Like I said, this is now a very big site. You three must have short memories for this kind of thing, is all I can say.
The reason it might not be BS is that myelin might not be an adequate insulator for very long axons.

... Oh, and BTW, SoS's claim that memory for concepts is equivalent to memory for names is total BS. My own memory (bad for names, good for ideas) disproves his daft idea.

DavidMcC wrote:Like I said, this is now a very big site. You three must have short memories for this kind of thing, is all I can say.
The reason it might not be BS is that myelin might not be an adequate insulator for very long axons.

Which has absolutely nothing to do with anything, particularly 'mechanical brains' or mechanical processes in brains.

Get to the point, provide a reference/link or drop it.

DavidMcC wrote:... Oh, and BTW, SoS's claim that memory for concepts is equivalent to memory for names is total BS. My own memory (bad for names, good for ideas) disproves his daft idea.

You haven't 'proved' anything yet David. You made a rather vague reference to mechanical action in long distance axon transmission that you have not been able to back up. How would anyone know if this is an example of a well-remembered concept or a miss-remembered concept?

or a completely fabricated concept?

GrahamH wrote:

DavidMcC wrote:... Oh, and BTW, SoS's claim that memory for concepts is equivalent to memory for names is total BS. My own memory (bad for names, good for ideas) disproves his daft idea.

You haven't 'proved' anything yet David. You made a rather vague reference to mechanical action in long distance axon transmission that you have not been able to back up. How would anyone know if this is an example of a well-remembered concept or a miss-remembered concept?

A. while one cannot prove things in science, one can disprove them. You should know that.
B. My memory for science is very good, it is only my memory for individual words and names that can be poor.

I'm just gonna throw this out Giulio Tononi and his Integrated Information Theory of consciousness. He seems to be on the right track from a information perspective in that he apparently has or is working a a way to measure the integration of systems that is based on integration and differentiation. Christopher Koch disscusses in this article: http://www.scientificamerican.com/artic ... ciousness/

.....
Consciousness Is Universal One unavoidable consequence of IIT is that all systems that are sufficiently integrated and differentiated will have some minimal consciousness associated with them: not only our beloved dogs and cats but also mice, squid, bees and worms. Indeed, the theory is blind to synapses and to all-or-none pulses of nervous systems. At least in principle, the incredibly complex molecular interactions within a single cell have nonzero Φ. In the limit, a single hydrogen ion, a proton made up of three quarks, will have a tiny amount of synergy, of Φ. In this sense, IIT is a scientific version of panpsychism, the ancient and widespread belief that all matter, all things, animate or not, are conscious to some extent. Of course, IIT does not downplay the vast gulf that separates the Φ of the common roundworm Caenorhabditis elegans with its 302 nerve cells and the Φ associated with the 20 billion cortical neurons in a human brain.

The theory does not discriminate between squishy brains inside skulls and silicon circuits encased in titanium. Provided that the causal relations among the transistors and memory elements are complex enough, computers or the billions of personal computers on the Internet will have nonzero Φ. The size of Φ could even end up being a yardstick for the intelligence of a machine.
....

Thus it fits with my thoughts on consciousness as well as Machio's with regard to the thermostat and systems and even goes down to the single cell level as far as being able to assign consciousness/awareness to it.

More here from Koch (I've posted this link before, not necessarily in this thread): http://www.wired.com/2013/11/christof-k ... ciousness/

I know I've posted this link as well to Tononi's paper at PLOS:

Abstract:
This paper introduces a time- and state-dependent measure of integrated information, φ, which captures the repertoire of causal states available to a system as a whole. Specifically, φ quantifies how much information is generated (uncertainty is reduced) when a system enters a particular state through causal interactions among its elements, above and beyond the information generated independently by its parts. Such mathematical characterization is motivated by the observation that integrated information captures two key phenomenological properties of consciousness: (i) there is a large repertoire of conscious experiences so that, when one particular experience occurs, it generates a large amount of information by ruling out all the others; and (ii) this information is integrated, in that each experience appears as a whole that cannot be decomposed into independent parts. This paper extends previous work on stationary systems and applies integrated information to discrete networks as a function of their dynamics and causal architecture. An analysis of basic examples indicates the following: (i) φ varies depending on the state entered by a network, being higher if active and inactive elements are balanced and lower if the network is inactive or hyperactive. (ii) φ varies for systems with identical or similar surface dynamics depending on the underlying causal architecture, being low for systems that merely copy or replay activity states. (iii) φ varies as a function of network architecture. High φ values can be obtained by architectures that conjoin functional specialization with functional integration. Strictly modular and homogeneous systems cannot generate high φ because the former lack integration, whereas the latter lack information. Feedforward and lattice architectures are capable of generating high φ but are inefficient. (iv) In Hopfield networks, φ is low for attractor states and neutral states, but increases if the networks are optimized to achieve tension between local and global interactions. These basic examples appear to match well against neurobiological evidence concerning the neural substrates of consciousness. More generally, φ appears to be a useful metric to characterize the capacity of any physical system to integrate information.
....

http://www.ploscompbiol.org/article/inf ... 00091-g018

kennyc wrote:I'm just gonna throw this out Giulio Tononi and his Integrated Information Theory of consciousness. He seems to be on the right track from a information perspective in that he apparently has or is working a a way to measure the integration of systems that is based on integration and differentiation. Christopher Koch disscusses in this article: http://www.scientificamerican.com/artic ... ciousness/

.....
Consciousness Is Universal One unavoidable consequence of IIT is that all systems that are sufficiently integrated and differentiated will have some minimal consciousness associated with them: not only our beloved dogs and cats but also mice, squid, bees and worms. Indeed, the theory is blind to synapses and to all-or-none pulses of nervous systems. At least in principle, the incredibly complex molecular interactions within a single cell have nonzero Φ. In the limit, a single hydrogen ion, a proton made up of three quarks, will have a tiny amount of synergy, of Φ. In this sense, IIT is a scientific version of panpsychism, the ancient and widespread belief that all matter, all things, animate or not, are conscious to some extent. Of course, IIT does not downplay the vast gulf that separates the Φ of the common roundworm Caenorhabditis elegans with its 302 nerve cells and the Φ associated with the 20 billion cortical neurons in a human brain.

The theory does not discriminate between squishy brains inside skulls and silicon circuits encased in titanium. Provided that the causal relations among the transistors and memory elements are complex enough, computers or the billions of personal computers on the Internet will have nonzero Φ. The size of Φ could even end up being a yardstick for the intelligence of a machine.
....

Thus it fits with my thoughts on consciousness as well as Machio's with regard to the thermostat and systems and even goes down to the single cell level as far as being able to assign consciousness/awareness to it.

More here from Koch (I've posted this link before, not necessarily in this thread): http://www.wired.com/2013/11/christof-k ... ciousness/

What bothers me about this is that it equates information processing with consciousness, irrespective of the information semantics. That is like regarding all computer software as GTA5. The thing that (I think) distinguishes consciousness is that it is about a subject experiencing. If the information being integrated is about temperature, or planetary motion, then it isn't about experience, so it isn't consciousness. The mechanisms can be the same while the content is different

If a bit of brain performs IIT on information input from a power plant, and not about a body and a self experiencing then the brain is not conscious.

Any IIT system that can't generate semantics of a self experiencing isn't conscious. This is the self model / model of attention. It's all about the semantics in the model, what the model means to the brain that generates it.

IIT is OK, as far as it goes but, just like Michio's thermostat, it falls far short of considering what information is integrated.

Everybody seems to looking for the conscious machine, the conscious process, the NCC.
That road lead to special sauce or panpsychism, as Koch freely admits.

Me and Graziano think the machine attributes semantic to things (people, objects, self), and behaves accordingly (moving, sensing, making language etc). No special sauce. No panpsychism, no woo-physics.

GrahamH wrote:...

Me and Graziano think the machine attributes semantic to things (people, objects, self), and behaves accordingly (moving, sensing, making language etc). No special sauce. No panpsychism, no woo-physics.

No you still don't understand what Graziano is saying. His work and that of Tononi, Koch, and the direction Michio is talking about all fit together as well as fitting the evolutionary framework and its requirements.

And none of it has anything (other than being an artifact) to do with 'subjective experience of shit' which is literally philosophical bullshit.

....and you clearly don't understand what Tononi is saying - particularly in the excerpt from the Koch paper I quoted. It is literally scientific panpsychism and that's fine. In conjunction with the other work by Koch, Graziano and others. It aligns perfectly. The linked paper goes on to point out where the IIT needs to be filled in and the additional work by Koch, Graziano and others does exactly that.

This bias of yours wanting to make human consciousness special is your own special sauce. This is why you don't get what Michio, Tononi and I are saying about thermostats in relation to consciousness.

