orpheus wrote:

Cito di Pense wrote:

SpeedOfSound wrote:I know it is very hard to believe but you would not recognize that there even was a beat if it were not for this effect of piling up of time in your brain. Yes, we can react to very small time intervals, like 20ms, but not in a deliberate and conscious manner. Unless we have a beat to predict or a trajectory we are pretty much fucked. If the ball does something weird you get hit in the head. If the beat or tone does something weird you get a visceral reaction but not until at least a fifth of a second later.

I think the research is accumulating for this analysis. Listen to something like "Roll Over Beethoven" the first time, and although the melodic structure is clear (because you have prior experience with blues riffs), a lot of the lyrics are gibberish. I love those websites that pay homage to mis-heard lyrics. There are some howlers. One of my favourites is a mis-hearing of Dylan's "Not Dark Yet": "My sensitive manatee has gone down the drain."

But also lot of the lyrics are not gibberish.

Certainly. A lot of the lyrics are badass. At least, the way I perceive them.

Footnote: "Not Dark Yet" is rendered at a funereal tempo. It's a kind of synergy. Still, one hears of manatees.

definitely sense of manatee.

SpeedOfSound wrote:I want to keep track of some principles or premises.


a. Any such percept must happen over time
b. Percepts NEVER happen in isolation. That is there are many objects and blends and many other things happening in the mind during the time of the percept.
c. Our minds always have a current context that mediates our perceptions.
d. We cannot communicate what we actually perceive but only a processed or packaged form of it.
e. Our memories of a percept our in this package form.
f. The package can 'set off' other more detailed memories and even random thoughts.
g. The packaging process happens in parallel to the sensing but the package is the take-away.

I want to comment on on the context. It seems at least one poster misunderstood what this was about.

We all carry around a very current memory of what we are doing and recent events. On waking we reboot what is left after dreaming is done with us and the important things we planned for today are refreshed. If I intend to go out and look at a tree and my back yard now contains a giant sand dune instead there will be some confusion and fear. But if it is the yard I remember the intention of finding a tree will have a large effect on what is perceived.

This context is in several types of memory. Some of it is very neat term and most is in long-term learning storage. The near term memory falls off rapidly with time. Memory from the last minute and last seconds provide a rich context for consciousness. It is this memory around one second old that we form pile up and package our percepts into objects that behave sensibly.

Consider what it would be like if you had no context memory whatever. Try to imagine just raw sense data with no history longer than a micro-second.

Yes. And lots of food for thought there.

orpheus wrote::this:

Yes. And lots of food for thought there.

On a poetic note. Imagine how music interplays with your mind and our ability to blend things in time. All the emotions and context all come together as a symphony that would not be anything other than a bunch of instantaneous spikes of energy without our minds. Best part is the symphony interplays with all of your past and is unique to each person.

What actually happens when I go look at the tree is that the visual information splits into three parts in my brain. The first is implicated in blindsight and is unconscious. It goes to a little tiny brain, the superior colliculus, that does some quick threat recognition and controls the saccade of your eyes (the flitting) and enters your cortex quickly to modify movements like ducking or other fast unconscious responses.

The main chunk of data then goes to the thalamus where it is gated and modified by attention. It relays to the back of the brain whee color and stereo vision are decoded. It splits into two streams across the brain. One is call the 'where path' over the top and the other is the 'what path' over the bottom and into the temporal lobes. Color is decoded and added to the streams.

All of the information moves toward the front of the brain where, after significant processing, it becomes the packaged content of your conscious recognition.

SpeedOfSound wrote:

orpheus wrote::this:

Yes. And lots of food for thought there.

On a poetic note. Imagine how music interplays with your mind and our ability to blend things in time. All the emotions and context all come together as a symphony that would not be anything other than a bunch of instantaneous spikes of energy without our minds. Best part is the symphony interplays with all of your past and is unique to each person.

