Issues of trust with a Hameroff presentation

Science and Technology
21

Absolutely, correct! My bad, triggered more by a mind glitch of transposition, blind spot caused by being too focused on something else. Incidentally, I have plenty of time to dispassionately observe my mind in action, with all it’s distractions, blind-spots, and even now as it’s joined my body in the start of the downward trajectory in some cognitive functions. It’s an interesting show to watch unfold. Waking up one day to realize, holy poop I’ve entered that dreaded “aging” stage of life.

Ironically, none of it really bothers me as much as I think it should. The comfort of having had the good years, and the sense to make the best of them with what I had to work with is a lot of comfort. Plus having put in the work to understand who I am and what I am, and my place in Earth’s scheme of things.

No I don’t think the human body is self-sustaining, it’s me who talks about how dependent our body is on interacting with it’s environment, nutrition being one key category of this interaction, one that intimately effects the body, brain, mind.

Oh golly, never heard of it, >snark<

Why are you saying “best guess” Why not say “best informed decision”?

Besides since when does “Best Guess” = Hallucinate”

“an experience involving the apparent perception of something not present.”

Can you explain how that works?

Oh, so, deprivation of stimulus is what causes hallucination.

Which is why I’ve gone to pains to point out that I’m not arguing again Seth’s understanding or lessons. I’m not claiming Seth is dancing between pseudo and real science. I’ve no argument with his nuanced descriptions or expertise.

My problem is with that glib toss off line, caused by a certain intellectual laziness in not coming up with a better metaphor about how our brain makes decisions, that’s it. Beyond that, on the whole I believe Seth’s talks are interesting and solidly educational. I cannot say that for what I heard from Hameroff. (And I’ll go further regarding Hoffman, point being, each is not like the other.)

Jess, you won’t even acknowledge the dictionary definition of hallucination.
What’s up with that?

I knew you were going to distract my thought, so when I came home with Maddy, I wrote down the following before opening CFI:

I don’t understand your vociferous defend of the “Brain in a Vat” mind experiment.

We can only hold so many ideas in our heads, why clutter it up with just-so-fancies?
I chose to be present to the physical biological reality I’m embedded within, and strive to recognize the line between that and the spiritual, woo that exists within my heart and imagination.

And since I was fortunate enough that from my mind’s earliest awakenings, god was but a speck of dust that wanted to be more, that’s my philosophical/spiritual foundation, I haven’t had to struggle with the all knowing GOD and Judgement Day the way most others seem to have in one way or another - even though I had two years of serious indoctrination, but not till 5th & 6th grades, Tabor Lutheran Elementary School.

Back to “Brain in a Vat” it is a philosophical tool, which has philosophical implications, all of which are firmly within our mindscape (which is the totality of one’s mental universe), down the hall from religious thinking, so to speak.

But, when it comes to studying the biology of consciousness and our minds, it has no place anymore, the science has gone light years beyond what 400 year old knowledge was able to produce.

What I’m saying is I don’t dismiss “Brain in a Vat” for its argument sake.
I dismiss “Brain in a Vat” for its scientific value.

It has little to bring to a science focused discussion. It is a stage tactic, part of the art of storytelling, not part of serious science itself. A tool that can used to do the science justice or mislead into dead ends.

22

What a huge question that is.

Seems like Smalley is talking about rationalizing.
Is that the same a deciding what one believes?

Seems more the philosophical realm, then the physical realm.

Looking at it from a physiological perspective, it gets very convoluted in a hurry, even a simple thumbnail outline would take a great deal of thought and time.

23

If you mean the believer is having doubts but can convince themselves those aren’t important, no. The guest was a preacher telling his story of how he stopped believing. He couldn’t say exactly what made him shift from “the Bible is true” to “Is the Bible true?” We can’t read minds, but we know that some people never make that change publicly. Most likely, they don’t “decide” to believe, they just do. Maybe I should say, “maybe”. I don’t know how the mind works well enough to say how belief occurs in everybody’s head.

This is not philosophical. That’s why I included the “personal responsibility” example above. Modern psychology accepts that a person who was raised without a father, in a poor educational environment, surrounded by violence, has a tougher time integrating into the adult world of work and peaceful cooperation. Liberals generally understand this and will look at those factors and adjust their approach to the person accordingly.

