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| Topic: What is a thought? | |
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Well Abra, if you believe that a thought and an idea are one in the same, and if you further believe that the idea of a dimensionless point can have any meaning whatsoever without first knowing what dimensions are then that is your problem, even if you do not own up to it. I have no problems at all Michael. I am completely satisfied with abstract thoughts that are completely independent from any physiological sensory perception. I have no problem with that at all. I am completely satisfied with allowing words like thought and idea to have abstractions that overlap. I do not have hang-ups concerning unrealistic expectations of some idealized perfect semantics that could somehow be used to settle philosophical issues. I realize that such an ideal is totally unrealistic. I openly confess that I have moved forward from the Classical View to accepting the observations made by Modern Science, and I also confess to embracing philosophies along the lines of Eastern Mysticism. I have no problems with any of this things Micheal. Any problems that you believe to perceive at my end are of your own making. I am satisfied with my answers. 
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Never mind coherence.
Thoughts cannot be independent of experience, they are born of it. That is clearly supported by looking at how humans have accured knowledge. It is built upon earlier knowledge. That is why calc does not stand alone. That is why a dimensionless point in space has noe meaning whatsoever if there is no conception of dimension. The dimensionless point came after dimesion had meaning. That is how it works. |
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Edited by
Abracadabra
on
Mon 07/25/11 03:23 PM
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Never mind coherence.
Thoughts cannot be independent of experience, they are born of it. That is clearly supported by looking at how humans have accured knowledge. It is built upon earlier knowledge. That is why calc does not stand alone. That is why a dimensionless point in space has noe meaning whatsoever if there is no conception of dimension. The dimensionless point came after dimesion had meaning. That is how it works. Yep, that's Classical Picture Michael. I learned all about that in High School Like I say, no one denies that the classical picture is indeed a part of reality. That's a given. But you're trying to use that to make sweeping conclusions about limitations that simply aren't warranted. We're beyond that limited picture now. Your just looking at the Classical Picture and demanding that this must be all there is. But Modern Science has already moved beyond that picture Michael. We now know that those limitations of the Classical World cannot be used to limit reality in general. So all you are continaully doing is arguing that we should all go back and restrict our philosophies to the only Classical Picture and ignore Modern Science. I'm not prepared to do that. Thank you very much for sharing your knowledge of the Classical View. 
I've already learned about that. For me, that's "Old-School" now.
I appreciate you sharing your views. I hope that you can understand why I am not interested in the Classical Picture as a limitation for the basis of reality. |
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Thoughts = a cog that may or may not be attached to a wheel of many in the mind. That's cute, and can be quite humorous when considered in from various perspectives. For example, I've met many people who seem to have many cogs but no wheel. 
Stop talking about me, I told you...lol J/k It feels like that for me sometimes. My mind has a hard time finding the wheel that the thought is suppose to go to but don't tell anyone  
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Abra,
What in the world are you talking about? This thread has a topic and it is not whatever your talking about, it is not what you think about me, rather it is about what constitutes being a thought. You objected to Di's claim that thought begins with sensory perception. So, I asked... Can you give an example of a thought that is void of all content stemming from physiological sensory perception, that does not admit of anything empirical in it's description and/or it's effect/affect?
You answered... The mathematical idea of a dimensionless point.
I now ask again... 1. Is a thought an idea? 2. What does dimensionless mean without dimension being known? |
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"Underlying mind is a complex but compact program that exploits the underlying structure of the world.
