature has laws (many of them mathematical) by which it works, and some rules as well, but I wouldn’t say that nature has logic, or that might be a tough argument to make. Humans have logic in the way that we reason, as in contradictions, which we find unsettling, as something can’t be both one thing and its opposite at the same time. But nature is based, at least partly, on mathematics, and you could say that mathematics has logic (in fact Bertrand Russell showed how mathematics can be reduced to logic and set theory). ----------- You wrote: “Like everything else, did physics and/or chemistry evolve and structure into what they are, or did they rather generate and structure evolution?” The answer is BOTH. Chemistry evolved as well. The periodic table just didn’t come into existence all at once or exist from the beginning of time or at the big bang, it evolved. The universe, after the big bang, consistent, when elements first evolved, as hydrogen and helium (still the most prevalent elements in the universe). When hydrogen compressed into gas clouds and stars were born, and there was enough heat and pressure for fusion to occur, then helium was created by fusion from hydrogen with a tremendous release of energy (what powers our sun). The fusion even created some slightly heavier elements, once there were stars long after the big bang, including maybe the first ten elements in the periodic chart. The heavier elements were created by supernova or when stars exploded. The bombardment of these elements from supernovae is what gave earth its heavier elements, filling out the periodic chart. So as I’ve just explained, CHEMISTRY EVOLVED TOO, not just biology, although this evolution follows the laws of physics, it isn’t the same as biological evolution, which is the answer to your second question, PART of why biological evolution occurs on earth is because of chemistry, DNA is certainly a molecule composed of chemicals, as is RNA and protein.
So, the answer to your question is BOTH. ------------ As I’ve said the subject of MOLECULAR biology has shown that much of biology can be explained in terms of chemistry (biological structures are organic chemical structures, biological pathways are chemical reactions). In studying biology the most useful course I took was organic chemistry.
Still there is much to be explained and much we don’t know in the chemistry of living things. Why do chemicals like proteins self-organize into complex structures like cells, which have many sub structures like organelles with specific functions (processes some of which we explain as chemical reactions like the production of energy in mitochondria by the breaking of phosphate bonds in ATP to ADP), and elaborate signaling (chemical signaling) between different organelles and functions. If we could truly reduce biology to chemistry we would have to explain all of this self organization in terms of chemical affinities, i.e., chemical bonding between the surfaces of proteins, we haven’t done this yet to any extent. There may be aspects to biology which require concepts not currently in chemistry to explain things like development. Why do cells know how to migrate in a chemical structure to create biological structures later in development, and how do these cells know what type of cell to differentiate into (by gene expression) at the proper time in development. We have to explain both TIMING and the PROGRAM of successive gene expressions to explain development, and a program is not really a concept in chemistry, but then again perhaps you can call a well defined succession of chemical events a program and that is the type of program we are talking about here.
We have reduced much biology to chemistry, but much hasn’t been reduced, and how we are going to explain self organization and development, features of living things, CHEMICALLY, is still a mystery. -------------- I think that a certain degree of reduction of biology to chemistry is already happening. Over the last 25 years biology has undergone a revolution, no one teaches biology anymore, they only teach MOLECULAR biology. At this point many (but certainly not all) biological structures and processes (reactions or reaction networks) are known chemically. This is NOT an argument for reductionism. We cannot say at this point that biology can simply be reduced to chemistry. It seems that there are some systematic aspects of biology which may not reduce to parts, but I agree with Donald in that we should reduce biology to chemistry to the extent that we can (let’s face it chemistry is a more advanced science than biology, it actually has a paradigm (like the periodic chart), whereas the paradigms in biology are sketchy, so such a reduction even if it is only a partial reduction makes biology a more advanced science). ------------ I think that’s a good observation. Historically philosophy of the natural world had to progress to some extent to become science. Some of the concepts of Aristotle were used by physicists, but some were just wrong. Where science departed from natural philosophy was when scientists based their reasoning or restricted their reasoning to observations. Philosophers don’t really make detailed observations of the world (or are loosely connected to these), but scientists do. Old sciences like astronomy were based upon discrete observations, although for some time these observations were confused with theologies along the lines of astrology. Science IS a philosophy, namely empiricism, but existed for some time as an observational endeavor long before the English empiricists developed their philosophy. At some point science progressed from mere speculation (as in Aristotle who did admittedly do some observations of living things) to experimentation coupled with observation with Galileo. Philosophy doesn’t do experimentation either.
Is this why Philosophy doesn’t clearly progress as science does, because it lacks observation and experimentation?
Or does Philosophy (now I modify my question) itself (non natural philosophy but other areas of philosophy) progress in some sense that there is a progression of understanding?
There clearly has been a progression in logic, an area of philosophy that some may also call mathematics, from Aristotle’s syllogisms to Fregian predicate calculus and beyond (e.g. Tarski’s logical theory of truth). What about ethics? Does ethics progress. Or are we still mired in the same questions that Aristotle pondered. What about other areas of philosophy. Epistemology for example. Does it progress, or is it a relentless rehashing of positions? There is Quine’s epistemology naturalized which claims that sciences such as psychology and psychophysics and neuroscience can answer some of the traditional epistemological questions about how we come to have knowledge. But that may be another case of science replacing philosophy and then progressing as observational and experimental science not progressing as philosophy.
I go back to my refined question, has non-natural philosophy progressed? ---------- I wanted to respond to your comment: “After all, the fact that you can make an artificial system work doesn't prove that the system will work in the real world.” When I say everything in the artificial system is completely known and hence answers to its operation are conclusively either right or wrong, I guess I’m talking about a closed artificial system. If you start introducing real world data to the system, as by sensors, (I’ll call this an open artificial system) then perhaps you can argue that its operation is not conclusive, you know in advance how it will respond to certain data, but since you don’t know what data it will receive, you don’t know in advance its behavior. The mars rover is an example of such a system. This is why I said discussing the extent and limits of knowledge on artificial and natural system is an interesting discussion. ----------- Question: is randomness actually random? My answer: Is randomness basically unpredictability? We say a generated set of numbers is random if it doesn't follow any defined sequence and we cannot guess what the next number will be. Unfortunately for random generators or numbers they seem to be pseudorandom. They use an algorithm (an algorithm IS predictable) which generates seemingly unrelated numbers within a range. But this, as I said in pseudorandomness does not seem to be true randomness. There seem to be random events about us: molecules in a gas seem to move randomly in a confined vessel, but do they? Is it simply that we cannot predict where a molecule will move, or that it would take an exceptional amount of study and physical calculations to determine where it will move? I.e., it seems that some (all?) random events in nature are not really so but appear so due to epistemological problems, our inability to do the complex calculations and physics to determine where molecules will move. I am moving towards but have not proven that randomness appears random but is not. ---------- I’d like to hear launch a discussion about parallel computing. Why do this? What does this have to do with the “cloud?” It has everything to do with the cloud. One of the few reasons you recentralize computing in the cloud as opposed to remaining with a distributed model like the internet is to have a mainframe (with multiple processors) or a COLLECTION of computers (more likely) like a grid work together to solve a compute intensive process. It may be that you have an application that servers many simultaneous requests, but rather than servicing those requests on a single processor (and hence creating a queue that is a bottleneck) you want to service those multiple requests each on a separate processor (or separate computer). Or you may have a compute intensive application that is slow which you can submit to the cloud grid and speed up by dividing the algorithm into separate simultaneously computable components. An example of this is a simulation or extensive calculation, or parallelizable search algorithm. You have users on the internet access the cloud where the parallel application is running and they get their results more quickly. When I talk about a search this could be a database search (database is an excellent application to be parallelized with parallel transactions or parallel queries) or it may be a search like a Google search, where the search can be broken into independent components to be run simultaneously on separate databases with the results put back together and sent to the internet requester. Or another example is multiple weather stations requesting simulations of national weather done on a cloud somewhere that is separating a meterological simulation task into separate components and running them simultaneously on different processors sending the results back to a requester over the internet. This can all be done with parallel compilers or parallel computing languages. With a parallel compiler you submit the source of a non parallel application to the compiler and it determines where in the algorithm to separate lines of code that can be run independently and simultaneously. It is really a preprocessor. With a parallel computing language, you originally write the application to have independently compilable components that can be run independently and simultaneously on different processors. We already have some of the basis of such a language with UNIX constructs like fork and spawn, which spawn separate processes from a single process with interprocess messaging capabilities like sockets, pipes, and semaphors. When I worked in database I managed a product which was a distributed database (Ingres STAR). We did parallel queries (or distributed queries) and distributed transactions. This involved a central process which sent out subqueries to geographically distributed databases over networks and correlated the information by doing a distributed join. With distributed transactions we updated geographically distributed databases as a part of a single logical transaction coordinated by the two phase commit protocol. This same technology would be extremely useful in a cloud where you might have different databases located on different machines in the grid of the cloud. A lot of people think of parallel computing as basically scientific applications (like CAE where you are doing simultaneously logic simulations on different parts of a circuit representation, or a scientific or numerical simulation), but parallel computing is equally relevant to the commercial space like accounting transactions where thousands of requests for queries and updates come in over the net to the cloud simultaneously and then hit of different databases on different computers. What I would like to know is how you could submit a regular non parallel application to a grid and get parts of it to run independently and simultaneously. That is a much needed capability and a much thornier engineering problem. I would like to hear more from other people about the subject of parallel computing in the cloud. But what do I know, I’m just a philosophy major who happened to work in computing. -------------- Szabolcs you make a good point. Whenever you talk about language you have to talk about meaning. Even a pattern of bits has meaning. Depending upon how it is interpreted it can either be a number, a letter (ASCII code), or an instruction. I.e., it is a string of bits with an INTERPRETATION, this interpretation is a lot like a meaning. There are many theories of meaning as regards human language, one, and one I agree with to an extent, is the representational theory of meaning. A sound (spoken language) or a set of marks (written language) is ASSOCIATED with a thing in the world, or a representation (like an image) of a thing in the world. When I utter “chair” I think or imagine a seat with a back with four legs. I learn this association when someone like my mother utters “chair” and points to a seat with a back and four legs. This correlation or association of an image or representation in our mind and a thing in the world is what we mean by meaning. If computers can “think” like humans they have to be able to process “meaning” i.e., they have to be able to mean things by words. I’ve long said of this forum that we have to specify do we mean ‘can computers think like humans’ or simply ‘can computers think in any fashion perhaps a non human fashion?” ------------- Don, everyone wants to bridge the gulf between the subjective account of consciousness and the objective account of neurophysiology. So far no one has, and methodologically it’s not clear that you can give an objective description of something subjective. Here’s what progress has been made. In neuropsychological experiments (the neuro is the objective account and the psychological is the subjective account) subjects are given a specific cognitive task, a math problem, a word problem, or a visual task for example. While they engage in that well defined task we can (through MRI or CAT scan or similar technology) map the blood flow in the brain, i.e., see what region of the brain is active during that task. We can do this for multiple subjects and then generalize as to the region activated by the cognitive task. That’s about the best we have done so far in correlating (and note I say ‘correlating’) the subjective experience of solving a cognitive problem with the objective description of the neurophysiology underlying it. It is a ‘correlation’ as we cannot properly conclude that the brain CAUSES the cognitive experience, because it could also be that the cognitive experience CAUSES the brain activity, so we are left with a mere CORRELATION between the two. I am reading a book that discusses the relation between the brain and subjective experience in a very thoughtful way. It is entitled “Cognition and the Brain: The Philosophy and Neuroscience Movement,” by Andrew Brook and Kathleen Akins (editors of a bunch of papers on the subject). You can order it on Amazon. ------------- Don, you bring up some excellent points, and this is just the direction I hoped this discussion would go. Yes, the brain clearly processes signals (perhaps information). Note that although I said the brain is not a Von Neumann machine I didn’t rule out that it is SOME sort of computer or processor. It’s more likely it’s like a digital signal processor. Clearly we take in signals from our sense organs (actually sound or light is transduced by those organs to create and send an electronic signal to the nervous system). The processing seems highly parallel, i.e., propogates along bundles of nerves. If you take vision for example, the rods and cones in the retina transduce the effect of light on these rods and cones into an electronic signal which is sent along the optic nerve, up through the superior colliculus, and then eventually to the occipital lobe where the neurophysiological story ends. Somehow we suppose the electrical signals in the occipital lobe to BE the experience of seeing something, but that’s a gulf (between the objective neurophysiological account and the subjective account of seeing) that no one has been able to bridge. So what sort of machine is this. First of all it is organic, i.e, the nerves are composed of organic molecules, they are cells with the organelles and organization of a cell, but a specialized one, it seems to transduce electronic signals. The electronic transduction is not like electrons flowing along a copper wire, they are caused by a membrane potential that is created out of negative and positive ions flowing in and out of ion channels in the nerve cell’s membrane. You may say this is like a digital signal processor because signals are either transduced or not depending upon the pre synaptic membrane potential. If there is a threshold level of potential (like in a neurode of a neurocomputer) the neurotransmitter is released and the vesicle emptied into the post synaptic site initiating the ion exchanges that propogate the signal along the axon. Note binary in a computer and binary and a brain are NOT referring to the same thing. Binary in a computer is indicated by a high or low voltage. Binary in a brain is just the fact that the neurotransmitter is either released or not released across the synapse (never partially released always a