But, take a kid who was raised by fundamentalists, went to seminary, where there was no minor in business admin and no science teacher that believed in evolution, and what kind of life will that kid have? They will likely end up getting their paycheck from a church, and if they have doubts, won’t have the skills or the support to change careers. I don’t see the liberal sympathy for that person.

24

Okay.

Sure.
Goes hand in hand with how much our environment and experiences helps form who we are.

:+1:t2:

Another aside video, guess I would ask Write, if this is a hallucination?
Would that be a fair description of the mental activity of absorbing this video?

the paper
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1434461022000578

25

Because a hallucination is a best guess. The brain doesn’t know the difference unless there is a controlling factor such as a good friend reminding you that you are wrong in your assessment of the situation… i.e. that gray you see (your best guess) is red in reality and here are the glasses that allow you to see red as it is in reality. Take the glasses away and your brain can only see gray again, because it receives bad information from the rods (microtubules ) in the retina of the eyes.

Before the “corrective” glasses the brain’s best guess was merely an hallucination. With the glasses that hallucination became controlled and the person entered a totally new reality.

This is the gist of the term “best guess” and how that guess can be proved wrong. The brain never knew the difference! Being told you are color blind is meaningless unless it can be demonstrated and the difference experienced by the brain.

I am sure this experience is life-altering and the only way I can get an idea of what colorblind is like is in the dark when everything loses color, but for color-blind people the grays never turn into color . They just become brighter shades of gray in the daylight.

Yet, as you say, the person interacts with his environment. It is just that he experiences a completely different reality as color-sighted people. His reality is just an hallucination.

26

Because of this

Visual hallucinations

Here, a person sees something that does not exist or sees something that does exist but sees it incorrectly. Several conditions can cause visual hallucinations including dementia, migraines and drug or alcohol addiction.

Or the result of evolutionary processes that offered a survival advantage.
Nevertheless, everything the brain experiences is a form of hallucination, an internal projection of the brain believing it is experiencing reality.

When this experience is reinforced by feedback data and comparison, the hallucination turns into a best guess. I believe this is a perfectly transparent way of explaining the brain’s relationship to and perception of reality.

Ask yourself “how do you know that what you see is really there”

Remember the chessboard ? No matter how hard you try, square A is the same color as square B but your mind won’t allow you to see them as the same color.
image

or most incredibly this!
image
skeptical? Put your finger over the line where the boxes meet

It’s true, these are tricks, but they prove the point that your eyes and brain are not always reliable data processors of the exterior. However, these false impressions often are a beneficial result of evolutionary survival mechanisms.

27

Oh, natural feedback don’t serve that purpose?

You’re spinning in circles, like a . . .
{never mind}
I am a human, not a calculating machine.

Take one of these and get a good night sleep.

It doesn’t really get interesting until the last third.

28

Natural feedback? Either you saw it correctly or you didn’t, but how do you know? Did someone say they were looking at the same thing and saw it differently? Or, you thought you saw something but then looked again but it wasn’t there (so we assume we hallucinated). Or, you didn’t notice something, then it hit you in the head? Or, an image flashed by of something impossible, so you’re pretty certain it didn’t happen. All of these are indications that our minds report things that don’t reflect reality. I don’t understand your problem with this data.

I’m not invested in Seth’s use of “hallucination” or your opinion on Write4’s reasons for talking about them, but I do care about your Earth Centrism ideas, which are all about perceiving our place on this planet. So perception seems pretty central.

29

What’s with the staged obtuseness?

One moment moves into the next.

Me reaching for a coffee cup, my fingers signal back to my brain and how I’m progressing, getting it to my mouth, or accidentally knocking it off the table, feeling the coffee cold, or hot, or poop, it’s not coffee at all, it’s dish water, what have I done!

When I’m looking for my dog

image
image1920×1439 898 KB

(and yes she really is in this picture, unlike my practical joke of a couple years back,)

How much can we really learn about the exquisite processes of discernment within our senses, body and brain - if we cling to childish notions? For all the brains Descartes had for his age, many of his thoughts were/are, frankly, childish in light of current understanding.