The mind is essentially programmed by DNA. We learn more rapidly than computer scientists have so far been able to explain because the DNA code has programmed the mind to deal only with meaningful possibilities. Thus the mind understands by exploiting semantics, or meaning, for the purposes of computation; constraints are built in so that although there are myriad possibilities, only a few make sense. Evolution discovered corresponding subroutines or shortcuts to speed up its processes and to construct creatures whose survival depends on making the right choice quickly. The structure and nature of thought, meaning, sensation, and consciousness therefore arise naturally from the evolution of programs that exploit the compact structure of the world." ~~Eric Baum |
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What is Thought? Synopsis
Eric B. Baum MIT Press, January 2004 What is Thought? proposes a model that explains how mind is equivalent to execution of a computer program, addressing aspects such as understanding, meaning, creativity, language, reasoning, learning, and consciousness, that is consistent with extensive data from a variety of fields, and that makes empirical predictions. To achieve this one must first address how the workings of a machine, a computer, can have meaning, what meaning is. The summary of the book in one sentence is: meaning is the computational exploitation of the compact underlying structure of the world, and mind is execution of an evolved program, largely encoded in the genome, that is all about meaning. The discovery of meaning by evolution comes about through a principle called Occam's razor. As William of Occam posed it in the 14th century, Occam's Razor said one should choose simpler explanations in preference to more complex ones. As such it is a powerful philosophical principle that underlies all science and arguably most day-to-day reasoning. Over the last few decades, computer scientists have formalized this principle to explain concept learning. What is Thought? explains and extrapolates the recent computer science literature (to which I contributed) to posit a central organizing principle of thought: Meaning results from finding a compact enough program (a ``simple enough explanation'') behaving effectively in the world; such a program can only be so compact by virtue of code reuse, factoring into interacting modules that capture real concepts and are reused metaphorically. For a variety of reasons, including arguments based on complexity theory, developmental biology, evolutionary programming, ethology, and simple inspection, this compact Occam program is most naturally seen to be in the DNA, rather than the brain. Learning and reasoning are then fast and almost automatic because they are constrained by the DNA programming to deal only with meaningful quantities. Evolution itself is argued to exploit meaning in related ways, and thus to speed itself up analogously to how it speeds our reasoning. This picture explains why artificial intelligence (AI) programs have not achieved understanding in the same way humans do. Finding meaning, finding programs that exploit underlying structure, is a very hard computational problem (in a technical sense: computer scientists say it is NP-hard) that requires extensive computation to solve. Humans are not capable of the hard computation that evolution brought to bear or even that computers bring to bear when they train artificial neural nets. Thus human written programs are generally not Occam and so do not understand. To gain insight into what it means to exploit structure and how it can be equivalent to understanding, What is Thought? discusses AI, Computer science, and human approaches to a variety of problems including Chess, Go, and planning problems. Moreover experiments are described in which modular computer programs were evolved to exploit structure in hard planning problems in a human-like fashion. These evolutionary computing experiments employ new principles for evolving cooperation among modules and achieve results that are much superior to previous evolutionary progamming techniques, at least on the problems tested, and give insight into evolution of cooperation more generally. This theory explains why language is so highly metaphoric (much more so than non-linguists realize). Metaphor is a manifestation of the reuse of computational modules. Words are labels for meaningful computational modules, explaining how they are learned so rapidly. Theories of why evolution took so long to discover language are discussed. Using the abilility to pass along programs through speech, humans have made cumulative progress in constructing, as part of their minds, useful computational modules built on top of the ones supplied by evolution. The difference between human and chimp intelligence is largely in this additional programming, and thus can be regarded as primarily due to better nurturing. The many aspects of consciousness are naturally and consistently understood in this context. Evolution produces the program of mind to make decisions favoring the interest of the genes. Creatures with such an internal agenda are naturally said to have will-- that is we think about such creatures and ourselves using a computational module attributing will to them. While it is true that the program of mind has many modules computing different things, the unified self can be understood as the client whose interest the whole system is representing: a reification (manifestation) of the interest of the genes. The nature of what we are and are not aware is naturally explained. We are unaware of extensive computations done by our mind to extract semantically meaningful summary information. We are aware of the meaningful information affecting our decisions because it is the decision making portion of the program that reports what we speak and feel. Qualia (the way experiences "feel" to us) have exactly the appropriate nature and meaning that evolution coded in the DNA so that the compact program behaves effectively. This picture thus explicitly and naturally answers "the hard problem" and says why conscious experience feels "like" something, even though it is nothing but execution of certain computer code. The execution of that computer code that we describe as qualia is like what it is like because it evolved to have certain meanings and thus must be programmed in such a way that it has certain qualities. No previous familiarity with computer science (or other fields) is assumed-- What is Thought? presents a pedagogical survey of the relevant background for its arguments. http://www.whatisthought.com/synopsis.html |
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Edited by
Redykeulous
on
Mon 07/25/11 07:32 PM
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I personally feel that there are several different ways in which we can experience thoughts...