Yes, absolutely. This is one of the things MTT meant by saying that good conductors have this peculiar ability to perceive the present, past and future at once. He didn't mean anything woo-ish at all. Part of what he meant was practical: hearing what's going on at the moment, being able to - in that moment - put it together with your memory of what happened in the music before (the tensions and releases, the density of sound, the "rhetoric" of the phrases), and at the same time as all that, being able to hear "ahead" in one's mind: to "visualize"* what's coming up very, very clearly in order to bring it about.

But beyond that practical meaning, there's also what you allude to: being hyper-aware of the interplay of all that within one, so that you can forge a strong connection among the instructions coded into the music by the composer, the impulses from your own past and present, and your perceptions of those same impulses of the musicians (who are each doing the same thing for themselves). Hopefully, if all goes well, that strong connection can produce music that has a kind of coherence that communicates powerfully to the listeners. (Who, of course, are bringing their own pasts and presents to bear on their experience as well.)

Complicated it gets, yes it does.


*Isn't it interesting that there's no English word equivalent to "visualize" for any of the other senses?

Cito di Pense wrote:

orpheus wrote:

Cito di Pense wrote:

SpeedOfSound wrote:I know it is very hard to believe but you would not recognize that there even was a beat if it were not for this effect of piling up of time in your brain. Yes, we can react to very small time intervals, like 20ms, but not in a deliberate and conscious manner. Unless we have a beat to predict or a trajectory we are pretty much fucked. If the ball does something weird you get hit in the head. If the beat or tone does something weird you get a visceral reaction but not until at least a fifth of a second later.

I think the research is accumulating for this analysis. Listen to something like "Roll Over Beethoven" the first time, and although the melodic structure is clear (because you have prior experience with blues riffs), a lot of the lyrics are gibberish. I love those websites that pay homage to mis-heard lyrics. There are some howlers. One of my favourites is a mis-hearing of Dylan's "Not Dark Yet": "My sensitive manatee has gone down the drain."

But also lot of the lyrics are not gibberish.

Certainly. A lot of the lyrics are badass. At least, the way I perceive them.

Footnote: "Not Dark Yet" is rendered at a funereal tempo. It's a kind of synergy. Still, one hears of manatees.

Time out of Mind is siiiiiiick. Brian Blade is the man!

From this discussion:
http://www.rationalskepticism.org/philo ... l#p1188645

One could say that our initial concepts or all of our knowledge is drawn from sense experience. But that would be misleading in the way it would be misleading to call Disney World a park.

It brings to mind this imaginary boundary of the brain with some electrical signals crossing the boundary. I think some people even think of it as a wire with a TV signal or something. So I think that leads to all kinds of hidden implications that are not in any way realistic.

A newborn seeing color for the first time ( this isn't true either but let us pretend), would have about a million separate neurons delivering a complex set of spike signals to a newly formed occipital lobe, visual areas V1. V4 is where the color magic seems to be and there is a well developed structure to receive all of that and it probably blasts across the brain of the newborn like a storm of TV static. Little happens to baby on seeing some blues and greens. I doubt they are even all that conscious. But no blue and green is learned.

But something happens. The neurons in the brain that are stimulated change a little. The ones that aren't die a little.

Say we put baby in a box with nothing but blue and green blobs and nothing else. We cut all of the kid's other common senses and paralyze the kid. The child would probably die within the first year or two. Barring that it would never learn green and blue like we know it.

Now this example is a brain that has a sensory signal. So if nothing is learned then how can we say that we learn blue and green with just our sensory signals?

Correct. We just don't do this to the kid and then it gets a long and varied stream of signal. But is that all there is to it? I think not.

See what you think so far.

A thing to note is that if it were not for some highly organized structure in the sensory signals, combined with a highly organized structure enacted by DNA in the brain, the kid's brain would just die and never learn a thing.

So it is a given that this data has structure. But what kind of structure?

It is also a given that the brain has structure to pour into. Without an internal organization that couple closely to the structure of the data we would again have just some mush.

This is simple logic as jamest would say ( I kid of choke saying it though )

SpeedOfSound wrote:From this discussion:
http://www.rationalskepticism.org/philo ... l#p1188645

One could say that our initial concepts or all of our knowledge is drawn from sense experience. But that would be misleading in the way it would be misleading to call Disney World a park.

No. It's not misleading. It's what happens. Think about teaching a child the meaning of the color blue for the first time. The teacher shows the child a blue ball, a blue car and a blue bird.

At some point, the child grasps what all the different objects have in common - the color blue

Once the child has grasped this general idea, the child can recognize new instances of the color blue like seeing a blue bicycle or blue paint.

It's obvious the child has grasped what is common to the different examples. You don't need to discuss neurology to understand this basic function.

The neurological mechanics of how this happens does not alter the basic nature of concept formation which is to grasp unity from a plurality.

Alrighty then.

SpeedOfSound wrote:Alrighty then.

SoS, it would be helpful if you were to think about the origin and construction of social languages. 'Red', for instance, is a word that had meaning long before science started talking about photons with specific wavelengths. Hence, if such words are not indicative of photons with particular wavelengths, what do you think that they refer to? Indeed, how could such words help to effect social communication if they referred to nothing and/or had no meaning?

I think I'll C & P this into my thread. If you're going to answer, please do so there.

If I look at a square pink patch of color painted on a wall in a room with some lamps I perceive a square that is colored pink all through. But if I move around and cast a bit more attention I notice that there is a glossy highlight form the lamps that can be bright white. I can change this by moving but I can't control it. In fact if I wanted to photograph the patch or something written on it it may piss me off that I simply can't get the highlights to go away.

I can control the percept by closing my eyes. I can watch it fade in my memory of it with eyes closed. with my eyes closed I cannot bring it back to full intensity as if I were still viewing it. I I close my eyes and move I cannot control where the highlight will appear when I open them.

I can get a few friends to look at the patch and query them on what they see.

All of this is 'evidence' for a square pink patch independent of my mind. Nor will I let your blather for god go unpunished anywhere I see it. I did that, now it is done for this thread.

A note on perception.

It is NOT static. Perception is transactional. An activity much associated with our motoring about and having intent. The standard is freshman philosophy seems to be to take the observation of a tree as some static singular, discrete, and instantaneous event. This is not supportable in the reality of human experience.

SpeedOfSound wrote:A note on perception.

It is NOT static. Perception is transactional. An activity much associated with our motoring about and having intent. The standard is freshman philosophy seems to be to take the observation of a tree as some static singular, discrete, and instantaneous event. This is not supportable in the reality of human experience.

Hold on... so after all this time, you have observed that... consciousness isnt static but changes...

Ok now tell why you think this is so significant.

pl0bs wrote:

SpeedOfSound wrote:A note on perception.

It is NOT static. Perception is transactional. An activity much associated with our motoring about and having intent. The standard is freshman philosophy seems to be to take the observation of a tree as some static singular, discrete, and instantaneous event. This is not supportable in the reality of human experience.

Hold on... so after all this time, you have observed that... consciousness isnt static but changes...

Ok now tell why you think this is so significant.

It's transactional. Perception is not a simple thing as it is often treated by philosophers who think they are philosphers of the mind.

DrWho wrote:...
It's obvious the child has grasped what is common to the different examples. You don't need to discuss neurology to understand this basic function.

The neurological mechanics of how this happens does not alter the basic nature of concept formation which is to grasp unity from a plurality.

It's taken me a while to respond to this post. Therapy, soothing teas, and lots of rest have finally given me sufficient strength. Barely. I'll take it in parts.

What concerns me with this part is that you seem to have the idea that we don't need science to tell us how the mind may work. We already know all about it from our folklore. We don need no stinkin' science!

Have I read this correctly? You are claiming that we know all we need to know about child development and how concepts are learned by the brain?

SpeedOfSound wrote:It's transactional. Perception is not a simple thing as it is often treated by philosophers who think they are philosphers of the mind.

So youre saying consciousness is more powerful than they assume?

Sidenote: if consciousness were static, we would never be able to observe the motion of matter.