Am I hallucinating Maddy’s location, or am I better at processing incoming information and getting better finding her simply by practice and learning to recognize subtle signals.

Yes, perception is dang central and we ought to show it a bit more respect,
then using a lousy term and defending that inappropriate term to death,
even though that term’s most common definition is about things that are not actually there, - hallucination is not about evaluation, feedback, or focusing on finding something that is hidden, which is what our brain is busy doing.

Okay you’ve say you’re not attached to the term, fair enough, I’m just explaining why I believe it matters to correct the self-delusion, (not to be mistaken with hallucination). :wink: :smirk:

30

Sure, you get better with practice, but in saying that, you’ve just included the imperfection in your definition. We know we “get better” because we know how to process information other than what we directly see, hear, feel, and taste. We do that using methods that were developed in the last few hundred years. We (the collective species “we”) had to put spirits and imaginations in a different category to do that. Descartes was just the beginning of that, as you say, childish. We still have imaginations, but we are now more free to discuss what reality is, since fewer of us are under the control of people who think they have a direct connection to the creator of everything.

So, I’m not obtuse, you are. I feel like I’ve done nothing but chase words for a month now; “natural feedback” explains how our brains process reality? which apparently is just the input of the 5 senses? Something is a “self-delusion”, but what? Is cutting-edge science on the nature of consciousness just delusional? You’ve shown your preferred theories on the nature of it, but even then you say they are close but not quite good enough. If I point to a current example of how our evolved brains are causing problems in handling modern problems you say I need to go back into deep time. If I include that broader picture, you say I’m pointing to the wrong point in that 13 billion-year timeline.

31

I DID NOT CALL YOU OBTUSE ! ! !

It’s your question that, seems to me, was the staged obtuseness.
You know dang well what I mean by our senses are constantly getting feedback that refines our perception of said instant.

32

It’s more than input - it’s literally feedbacks that are constantly adjusting our assessment of our environment, constantly.
What are you arguing that that is not a thing?
{Incidentally, we aren’t limited to five senses} (case in point)

The science is doing just fine, the problems come with the philosophy the utterly self-centeredness of our conceptions.

Hoffman being my best example of something that’s devolved into shear lunacy, moon dreaming, in the hand of “scientists” more interested in provocative story telling and selling and of course everyone wants to be a celebrity.

I clearly showed where Hameroff plays both side of science, serious and pseudo. That doesn’t mean he’s not an expert in his particular specialty anesthesiology, but when he drags in religious and philosophical thinking to try to justify his particular pet project, I’m not going to give him a pass.

That’s playing dirty.
I have no idea what you are talking.
I strive to directly answer questions I’m challenged with, much more than others.
“If I point to a current example” - hmmm, how often have you pointed and used that as an excuse to dismiss my complaints?

Well. Look at the shape of the world. Look at the profound disconnect people seem trapped in. I mean we have an ex-president saying we should suspend the US Constitution, and there’s little uproar, and in fact there are Republicans supporting the idea of tossing out our US Constitution.

Dang straight we are not doing enough. You think we are?
That example isn’t apples and potatoes, this is about how people think and process information and how we’ve learned to embrace magical thinking and how we haven’t striven to open our eye’s to the reality beyond our own self-serving needs…

33

I do know that senses give feedback, and I know they make mistakes. I’m not going to apologize for not knowing what “staged obtuseness” is.

No, obviously it’s a thing. And I know there are more senses. The problem is, they don’t tell us everything and never will. You’ve agreed that “we need each other”, so I can’t even figure out why you keep arguing this.

There’s too much in the above to try to respond to. I should probably give up. You insist on bringing in total morons as examples of what is acceptable when they are actually examples of the type of people that we have been working to corral and tame for 500 years. I don’t expect, after a couple of million years of throwing rocks at each other, that we would suddenly start living in peace. Why you even ask if I think we are doing enough just doesn’t compute.

This kind of sums it up. Our disagreements are about which science is doing fine. It seems like most of it is not fine to you, but I don’t know anymore. We probably have a lot more agreement on who the self-centered philosophers are, but we disagree on how much attention they should be given or how fruitful it is to focus on them. Or, maybe not, sometimes it seems like you are saying the entire human species is infected with this self-centeredness. Like I said, I don’t know anymore.