This is curious... could you expand? This would be difficult to put into words. I've been studying and practicing various different techniques in meditations, dreamwork, shamanic journeying, and the art of creating spiritual thought-forms. These various techniques require quite a bit of background. It's not something that can be easily be explained in a few words. In fact, I'm not sure if it can be explained in words at all. These are techniques that basically need to be practiced and experienced. About the only thing I can actually share about this in words is to say that I have learned that I have far more psychic ability than I had previously realized. If the term "psychic" conjures up idea of the supernatural just replace the term with consciousness. I have far more conscious abilities than I had previously realized. To try to explain these experiences in words would be a truly futile endeavor. Abra, I don't want to speak for you in any way but I do see something in your words >>"...are several different ways in which we can experience thoughts."<< that is familiar to me, it's called 'state of mind'. Although some may equate state of mind with physiological brain wave responses (alpha, beta, delta),which can often be detected during deep meditation, there are also other states of mind which often stem from emotion or deeply focused concentration or simply lack of awareness. Lack of awareness is the state of mind in which thinking is below the level of conscious awareness. When we sleep, our dreams often include inforamtion or cognition that was accrued dureing the day just below the leve of conscious awareness. Abra, do you think that I may have stumbled onto a partial explanation for your idea >>"...are several different ways in which we can experience thoughts."<< ?? Yes, I think so Di, State of mind, or state of consciousness is indeed a good terminology to use. In fact, this is often the terminology that is used in the books on these topics. However that description alone can be lost in the translation because there are many different facets to each state of consciousness. And sometimes people assume that those facets themselves are different states of consciousness. In a sense they are. In fact, some people have described these states of consciousness as being like fractals. The way in which they can be faceted is basically endless. Different authors have different ways of classifying the different states of consciousness. The most common practice is to divide it into three main sections. The waking consciousness, the dream consciousness, and the cosmic consciousness. Of course different people use different terms. But it's usually divided into these three realms. Although some authors divide it up differently. I have several very elaborate ways of dividing up states of consciousness. This isn't merely for the sake of classifying things, but it actually helps the consciousness to navigate through the different realms. It's like a psychic map. Consciousness is imagination, whether being guided by a physical world at times or not. And it can actually help the imagination to create a map for it. Especially if it is our quest to take a specific journey through consciousness. We can even do this in the waking consciousness. In other words, it can have profound practical value associated with helping to guide the walking consciousness as we navigates through the imagination of the physical world. We imagine a lot in our everyday physical life. We imagine what other people are thinking about us and how they perceive us. We imagine whether or not we are going to like some stranger we meet. Etc. We actually imagine many of the interactions that we participate in and our imagination of them does indeed "create" profound affects as the interactions unfold to become our reality. So imagination is paramount to our actually physical lives. Dreamwork is a great place to work on imagination. Spiritual work is when we set the imagination free to speak to us without any preconception of what we expect from it. That is when we engage the "mind of God" as they say. Or the "higher self". Perhaps imagination itself is the cosmic consciousness that we try to pin down as "God". But yes, states of consciousness is a good way to put it. But if that's going to be taken too 'technically' in terms of what science might have to say about "states of consciousness" then maybe not. What they might actually be classifying are merely different facets of a single state of consciousness. So while the term is abstractly useful, I wouldn't carve it in stone. If it's carved in stone, then it's not the concept that I'm attempting to get it.
It seems our state of mind can certainly be altered. I look to this idea to provide utility such as in the health field. I'm not sure what you mean by taking your ideas "too technically" unless you are not intrested in finding what utility "state of mind" may have to offer. If we are to research an idea for its possible uses then the idea does need to be grounded within the scientific method. I happen to think that human ideas can be far more than simply a preoccupation with creative fantasy. Of course that doesn't mean that I don't appreciate creativity such as your songs or JB's card sets. I find that a worthy occupation but I'm obviously not as creative as all that so I tend to consider ideas on the basis of their scientific value. If that means that I am considering state of mind "technically" then yes I am. But that doesn't mean YOU have to. I was just offering a possibility and you found some value in it. That doesn't have to be the same as my value. |
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Di wrote:
Thought processes begin with sensory perception. You state that as though it is a known fact. Has anyone claimed to have shown this to be the case without question? I have serious doubts that this is correct. My own experiences with thoughts would suggest this this is not the case. Can you explain why you believe this to be the case? ~~~~ Having said that, I should clarify that I most certainly do understand how sensory perception can indeed be the food for thought. I use that quite often in my shamanic journeys. I will go to a physical place, "take in the physical sensations there" and then use that as food for thought to create a starting place for a shamanic journey. However, that is certainly not a requirement. I have also started shamanic journeys from pure abstract ideas and concepts that can't even possible exist in the physical world. So where would be the sensory perception for those thoughts? Perhaps I didn't make myself clear. When I said that thought processes begin with sensory perception I really meant BEGIN as in a newborn beginning to experience the world. It's all about perception. It takes a long time for 'conscious' thought to begin because the baby has to develope a broad enough repertoire to make associations with new experiences. The best example is the one Creative has already provided utilyzing your own comments: "What does dimensionless mean without dimension being known?" |