Here's what Graziano says in his Aeon article:

Some people might feel disturbed by the attention schema theory. It says that awareness is not something magical that emerges from the functioning of the brain. When you look at the colour blue, for example, your brain doesn’t generate a subjective experience of blue. Instead, it acts as a computational device. It computes a description, then attributes an experience of blue to itself. The process is all descriptions and conclusions and computations. Subjective experience, in the theory, is something like a myth that the brain tells itself. The brain insists that it has subjective experience because, when it accesses its inner data, it finds that information.

i.e. there is no such thing as subjective experience, it's an illusion, there is no qualia....

what is it you are not getting about this Graham?

kennyc wrote:

SpeedOfSound wrote:.....

if you wrap the pipe in myelin you end up plugging the leaks and the wave flows faster.

yes, but that's nothing more than insulation on a wire, it doesn't change the operation of the circuit.
other than as you say allows greater speed/efficiency of electrical flow.

Not exactly
Here's something interesting...and helpful in dealing with those annoying absolutes.

http://jonlieffmd.com/blog/new-myelin-c ... complexity

carry on

Templeton wrote:

kennyc wrote:

SpeedOfSound wrote:.....

if you wrap the pipe in myelin you end up plugging the leaks and the wave flows faster.

yes, but that's nothing more than insulation on a wire, it doesn't change the operation of the circuit.
other than as you say allows greater speed/efficiency of electrical flow.

Not exactly
Here's something interesting...and helpful in dealing with those annoying absolutes.

http://jonlieffmd.com/blog/new-myelin-c ... complexity

carry on

Interesting, fascinating in fact! But not mechanical as was claimed. still operates via electrical and chemical signaling....

no real explanation of the 'different' types of myelin types or function. Doing a google search does not result in any further information on different types of myelin .... I think I'll reserve judgment with regard to that claim until I have more information to draw from.


Carry on.

Templeton wrote:...
http://jonlieffmd.com/blog/new-myelin-c ... complexity
....

interesting site....quite scattered...and quite a collection of things and interpretations of other's works. He himself is an MD and apparent expert in geriatric psychiatry.

Quite a bit of woo on this page in particular: http://jonlieffmd.com/blog/human-brain/ ... n-and-mind. Not saying he is into woo, but he's certainly repeating it from the likes of Penrose and Hameroff.

As I said most of what is there is pretty clearly taken from other researchers - written fresh of course but there doesn't seem to be much if anything in the way of citations, links, support. A bit like saying 'trust me' -- medicine and psychiatry might work that way, but science doesn't.

P.S. I just found a list of book references and a list of 'journals he reads' but .... it's not evident these are books he has read or they are simply associated with the categories on his website......

oh and a whole section of Penrose quantum consciousness books...

kennyc wrote:
Interesting, fascinating in fact! But not mechanical as was claimed. still operate via electrical and chemical signaling....

I couldn't care less what convoluted mess you turn into a pissing match because it's obvious you haven't a clue what you're talking about.

Carry on

kennyc wrote:

GrahamH wrote:...

Me and Graziano think the machine attributes semantic to things (people, objects, self), and behaves accordingly (moving, sensing, making language etc). No special sauce. No panpsychism, no woo-physics.

No you still don't understand what Graziano is saying. His work and that of Tononi, Koch, and the direction Michio is talking about all fit together as well as fitting the evolutionary framework and its requirements.

And none of it has anything (other than being an artifact) to do with 'subjective experience of shit' which is literally philosophical bullshit.

Bravo Kenny, for basically repeating back to me what I just stated (and ignoring the further bit you don't like).
These theories are all basically referring to the same mechanism (it's all physics) and function (it's all information processing). How is it not obvious to you that we have no disagreement at all about that?

Graziano goes a step further, as do I, to consider what the integrated information content is in the Hard Problem. If you ignore the issue of experience entirely and treat people as P-Zombies of course this distinction will mean nothing to you, but stop claiming I "don't understand". I understand very well that there is a part of the issue that you cannot deal with, so you stick with the nuts and bolts. That's your choice.

Graziano's key point is that consciousness is attribution of self. I.e. qualia and all that 'shit' are 'illusions'. You got that. Well done. So, we explain something about thw illusion, how the trick is done, rather than denying there is anything to understand - 'there is no trick at all!'.

Graziano wrote:It says that awareness is not something magical that emerges from the functioning of the brain. When you look at the colour blue, for example, your brain doesn’t generate a subjective experience of blue. Instead, it acts as a computational device. It computes a description, then attributes an experience of blue to itself.

That's it. That's what I'm saying, exactly.

The other information theories are not in conflict with this at all. They merely focus on the processing rather than the content of the information. Attribution is content.