binary event either released or not released depending upon a threshold). When we talk about information processing in a computer we are talking about an algorithm modifying data in some way. When we are talking about information processing (?) or just signal transduction in a brain there is no modification of data, there’s just a propogation of a signal to some center in the brain where the neurophysiological story ends. About logic gates in the brain. I did see one study about computational modules in the brain, where a computer program looked at a representation of a network of neurons in the brain and noted that there were repeating units of neurons that behaved in stereotypic ways (like two neurons in and one out). I haven’t seen anything about timing cells, but I believe what you tell me. A computer of course cannot work without a clock which times the up and down voltages to create a binary pattern. DNA and RNA programming don’t really enter into the architecture of the brain, as these are just programs to produce proteins when the cell is made or maintaining itself. When we describe the architecture of the brain we are talking about the cellular level. ------------ Don, I’m sorry for calling your statement ridiculous. And yes I DO know about neuroscience and computing, my masters thesis at Stanford was on computational neuroscience. Yes, computers have multiple processors, but they are all Von Neumann machines, they all process a sequence of instructions and invoke the control unit to use the logic gates to implement the instruction. My point stands that a brain has NO CPU, no instructions, and no logic gates, so it is nothing like a computer (or nothing like a Von Neumann machine). Perhaps you are thinking about a parallel processing machine with many CPUs. The principle is the same, they are ALL Von Neumann machines. When an algorithm is run, it is broken into separate instructions or instruction sections that can be run in parallel on multiple Von Neumann machines, so the principle is the same. Perhaps you can argue that a brain is some other sort of computer, some say like a neurocomputer, some say like a digital signal processing system. Perhaps. But again the brain is a CHEMICAL machine, a computer is not (it’s a logic machine), as everything in the body including the brain is just based upon organic chemistry. And as far as the Turing test is concerned, no machine has ever passed it. Yes you have machines like Siri that answer your questions about where is the nearest Chinese restaurant, but try to have a philosophical discussion with Siri, the computer simply doesn’t have concepts that allow it to have a conversation at that level. -------------- Don, again this is a ridiculous statement: “there is no difference between a computer and a human brain.” Do you know nothing about neuroscience or computer science? The two couldn’t be more different. Computers (most of them) work according to the Von Neumann architecture, long term storage, short term storage, and a CPU. The short term storage contains programs which are sequences of instructions and data (the sequence can jump around due to jump instructions). The CPU sequentially loads an instruction and its immediate data and the instruction code is decoded by the control unit to implement the circuit of the instruction (i.e., to use the logic gates that do an ADD when the instruction is ADD, etc….). A brain doesn’t work anything like this. A brain is composed of assemblages of neurons which impinge upon eachother to send signals at synapses. It is more like a signal processing system. But the neuron signaling is CHEMICAL (a computer is not chemical) composed of neurotransmitters which when accumulated to a certain degree initiate a binary event of signal transduction. There is no CPU, there are no instructions, there is NOTHING like a computer in the brain. There have been some attempts to build neurocomputers which are composed of neurodes which change a statistical value if a certain number of input neurodes reach a threshold. Neurocomputers do pattern recognition, they are statistically based, and don’t do anything like think. EW -------------- Don, there is a big gap in your thinking. What you describe a robot doing (picking out a screwdriver) is object recognition. It’s similar to identifying an object in a picture. This is a far cry from thinking. This if anything is a simple act of perception. I think the problem with this whole discussion is no one has offered a definition or what they mean by “thinking.” If you’re going to ask “can a computer think” you first have to have an answer as to what is thinking. Analyze human thinking for a start. It certainly is infinitely more than object recognition. You may also want to ask whether consciousness is necessary for thinking. We may never build a conscious robot (for as far as we know the only thing in the universe which is conscious is a brain, and we don’t know why that is the case, it just is) but may build a robot which non-consciously simulates human thought. If you can non-consciously and non-volitionally (see my previous argument why computers, determined systems, cannot have something fundamentally undetermined like volition) SIMULATE thinking, it that thinking? It certainly is not thinking in the human sense, where we are volitionally conscious of our thoughts. So it’s important when you ask the question “can a computer think” do you mean “can a computer think like a human” or “can a computer think in SOME fashion, as in a simulation)? None of the preliminary groundwork to answer the question “can a computer think” has been done in this forum. -------------- You said “the computer cannot directly perceive the world and get knowledge about it.” I find this to be false. What about SENSORS? An artificially intelligent system has sensors which take information in from the environment and respond to it. As for some of your other statements they are more sensible: “computers apply a fixed set of algorithms to the data provided by human operators (or environmental data provided by sensors, my addition). The brain does not need an external program whereas computers cannot function without it.” ---------------- Without knowing too much about quantum computers, it seems to me they are undetermined only in the sense that they are probabilistic. Whereas volition is not probabilistic. When we form an intention (volition) we do something, cause something to happen, we don’t maybe (probabilistically) cause it to happen. Also nothing causes us to necessarily have the intention, there are only influences on the formation of the intention. The formation on the intention is not a matter of probability. Given this, I would say that probabilistic quantum computers could not support volitions or volitional actions. --------------- My view is a computer will never have volition. There might be a simulation of volition but never true volition. Let me define volition or an act of free will. An act of volition is contradistinguished from a determined act. When a rock rolls into another rock, the path the other rock will take is determined by the force, angle, friction, other rocks in the area etc… But when you decide (will) to eat dinner, your decision is not determined. There may influences on your decision like the time of day or your state of hunger, but you CAN ACT OTHERWISE, whereas the rock CANNOT ACT OTHERWISE. This whole discussion of determinism versus indeterminism is related to the notion of CAUSATION. The action of the rock is CAUSED by the force and angle of the first rock. But your decision to eat dinner is NOT CAUSED by your hunger pangs although is influenced by them. Therefore that which is caused is determined and that which is not caused is not determined. In my view a computer system is determined. Each event is CAUSED by a prior event. Think about the nature of circuitry, it is all based upon physical (and logical) causation. Ultimately any software program is just certain voltages flowing through certain circuits. Since the computer system is a determined physical system it cannot support something undetermined or uncaused, it cannot therefore support volition. You could theoretically program a computer with some random range function to appear to act volitionally, but, as I’ve clarified, because of the nature of a computer it would be a representation or simulation of volition but not real volition. And by the way an ACT doesn’t always follow a volition. I.e., action and volition are not the same. I can will to fly (not in a vehicle but as a winged creature) but cannot. So clearly I can will things I cannot enact. I will to think about this then will to think about that, it’s not clear my change in thought is an action, so that is probably an example willing without action. If you get my arguments I can think of some good objections and a good debate. Anyone want to continue this debate on whether computers can have volition. Find something wrong with my argument for a start. -------------------- If you do achieve machine consciousness you don’t necessarily get volition. Not all consciousness is volitional. Perception for example is part of consciousness but not volitional, whereas something like planning a movement and moving is volitional. I find a fundamental problem in that computers are essentially determined machines (output is determined by input) whereas volition is essentially undetermined. I condition my statement that computers are determined machines with the realization that we have partially autonomous agents that have sensors and actuators that determine their actions programmatically according to environmental data. ------------------ I’d like to hear more about what you consider ‘non-random processes.’ You’ve hinted at it but weren’t very explicit. Darwinian evolution is basically the natural selection of random mutations. Some mutations are silent, i.e., make no difference to the protein hence no biological difference hence have no effect on evolution, some are deleterious, the animal dies and it has no measureable effect on evolution, the only ones which make a difference are mutations that confer an advantage, and yes you could say that natural selection is not entirely random, it depends on the conditions of the environment at the time (like plants, other prey and predators, climate etc…). But what other non random processes are you referring to? Please be explicit. ------- I think this is a perfectly sensible statement on the part of Christine “before science.” Clearly there was MUCH human history BEFORE anything we would call science existed. Probably the earliest science existed as astronomy or star gazing and making charts etc… of the position and movements of the stars. But even this was often infused with mysticism ala astrology or similar myths. Clearly the Greeks were doing SOME science, some 300 BC, with notions like atoms and Aristotle actually collected and dissected plants and animals. What we would recognize as anything like modern science didn’t start until the renaissance with Galileo and a few others (1400’s), who actually made observations, EXPERIMENTED, and used some mathematics in their calculations. Something we would DEFINITELY recognize as science was Newton’s “The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy” (remember that all science was called natural philosophy in those days, a branch of philosophy) where observation, experimentation, and MATHEMATICAL expression of natural phenomena were used. This became the model of science hence forth. This was in the 1700’s I believe. So science is relatively new in human history and non-scientific religious and mythical thinking predates it by thousands of years. ------ The general view of science today is that the universe DID have a beginning: the big bang. I.e., it is not infinite. Supposedly time and space started and expanded from this point, so it’s senseless to ask what existed BEFORE the big bang as it was the beginning of time as well. Also the universe seems to have a definite size, i.e., is NOT infinite in extent, although is expanding. That’s the predominant view. Some scientists and some theologians dispute it. ----- I want to say something about all of your pronouncements about god and science. First of all, no amount of scientific evidence or logical proofs is ever going to determine whether there is a god or not (see Kant on the impossibility of determining whether god exists as there are valid proofs that he does and valid proofs that he doesn’t, i.e., it is an antimony of pure reason). Many scientists are NOT atheists. It’s a personal matter how you theologically interpret the evidence of science, some scientist believe it proves there’s a god, some scientist think it proves there is not a god. My own view is that the universe is a mechanism. This is what I determined from studying science. Evolution is a mechanism. You can ask what created the mechanism and then you will get different answers. Personally I don’t think something (the universe) can come from nothing, nor do I think something with great intricate design can come from random processes (you can even generate probability arguments that shows how ridiculous the notion is that something with complex design can come from random processes). I have no interest or respect for any existing religions, but I do share a belief in something super intelligent that created the universe as did Einstein (from the argument from design). Ironically science did not make me atheistic, the incredible design of nature that I studied in science made me MORE religious (not in the sense of belonging to any religion but in the sense that Einstein was religious). You think science makes people atheistic (and for some it does) for others science makes them all the more religious. So give up this idea that science and religion are at odds, and if you are a scientist then you must be an atheist. Nothing could be further from the truth. ------- Art I think you’re confusing a notion of ‘good and evil’ with freedom. The two are orthogonal. You can have freedom without good and evil. Animals have this. Yes you need freedom to be able to choose between good and evil if that’s what you mean, but you need freedom to choose ANYTHING, to choose to raise your arm. Freedom is opposed to determinism. If you’re actions aren’t determined then they are free. This is that nature of volition, it is not determined therefore free. Animals have volition or freedom of choice just as humans do. They can choose whether to lift their leg or not to. They can choose to pursue some prey or not to. Animals are largely driven by instinct. When they kill they are not making an evil choice, they are just choosing and acting to satiate their hunger. When they protect their young they are not making a good choice, they are just doing what instinct urges them to do. They CAN abandon their young, which is contrary to their instinct, so their choice to protect their young is free, not determined, but influenced by instinct, but not based upon good and evil. I.e. animals seem to be morally neutral in what they do. But what they do they freely choose to do. If you think animals are not free but determined, then you end up with the ridiculous notions that Descartes had, when he said animals are just mechanisms, but humans are free. This thinking is ridiculous and contrary to everything we know about nature. ------------- To further support Paul’s case, consider TODAY that there are cultures studied by anthropologists and anthropolinguists that have verbal language and NO written language. This in fact exists in many primitive cultures. So we have some CURRENT evidence that verbal language can and does exist without any written language. ------------- I think you have defeated your own argument. If neurophysiology hasn’t explained consciousness and neurophysiology can be reduced to physics, physics hasn’t explained consciousness. Moreover we haven’t by any stretch of the imagination reduced neurophysiology to physics. Yes, what we know of neurophysiology so far is not inconsistent with physics. “There is no domain in which physics can explain everything.” I’m not sure what you’re trying to say here. If I think about Newtonian mechanics, or the physics of macrophenomenal objects, I would say that’s a domain where everything is pretty much explained (e.g. what a projectile’s trajectory is). Maybe you meant physics doesn’t explain everything, which is certainly true, not there is no domain in physics where everything is explained. You said “if there is a mind that is not material at some point that non materal causes an effect on the material, let’s say the brain. Well we have never discovered any such thing. Really? The problem might be that physics is not able to investigate something non physical and the mind could possibly be (possibly not) non-physical. Anyway, it seems a mental phenomenon as simple as an intention (an act of volition) causes something physical (the neurons in the brain and body that control the raising of my arm), i.e., when I intend to raise my arm and do. -------------- Jim wrote: “So if you can accept that math is the structure of the physical universe but biology does not follow, then you must be saying that living things are not part of the physical universe and do not obey physics. I do not believe you mean that.” No, Jim, biological entities do obey that laws of physics but I also contend physics probably (the jury is out) cannot explain biology strictly in terms of physics. If you think it can you are a reductionist, and there are many problems with reductionism. I know many physicists are reductionists and claim physics is a ‘theory of everything,’ and therefore must believe that social relations, mental life (like perceptions and consciousness or learning a new language), and biological entities can all ultimately be explained by physics. I think this is a vastly overextended thesis and I do not hold this view. We haven’t succeeded in reducing consciousness to biology, and we haven’t succeeded in reducing biology to physics. We have never built a biological organism (I’m not talking about modifying an existing organism), and we have never built a conscious entity (like a conscious robot). If we can truly reduce consciousness and biology to physics then we should have already been able to do this. I will not say that we won’t ever, but we haven’t and so I suspend my judgement. It may be that there are emergent properties in biological entities and in consciousness which are not reducible to physics. -------------- You said: “Man is rational.” This sounds very Aristotelian. Aristotle said “man is the rational animal.” What exactly to you mean by ‘rational?’ It seems to me man is also frequently irrational, as evidenced by crimes of passion, riots, wars, all led by emotions and less by thinking. And it’s not clear that animals are ‘irrational,’ it seems they act very sensibly, protecting themselves, searching for food drink when they are hungry and thirsty. Their actions may be a bit more scripted than ours, or as many say, instinctual, but they do not seem irrational. So can we really say ‘man is the rational animal?’ ------------ Just one comment about your statement (paraphrased) “that the universe’s structure is mathematical.” That may be an overextended thesis. Certainly the PHYSICAL universe’s structure appears to be mostly mathematical, but what about the biological universe, what about the mental universe, what about the social universe? It is not clear that these are strictly mathematical. In fact I have a masters in computational biology (masters thesis done at Stanford) so in this field we have spent a lot of time analyzing biological phenomena, to the extent that they can be, mathematically. Sure, you can mathematically treat proteomic and genomic sequences, and even do some mathematical modeling of some biological phenomena, but I would say otherwise biology is quite UNMATHEMATICAL. A biological entity is composed of proteins, tissues, physiology, none of which is particularly conducent to mathematical representation. If you said, mathematics is more than a language, it’s the very structure of the PHYSICAL universe I would accept that. If you just use the word “universe,” you are on the slippery slope of trying to argue REDUCTIONISM, that everything is ultimately physical, and that even living things can be explained solely by mathematical physics, and I have a lot of reasons to belief that is not the case, and we certainly haven’t succeeded in doing that yet. ------------- Okay, Jim, I think that’s a pretty good answer. That mathematics is not just a language but something which is actually built into the structure of the universe. My question is is it really built into the structure of the universe, or are we simply able to interpret physical events as being mathematically describable, i.e, that mathematics is a mental abstraction of the physical events we observe? ---------------- Jim, in what I wrote I said mathematics is definitely a language but I also said it may be other things as well. I took issue with your notion that natural language is only descriptive. It can be proscriptive and predictive as well, as I have shown. You say that mathematics is more powerful than a mere language. What did you have in mind? What else is it besides a language? I am not here saying you are wrong, just want to know what you have in mind when you say it is more than a language. ------------ Jim, I also want to point out that you can make predictions in natural language. “I predict that John will be at the football game tomorrow.” There, I just made a natural language prediction. It can be verified, tomorrow if he shows up, or confuted, if he doesn’t. It has all the hallmarks of a prediction and yet it is made with natural language. Jim’s statement: “Mathematics is so much more than merely a language. Part of the math is the language part, but languages don't predict things, they merely describe things. Math can make predictions.” ------------- I agree totally Jim. That’s why I said math is definitely a language but also may be more than that. Clearly we describe things with mathematics. If you’ve ever done mathematical modeling (I’ve done it modeling neurophysiology and also modeling manufacturing floor optimization problems in business school), you know what you are doing is DESCRIBING some aspect of experience with mathematical symbols (variables and operators). Same thing in physics, when an object is flying through the air we can describe its path with a mathematical equation and predict where it will land with the same equation. ------------- No one is saying evolutionary theory is perfect, it has its short comings. Yes, we cannot go back in time and actually see what happened. But I also would not say that the historical sciences fail the science reproducibility test. It seems that if one person carbon dates a dinosaur bone, another person can carbon date the same bone, and will get approximately the same result in most cases. It seems to me this is a case of reproducibility in paleontology. If a geologist looks at the stratification of rocks he/she can make a judgement as to the relative time of the deposits, and another geologist can look at the same stratification and come to the same conclusion. It seems to me this is reproducibility. The problem may be more that the historical science lack experimentability. It exists to some extent in the historical sciences, but is somewhat lacking. Also, modern techniques in evolutionary biology use computers to compare the genetic sequences of living animals to determine their relation, and with an estimate of the mutation rate, an evolutionary tree which tells when certain animals split from eachother and how and by how much time they are related. Your point about finding a future instance when, for example, a physical law may be proven wrong, is correct. This is how science works. After a sufficient number of cases and NO counterinstances, we induce a law. It could possibly one day be proven wrong, and this is partly how science progresses. Your point about neuroscience and the fact that our senses sometimes lie to us: this actually is a very deep philosophical question about the nature of reality. Does reality somehow exist outside of the mind, or is what we call reality or experience the processing of the brain of physical information so that we essentially create a view of the world in our head. We could talk about that one for hours drawing on neuroscience, psychophysics, and epistemology. As far as us being children of an alien civilization, I know that’s a view that some people share (particularly on the history2 channel). Still it has never been proven and just has the status of a conjecture. --------------- No I don’t think animals have a sense of good and evil as do humans. There may be some instances where there’s a sense of the right thing to do, however, as a mother (animal) knows it’s wrong to abandon its babies, and knows its right to provide food for its babies. This may be relegated to instinct, perhaps. As far as killing in the animal kingdom, it’s pretty much done to eat, or in some cases to protect a territory (as battling males may die over fighting over a female or a territory). The killing seems to be related to the survival instinct. Whereas humans kill for all sorts of reasons: monetary gain, revenge, even as a part of a job in an army, not usually just for survival. --------------- That’s more to the point, Christine. I agree that language, in the human sense of a grammar with large vocabulary is unique to humans (by degree and perhaps in kind), and tools, to the extent to which we use them is unique (by degree and perhaps in kind). However, you will get some counterargument in the sense that chimpanzees have been shown to be able to relate some (2000, not sure of the number) symbols given on computer screens to things in the world and to construct simple sentences for things they want. And chimpanzees also salivate on a twig and stick it down an ant hole to extract the ants to eat, a type of simple tool using. --------------************ While we seemed to have switched the subject to capitalism, and I see NO connection between capitalism and the subject of this thread, is man just an animal, I would like to return to the subject of volition, of which Christine so kindly supplied a correct definition. What exactly is the relation between volition and consciousness? Certainly they are related but not the same. Just as a car and a human are related by the ‘driving’ relation, but a human and car are not the same thing. What is volition (an act of will or the faculty of willing). What is consciousness (my definition is a flow of percepts, think about this, it’s a surprisingly good definition which captures what we call conscious states). Clearly there are forms of consciousness which are not volitional. Examples are percepts. When you are looking at a scene, you are ‘conscious’ of the lake and mountains before you, but you are not willing them to be there. Percepts are examples of conscious states which are not volitional. However if you will to now turn away from the lake and mountains to look at your car, you have invoked volition which changes your percept. But the question remains is there any volition without consciousness? Can I will something and not be conscious why I am willing. Probably not, unless you want to invoke some weird example like someone who is not fully conscious but dreaming and sleep walking. It SEEMS like volition requires consciousness. There we have it, consciousness does not require volition, but volition requires consciousness. We can speak, then, as Christine did (but meant something else by this) of ‘volitional consciousness.’ ‘Volitional consciousness’ is that state in which you are conscious and you are willing something, like willing or forming the intention to raise your arm. What has volitional consciousness? Clearly all animals, at least those with a nervous system and sense organs have percepts and a flow of percepts therefore have consciousness. But is their consciousness also sometimes volitional? Yes, all animals, certainly those with nervous systems, can initiate a voluntary movement, therefore they have volition. In the moment when they initiate a movement (not a reaction or reflex arc, a voluntary movement) and are conscious of doing so, they have volitional consciousness. Back to our subject, volitional consciousness clearly did not develop with homo sapiens or early hominids, it has existed as long as conscious animals and voluntary movements have existed, some two billion years. -------------- Going back to a comment someone made earlier in this forum: they said “mathematics is not a language.” It most certainly IS a language, but it may be some other things as well. If you have ever done mathematically modeling you realize you are using mathematical operators and variables to describe a real world phenomenon. Again, physics is a perfect example of this where real world phenomena like the trajectory of a projectile are described with mathematical equations. Mathematics has nouns, verbs, and grammar. The nouns are variables, the operators are verbs, and the rules or laws of for example algebra or how you can put together the variables and operators in an equation (sentence) is the grammar. Mathematics one hundred percent is absolutely a language. ----------------------- Christine wrote: “The development of 'volition' in early hominids was part of their evolutionary adaptation to a changing environment.” Again this is a misunderstanding of what volition is. Volition or will exists in all animals, without it they could not initiate movement. Before there is movement you have to have an intention or a volition or will to move, then execute the movement (I am NOT talking about ordinary movement, not cases of reaction or involuntary movements like a reflex arc). Since volition has always existed in all animals it did not start with the early hominids. Again pre-hominids or apes already had volition. You continue to insist on using a definition of ‘volition’ which is NOT the dictionary definition of ‘volition’ or anything close to it. You have just given a word that has a certain meaning your own meaning. ---------------- Paul, I don’t think I was saying mathematics came from Aristotle. I do think I am saying that mathematical logic came originally from an analysis of natural language done by Aristotle (ala syllogism). Over time it became more ‘mathematical’ with the introduction of variables and quantificational operators (ala Fregian predicate calculus). It is interesting that it was later shown that mathematics can be reduced to logic and set theory. This begs the question I wanted to hear from others on, what exactly is the relation between natural language and mathematics? All natural languages have numbers and quantificational operators like some, all, a few. Did mathematics come from these? Where did mathematics come from? I’ve given a partial answer in the sense that geometry (which literally means measure of the earth) came from measuring farm plots. ----- You wrote “Cassirer argued that science and mathematics developed from natural language.” This is an interesting statement that needs more exploration. It is true that logic underlies mathematics (as Bertrand Russell proved mathematics can be reduced to logic and set theory), and that logic originally came from an analysis of language (i.e. ala Aristotelian syllogism). Later logic became more mathematical with the introduction of logical variables and operations (like the universal and existential quantification operators ala Frege). It is true also that all natural languages have some way to deal with quantity, numbers, quantifiers like some and all or a few, etc… Some languages also have classifiers which are used to group a number of a type of thing (like Chinese). What exactly did you mean, in more detail, when you said “Cassirer argued that science and mathematics developed from natural language?” ---------- I agree with most of what you say. However, I am puzzled by the statement “when man began to be a volitional creature…” Man has ALWAYS been a volitional creature. In fact ALL living things are volitional, I would say it is part of what defines a living thing (a robot does not have volition but is determined). You might be confusing volition with symbolic consciousness. Man also has always been conscious. Most living creatures are also conscious. The only distinction I see here is that only man seems to have symbolic consciousness (ala philosophy of Cassirer). What do you mean by ‘volition?’ Clearly you’re definition is not mine and is not orthodox. Volition is the faculty of willing, it is related to free will, related to intention. All creature have it or they would not be able to will or initiate their movements (Aristotle called animals that which is self moving). Also volition is NOT related to language as you seem to imply. As I said all animals are volitional and they don’t have language in the human sense. Volition is simply the faculty of willing. What the heck is your unorthodox definition of volition to make the statement “when man began to be a volitional creature?” -------- I think this book could be a partial answer to the Darwinian explanation of why mathematics evolved (what survival value it has). From the few reviews I’ve seen, Keith Devlin distinguishes between ‘natural mathematics’ and ‘symbolic mathematics.’ All animals do the first, only humans do the second. I.e., in catching a Frisbee a dog must calculate in some sense when to jump in his run to catch the Frisbee in mid air. Symbolically this may be a vector, or calculus problem. The dog clearly doesn’t know calculus or vector arithmetic but can somehow do some sort of calculation of how to meet the Frisbee in air. Devlin goes on to cite many examples of survival skills that use the natural mathematical approach. This argument also indicates something that we have previous said on this forum, a unique human capability seems to be SYMBOLIZATION. In fact Ernst Cassirer wrote a multi volume philosophical work on ‘the philosophy of symbolic forms,’ where everything from language and mathematics to religious ritual and many cultural practices are basically SYMBOLIC. A symbol again is any thing that represents some other thing, where the relation between the two may be arbitrary, as in a religious symbol or a variable. Has anyone read Devlin’s book “The Math Instinct”? ---------------- I am inclined to agree with you if you cite human language as being a differentiator from animal language, moreover the things that language allows, such as abstractions and deductions (analytic truths). I take it when you say “our species makes conscious what for animals is not conscious” you are talking about things like abstract thought. However some aspects of language derive from our animal nature, like associations. Animals clearly can make associations, like the mouse learning that a bell means food, and that is how we BEGIN to learn language (my mother points to a chair and utters the sound ‘chair,’ I then make an ASSOCIATION between the chair object and the sound ‘chair.’). However language also takes on a life of its own which probably isn’t present in animals, in the sense that it organizes our thought and allows deductions and abstract thought. -------------- Some good points. But on ‘granger causality’ I think we should be clear that they are talking about probabilities and ‘granger causality’ is a stochastic process. True causality is not stochastic. It is absolute in the following way. X causes y if y cannot occur without x, if y always follows x and there are no exceptions to this. If in some case y does not follow x, x does not cause y. Something can’t be probabilitistic or stochastic and be absolute. Granger causality simply is NOT causality. ----------------- That might be part of the reason we have things like mathematics, a by-product of other capabilities that had survival value. But if this is the case, what a by product it is. It made modern science and engineering possible. It is true some of mathematics came from abstractions of everyday things. Take the word ‘geometry.’ It literally means ‘measure of the earth’ as this was the way geometry began: by measuring agricultural plots (rectangles or other shapes) and then figuring a way to calculate the area (or later volume) of something (like the area of a plot is just the product of the length and width of the plot). But at some point someone started thinking about the shapes themselves, then when we had something circular, people noticed the area or circumference was always mathematically related to the number pi. ----------------- Thanks for your response to my comments. One thing I do want to clarify however, is that I was not saying that Philosophy or mathematics is delusional, just the opposite, it is science (which came from natural philosophy) and mathematics that allowed us to have a clearer view of reality. However, science (with the experimental method etc…) is probably only a few hundred years old (experimentation started with Galileo), mathematics somewhat older (the Greeks were doing it 3000 years ago), but it is important to understand what predated science and mathematics. Humanity has been around for hundreds of thousands of years (homo sapiens), and we have gained only a clearer view of reality recently with math and science. Before math and science our beliefs were based upon myth, we saw natural forces as controlled by deities whom we worshipped, these myths and appeals to the supernatural to explain natural phenomena is what I call a somewhat delusional view of the world, i.e., it is not based upon reality or what really happens in the universe (the picture that modern science gives us). Therefore man had to emerge from his delusional or at least mythical and supernatural belief systems to develop math and science and see reality clearly. ------------------ If you had randomness only then there would be no free will. I understand the point you are making, that if the universe is strictly determined there is no free will (this seems true). But it doesn’t follow that free will is random. Consider the following. If the world were random and I decided (intended) to pick up a cup from a table, couldn’t necessarily enact my will to pick up the cup. Whether the cup is picked up, whether my hand grasps the cup and lifts it from the table would be a RANDOM event, it MAY or MAY NOT happen. Clearly this is not what happens when I will to pick up a cup. It doesn’t maybe happen or maybe not. It is not a random event. An act of free will, therefore is NOT a RANDOM event. Clearly free will requires that our action is DETERMINED by our will or intention. It seems, although this is somewhat inexplicable, to have free will your intention and resulting act has to NOT be determine but has to DETERMINED. I.e., the nature of free will is that it is NOT caused but causes. If our actions weren’t caused by our intention then we could not act. So you NEED causation or determination to have free will (on the outbound side but not on the inbound side). ------------ Bill your point might be right. Still it seems we can have some concepts of things devoid of anything. I can think of empty space with nothing in it. I can think of complete darkness devoid of anything or any image. I cannot, it seems, think of timelessness, i.e., even when I think of empty space I think of it as persisting through time. We have the concept of zero which in some sense is a concept of nothingness. When you take a quantity away from the same quantity you are left with nothing. Nothing in this mathematical sense is a type of nothingness. If you think of infinitesimal calculus, as something converges to some quantity, we see the difference shrink until at the limit the difference becomes nothing. My point is it does seem we have some concepts of nothing and perhaps nothingness. -------------- When we try to find a SCIENTIFIC explanation for why human brains are three times larger than chimps there may be many reasons. Our growth period from newborns is much longer than chimps. Chimps are born with 70% of their brain mass and develop into adults much more quickly. Humans are born with only 25% of our adult brain mass, and since child development is MUCH longer in humans, there is more time to grow a brain 75% bigger. Moreover, we HAVE found genes in humans and not in chimps (or not in the same quantities) that create MORE brain growth in humans and less muscle growth in humans (or in chimps more muscle grow and less brain growth). These genes regulate for example the amount of glucose that feeds the brain (much more in humans than chimps) the gene name is: SLC2A1 and SLC6A8 and CKB (which regulates how much creatine is in the human brain). In other words, genes and the proteins they encode do partly explain why human brains are bigger than chimps. Look at this article from scientific american: http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/2012/02/21/how-did-human-brains-get-to-be-so-big/ ---------- I’d like to add something to Francesco’s comments, that naturalism and evolution lead to human’s ability to see the truth. In fact, through most of human history, humans did not see reality correctly (the reality we see today by the scientific account of the universe). This was long in coming. Throughout most of human history humans believed things which were not true and today might seem delusional, such as their explanation of natural events as caused by gods or spirits, or forms of animism, and even with the rise of religions, incorrect beliefs about the nature of the natural world prevailed until perhaps a few hundred years ago with the advent of observation, experimentation, natural philosophy or the creation of the scientific method. So it does not seem that nature and evolution yielded truth, but rather we had to go against our own delusional beliefs to produce anything like science and truth. -------------- There is a good question here. If you follow strictly the naturalist explanation of the development of human intelligence, it is clear that some mental attributes possess survival value (like hand-eye-cognitive coordination, language, clearly it was important to communicate during a hunt where some members flushed animals out and others speared it, planning, as in my last example hunting required planning etc…) but it doesn’t explain very well why we developed the ability to do mathematics, or philosophy, or some other features of abstract thought. What else besides survival value might be involved in the development of these faculties? --------------- I think that Frederic Alliet has the order correct. First ape like creatures walked upright (probably because of the ecological transition from a forested Africa to much savannah, i.e., grass lands where it was important to walk upright to see predators such as lions in the tall grass). There is some evidence that the growth in the brain (we cannot see the internal structural changes like when a language related function evolved in the left parietal cortex) was aided by the eating of meat, which may have become more popular with the discovery of how to create fires and roast the meat. Eventually there was the use of tools. Events like language we have very little of an ancient record of. We don’t know when any sort of language with substantial vocabulary and grammar developed, but it could be quite old (spoken language preceeded written language by a long time). Burying the dead and the production of art objects was the last to develop, maybe in the last 30,000 years. ---------------- Just a clarification of my point that we are genetically 99% similar to a chimpanzee. This is true, but it is also true that we are 70% similar to a mouse. It ends up that most of DNA (which encode proteins) is involved with cellular machinery which ALL animals have. The percentage of DNA that makes us different from a mouse or a chimpanzee therefore is small, and the percentage of cell machinery DNA that we share with them is large. The 1% difference between chimp and man therefore is a significant difference and those stretches of DNA should be of especial interest to study. ------------- Although I agree with most of what has been said about a categorically unique or at least unique by great DEGREE difference between animal language and human language, I am not so sure that ONLY humans have self consciousness. We cannot hear animals report their internal states as they don’t vocalize their thoughts (except in a very rudimentary way as when my cat meows in a whining tone when he is hungry). They certainly have internal thoughts. If you take merekats for example, merekats are very conscious of the dominance-submission hierarchy in the society. They will engage in grooming and other sorts of behaviors to curry favor with the dominant. They clearly know that another merekat is the dominant and that they are not. Knowing what they are (in terms of the social dominance submission hierarchy) is some sort of SELF consciousness. One or more merekats will also stay behind and not feed in order to babysit the dominant female’s pups, this clearly indicates a type of SOCIAL consciousness and a consciousness about their ROLE in the merekat society. Knowing your ROLE is some sort of SELF CONSCIOUSNESS. I do not buy this view that you have to have symbolic thought to have self consciousness. Self consciousness is just that, it is consciousness about yourself, your role in a society etc… Animals like merekats clearly have this. ---------------- Just following up on Jim’s point. Religion discusses morality but sometimes the morality put forth by a religion is abhorrent. Islam states that you should engage in jihad or holy war for your god and that you should kill the infidel. There’s your religious morality, thou shalt kill (other religions say thou shalt not kill but kill anyway). Better is ETHICS in Philosophy. This is a better discussion of morality, as it not only suggests what we should and should not do but gives REASONS for the suggestion. And then there is LAW too, which is basically applied ethics, it tells you what you can’t do or what the consequences are for negative actions, and even includes intelligent concepts which relate to the REASONS for not engaging in certain actions like harm done to others and intention. ------------ Arvind, you raise the interesting question of animal ‘language.’ Clearly there are ways in which animals communicate, and one of the main functions of language is to communicate. Is animal communication language? In the human case, I have an idea in my head which I want you to have, I use words to describe my idea, you hear and understand those words and form some similar idea in your head. I say I saw Tom yesterday at the barber. And you hear this and picture in your head (idea in greek means picture) Tom sitting at the barber. I have communicated my idea to you via a common language. Is this what animals are doing? Animal calls seem much more restricted and immediate, a call to indicate there is a predator around (a warning call), a call to attract a mate (mating call), even among merekats a call and behavior that indicates a coordinated attack on other merekats that have violated our territory. But, in my analysis the number and purpose of such calls is limited. It is not a 100,000 word lexicon like common French or a million word dictionary like Webster. An animal call lacks a sentence structure, i.e, it does not have a grammar, it is just a single call associated with an action. Can we really call a small number of animal calls associated with actions a language? It is not a language in the sense of having an extensive vocabulary or syntax or grammar. All human languages have grammar and extensive vocabulary. And human social interactions are complex. Animal interactions show some social complexity as well. Take the meerkats. There is a dominant female and dominant male. The rest of the pack knows this a keeps their place. When foraging , some meerkats stay behind to babysit the baby merekats at the burrow, to gain points with the dominant male and female. I would argue that our more complex socialization rules and codified into volumes of lawbooks derive from this social behavior found earilier in other animals. But animals seem very tied to the immediate (immediately finding mate, immediately find food, immediately protecting a territory). Whereas man’s view seems to look at the past, present, and future and makes rational decisions based upon data from all three. I’m also not sure animals have abstract thought. We can form this concept of furniture from chairs, beds, and dressers, a class to which they all belong. Can an animal form the notion of this polka dot plant, this brown bulbous plant, and this somewhat stringy bulbous plant are all mushrooms? It’s not clear abstraction goes on in the animal mind, which is the basis of how the human mind takes off (the logische aufbau --- the logical buildup) of concepts into a conceptual framework and a frame work for knowledge. If we are not dealing with a difference in kind of language and thought in the human mind, we are dealing with a difference of substantial degree in language and thought. ----------------- I think maybe the question is wrong. “Is man an animal.” The answer is clearly yes, we are part of the animal kingdom, biologically we are an animal. If you dispute that you are an idiot. But perhaps the question should be “Is man anything more than an animal,” to which the answer is also yes. Yes we are biologically an animal, but due to our superior brain, we have evolved not only biologically, like all other animals, but also psycho-socio-culturally. Basically I see history as psycho-socio-cultural evolution. That is an evolution that animals do NOT have. We are biological but we are also cultural (culture doesn’t really exist in other animals). Lecompte du Nouy argues that man is the beginning of a new type of evolution, a spiritual evolution. There are many who would call that too religious an interpretation. Perhaps. But clearly something happened with humans that didn’t happen with other animals, we developed psychologically, socially, and culturally as well. Yes some animals are social, but they don’t have social mechanisms like language that allow humans to vastly surpass their biological evolution. -------------- A discussion of the concept that information is ‘the mapping of one sequence of symbols to another sequence of symbols.’
It seems that pure data is not information. But a sequence of symbols is
data, but it’s data that means something. A ‘symbol’ STANDS for something.
It is usually a mark which represents some thing in the world. But to
represent some thing in the world as a symbol we are basically assigning a
MEANING to a symbol (here I am using the representationist view of meaning,
that the meaning of something is just what it represents, like the meaning
of the symbols c-a-t represents or means a small feline four legged
creature with certain habits like licking itself to stay clean). This gets
us into trouble. To say information is a sequence of SYMBOLS is to say it
is a sequence of marks that MEAN something. And to say that information is
the mapping of a sequence of symbols to another sequence of symbols is to
say that information is a sequence of marks that mean something to a
sequence of marks that mean something else. So in the computer case a
sequence of 0’s and 1’s (data) which means nothing but perhaps a number or
a letter in ASCII is mapped to an instruction, which means something else
(i.e., it means DO something, like ADD, Compare, etc…) is a case of
information. Perhaps. Perhaps the information is that what was a number
now means ADD. I’ve tested this definition somewhat, and it makes SOME
sense. But implicit in this definition is the whole thorny problem of
MEANING. There can be no symbols with MEANING, as symbols are marks which
mean something or represent something else (the representationist view of
meaning). I don’t think that the information theorists wanted to get into
the thorny philosophical problem of meaning, but I don’t see how they can
avoid it. The transcription of a sequence of symbols to another sequence
of symbols IS the transcription of a set of marks that MEAN something to a
different set of marks that MEAN something else. There is no way to avoid
this unless you don’t understand what a symbol is. A symbol is a
representation of something else, it has meaning.
And I haven’t talked about knowledge and how true justified belief is
related to mapping one set of symbols to another. Someone like Andre
Cusson should try to tackle that one.
------------------- Fore note: Here to clarify I am talking about two definitions of
information, one as the interpretation of symbols, and two as the mapping
of one sequence of symbols to another.
Yes, finally some people in this discussion are starting to talk about the
relation of information to knowledge (see Andre Cusson’s discussion). In
the definition that information is an interpretation of symbols, how does
that definition related to the common sense definition of information, as
when I tell you something new about a friend? Are we considering the
language (a sequence of sounds, or if written a sequence of symbols) as
interpreted by the listener in the sense of assigning meaning to the sounds
or letters? And what exactly is meant by ‘interpretation’ even when you
are just dealing with machine information? Does that mean some sort of
SEMANTIC interpretation, as is done by a natural language processing
system, the interpretation of a compiler in processing the symbols into
something that can be processed by a machine, in which case how is machine
code (a series of 1’s and 0’s) an interpretation of data? Are we talking
the interpretation of the machine architecture of some 1’s and 0’s as
instructions and others as data? And what makes an instruction
(interpreted data) information? Clearly there is a problem here. In the
definition given, the meaning of ‘interpretation’ hasn’t been sufficiently
given. Interpretation can be a whole host of things. What SORT of
interpretation turns data into information? Are we talking about the human
interpretation of symbols, as the human interpretation of the output of a
program? This can’t be right, as we clearly speak of ‘information’ in the
context of machines without humans being present. The information theory
definition of information involves no human interpretation. It merely
involves the mapping of one input sequence of symbols to an output
sequence. So a transcripted symbol is an informatum?
-------------------- Fore note: Here to clarify I am talking about two definitions of information, one as the interpretation of symbols, and two as the mapping of one sequence of symbols to another. Yes, finally some people in this discussion are starting to talk about the relation of information to knowledge (see Andre Cusson’s discussion). In the definition that information is an interpretation of symbols, how does that definition related to the common sense definition of information, as when I tell you something new about a friend? Are we considering the language (a sequence of sounds, or if written a sequence of symbols) as interpreted by the listener in the sense of assigning meaning to the sounds or letters? And what exactly is meant by ‘interpretation’ even when you are just dealing with machine information? Does that mean some sort of SEMANTIC interpretation, as is done by a natural language processing system, the interpretation of a compiler in processing the symbols into something that can be processed by a machine, in which case how is machine code (a series of 1’s and 0’s) an interpretation of data? Are we talking the interpretation of the machine architecture of some 1’s and 0’s as instructions and others as data? And what makes an instruction (interpreted data) information? Clearly there is a problem here. In the definition given, the meaning of ‘interpretation’ hasn’t been sufficiently given. Interpretation can be a whole host of things. What SORT of interpretation turns data into information? Are we talking about the human interpretation of symbols, as the human interpretation of the output of a program? This can’t be right, as we clearly speak of ‘information’ in the context of machines without humans being present. The information theory definition of information involves no human interpretation. It merely involves the mapping of one input sequence of symbols to an output sequence. So a transcripted symbol is an informatum? It seems that pure data is not information. But a sequence of symbols is data, but it’s data that means something. A ‘symbol’ STANDS for something. It is usually a mark which represents some thing in the world. But to represent some thing in the world as a symbol we are basically assigning a MEANING to a symbol (here I am using the representationist view of meaning, that the meaning of something is just what it represents, like the meaning of the symbols c-a-t represents or means a small feline four legged creature with certain habits like licking itself to stay clean). This gets us into trouble. To say information is a sequence of SYMBOLS is to say it is a sequence of marks that MEAN something. And to say that information is the mapping of a sequence of symbols to another sequence of symbols is to say that information is a sequence of marks that mean something to a sequence of marks that mean something else. So in the computer case a sequence of 0’s and 1’s (data) which means nothing but perhaps a number or a letter in ASCII is mapped to an instruction, which means something else (i.e., it means DO something, like ADD, Compare, etc…) is a case of information. Perhaps. Perhaps the information is that what was a number now means ADD. I’ve tested this definition somewhat, and it makes SOME sense. But implicit in this definition is the whole thorny problem of MEANING. There can be no symbols with MEANING, as symbols are marks which mean something or represent something else (the representationist view of meaning). I don’t think that the information theorists wanted to get into the thorny philosophical problem of meaning, but I don’t see how they can avoid it. The transcription of a sequence of symbols to another sequence of symbols IS the transcription of a set of marks that MEAN something to a different set of marks that MEAN something else. There is no way to avoid this unless you don’t understand what a symbol is. A symbol is a representation of something else, it has meaning. And I haven’t talked about knowledge and how true justified belief is related to mapping one set of symbols to another. Someone like Andre Cusson should try to tackle that one. ------------ Religion isn’t the only discipline which has anything to say about morality. Philosophy studies morality in its study of ethics. And the law (which is an implementation of ethics) has much to say about morality and ethics (not sure the two are anything different). The ‘morality’ that comes out of religion is prescription, thou must do this, why, because you must do whatever you are told by a religious text and dare not question it. It is clearly morality without any thinking. There are religions that tell you to ‘kill the infidel’ ‘kill for your god and you will be rewarded,’ ‘subjugate women,’ these are religious moral judgements, do they sound ethical to you? ------------- Jim, I don’t believe I used the word “merely” in my comment. I did say mathematics is a language. That doesn’t rule out that it is other things as well. Clearly it is a language as when we mathematically model something we are giving a description (as for example by a group of equations) in terms of variables and operators of what happens in the world. As far as prediction is concerned, you can clearly predict things with a language. “It’s going to rain tomorrow.” There, I just gave a prediction in natural language. Clearly you can also give predictions in mathematical language, as in causal language, when x happens then y will happen, or with probability, x will occur with .9 probability. Also language does reveal relationships. “Bob is taller than Bill,” or “Bob is to the right of Bill.” There I have given a relationship between Bob and Bill in terms of height and location with a natural language. You can express relationships with mathematical language as well: The mathematical pull of two objects is inversely related to their masses divided by the square of their distance or F = G(M1M2/d^2). ------------------- More on parallel computing and the cloud: When I worked in database I managed a product which was a distributed database (Ingres STAR). We did parallel queries (or distributed queries) and distributed transactions. This involved a central process which sent out subqueries to geographically distributed databases over networks and correlated the information by doing a distributed join. With distributed transactions we updated geographically distributed databases as a part of a single logical transaction coordinated by the two phase commit protocol. This same technology would be extremely useful in a cloud where you might have different databases located on different machines in the grid of the cloud. A lot of people think of parallel computing as basically scientific applications (like CAE where you are doing simultaneously logic simulations on different parts of a circuit representation, or a scientific or numerical simulation), but parallel computing is equally relevant to the commercial space like accounting transactions where thousands of requests for queries and updates come in over the net to the cloud simultaneously and then hit of different databases on different computers. What I would like to know is how you could submit a regular non parallel application to a grid and get parts of it to run independently and simultaneously. That is a much needed capability and a much thornier engineering problem. I would like to hear more from other people about the subject of parallel computing in the cloud. But what do I know, I’m just a philosophy major who happened to work in computing. ------------ I’d like to hear launch a discussion about parallel computing. Why do this? What does this have to do with the “cloud?” It has everything to do with the cloud. One of the few reasons you recentralize computing in the cloud as opposed to remaining with a distributed model like the internet is to have a mainframe (with multiple processors) or a COLLECTION of computers (more likely) like a grid work together to solve a compute intensive process. It may be that you have an application that servers many simultaneous requests, but rather than servicing those requests on a single processor (and hence creating a queue that is a bottleneck) you want to service those multiple requests each on a separate processor (or separate computer). Or you may have a compute intensive application that is slow which you can submit to the cloud grid and speed up by dividing the algorithm into separate simultaneously computable components. An example of this is a simulation or extensive calculation, or parallelizable search algorithm. You have users on the internet access the cloud where the parallel application is running and they get their results more quickly. When I talk about a search this could be a database search (database is an excellent application to be parallelized with parallel transactions or parallel queries) or it may be a search like a Google search, where the search can be broken into independent components to be run simultaneously on separate databases with the results put back together and sent to the internet requester. Or another example is multiple weather stations requesting simulations of national weather done on a cloud somewhere that is separating a meterological simulation task into separate components and running them simultaneously on different processors sending the results back to a requester over the internet. This can all be done with parallel compilers or parallel computing languages. With a parallel compiler you submit the source of a non parallel application to the compiler and it determines where in the algorithm to separate lines of code that can be run independently and simultaneously. It is really a preprocessor. With a parallel computing language, you originally write the application to have independently compilable components that can be run independently and simultaneously on different processors. We already have some of the basis of such a language with UNIX constructs like fork and spawn, which spawn separate processes from a single process with interprocess messaging capabilities like sockets, pipes, and semaphors. This message is continued on the next email so it doesn’t violate the 4000 character limit. ------------------- I’d like to hear launch a discussion about parallel computing. Why do this? What does this have to do with the “cloud?” It has everything to do with the cloud. One of the few reasons you recentralize computing in the cloud as opposed to remaining with a distributed model like the internet is to have a mainframe (with multiple processors) or a COLLECTION of computers (more likely) like a grid work together to solve a compute intensive process. It may be that you have an application that servers many simultaneous requests, but rather than servicing those requests on a single processor (and hence creating a queue that is a bottleneck) you want to service those multiple requests each on a separate processor (or separate computer). Or you may have a compute intensive application that is slow which you can submit to the cloud grid and speed up by dividing the algorithm into separate simultaneously computable components. An example of this is a simulation or extensive calculation, or parallelizable search algorithm. You have users on the internet access the cloud where the parallel application is running and they get their results more quickly. When I talk about a search this could be a database search (database is an excellent application to be parallelized with parallel transactions or parallel queries) or it may be a search like a Google search, where the search can be broken into independent components to be run simultaneously on separate databases with the results put back together and sent to the internet requester. Or another example is multiple weather stations requesting simulations of national weather done on a cloud somewhere that is separating a meterological simulation task into separate components and running them simultaneously on different processors sending the results back to a requester over the internet. This can all be done with parallel compilers or parallel computing languages. With a parallel compiler you submit the source of a non parallel application to the compiler and it determines where in the algorithm to separate lines of code that can be run independently and simultaneously. It is really a preprocessor. With a parallel computing language, you originally write the application to have independently compilable components that can be run independently and simultaneously on different processors. We already have some of the basis of such a language with UNIX constructs like fork and spawn, which spawn separate processes from a single process with interprocess messaging capabilities like sockets, pipes, and semaphors. When I worked in database I managed a product which was a distributed database (Ingres STAR). We did parallel queries (or distributed queries) and distributed transactions. This involved a central process which sent out subqueries to geographically distributed databases over networks and correlated the information by doing a distributed join. With distributed transactions we updated geographically distributed databases as a part of a single logical transaction coordinated by the two phase commit protocol. This same technology would be extremely useful in a cloud where you might have different databases located on different machines in the grid of the cloud. A lot of people think of parallel computing as basically scientific applications (like CAE where you are doing simultaneously logic simulations on different parts of a circuit representation, or a scientific or numerical simulation), but parallel computing is equally relevant to the commercial space like accounting transactions where thousands of requests for queries and updates come in over the net to the cloud simultaneously and then hit of different databases on different computers. What I would like to know is how you could submit a regular non parallel application to a grid and get parts of it to run independently and simultaneously. That is a much needed capability and a much thornier engineering problem. I would like to hear more from other people about the subject of parallel computing in the cloud. But what do I know, I’m just a philosophy major who happened to work in computing. ------------ Okay, Eric Little, I would like to hear much more about ‘parallel reasoning.’ Here’s how I see parallel processing. We have these multiple processors and we need software to take advantage of them. This requires parallel algorithms. This can be done in software, where you have an algorithm, in source, which is split into separable units which can be reassembled after processing. This involves a preprocessor which separates the source algorithm into separate components which can be compile separately, and then reassembled into a solution after running. The more difficult problem, and perhaps more typical problem, is how do you disassemble an EXECUTABLE into separately executable components. How do you do this? You have an executable, and during runtime, you have to separate it into differentiable computable components. This can be done with the processor, that can be engineered to separate the instruction statements to run on different processors, but this is a much more difficult problem. How do you separate the parallel components of an EXECUTABLE? That is my question. ------------- The meaning of my statement “we can’t know anything other than what we sense or perceive” is as follows: Actually this was a comment in response to Kabir’s comment that “Perception is formed WITH experience.” My point is that ‘experience’ IS perception. This is the basic thesis of empiricism, which is the philosophy science is built upon. That all knowledge STARTS with experience or perception is also said by Kant. Certainly there is more than perceptions or faint copies of perceptions in our head (imaginations). We have concepts, thoughts etc… but these are all formed out of PERCEPTIONS. I said nothing about the external world other than what my comment implies, we can’t get PAST our perceptions, so direct knowledge of an external world (independent of our perceptions) is impossible. We suppose that there is an external world independent of our perceptions (or at least naïve realism does, i.e., the common sense view), but we do not KNOW there is an external world or if there is exactly what it is like (Kant’s point of the noumena versus phenomena). In science, we ASSUME (but don’t KNOW) there is an external world, and events that occur in it (physical events) CAUSE our perceptions (the study of psychophysics). The problem with psychophysics, as you’ve partly identified, is that the explanation always ends with a set of neurophysiological events in the brain (the firing of some neurons in some locus in the brain) without ANY explanation of how that firing of neurons IS the mental event of a perception (correlating the two does not explain how one IS the other, i.e., as identity theorists may suppose). Science, ultimately, is just another (although highly intelligent) organization of our perceptions (experimental data, i.e,., an ‘experiment’ is just a ‘conditioned experience.’). So this all brings us back to the very sensible statement that “we can’t now anything other than what we sense or perceive,” or certainly whatever we DO know STARTS with sensation and perception. And as Kant properly identifies, we can’t get past the ‘phenomena’ to the ‘noumena.’ As far as ‘marketing’ is concerned, I don’t like your characterization of it, and selling people what they don’t want is certainly not what I did as a Product Marketing Manager. I was basically an engineer talking to other engineers about our architecture and how it was superior to that of our competition. Whether they buy or not was not my concern so much as it was the concern of people in the sales department. I am technical and do have a degree in science (computational biology with my thesis done at Stanford), as well as a philosophy degree from Berkeley. So I do not characterize myself as the same sort of marketing person who hounds people with phone calls trying to get them to buy useless products. --------------- I did make a comment to which you are PERHAPS responding. My comment was “We can’t know anything other than what we sense or perceive.” Actually this was a comment in response to Kabir’s comment that “Perception is formed WITH experience.” My point is that ‘experience’ IS perception. This is the basic thesis of empiricism, which is the philosophy science is built upon. That all knowledge STARTS with experience or perception is also said by Kant. Certainly there is more than perceptions or faint copies of perceptions in our head (imaginations). We have concepts, thoughts etc… but these are all formed out of PERCEPTIONS. I said nothing about the external world other than what my comment implies, we can’t get PAST our perceptions, so direct knowledge of an external world (independent of our perceptions) is impossible. We suppose that there is an external world independent of our perceptions (or at least naïve realism does, i.e., the common sense view), but we do not KNOW there is an external world or if there is exactly what it is like (Kant’s point of the noumena versus phenomena). In science, we ASSUME (but don’t KNOW) there is an external world, and events that occur in it (physical events) CAUSE our perceptions (the study of psychophysics). The problem with psychophysics, as you’ve partly identified, is that the explanation always ends with a set of neurophysiological events in the brain (the firing of some neurons in some locus in the brain) without ANY explanation of how that firing of neurons IS the mental event of a perception (correlating the two does not explain how one IS the other, i.e., as identity theorists may suppose). Science, ultimately, is just another (although highly intelligent) organization of our perceptions (experimental data, i.e,., an ‘experiment’ is just a ‘conditioned experience.’). So this all brings us back to the very sensible statement that “we can’t now anything other than what we sense or perceive,” or certainly whatever we DO know STARTS with sensation and perception. And as Kant properly identifies, we can’t get past the ‘phenomena’ to the ‘noumena.’ ------------- Okay Kabir, I think you have it backwards. You say “Perception is formed WITH experience.” NO. Experience IS perception. What do you think experience is? Experience, by which we mean the flow of consciousness IS the flow of perceptions. Let me state that again. Consciousness IS the flow of perceptions. When you say I ‘experience’ something, what do you mean? You mean I see it, I hear it, I feel it, in other words you perceive it. All of empiricism which is the predominant philosophy of SCIENCE, is based upon information by the senses. We can’t know anything other than what we sense or perceive. Science is just an organization of our perceptions. ------------ Eric Little --- I don’t disagree with the need for mainframes, supercomputers, or collections (perhaps grids) of computers or supercomputers to solve computational and disk intensive computing problems. You need those. As those are remotely located from the clients utilizing them they are ‘clouds.’ But, I spent a lot of my career advancing distributed computing and distributed database, and still think this is a most sensible model (one which the internet largely has, as the client site with the browser connects through various URLs to different servers located on different computers anywhere on the internet). I don’t think in general you want to locate an application in a cloud to be shared by clients, here the client server model is much more sensible, where the User Interface based application resides on the client and only terse messages and resulting data is sent back over the network, where the database and compute intensive resources remain on the server. You also have the ability in the client server model to keep sensitive and private data ON YOUR CLIENT, inaccessible to others. Suffice to say there is SOME requirement for cloud type computing for computer and data intensive tasks, while the general computing model of the internet (and intranets etc…) remains distributed (client-server, and server-server, where the servers are located on different computers as in distributed database applications). One thing that occurs to me, if you’re doing grid computing (using collections of computers to perform a single computing task) you need parallel software to harness this computing power. It seems to me that’s a big area of future development, parallel software. I have been retired out of the computer industry for a while, but when I left parallel software was very infantile. By parallel software I mean software that breaks an algorithm into units that can be run independently and simultaneously. --------------- Yes, Robert, philosophy (which many today call semantics) has its influence on other, for example semantically based areas of computing, as you were talking about semantically based search. For example in natural language understanding, sentences need to be computationally analyzed into verb-subject-object atoms and then composed into a semantic network for understanding. For example “the boy hit the ball” becomes Hit(Boy,Ball) and then a part of a semantic network. Some of this knowledge comes from philosophy of language and semantics some from linguistics. Also I forgot to mention that Philosophy is heavily involved in artificial intelligence, where there is often an attempt to make a top down ontology of a world or microworld. ------------ Devendra Nath Tiwari writes: “How can I understand and share your thoughts which are not put before me,” and also “I do not find any cognitive ground to understand thinking without language.” Perhaps I don’t understand your point, but there seems to be a confusion between thinking and communication. Let me make it clear that communication and thinking are NOT the same. Yes, for another to understand your thoughts you need to communicate them, but it doesn’t follow from this that communication and thought are the same. One can certainly think without communicating. We all have private thoughts that we don’t communicate. Also, depending upon what you mean by communication, it might be said that communication is possible without thinking. Computers communicate yet don’t think. Here by communication I mean “the transfer of information.” ------------------ Devendra Nath Tiwari says “No cognitive activity is possible without language.” This is clearly wrong and a false statement. You are a student and even a professor of philosophy, but I strongly question your understanding of science. I strongly suggest that you at least google “animal cognition.” You will see that animals have a great deal of cognitive activity, but no language (I don’t mean grunts and calls I mean nothing like a human language with a grammar, 50,000 word vocabulary, and the ability to generate an infinity of sentences). I will indicate my credentials on this problem: I am both a philosopher and scientist, with a degree in Philosophy from UC Berkeley and a degree in Computational Biology (masters thesis done at Stanford). My argument is simple. Animals have cognition. Animals do not have language (I mean a human like language). THEREFORE, COGNITION IS POSSIBLE WITHOUT LANGUAGE. Cognition in animals IN FACT exists without language. There is no way to deny the truth of this argument. The only possible counter argument you can levy is that thought is not the same as cognition. Therefore thought is not possible without language. I think this is a hard argument to make. All thought is clearly cognitive activity but perhaps not all cognition is thought. My argument (which is undeniable) is that cognition exists without language. This is very close although not exactly the same as thought is possible without language. I will further extend my argument that humans (homo sapiens) are animals. We are part of the animal kingdom. If cognition is possible without language in non-human animals, it is possible without language in human animals. We don’t come from nowhere, we evolved from animals (our DNA is 99% similar to a chimpanzee). Each of the examples I will give apply to humans as well as animals. I will now educate you on animal cognition. Here are just a few examples of animal cognition gained from observation and experimentation. You can read the details if you just google ‘animal cognition.’ Animals identify objects in a visual field. If they couldn’t they wouldn’t be able to navigate their environment, recognize predators, or find a mate. Object recognition in a visual field is a difficult and cognitive process (shown difficult by how hard it is to get a computer to recognize objects in a visual field). Moreover animals do perceptual CATEGORIZATION. An animal responds to several stimuli that share a common characteristic in a similar way. Animals apply their learning of several instances of a common characteristic to new instance sharing the same characteristic to survive. Let's say a squirrel encounters a dog and learns that the dog bites and hence is a threat. Upon encounter of another dog the squirrel avoids the dog because it has GENERALIZED that all dogs bite and hence should be avoided. Animals engage in selective attention: selecting relevant from irrelevant information from an onslaught of information. Animals LEARN: If animals couldn't learn then conditioning would not be possible. But animals can be conditioned, therefore they learn. Take meerkats for example. They learn to build burrows. They learn their social order (who is the dominant female and dominant male). They learn how to dig food out of the ground. Without the ability to learn (a cognitive activity) animals couldn’t survive. Some animals even learn rules. You can see the experiments if you google ‘animal cognition’ or even look at something as simple as Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_cognition. Animals engage in spatial cognition: they move purposefull toward a location navigating the environment. Birds do this when they migrate long distances following the same route every time. Many animals do this during mating season. Animals show cognitive activity with respect to time: Many animals time their behavior to occur at particular times or seasons. This is true of mating behavior, or migration, as well as hibernation and preparing for hibernation (knowing that winter is coming before it comes). Many animals engage in social cognition with elaborate understanding of social relations. Take meercats who have a recognized leader and a social pecking order (submission dominance order). Members take tasks for the good of the group like being a look out for predators while others are feeding or staying behind from feeding to babysit youngsters in a borough. Some animals engage in Tool using: although several animals do things like build nests with ambient materials the most clear tool use is from a higher species (apes or chimpanzees) who actually fashion twigs and salivate on them before sending them down an ant hole to catch ants to eat. All of these (a non-exhaustive list) are examples of animal cognition. From experiments animals have come to be seen as "goal seeking agents that acquire, store, retrieve, and internally process information at many levels of cognitive complexity." They do all of this without language. ------------ I don’t buy your argument that there was no time in human history when we thought and had no language. I’m sure that human language (verbal) is very old, perhaps hundreds of thousands of years (in the develop of homo sapiens) (written language is much more recent). But if you go far enough back in human evolution we are apes. So let’s think about apes or ape like humans. Clearly apes can think but don’t have anything like human language. Not only do they lack the cognitive development for anything like human language, they lack the cortical structures (Wernicke and Broca’s areas of the left parietal cortex) and they lack the speech organs (like a developed larynx). Yet, clearly they think. They can plan to find a stick which they salivate and stick into an ant hole to eat ants (i.e., they create and use a primitive tool) all without any human like language. I take my cat for an example. Clearly he has no human like language (only noises that mean general things like I’m looking for a mate or I’m ready to fight, nothing with the specificity of a language with 100,000 words all of which have specific meanings). Yet he can PLAN, and planning is a type of thinking. When I put food on the table, he knows that he has to go up on the couch, then walk from the couch to the amplifier, then from the amplifier to the table to get the food. I.e., he is clearly PLANNING or doing motor planning which is a type of thought. He does all of this without any language. Therefore thought is possible without language. Intelligent animal behavior is proof that there is thought without language. Our thought didn’t come from nowhere, it came from animal behavior and animal cognition (as we are animals and evolved from animals, we didn’t spontaneously appear as humans with language). Part of the problem here is that no one has defined what they mean by thought or what they mean by language. You cannot possibly answer the question ‘is it possible to think without language’ until you define ‘thought’ and ‘language.’ I am defining thought as something much greater and much more pervasive than just processing propositions (no animals can’t do this or think abstractly). I am defining it as the many aspects of cognition, like planning, much of which is possessed by both animals and humans. ------------- Just to reiterate. Brain activity and thought are not the same at all. Yes thought involves brain activity but much brain activity does not involve thought. Consider motor activities. The motor cortex and other systems down to the spinal chord are involved in motor activity, this is all neurophysiological activity but doesn’t involve any thought (except for perhaps motor planning). Seeing something involves neural activity from the retina through the occipital cortex, but just seeing something is clearly not thinking about it or thought. Since I’ve established that many if not most neurophysiological events do NOT involve thought, I’ve established that neural activity and thought are NOT the same. You could say that ALL thought involves neurophysiological activity but not all neurophysiological activity (by any stretch of the imagination) involves thought. ------------- Abraham, I think you made a good point. Language clearly evolved from the grunts of animals into human language. Animals make sounds that mean primitive things like ‘danger a predator is approaching’ and ‘I’m looking for a mate.’ But human language has evolve to involve tens of thousands of sounds which have very specific meanings and to have sentences which are constructs of multiple sounds (i.e., a grammar). None of that exists in animal language. So HOW did we get from one to the other? Clearly there was some sort of gradual process to create human language. I am guessing that more and more sounds were added that meant more and more specific things. We know that Wernicke’s and Broca’s areas of the brain in the left parietal cortex exist in homo sapiens but not in other species. And the human larynx and speech organs developed in homo sapiens that did not develop in other animals. So there were some BIOLOGICAL points of evolution that occurred during this period of language acquisition, only in humans. Clearly there was a period in anthropoid development when we were surviving without language having been developed yet. We may have been quite sophisticated survivors before language was acquired. I still go back to the argument of my cat. It seems to me that animals show aspects of thinking and yet they clearly have no language (nothing like human language). When my cat wants to get food on top of a table, he knows he has to go from jumping up on the chair to walking across the amplifier to step onto the table to get the food. This clearly takes some PLANNING, a least motor planning. Planning is a part of thinking. It can clearly go on inside a biological brain without the use of language. This is not to say all aspects of thinking can occur without language. Abstract thinking may be language dependent. My animal analogy breaks down there as there is no evidence that any animals besides humans have abstract thoughts. ------------- Language is any mnemonic device. I haven’t heard this idea before so let’s explore it. Certainly we can remember things without language. I can recall a horse I saw in a pasture three weeks ago. In remembering I summon up an image of the horse in the pasture. Recall of an image doesn’t require any language. So certainly there is memory without language. But this is not exactly what you are saying, I think, not that there is no memory without language but that when you DO use language it functions as a mnemonic. That’s an interesting idea. Certainly there is the idea of ‘naming’ in language. In order to name something we need to have an image of the thing and associate a sound with it, and if we refer to this thing in the future we need to remember the sound that associates with the image. This is closer to my definition of language. At the root it is ASSOCIATION between an image and a sound (or physical mark). When I learn the word ‘chair’ as a child, my mother points to a chair, an image which I now have in my mind, and she says ‘chair.’ I make an ASSOCIATION between the image of the chair and the sound ‘chair,’ and thereby learn the word. You might say that association requires some sort of memory. Certainly to use this word again, I have to REMEMBER that the sound ‘chair’ represents this image of a chair, and so now by using this sound I can refer to an image which may not even be present, but which conjures up the image of a chair in the mind of the person hearing the word (me and my listener). Now, there are other features of language, not everything has to do with sounds associated with images. What about abstract nouns and concepts. Take the word ‘furniture.’ Now I must have the concept that chairs, couches, beds, etc… all belong to this class or set which is named ‘furniture.’ I may or may not have an image associated with the name ‘furniture’ but I understand the concept. Does abstraction involve memory? Certainly in later conversation I need to recall the name ‘furniture’ and associate that name with the concept of a class of things. What about events? When I say ‘water ski’ I may picture a moving picture of someone on top of the water on skis being pulled by a boat. I see this image as occurring through time. As in the case of a noun I am able to recall ‘water ski’ and associate it with this moving image. What about sentences? ‘I go to the store.’ Is there an image associated with this sentence. Maybe. What about the sentence ‘language is any mnemonic device.’ Is there an image associated with this sentence. Probably not. But it is language and I do understand it. Is it mnemonic in the sense that I have to recall what the mark ‘language’ refers to and what ‘mnemonic device’ refers to. Probably. What about thinking. You say the ‘child touching a hot stove learns by thinking.’ Well what the child does is associates the image before her/him of a stove with a red burner with the pain received by touching it. Yes the child has learned something. Is learning thinking? Yes the child thinks, in the future, that if I touch the hot stove, I will feel pain. Here actually the child is remembering and associating touching a stove with a red burner with pain. Is thinking associating? I think we still haven’t defined what we mean by thinking. Some philosophers would say you’re only thinking if you’re using propositions, sentence which are either true or false. This seems a bit restrictive. What about ‘I want to go to the store.’ This certainly is a thought but it’s not true or false. So is thinking ‘intentional,’ from the theory of intentionality, i.e., involves beliefs and desires, propositional attitudes and propositional content? Maybe. It seems to me thinking is more than memory. It seems to involve some sort of CONNECTIONS (often logical connections) between ideas. I recall a waterfall. Is that a thought? I reason that if there were no cliff the water wouldn’t fall. That certainly seems to be a thought (with the logical connective ‘if’). Do I need to have language to recall the image of a waterfall? Probably not. Do I need to have language to reason that is there were no cliff the water would not fall? Maybe, maybe not. Seems to me I, and a primitive person, can have the idea that without a cliff the water wouldn’t fall, without having names for water and cliff and fall. I can just imagine the image of water without a cliff not falling, an and imagination, based on an image, is not language. I refer to my earlier comment. To answer the question can you think without language, we need to first define what we meaning by thinking and also what we mean by language. It’s not clear this has ever been done in this forum. -------------- I think it would be good to define what we mean by thinking. Not all forms of consciousness are thinking. I often define consciousness as a flow of percepts (mostly external like vision, but some internal like imaginations). I personally don’t think that when someone is dreaming they are thinking. Certainly the events in a dream are desultory and not logical or coherent. Likewise imagining or daydreaming doesn’t seem to be thinking to me. Some philosophers are probably too strict about what constitutes thinking saying that it is only thinking when we are processing propositions. If we consider all forms of consciousness to be some form of thinking, then clearly there is much thinking without a language (imaginations, dreams, daydreams etc…). But if we restrict thinking to propositional logic then perhaps thinking requires the language of logic (which symbolically can be represented as a type of mathematical language). Even with this definition it’s not clear that thinking or all thinking requires a natural language, as a proposition may be pre-linguistic, as in logic where you can represent the proposition in a mathematical language which then has to be TRANSLATED into any of many particular NATURAL languages. We need to first define what we mean by ‘thinking’ to answer the question can we THINK without language. -------------- Amram Since you’re a physicist and mathematician I would like to ask you the following question. Why is the physical universe mathematically describable? I.e., why do phenomena in the physical universe in many cases correspond exactly to our mathematical notions (example gravitational pull follows the inverse square law). Why aren’t physical phenomena more chaotic and not susceptible to be described in a mathematical formula? EW -------------- I too have to disagree that “space and time are abstract.” We certainly can have abstract REPRESENTATIONS of space and time (space, for example as a three dimensional coordinate system, time as a fourth dimension). There are other abstract representations of time, such as Einsteinian space-time. But a representation is not the same as the phenomenon it represents. Space is real, not abstract. We move about space (a three dimensional world), we persist through time. I don’t know what you mean by calling space and time abstract. ------------ Good point. Some sciences involve BOTH subjective and objective approaches. Take neuropsychology for example. A subject engages in a cognitive task (subjective) yet the blood flow to areas of the brain involved in processing the information is measured (objective). I.e., we are looking for subjective-objective correlations. I would agree too that aspects of economics ARE objective and measureable, as is linguistics (which studies language an objective fact rather than the minds necessarily of those processing the language). Still when we get into the area of semantics or philosophy of language things seem to be a bit more subjective when we investigate what we mean by a statement. ---------- Thank you for your comments. When I talk