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What is Thought? Synopsis Eric B. Baum MIT Press, January 2004 What is Thought? proposes a model that explains how mind is equivalent to execution of a computer program, addressing aspects such as understanding, meaning, creativity, language, reasoning, learning, and consciousness, that is consistent with extensive data from a variety of fields, and that makes empirical predictions. To achieve this one must first address how the workings of a machine, a computer, can have meaning, what meaning is. The summary of the book in one sentence is: meaning is the computational exploitation of the compact underlying structure of the world, and mind is execution of an evolved program, largely encoded in the genome, that is all about meaning. The discovery of meaning by evolution comes about through a principle called Occam's razor. As William of Occam posed it in the 14th century, Occam's Razor said one should choose simpler explanations in preference to more complex ones. As such it is a powerful philosophical principle that underlies all science and arguably most day-to-day reasoning. Over the last few decades, computer scientists have formalized this principle to explain concept learning. What is Thought? explains and extrapolates the recent computer science literature (to which I contributed) to posit a central organizing principle of thought: Meaning results from finding a compact enough program (a ``simple enough explanation'') behaving effectively in the world; such a program can only be so compact by virtue of code reuse, factoring into interacting modules that capture real concepts and are reused metaphorically. For a variety of reasons, including arguments based on complexity theory, developmental biology, evolutionary programming, ethology, and simple inspection, this compact Occam program is most naturally seen to be in the DNA, rather than the brain. Learning and reasoning are then fast and almost automatic because they are constrained by the DNA programming to deal only with meaningful quantities. Evolution itself is argued to exploit meaning in related ways, and thus to speed itself up analogously to how it speeds our reasoning. This picture explains why artificial intelligence (AI) programs have not achieved understanding in the same way humans do. Finding meaning, finding programs that exploit underlying structure, is a very hard computational problem (in a technical sense: computer scientists say it is NP-hard) that requires extensive computation to solve. Humans are not capable of the hard computation that evolution brought to bear or even that computers bring to bear when they train artificial neural nets. Thus human written programs are generally not Occam and so do not understand. To gain insight into what it means to exploit structure and how it can be equivalent to understanding, What is Thought? discusses AI, Computer science, and human approaches to a variety of problems including Chess, Go, and planning problems. Moreover experiments are described in which modular computer programs were evolved to exploit structure in hard planning problems in a human-like fashion. These evolutionary computing experiments employ new principles for evolving cooperation among modules and achieve results that are much superior to previous evolutionary progamming techniques, at least on the problems tested, and give insight into evolution of cooperation more generally. This theory explains why language is so highly metaphoric (much more so than non-linguists realize). Metaphor is a manifestation of the reuse of computational modules. Words are labels for meaningful computational modules, explaining how they are learned so rapidly. Theories of why evolution took so long to discover language are discussed. Using the abilility to pass along programs through speech, humans have made cumulative progress in constructing, as part of their minds, useful computational modules built on top of the ones supplied by evolution. The difference between human and chimp intelligence is largely in this additional programming, and thus can be regarded as primarily due to better nurturing. The many aspects of consciousness are naturally and consistently understood in this context. Evolution produces the program of mind to make decisions favoring the interest of the genes. Creatures with such an internal agenda are naturally said to have will-- that is we think about such creatures and ourselves using a computational module attributing will to them. While it is true that the program of mind has many modules computing different things, the unified self can be understood as the client whose interest the whole system is representing: a reification (manifestation) of the interest of the genes. The nature of what we are and are not aware is naturally explained. We are unaware of extensive computations done by our mind to extract semantically meaningful summary information. We are aware of the meaningful information affecting our decisions because it is the decision making portion of the program that reports what we speak and feel. Qualia (the way experiences "feel" to us) have exactly the appropriate nature and meaning that evolution coded in the DNA so that the compact program behaves effectively. This picture thus explicitly and naturally answers "the hard problem" and says why conscious experience feels "like" something, even though it is nothing but execution of certain computer code. The execution of that computer code that we describe as qualia is like what it is like because it evolved to have certain meanings and thus must be programmed in such a way that it has certain qualities. No previous familiarity with computer science (or other fields) is assumed-- What is Thought? presents a pedagogical survey of the relevant background for its arguments. http://www.whatisthought.com/synopsis.html Very interesting. Can you highlight the main points, in your own words, which provide value to the discussion in this thread? |
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Just fluff...
Occam's razor sides with meaning is use. meaning is the computational exploitation of the compact underlying structure of the world..
That is not meaning, it is gibberish. |
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Very interesting. Can you highlight the main points, in your own words, which provide value to the discussion in this thread?
Well.... the title of the thread was "What is thought?" This is a question that people and scientists have pondered for a long time. I have my own ideas, but I have learned that my ideas are simply said to be "not suitable" for the science and philosophy thread simply because I do not accept the premise thought arises from the human brain. I thought this was very interesting too. The most interesting sentence in it for me was this one: "For a variety of reasons, including arguments based on complexity theory, developmental biology, evolutionary programming, ethology, and simple inspection, this compact Occam program is most naturally seen to be in the DNA, rather than the brain." That is as far as I can take that line of thought given the boundaries I have found in this forum. I will say that I suspect that 'thought' comes from a field of DNA. |
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Eric B. Baum is an American computer scientist, artificial intelligence researcher and author. He is known for his materialist and evolutionist theories of intelligence and consciousness, set forth in his 2004 book What is Thought? (ISBN 0262524570).
In his book, Baum claims that intelligence, consciousness, qualia and free will are fully explained by evolution's mandate to "exploit the compact structure of the world." He argues that meaning and semantics arise whenever a compact description or program correctly captures a large amount of data. He sees the mind as composed of computational modules that are "meaningful" in this sense, found and improved by evolution over large time spans and largely encoded in the genome. The genome, in his view, also provides guidance ("inductive bias") to the very fast learning processes that occur during an organism's lifetime. Further the genome provides a complex of evaluation functions to guide the organism's decision processes, with the ultimate goal of maximizing propagation of the genes. The illusion of free will is seen as arising from the necessity to model future decisions of oneself and other actors, decisions that are guided by wants and desires but cannot be fully predicted. He has also developed software inspired by his theories, including Hayek, an evolutionary system that can solve large blocks world problems (named for economist Friedrich Hayek due to a bidding mechanism used by the program). Baum was awarded undergraduate and graduate degrees by Harvard University and a Ph.D. in physics by Princeton University. He has worked at the NEC Research Institute since 1990. He is the son of Leonard Baum, co-creator of the Baum–Welch algorithm. |
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Well.... the title of the thread was "What is thought?"
This is a question that people and scientists have pondered for a long time. I have my own ideas, but I have learned that my ideas are simply said to be "not suitable" for the science and philosophy thread simply because I do not accept the premise thought arises from the human brain. That is not the case though JB. Being suitable for the science/philosophy forum does not require holding such a premiss about thought. There are many philosophers who do not hold such a premiss. My aim here involves figuring out what is necessary for thought/belief formation to occur as we know it. I find no need to posit a source other than the physiological nervous system of a thinking subject. If something can be shown as not necessary for thought to occur, then why should we conclude that it is? |
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Well good luck figuring it out then.
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We have a couple of premisses that I can think of to work with.
1. At conception we are void of thought/belief. 2. At conception we possess thought/belief. -- Or we skip positing a premiss, after all they are unnecessary, and just look at the way things are. We can look at the thoughts that people write down and see how they tie together with one another. We can look at written history and compare the commonalities in the writings. We can look at language itself and see what it points to and what it doesn't. We can look at written thoughts and identify common denominators in all of them. Identity is one such common denominator. What is a thought if it is not to think about something? I mean what is left of a thought if the object of thought is removed? |
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I think Di's point, and I could be wrong here, was that it is not very engaging to just post some other author's thoughts on the matter, especially when those thoughts engage a host of other topics altogether.
I have several issues with that whole notion as well, but they are about things other than the topic. Although, the one notion that was brought(Occam's razor) is quite relevant to all philosophical pursuits. |
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Edited by
Jeanniebean
on
Tue 07/26/11 02:29 AM
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I think Eric B. Baum is much more qualified than I am with great credentials. He did, after all, write a book on the subject called "What is Thought." I have not read it.
He seems to think in a more academic and scientific manner which I am sure is more to your liking than anything I would do. Your two premises are not appropriate at this point because the question about what thought actually is hasn't been established. Or has it? I don't know. If you don't know what thought actually is, how can you set any premise about whether you are void of it at conception or possess it? So I would suggest you might want to decide what you think thought is or state your premise about what you believe thought is. |
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a thought is a potential 3-d fractal hologram seed. Not all thoughts survive the entire process of becoming a 3-d fractal hologram, but the ones that do, make up "reality" as we (think we) know it.
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I would say, Jb that we're putting thoughts down on paper... and I would say that with absolute certainty.
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