The computer / software analogy should make the point clear. A computer is an information processor and we can look at the physical interactions in the circits and say "that's information processing", but then we could say that about any physical system. The universe is pan-computational. Where things get interesting with computing is the software, which is simply a different way of understanding the operation of physical systems. The same mechanism, the same processes, have very different effects according to what software is running. Understanding semiconductor junctions and interconnections only gets us so far in comprehending how a computer works. For comprehensibility to human minds we need think about software. That is not to reify software as some sort of Platonic ontological category. It's still all physical interactions of fundamental particles, but we can't understanding macro phenomena from that quantum scale. We end up referring to abstract concepts such a thermostats, rather than thinking about the base physics. That's how understanding works, by abstracting simpler models. The proposition is that the brain does that, to it's own operation, and by doing so makes it computable and assignable.

Do you think that brains cannot perform that sort of computation? Do you deny that brains construct meaningful abstractions?

None of this has anything to do with 'special sauce'. How can you not see that?

Templeton wrote:

kennyc wrote:

SpeedOfSound wrote:.....

if you wrap the pipe in myelin you end up plugging the leaks and the wave flows faster.

yes, but that's nothing more than insulation on a wire, it doesn't change the operation of the circuit.
other than as you say allows greater speed/efficiency of electrical flow.

Not exactly
Here's something interesting...and helpful in dealing with those annoying absolutes.

http://jonlieffmd.com/blog/new-myelin-c ... complexity

carry on

Thanks for that.

GrahamH wrote:

kennyc wrote:

GrahamH wrote:...

Me and Graziano think the machine attributes semantic to things (people, objects, self), and behaves accordingly (moving, sensing, making language etc). No special sauce. No panpsychism, no woo-physics.

No you still don't understand what Graziano is saying. His work and that of Tononi, Koch, and the direction Michio is talking about all fit together as well as fitting the evolutionary framework and its requirements.

And none of it has anything (other than being an artifact) to do with 'subjective experience of shit' which is literally philosophical bullshit.

Bravo Kenny, for basically repeating back to me what I just stated (and ignoring the further but you don't like).
These theories are all basically referring to the same mechanism (it's all physics) and function (it's all information processing). How is it not obvious to you that we have no disagreement at all about that?

Graziano goes a step further, as do I, to consider what the integrated information content is in the Hard Problem. If you ignore the issue of experience entirely and treat people as P-Zombies of course this distinction will mean nothing to you, but stop claiming I "don't understand". I understand very well that there is a part of the issue that you cannot deal with, so you stick with the nuts and bolts. That's your choice.

Graziano's key point is that consciousness is attribution of self. I.e. qualia and all that 'shit' are 'illusions'. You got that. Well done. So, we explain something about thw illusion, how the trick is done, rather than denying there is anything to understand - 'there is no trick at all!'.

Graziano wrote:It says that awareness is not something magical that emerges from the functioning of the brain. When you look at the colour blue, for example, your brain doesn’t generate a subjective experience of blue. Instead, it acts as a computational device. It computes a description, then attributes an experience of blue to itself.

That's it. That's what I'm saying, exactly.

The other information theories are not in conflict with this at all. They merely focus on the processing rather than the content of the information. Attribution is content.
….
None of this has anything to do with 'special sauce'.

I strongly agree with all of this, the science of consciousness is a multifaceted affair, like the science of the colour blue. Scientists may look at the characteristics of things which we see as blue, (e.g. the blue pigments in a flower absorb light which is not blue, while the blue “eyes” on a peacock butterfly's wing are diffraction gratings), or they may look at the brain regions, from the retina to the language centres, which enable us to describe those things as blue, or they may focus on electromagnetic radiation with wavelengths around 475 nanometres. All these very different approaches are valid, none gives the complete picture on its own.

Similarly, there is the science of the things which we perceive as conscious (other people, ourselves, animals, possibly thermostats or even infinitesimal points), there is the science of what goes on in our brains when we attribute consciousness to those things (the evolved modelling processes of Theory of Mind, which have the primary function of enabling us to predict other people efficiently but not all that accurately), and there is the science of exactly what features of the world trigger the Theory of Mind processes so that we perceive consciousness (goal-seeking behaviour is probably a start, which is where thermostats are involved). Again, all these approaches are scientific, non-woo.

I agree with GrahamH (and Graziano) that the Hard Problem, the recursive weirdness of consciousness, is probably a result of our modelling our own brain processes in the same way that we’ve evolved to model other people’s brain processes.

Templeton wrote:

kennyc wrote:
Interesting, fascinating in fact! But not mechanical as was claimed. still operate via electrical and chemical signaling....

I couldn't care less what convoluted mess you turn into a pissing match because it's obvious you haven't a clue what you're talking about.

Carry on

Don't even start. Clearly I've debunked your claims given that is your only response.