34

Exquisite discernment, really? Almost all animals exceed our sensory abilities and relationship to the environment.
Our strength lies in ability to make “best guesses” from little information.
Animals do not have the ability to imagine ghoulies, ghosties, and things that go bump in the night, humans do. The more you think about it the more Seth’s “controlled hallucination” makes sense.

35

Arguing what?

That’s a tough one, I’m bringing in memes that people are embracing.
I’m bringing in the fact of the mass profound disconnect with the simplest of Earth’s processes - I don’t think that’s beside the point or beyond comprehension.

Seriously ?
Am I not being clear about what kind of science (the wishful thinking kind) that I object to?
I don’t object to microtubules, but I can read what other scientists have reported and compare that to what someone is telling me, and I can recognize when someone is over promising.

This is actually what I want to focus on, but the feedback process won’t let me.

Earth Centrism

Because Earth is our ultimate touchstone with reality and ourselves.

This insight leads to a realization that, for this complex living Earth that we experience, to exist at all, is proof positive that our Earth evolved down one particular pathway, no matter what we people imagine one way or the other.

Ours is to figure it out and appreciate - not to presume to define it!

We appreciate that we are evolved biological creatures born of Earth’s processes, as expressed through its singular Evolutionary Pageant.

We appreciate the profound divide between physical reality, that is matter, biology, laws of nature, on the one hand, and on the other, our thoughts unfolding within our amazing minds, (or more descriptively, within the realm of our “human mindscape").

We appreciate that fundamentally, awareness and life’s “consciousness spectrum” started over a couple billion years ago with the invention, then prospering, of the unbelievably complex organization of Eukaryote cells (some suggest guided by microtubules).

Consider that in due time these cells created colonies of cells that demonstrated a sense of place and order and purpose or the organism would have dissolved into a chaotic blob. Increasingly complex creatures depended, at every step, on increasing awareness, sensing, data processing, physical systems growth & maintenance, internal communication along with improving and refining manipulatory abilities.

By and by, along came one particular clade the eutherians, small nocturnal insect eaters who gave birth to the class of mammalian animals, which begat the primates, which begat hominids, which begat our modern humankind species.

Every stage required new refinements and developments within the complex sensing/body/brain system and the mind they collectively produce - refinements that are dependent on previous refinements and lessons. Your Being is the sum total of all the days of Evolution that went into producing the human form you possess and live through, while your mind reflects the sum total of all the days you’ve lived and experienced.

I believe a genuine understanding of oneself starts with the realization that we are an evolved biological sensing creature, and that our consciousness is fundamentally the inside reflection of your body/brain dealing with itself and the environment/circumstance it is embedded within.

This understanding leads to another inevitable realization, namely that our “Gods” are in truth creations of our minds, tailored by our self-serving egos. Which is okay, if one doesn’t take their God, or themselves, too seriously.

Yeah, well, looking out at our collective global self-cannibalizing, and general dysfunction-ality, perhaps I am.

Heck if something as seemingly simple and basic and obvious (once you see it, you can’t unsee it, kind of thing) as,

“Appreciating the Human Mindscape ~ Physical Reality divide”

is utterly incomprehensible, …

Well, like you say, I just don’t know anymore.

36

Let’s relax

So can anyone find Maddy?

37

Well, okay. Yes the entire human species is infected with a sense of self-centeredness, it’s what has enabled us to dominate the Earth. Where would our survival instinct come from if we weren’t self-centered. Thinking on it, how can any evolved sensing organism not be self-centered since the self is all we really know?

We are supposed to have higher mental facilities that allow us to recognize the self in a way that separates us from the rest of nature.

I’m thinking explicitly recognizing the self as only one component of this reality we find ourselves in, would be beneficial.

I’m thinking there’s a big difference between us being self-absorbed within ourselves (so much so that we turn a blind eye to the rest of creation), or us recognizing we (self-centered though we may be) are but one individual component of a greater reality.

38

that, I definitely can track

1 Like
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1.5" from center @ 1:00 o’clock? The little white figure behind the tree line?

40

:+1:t2:
I was thinking 2ish o’clock, but you’re the mathematician.
:trophy: