Re: The Emptiness of Theology

From: Dale Trynor (dalet_at_nbnet.nb.ca)
Date: 08/15/04 

Date: Sun, 15 Aug 2004 23:13:39 GMT

Robert J. Kolker wrote:

>
>
> Branimir Maksimovic wrote:
>
>> Well, Albert, I couldn't agree more with you. Brain science today
>> really looks like astrology, because it tries to "make testable
>> quantitative predictions", then tries to "check that via experiment
>> and observation".
>
>
> That is precisely why modern neurophysiology is NOT like astrology.
> Astrology is based on nonsense and makes no testable definite
> predictions. It is also based on the Babylonian ephemeris which is
> completely inaccurate.
>
> Modern neurophysiologoy is a science and astrology is not.
>
> As to how the mind works, one must first say what a mind is. Tell us,
> sport, where is your human mind located in the spacetime manifold. You
> do not have to be precise. Just give us a rough idea.
>
> Is your mind in your head? Is it in your spleen? Is it in your body?

Dale Trynor wrote:
The most logical guess is that its in the brain of course, asking where
exactly and it might not even turn out to work that way.

Long ago I came to the conclusion that it's most reasonable that it
takes many souls to make up a mind and one finds reason to speculate
that the mind uses some property of them as part and parcel of how a
mind actually works.

I am probably out of date on this but remember reading that the parts of
the brain where we experience images appears to be completely separate
from areas where we experience sound and it was a mystery at the time on
why we seam to experience both phenomena at the same time. Perhaps soul
quanta ( forgive my thinking I am making up terminology )have an
essential behavior to enable this apparent sharing the experiences so
that this is all possible and essential to its dezine.
Unfortunately this is all mysticism now but one finds no reason to
assume it will never become science when one figures out what the
questions are and then dreams up the experiments to actually try.

> What relation does this wonderful entity mind, have to your brain which
> can be seen (by various scans) and whose activity can actually be
> measured.

A post quite some time ago I looked at the idea that even insects are
probably able to experience such basic things as color and understanding
how they do this Should end up telling us how our minds enable us to
experience as well but they are vastly more simple.

I also posted on the idea of a reverse engineering stereo lithography
to recreate simple brains in at least a sufficient amount to allow much
easier study.
Difficultys of doing something like this required one to know enough
about the behavior of individual cells so that the artificially
recreated ones would also behave just like the original cells only by
using this method one can recreate all of the complex connections
without understanding anything about them let alone where any human
could recreate. Machines do this sort of thing well.

The proposed idea was to shave layers from a frozen and stained brain
and record the detales of each layer with every connection etc. Then
doing a reverse of the process where layers are layed down retaining all
of the original complexity. One major advantage could be had if it
proves that one can scale the whole thing up by an extreme degree and
still have it work, as this would both simplify its recreation and allow
more easy study.

I seriously cannot emphasize the usefulness of being able to develop the
tools to actually do this sort of thing.

Where does your mind go when you die. Your brain rots. Does
> your mind rot or does it float up to heaven to be with God?
>
> Bob Kolker
>
Its a good guess that soul quanta don't contain any more information
than expected of water molecules. So if any god exists it was surly a
manufactured one, by some rather advanced civilization and I have
examined this idea in one of my earlier posts looking at a somewhat
extended version of the Drake equation. Where one adds a bit more
speculation than its usually intended to do.
We both know that this sort of subject on the functioning of minds is
not yet developed well enough to be considered science, just as stone
age men would have thought the same of lightning. That doesn't mean it
never will be. And it will prove to be essential to the creation of
electronic devices the respond to experience rather than only respond to
input. We can only speculate now of what sort of increased range of
flexibility it might provide over that possible with AI as its now believed.

Logical questions to ask is why even insects would evolve a nervous
system that at least appears to responds to experience rather than just
respond to input the way that todays AI dose. It seams like a reasonable
speculation that it would provide some advantage and this can eventually
lead to some decent questions on evolution. A few clues to start is that
one time I estimated the amount of our DNA involved with creating our
brains and was surprised how small it appeared to be. 3 billion base
pares and only 3% is claimed to actually code for anything and of that
only 25% was involved with the brain or at least as I remember reading
so I could be wrong. . The required 25.5 base pares can be represented
by only 2 bits to represent the 4 nucleic acids so it goes down to just
under 7 megabytes when its converted to bytes of 8 bits each.

Somehow I cant see any way one could have an AI program of only 7
megabytes to develop the whole range of flexibilitys of a human mind.
Its to be noted here that the parts of the DNA that don't appear to code
for anything could yet prove to be important and I think I herd that its
now speculated that they control differentianism. I have a feeling and
more of a guess really that it might prove to be like clock ticks to
turn off repetitions such as when to stop making a proten when one has
enough of those type of cells.If these were basically like clock ticks
they would be very subject to efficient compression giving a much
smaller size. Someone here please step in and give an educated bit of
information to my obviously suspect speculations and I haven't had the
time to look into this more. I am interested.

Could it be that because nature is so good at repatative complexity
where one makes the same types of cells over and over again, i.e., our
skeletal structure is made of tiny cells where a cast piece of titanium
having very little ordered complexity would do as good. Could it be that
AI would require far to large of a file size and so tax any sort of
reasonably sized DNA for any sort of AI that could work with the
flexibility of a mind. So the dezine of a mind is in part due to the
ease of natures preference in repeating the same complexity over and
over again and allowing adaption to take care of the rest of the
complexity . Consciousness might be the result of these factors and
might even apply for the simplistic insects.

I have often emphasized that knowledge of a question is knowledge.
Knowledge of an original question is original knowledge.
For when trying to advance science, it helps to know what the questions are.
Dale

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