about integrating information, I’m not talking about integrating information within philosophy. I.e., not between the traditional parts of philosophy per se, logic, ethics, metaphysics, aesthetics, etc… No, I am talking about integrating information between non-philosophic disciplines through philosophy. Besides the traditional subdisciplines of philosophy there is the “philosophies of.” By this I mean philosophy OF mathematics, philosophy OF language, philosophy OF Science (which is mostly philosophy OF physics), philosophy OF biology, philosophy OF economics, etc… In ANY discipline, there is the philosophical component, i.e., there is the philosophy OF any discipline. The ‘philosophy’ or the underlying principles and theory of a discipline is what I am talking about. There are philosophical questions which span disciplines, like the question of the ontological status of theoretic entities. This question is NOT a scientific question, i.e., you can’t answer it with any detailed information about the world, it is a question about the superstructure of science per se, i.e., it is a PHILOSOPHIC question. It is a question which SPANS multiple disciplines, i.e., you can talk about the theoretic entities in physics, but also in biology, and perhaps also in economics. There are MANY questions like this which are about knowledge IN GENERAL, i.e., they are answered only by the most general discipline, philosophy. ------------ Patrick, I agree with many of your comments. But, specialization in philosophy to me is anti-philosophical. We live in the age of the dis-integration of knowledge. The specialized sciences have advanced by virtue of asking and answering detailed questions specific to their discipline. You greatly need SOME discipline in knowledge that is NOT specialized, that can ask and attempt to answer the grand questions that SPAN disciplines. This to me is the role of philosophy. Perhaps philosophy has become esoteric and specialized and that is a big MISTAKE. By the way, there has been some modest integration of disciplines, of the special sciences, in the last 30 years. In my own area, computational biology, that is historically an integration of biology with chemistry that yielded MOLECULAR biology (the only type of biology that is now taught), and molecular biology combined with math and computer science to yield computational biology (or bioinformatics). ------------ I agree with much of what you say, but I cannot agree that Philosophy is dead. I think that it will never die, there will always be philosophical discourse in the sciences (at the fringes of theories and at their methodological basis), there will always be ethical discussions (although nowadays we have some new renditions like bioethics and ethical problems related to technology), there will always be political discussions, and when these are discussions of political THEORY, that IS political philosophy. I too am dismayed with what goes on in philosophy departments. I found my degree fun and sometimes fascinating, but sometimes a waste of time, like who cares (the traditional epistemological problem) whether there is a real world beyond our sensations, I simply suppose there is and use the naïve realist model of common sense and science. Much of philosophy in philosophy departments is caught in esoteric issues with philosophers only talking to other philosophers. But, I have hope. Just as philosophy changed in the sense that natural philosophy became science (remember when Newton wrote his treatise on physics, it was entitles “the Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy), I think it needs to change again and become something more like metascience, tackling issues across disciplines or that touch on multiple sciences. It don’t think philosophy is dead, nor can you kill it, it will always be around, it just needs to change and adjust to the modern paradigm of knowledge. By the way, my favorite problem in philosophy was the mind/body problem or if you will the mind/brain problem. Before I got my degree in philosophy I studied much neuroscience. The problem with neuroscience is that as much as we know we have virtually NO idea how the brain produces consciousness. But isn’t that the MOST important thing that the brain does? Hence I turned to philosophy which DOES study the mind, from a subjective analytical point of view (and often with language analysis). I attempted to combine the two, my knowledge of neuroscience, and whatever we know about consciousness, with a study of consciousness (subjectively) from the philosophical viewpoint, combining them in the mind/brain problem. I was disappointed with neuroscience for not being able to give an objective account of consciousness (yes we have CORRELATIONS between cognitive tasks (subjective) and neurophysiological events, but that doesn’t answer questions like is that correlation an identity or not), and I was disappointed with philosophers for not knowing enough about the brain. Another way of looking at the problem is it’s an objective/subjective problem: how do you reduce something subjective like consciousness, the flow of percepts, to something objective, like neurophysiological events? Later I got the comp bio degree and did my thesis in computational neuroscience (modeling, simulating and calculating things about the nervous system of C Eleans, a worm, thesis done at Stanford). The human brain is just too complex, we will never understanding it until we understand much simpler nervous systems first. -------------- I guess I have a different view of Philosophy than you do. To me, whenever you are tackling a subject or issue that spans multiple disciplines, you are doing philosophy. I.e., philosophy is also about the INTEGRATION of knowledge. Also whenever you are dealing with the methological basis of a science or dealing with questionable aspects of a theory you are doing philosophy. I have a much broader view of philosophy than you do. I have both a degree in philosophy and a masters in science (computational biology, like you I am a student of neuroscience, my thesis was in computational neuroscience), and so have personally followed the expanded view of philosophy above. I do have to say I agree somewhat about the current state of what is talk in philosophy departments, my time at the Berkeley philosophy department was spent dealing with esoteric issues that only philosophers understand (philosophers talking to philosophers rather than the common man). It was highly analytical and some say (science teachers of mine have said this) that philosophy nowadays is just semantics. -------------- I agree with you, but also contend Hawking doesn’t understand the scope of philosophy. Science, for example, will never be capable of ethical reasoning, as it is about what is and not what should be. There’s just one example of why you can’t dispense with philosophy altogether. I think Hawking has very much a physicist perspective only. Even in a book “theory about everything” is pretentious and incorrect, physics is not everything, it is not, for example, a study of the mind. We simply have no idea how to reduce subjective experience (the mind) to neurophysiological states (we can correlate them but cannot determine how one IS the other). ----------- Eric, when you talk about cognitive science and it possibly replacing philosophy, I have a few things to say. This is along the lines of what Quine calls epistemology naturalized, i.e., we can use science to study things like how we come to have knowledge, involving the disciplines of psychology, psychophysics etc… But when studying the mind, both objective and subjective methods need to be used. I am a student of neuroscience and will gladly say that given all we know about the brain, we have virtually no understanding how the brain produces a subjective experience. In neuropsychology we can correlate objective facts like blood flow in the brain with the subjective facts of a cognitive task, but all we ever get is a CORRELATION, which doesn’t prove identity. For Hawking to say that there is no longer a need for philosophy, and everything can be explained ultimately by physics, he IS tacitly (or maybe openly) a reductionist. I have a masters in computational biology which is also the study of molecular biology, and I can’t even see at this point how the complex system of a cell can just be explained in terms of chemistry or aspects of a single celled organism like voluntary movement. And although some areas of philosophy have been replaced by science (as natural philosophy or the philosophy of nature was replaced by the natural sciences) other aspects of philosophy cannot be replaced by any type of science, for example ethics. Science is about what is, not about what should be, but ethics is about what should be. The latter cannot be reduced to the former, clearly, unless you’re going to try to study the brain of someone making an ethical decision and explain the decision in terms of neurophysiology (which will probably expose the neurophysiological events correlated with the decision but nothing substantial about the decision itself). I think Hawking is a physicist and understands much about the physical universe, but understands very little about the scope and natural of all philosophy deals with. (By the way I both have a degree in philosophy as well as a masters of science in computational biology). ------------------- I want to reassert my claim that animals show ‘self-movement.’ Notice I didn’t say ‘plants.’ Plankton show self movement too. It depends on the kind of plankton. Some plankton move using fine hair-like projections around their cells called cilia (singular: cilium). Some move using the help of whip-like projections called a flagella (singular: flagellum). Other members of the plankton community move using leg-like appendages, such as larval arthropods. So my general statement that animals (including single cellular organisms like bacteria) demonstrate self-movement and it’s not clear this is true of cells (which are not organisms). -------------- Here’s my definition of a living thing. Does the definition apply to both cells and single cellular organisms? Maybe so, but I would like some comment on this. “x is a living thing (on earth as we know it)” if and only if “x consists of all of the following: x is a system of organic molecules organized into a water based cell or cells which contain genes and are capable (except for plants) of self-movement, reproduction, that take in food and produce energy and hence have a metabolism, grow, adapt to their surroundings and reproduce their kind.” Can you say the above of both a cell and a single cellular organism? --------------------- I would say our cognition is dependent on our volition in the sense that what thought we are going to think next is dependent on what thought we want to or will to think next. I.e. the flow of thoughts and even the flow of percepts (based upon what we will to look at or turn our attention to) is all influenced by our volition. Just as we can’t move our arm without a volition, we can’t choose our next thought without a volition. On the other hand, I’m not sure what you mean when you say “our volition is dependent upon our cognition.” ============= Osku, I COMPLETELY AGREE!!! There was another forum which asked “Can you think without language?” My answer is OF COURSE, all animals think without language. Animals even communicate to some degree without language. If you watch the Animal Planet special on Meerkats you will see how intelligent they are. They have a social organization and even division of labor. When most Meerkats go to eat, some will stay behind and babysit the young. They coordinate their behavior like going to war together against rival Meerkat clans to maintain or establish new territory. I simply need to watch my cat to know that animals think (without language). My cat doesn’t have language but he PLANS (planning as I’ve said is a type of thinking, among many other types). When I put food on a table that is only accessible by jumping up on a chair and then walking across my amplifier to the table, my cat does it. This is ACTION PLANNING. He has to reason that in order to get up on the table he has to execute a SEQUENCE of events (that’s planning), first jump on the chair, then walk over the amplifier and then eventually get to the table where the food is. It is completely arrogant and anthropomorphic to think that only humans think. Where do you think our brains came from? They came from the animal kingdom. Our cognitive capabilities are from a long evolutions of brains in animals long before humans existed! ----------------- I think part of the thinking behind the idea of a mental substance is things like ‘thoughts’ don’t seem to have physical attributes like location or extent. What is the spatial extent of a thought? Where is a thought LOCATED? This was the thinking of people like Descartes. Still modern scientists would say that a thought DOES have location. It is located in the brain. It is a set of chemical events in the brain with location and duration. -------------- One further comment on ‘emotion being mental substance.’ Even those who posit two substances, mental and physical, tend to consider thought part of mental substance but emotion more connected to the physical. You can see this for example when someone has an excited emotional state, physical things such as heart rate tend to increase. So emotions are more connected to the physical. This was the view of Rene Descartes as well. When he posited mental substance, he meant a ‘thinking’ substance. ---------- Don, I want to clarify one thing about Ramanath’s former pronouncement that ‘emotion is a substance,’ and that it is a ‘mental substance.’ I want to try to explain his point of view. There is a long standing tradition in Philosophy that there are two substances: physical substance and mental substance. Here ‘substance’ does not necessarily mean ‘matter’ but that which inheres in itself and is not dependent upon anything else. People like Descartes held this view that there are two substances ‘mental substance’ and ‘physical substance.’ The problem with this view is that you have to explain how the two substances interact, i.e., how something like a physical thing, can create a vision or perception of something, a mental thing. And you also have to explain how something mental, like an intention to move my arm, can result in something physical, like moving my arm. In other words if you posit two substances you have to explain how the two ‘interact.’ There are various theories of ‘interactionism.’ Descartes view was somewhat ridiculous that the two substances interacted through the pineal gland in the brain. Modern scientifically minded people tend not to subscribe to the view that there are two substances. Most of them would say there is one substance, physical substance, and that mental phenomena are just chemical reactions in the brain (a physical thing). --------- Osku, it is possible someday that we will be able to build a ‘biological machine.’ But we are far from doing anything of that sort at present. As far as simulating the functions of the brain with something like a neural net, actually neural nets and connectionist architectures in AI have made no more or even less progress in simulating thinking than has traditional symbolic (deductive) AI. Neural nets and brains differ in some important respects. Neural nets are based logical machines (although their operation is statistical), where as brains are CHEMICAL machines. A brain is not just a logical machine like a computer, it is a CHEMICAL machine that operates by way of neurotransmitters of different types not just on off switches (although transmission or non transmission of an electrical impulse across a synapse IS a digital on or off event). To indicate the extent to which a brain is a CHEMICAL machine consider how drugs affect the brain and mental processes. We have drugs that can solve certain types of schizophrenia, transforming the mental experience of a subject WITH A CHEMICAL (the drug is a chemical and its effect on the brain is chemical), or consider drugs like LSD which alter a subjects mental perceptions, again a CHEMICAL substance that works on the brain CHEMICALLY. ------------ I want to shift the conversation away from emotion, as the question is not does a computer have emotion but can a computer think. Let’s get back to the question of what is thinking. I think Don Wade is on the right track that thinking is among other things problem solving. But, in my thoughts, thinking is actually a number of different activities (whereas as far as I am concern emotions are just chemical events in the brain). I would like some sort of response to the post I made on WHAT THINKING IS. We cannot answer the question of can a computer think until we answer the question of what thinking is. Repost: To answer the question of ‘what is thinking’ which we need to do before we can ask ‘can a computer think’ here are some aspects of thinking: Constructing models of the world. Interpreting those models. Making predictions about events. Planning. Having ideas or concepts. Reasoning. Judgement. Having beliefs or opinions. Intentionality: having beliefs and desires. Problem solving. Consider among these aspects of thinking which a computer can do? Can a computer have ideas or concepts? Computers can certainly construct models and also interpret those models (a model is a representation in symbols of some features of the real world. Once you construct a model you can interpret it to answer questions about the model and hence about the phenomena in the real world which it models). Making predictions of events (seems a computer can do this with simple if then else statements, if x happens then c will happen is a prediction). Reasoning, as I’ve already said there already exist AI programs which do reasoning in terms of propositional logic. You can represent logical propositions in a computer (a language like Prolog is completely set up to do this), then evaluate their truth, and also deduce new propositions from old ones with a deduction program. The intentionalistic idea of thought is perhaps more problematic for a computer, since a computer may have representations of beliefs (propositions are representations of beliefs and computers have those) but not desires. An intentionalistic evaluation of language indicates it involves both beliefs and desires. I hope that it doesn’t rain today is a typical sentence, but a computer can’t hope, it can’t have the desire that something be the case. I fear I will be late, is a desire not to be late. A computer can’t have a desire. So some part of our mental life indicated in our language apparatus is not available to computers as they can’t desire that something is or isn’t the case. Planning: computers notably robots can certainly plan. Consider the robots that stack boxes, they have to plan several steps to put the red box on top and they can do that. Problem solving: computers certainly can solve problems, better than humans in many cases. Take the four color map problem that no human mathematician was able to solve but was solved by a computer program. Some of the questions you may ask is 'is thought or thinking a program?' If so what sort of program is it? These are just some thoughts on ‘what thinking is’ to stoke the conversation which seems to be completely stuck in a complete lack of any ideas as to what thinking --------------- Don, I already answered this question “can a computer think without being self aware?” The answer is YES. The type of ‘thinking’ that a computer does is a representation of thinking as in propositional logic (this is already being done in AI). You have a set of propositions, indicated in the computer by logic, and then you have a deduction engine which deduces new propositions from the old ones. This is a type of thinking. But it is a type of thinking that occurs without any self awareness, consciousness, or volition, so it is nothing like the type of thinking a human does. Also much of a human’s thinking has to do with MEANING, and representing meaning or semantic content in computers is extremely hard. There has been some progress in natural language understanding systems. -------------- To mimic thinking I am supposing that the computer has some REPRESENTATION of thought like a representation of propositions and an engine to deduce things from propositions, yet the thinking has no consciousness nor volition and hence is NOT like human thinking. It is a non volitional non conscious REPRESENATION of certain aspects of our thinking. This was in answer to Szabolc’s question “how do you mimic thinking?” ----------- Returning to the subject of this forum and ethics, Hawking’s statement that Philosophy is no longer needed and can be replaced by science and technology is pure hogwash when you consider that science tells how things ARE, not how they SHOULD BE or what we SHOULD do. With technology it is not only what you CAN do, but what you SHOULD do, how you SHOULD use the technology (an ethical question). We have the technology to build nuclear bombs, and we CAN use them, but SHOULD we use them is an ethical question, belonging to the realm of philosophy. ---------------- I’ve been thinking about how a computer may simulate curiosity, while not actually having it in the human sense. A computer program (robot program) can scan the environment with sensors and then analyze what it has sensed (actually analyze the data that it has taken in through the sensors) to do object recognition, heat degree sensing, etc.. to determine what is in the environment and whether it is dangerous (whether its tested parameters are above or below certain acceptable values). The robot program can also scan the environment for anything new (for an deltas between a former image of scanned environment or anything new or for anything that appears to be moving in the environment) and then apply the safety checks and other checks to the novel items encountered. This is all possible with a robot with sensors and a computer program. Is this curiosity? I don’t know, but it seems to simulate many of the features of curiosity. --------- I think that’s a decent description. I call consciousness “a flow of percepts” from a subjective point of view. From an objective point of view it seems to be electrical activity in certain areas of the brain. Note “a flow of percepts” is similar to your definition of sensation and memory. ----------- I believe that’s exactly what computers will probably end up doing: ‘simulated thinking.’ I.e., a ‘representation’ of thinking may be developed in terms of words, meanings (symantic processing like semantic nets), and artificial reasoning, but all of this will be done without consciousness and volition. Consciousness and volition are two features of our own (human) thinking that I think you cannot get on a computer. So a computer might be able to think in the sense of SIMULATING thinking but not think in the way that a human thinks. An example is Deep Blue, the IBM computer that beat contestants at Jeopardy. Deep Blue uses statistical algorithms to very quickly search through large numbers of text segments to find an appropriate answer. It does not seem this is what goes on in our brain when we search for an answer at all. Therefore the computer is answering, and SIMULATING thinking, while it is not conscious, unvolitional, and uses algorithms (statistical) that our brain doesn’t use. I.e., it is SIMULATING thinking only. -------------- Of course it is the case that computers HAVE language. All of the software is based upon a language or languages, which are artificial languages. Still this may not be the point you are raising. Do computers have anything like a human language with which we think. Human language involves MEANING, do computers have meaning or can they represent meaning? This is a complicated question. There are areas of computing, like natural language understanding systems, that build semantic representations of sentences (linguistic strings), they have some type of meaning. And can these computers ‘reason’ with meaning, as we can reason that a ‘bachelor’ is an ‘unmarried male?’ It seems they can to some extent answer questions about an input text. ------------- I see this comment all of the time which basically amounts to “nature and science are mathematical.” NO! PHYSICS is mathematical. PHYSICAL NATURE is mathematical. But what about BIOLOGY? Biology is largely NOT MATHEMATICAL. It is a part of science, it is a part of nature. So you cannot claim that science and nature are mathematical. This spoken from a computational biologist. ------------- Szabolcs you make a good point. Whenever you talk about language you have to talk about meaning. Even a pattern of bits has meaning. Depending upon how it is interpreted it can either be a number, a letter (ASCII code), or an instruction. I.e., it is a string of bits with an INTERPRETATION, this interpretation is a lot like a meaning. There are many theories of meaning as regards human language, one, and one I agree with to an extent, is the representational theory of meaning. A sound (spoken language) or a set of marks (written language) is ASSOCIATED with a thing in the world, or a representation (like an image) of a thing in the world. When I utter “chair” I think or imagine a seat with a back with four legs. I learn this association when someone like my mother utters “chair” and points to a seat with a back and four legs. This correlation or association of an image or representation in our mind and a thing in the world is what we mean by meaning. If computers can “think” like humans they have to be able to process “meaning” i.e., they have to be able to mean things by words. I’ve long said of this forum that we have to specify do we mean ‘can computers think like humans’ or simply ‘can computers think in any fashion perhaps a non human fashion?” ----------- There’s some good stuff in your link. The holonomic theory is just that a theory with scant evidence. But it is true that we know something about visual processing in the brain. There seem to be some neurons that respond to edges in a visual field (edge detection) and other nerves that respond to color (the rods and cones in the retina). This indicates something about how a visual field might be formed. “Both Pribram's theory and the more conventional theory have the brain divided up into various functioning communicating modules. One main difference is in how the information is stored in these brain modules. For example, in the case of vision, the conventional theory has specific features stored in certain dedicated cells. These different sub-modules then have parallel pathways to other modules that produce the combined visual experience. This would be somewhat analogous to a computer performing signal processing directly on an image. For example, dedicated circuitry for edge detection would interface with other circuitry for other features like color. Every feature of the image gets stored (or processed) in different dedicated "circuitry". These "circuits" then have parallel pathways to other brain regions in which the collective subjective experience of the perception is formed.” Note that Pribam agrees with me that the processing in the brain is NOT algorithmic, i.e., NOT like a computer. “The conventional view is that the brain is a computational device. There is a growing body of literature, though, that shows that there are severe limitations to computation (Penrose, 1994; Rosen, 1991; Kampis, 1991; Pattee, 1995). For instance, Penrose uses a variation of the "halting problem" to show that the mind cannot be an algorithmic process. Rosen argues that computation (or simulation) is an inaccurate representation of the natural causes that are in place in nature. Kampis shows that the informational content of an algorithmic process is fixed at the beginning and no "new" information can be brought forward. Pattee argues that the complete separation of initial conditions and equations of motion necessary in a computation may only be a special case in nature. Pattee argues that systems that can make their own measuring devices can affect what they see and have "semantic closure". This is a highly questionable view of consciousness that is Pribam’s belief but not others: “Conscious awareness (and memory) is the byproduct of the transformation back again from the spectral holonomic domain back to the "image" domain.” Although I do have to admit that conscious experience is mostly visual. -------------- Don, everyone wants to bridge the gulf between the subjective account of consciousness and the objective account of neurophysiology. So far no one has, and methodologically it’s not clear that you can give an objective description of something subjective. Here’s what progress has been made. In neuropsychological experiments (the neuro is the objective account and the psychological is the subjective account) subjects are given a specific cognitive task, a math problem, a word problem, or a visual task for example. While they engage in that well defined task we can (through MRI or CAT scan or similar technology) map the blood flow in the brain, i.e., see what region of the brain is active during that task. We can do this for multiple subjects and then generalize as to the region activated by the cognitive task. That’s about the best we have done so far in correlating (and note I say ‘correlating’) the subjective experience of solving a cognitive problem with the objective description of the neurophysiology underlying it. It is a ‘correlation’ as we cannot properly conclude that the brain CAUSES the cognitive experience, because it could also be that the cognitive experience CAUSES the brain activity, so we are left with a mere CORRELATION between the two. I am reading a book that discusses the relation between the brain and subjective experience in a very thoughtful way. It is entitled “Cognition and the Brain: The Philosophy and Neuroscience Movement,” by Andrew Brook and Kathleen Akins (editors of a bunch of papers on the subject). You can order it on Amazon. -------------- Don, interesting your statement that “consciousness is only a perception produced by a large accumulation of smaller bits of information.” From the subjective point of view I have often called consciousness “a flow of percepts.” ------------ Don, you bring up some excellent points, and this is just the direction I hoped this discussion would go. Yes, the brain clearly processes signals (perhaps information). Note that although I said the brain is not a Von Neumann machine I didn’t rule out that it is SOME sort of computer or processor. It’s more likely it’s like a digital signal processor. Clearly we take in signals from our sense organs (actually sound or light is transduced by those organs to create and send an electronic signal to the nervous system). The processing seems highly parallel, i.e., propogates along bundles of nerves. If you take vision for example, the rods and cones in the retina transduce the effect of light on these rods and cones into an electronic signal which is sent along the optic nerve, up through the superior colliculus, and then eventually to the occipital lobe where the neurophysiological story ends. Somehow we suppose the electrical signals in the occipital lobe to BE the experience of seeing something, but that’s a gulf (between the objective neurophysiological account and the subjective account of seeing) that no one has been able to bridge. So what sort of machine is this. First of all it is organic, i.e, the nerves are composed of organic molecules, they are cells with the organelles and organization of a cell, but a specialized one, it seems to transduce electronic signals. The electronic transduction is not like electrons flowing along a copper wire, they are caused by a membrane potential that is created out of negative and positive ions flowing in and out of ion channels in the nerve cell’s membrane. You may say this is like a digital signal processor because signals are either transduced or not depending upon the pre synaptic membrane potential. If there is a threshold level of potential (like in a neurode of a neurocomputer) the neurotransmitter is released and the vesicle emptied into the post synaptic site initiating the ion exchanges that propogate the signal along the axon. Note binary in a computer and binary and a brain are NOT referring to the same thing. Binary in a computer is indicated by a high or low voltage. Binary in a brain is just the fact that the neurotransmitter is either released or not released across the synapse (never partially released always a binary event either released or not released depending upon a threshold). When we talk about information processing in a computer we are talking about an algorithm modifying data in some way. When we are talking about information processing (?) or just signal transduction in a brain there is no modification of data, there’s just a propogation of a signal to some center in the brain where the neurophysiological story ends. About logic gates in the brain. I did see one study about computational modules in the brain, where a computer program looked at a representation of a network of neurons in the brain and noted that there were repeating units of neurons that behaved in stereotypic ways (like two neurons in and one out). I haven’t seen anything about timing cells, but I believe what you tell me. A computer of course cannot work without a clock which times the up and down voltages to create a binary pattern. DNA and RNA programming don’t really enter into the architecture of the brain, as these are just programs to produce proteins when the cell is made or maintaining itself. When we describe the architecture of the brain we are talking about the cellular level. --------------- Don, I’m sorry for calling your statement ridiculous. And yes I DO know about neuroscience and computing, my masters thesis at Stanford was on computational neuroscience. Yes, computers have multiple processors, but they are all Von Neumann machines, they all process a sequence of instructions and invoke the control unit to use the logic gates to implement the instruction. My point stands that a brain has NO CPU, no instructions, and no logic gates, so it is nothing like a computer (or nothing like a Von Neumann machine). Perhaps you are thinking about a parallel processing machine with many CPUs. The principle is the same, they are ALL Von Neumann machines. When an algorithm is run, it is broken into separate instructions or instruction sections that can be run in parallel on multiple Von Neumann machines, so the principle is the same. Perhaps you can argue that a brain is some other sort of computer, some say like a neurocomputer, some say like a digital signal processing system. Perhaps. But again the brain is a CHEMICAL machine, a computer is not (it’s a logic machine), as everything in the body including the brain is just based upon organic chemistry. And as far as the Turing test is concerned, no machine has ever passed it. Yes you have machines like Siri that answer your questions about where is the nearest Chinese restaurant, but try to have a philosophical discussion with Siri, the computer simply doesn’t have concepts that allow it to have a conversation at that level. -------------- Don, again this is a ridiculous statement: “there is no difference between a computer and a human brain.” Do you know nothing about neuroscience or computer science? The two couldn’t be more different. Computers (most of them) work according to the Von Neumann architecture, long term storage, short term storage, and a CPU. The short term storage contains programs which are sequences of instructions and data (the sequence can jump around due to jump instructions). The CPU sequentially loads an instruction and its immediate data and the instruction code is decoded by the control unit to implement the circuit of the instruction (i.e., to use the logic gates that do an ADD when the instruction is ADD, etc….). A brain doesn’t work anything like this. A brain is composed of assemblages of neurons which impinge upon eachother to send signals at synapses. It is more like a signal processing system. But the neuron signaling is CHEMICAL (a computer is not chemical) composed of neurotransmitters which when accumulated to a certain degree initiate a binary event of signal transduction. There is no CPU, there are no instructions, there is NOTHING like a computer in the brain. There have been some attempts to build neurocomputers which are composed of neurodes which change a statistical value if a certain number of input neurodes reach a threshold. Neurocomputers do pattern recognition, they are statistically based, and don’t do anything like think. -- Don, there is a big gap in your thinking. What you describe a robot doing (picking out a screwdriver) is object recognition. It’s similar to identifying an object in a picture. This is a far cry from thinking. This if anything is a simple act of perception. I think the problem with this whole discussion is no one has offered a definition or what they mean by “thinking.” If you’re going to ask “can a computer think” you first have to have an answer as to what is thinking. Analyze human thinking for a start. It certainly is infinitely more than object recognition. You may also want to ask whether consciousness is necessary for thinking. We may never build a conscious robot (for as far as we know the only thing in the universe which is conscious is a brain, and we don’t know why that is the case, it just is) but may build a robot which non-consciously simulates human thought. If you can non-consciously and non-volitionally (see my previous argument why computers, determined systems, cannot have something fundamentally undetermined like volition) SIMULATE thinking, it that thinking? It certainly is not thinking in the human sense, where we are volitionally conscious of our thoughts. So it’s important when you ask the question “can a computer think” do you mean “can a computer think like a human” or “can a computer think in SOME fashion, as in a simulation)? None of the preliminary groundwork to answer the question “can a computer think” has been done in this forum. ------------- You said “the computer cannot directly perceive the world and get knowledge about it.” I find this to be false. What about SENSORS? An artificially intelligent system has sensors which take information in from the environment and respond to it. As for some of your other statements they are more sensible: “computers apply a fixed set of algorithms to the data provided by human operators (or environmental data provided by sensors, my addition). The brain does not need an external program whereas computers cannot function without it.” -------------- Without knowing too much about quantum computers, it seems to me they are undetermined only in the sense that they are probabilistic. Whereas volition is not probabilistic. When we form an intention (volition) we do something, cause something to happen, we don’t maybe (probabilistically) cause it to happen. Also nothing causes us to necessarily have the intention, there are only influences on the formation of the intention. The formation on the intention is not a matter of probability. Given this, I would say that probabilistic quantum computers could not support volitions or volitional actions. ------------- My view is a computer will never have volition. There might be a simulation of volition but never true volition. Let me define volition or an act of free will. An act of volition is contradistinguished from a determined act. When a rock rolls into another rock, the path the other rock will take is determined by the force, angle, friction, other rocks in the area etc… But when you decide (will) to eat dinner, your decision is not determined. There may influences on your decision like the time of day or your state of hunger, but you CAN ACT OTHERWISE, whereas the rock CANNOT ACT OTHERWISE. This whole discussion of determinism versus indeterminism is related to the notion of CAUSATION. The action of the rock is CAUSED by the force and angle of the first rock. But your decision to eat dinner is NOT CAUSED by your hunger pangs although is influenced by them. Therefore that which is caused is determined and that which is not caused is not determined. In my view a computer system is determined. Each event is CAUSED by a prior event. Think about the nature of circuitry, it is all based upon physical (and logical) causation. Ultimately any software program is just certain voltages flowing through certain circuits. Since the computer system is a determined physical system it cannot support something undetermined or uncaused, it cannot therefore support volition. You could theoretically program a computer with some random range function to appear to act volitionally, but, as I’ve clarified, because of the nature of a computer it would be a representation or simulation of volition but not real volition. And by the way an ACT doesn’t always follow a volition. I.e., action and volition are not the same. I can will to fly (not in a vehicle but as a winged creature) but cannot. So clearly I can will things I cannot enact. I will to think about this then will to think about that, it’s not clear my change in thought is an action, so that is probably an example willing without action. If you get my arguments I can think of some good objections and a good debate. Anyone want to continue this debate on whether computers can have volition. Find something wrong with my argument for a start. --------- If you do achieve machine consciousness you don’t necessarily get volition. Not all consciousness is volitional. Perception for example is part of consciousness but not volitional, whereas something like planning a movement and moving is volitional. I find a fundamental problem in that computers are essentially determined machines (output is determined by input) whereas volition is essentially undetermined. I condition my statement that computers are determined machines with the realization that we have partially autonomous agents that have sensors and actuators that determine their actions programmatically according to environmental data. ----------------
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