[FRIAM] Eternal questions

[uǝlƃ ☤>$]

Right. Implied in your lucid dreaming discussion is that this body-part to body-part learning *scales* down to intra-body learning. This was the point of the "thumb". The [neuronal] network that learns the patterns of the amygdala is a body part, similar to one's thumb being a body part. Non-lucid dreaming, I think, represents a tight coupling between the body parts that do the learning/predicting and the targets they're attending. Lucid dreaming might be described as a slight *decoupling* of the targets from the learners, allowing for some translation. Regular dreaming is still decoupled, due to GABA and glycine (I'm guessing). But the lucidity may be achieved by applying one's learners somewhat independent of the restrictions of the particular target. E.g. just because I don't have wings doesn't mean my learner body parts can't predict what it might be like to fly.

In pitching for an algebra by which we do the composing of body parts, maybe we could identify lucid dreaming as a higher order decoupling, where normal sleep paralytics are a lower order decoupling?

But if we allow the behaviorists to keep sticking us in the quagmire of philosophy, unenlightened by neurophysiological composition, we can't have these finer grained conversations. And, as Marcus is right to point out, the monkey pong (or Cisek/Buzsáki position in the article Roger linked) results will have no impact on the conversation.



On 8/29/21 9:29 AM, Steve Smith wrote:
>> I can't shake the feeling that it doesn't matter what I write, here. But I'm stubborn.
> <grin> We rely on that.
>>
>> My point has been that our feelings are forms of self-attention. And if we take self-attention seriously, it may not be necessary for the learning to be 'socially taught'. One part of the body can learn the patterns of another part of the body, without any inter-body social interaction.
> I experienced this as a somewhat self-aware (reflective?) child with
> limited social contact.   I spent a lot of time with myself (and more to
> the point, with the natural world) and found the body-body interactions
> as important as the body-environment (climbing trees, hopping from rock
> to rock, digging in the ground laying on my back watching trees wave,
> clouds morph, animals move about their business).   As an aging man with
> a professional stake in mediating the extended sensorium (beyond
> sight/sound) in the time of COVID lockdowns I am becoming more and more
> aware of how my various body parts/systems interact... especially around
> pain/discomfort.  Finding a comfortable sitting/sleeping position,
> learning how to change my gait, my modes of moving, lifting, etc. 
> consumes more than a little of my attention as it seems like it did as I
> learned to walk, run, leap, swim as a child.
>> If that happens in each body, then the slight differences in each body can lead to different learned patterns in each body. And if that happens, the 'hard problem' becomes one of uniqueness. How different are the intra-body learned patterns?
>>
>> Inter-individual influence will dampen the diversity of intra-body learned patterns, but perhaps only to some extent. Even with that dampening, we might each be ever so slightly unique, such that no one body can ever accurately explain any other body [¶].
>>
>> Or, perhaps that uniqueness is negligible for any 2 similarly structured bodies. So intraspecies mind reading is justified. But interspecies mind reading is not. Or maybe all mammals can mind read each other. But reptile-mammal mind reading can't happen.
> 
> Having had two wildly different housemates for nearly two years, one
> with some acute neurological (brain injury) challenges and another with
> severe social differences (conspiracy theorist on virtually every topic
> available), I am very aware of how simllar/different we can all be and
> how we (do or don't) resonate.  
> 
> I think your point about inter-species is even more interesting in some
> ways.   I observe that infant mammals *all* seem to be able to play with
> one another which is an example of "mind-reading" as well as *learning*
> or *practicing* it.   
> 
> One of my lifelong acutely recurring dreams involves "non-standard"
> locomotion... dreaming about running, jumping, flying, swimming,
> vine-swinging, etc.   Some of this is MY body-motor-models exercising my
> body-mass/neuro-muscular leverages, elasticities, etc...   Watching
> animals locomote  triggers/builds mirror neuron(al connection)s for me.
> 
>>
>> [¶] Even if we allow a long-memory, perfect information demon, observing the body from the outside, that demon might not have access to the self-attention learning inside the target. 
>>
>> On August 28, 2021 8:07:43 AM PDT, Eric Charles <eric.phillip.charles at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> The question of mechanism is not an easy one. There have been several
>>> attempts to figure out how to speak of it, by those who think mostly along
>>> the same lines as Nick and I do.
>>>
>>> Gilbert Ryle famously talked about "dispositions" in this context. Nick
>>> wants to go with pure "up reduction". My buddies Andrew and Sabrina want to
>>> talk about how organisms transition between being different types of
>>> special-purpose machines. There are other options.
>>>
>>> No one is denying that there are internal mechanisms which, in the right
>>> environment, will produce the pattern of responses being discussed. The
>>> first question is how to properly understand the relationship between
>>> that *part
>>> *of the mechanism and the "higher-level" phenomenon of interest. All I care
>>> about, and all Nick should care about, in that context is that we keep our
>>> descriptions and explanations distinct. Discussion of brain parts serves to
>>> help explain the behavioral patterns of interest, and at no point should we
>>> confuse the brain parts for the behavioral pattern. That would be like
>>> confusing the breakdown of baking soda with the rising of the bread.
>>> Obviously the baking soda is important, and it is worth describing how it
>>> breaks down when wet, but also we can't rule out that there are other ways
>>> for bread to rise, and if we remove all the wet baking soda, no amount of
>>> staring at it in isolation will result in our finding leavened bread.
>>>
>>> The second question is how to understand how we "feel" the emotion. The
>>> answer is going to be something of the form: *We are socially taught to
>>> recognize early correlates of the larger patterns, and to label them in
>>> particular ways.* If you reject the dualistic idea that we have infallible
>>> knowledge about ourselves, you are going to end up at some variation of
>>> that. And if you are *not *going to
>>> reject infallible-dualistic-self-insight, then we shouldn't be anywhere
>>> near this discussion yet, because there are much more basic issues
>>> to figure out first.
>>>
>>> Again, in a casual conversation, we can really not care about any of this.
>>>
>>> Also, I'm not sure what's up with the thumbs metaphor. You have thumbs, I
>>> could definitely, have your thumbs. Yes, there's a sense in which your
>>> thumb is a complex, dynamic system. But also, your thumb is easily removed
>>> and handed to me. In this modern wonder-age, I could even have it attached
>>> and made functional on my own hand.
>>>
>>> <


-- 
☤>$ uǝlƃ