Patterns, DSeid? Don’t tell me you’re jumping on the realist platform!
erl,
Again demonstrating my ignorance, can you explain to me why “patterns” is a “realist” position? I seriously don’t know what platform I adhere to …
I do believe that Kurzweil has it mostly right, with one caveat: I don’t think that we know, or can ever really know, what reality ultimately is. But we get closer when we realize that what we percieve is really patterns and that what we think of as matter itelf, is our perception of some sort of pattern of something.
At the most fundamental, modern physicists are mainly agreed, as expressed by Arkani-Hamed in this week’s Science, that “When you get to distances shorter than Plank length, really, fundamentally, there is no space at all, … Space itself is created out of the interaction of particles.”
We percieve patterns and try to make sense of it. We are a pattern percieving and identifying itself. I continue to believe that our attempts to understand these patterns can be well visualized by a conceptual space metaphor with a heavy dose of nonlinear dynamics.
See, I don’t have any issue accepting that I’m a “self”, since for all practical perceptive reasons, a self is definitely there. It’s the “what am I” question that gets to me. What is perceiving self? What is making this post?
I like Kurzweil’s posit up above. I also am enamored of the idea of “wholons”. As wholons, every object is a complete whole, and yet at the same time, an aspect of a greater whole (and also composed of lesser wholes).
Wholes and Wholons start to sound weird when you say the words many times.
DSeid, the question is whether abstract properties of things exist. If you’ll recall, the nominalist platforms states that they don’t, while the realist platform states that they do. The transcendent realist thinks they have existence in their own right, on a level of existence that, obviously, transcends normal reality, while the immanent realist feels that they exist, but only as a property of things.
Asserting the existence of patterns betrays at least an immanent realist platform. Requiring that a universal must be coupled with something that has identity (a unique identity, I would imagine) implies immanent realism.
Saying that only the patterns exist puts one on a very firm footing for transcendent realism, the notion Plato gave “form” to (philosophy joke) some time ago.
Unfortunately, our previous debate on universals was destroyed. Only the first page remains, which I feel is a grand shame as it was a rather lively discussion of the matter, though not quite as messy as the identity thread. However, in the identity thread we did get down to the level of patterns themselves being the focal point of identity, which is sort of interesting in itself.
The mental “I”, as distinguished from the physical “I”, is a very interesting question. I like to stick to the notion that the self is the negative space of introspection into the matter of self. Whenever we look, we find a thing looking… that “looker” evades the toughtest of internal pursuits. There seems to be no built-in mirror for the self to observe itself.
Now, that alone doesn’t seem to imply that the self can’t exist. If we stick to a materialist perspective, disproving the self should be possible since we have a finite space to work with: specifically, the human brain.
However, having a good model for “self” in a brain should prove to be exceedingly difficult, much like having a good model for San Fransisco would be exceedingly difficult. Breaking up human functions into self-contained units seems promising, much like considering only SF’s streets when designing a map, and ignoring the third dimension. If we try and contain brain activity to speech functions, sight functions, et cetera, and find nothing left over that does anything, then we are in a strange place indeed.
At least one experiment that I have read of implies that memory of behavior is not part of a specific location in the brain, or at least is highly redundant. I believe I have mentioned this experiment to you before. A neuroscientist took a series of rats (or mice, I don’t recall which), and taught them to run a specific maze. Then he basically performed brain surgury on the whole set. Without destroying any one creature, taking the sum of all creatures he had basically destroyed the entire brain (that wasn’t a part of, for example, controlling heartbeat and other vital functions). All creatures could remember, after regaining the ability to move again, how to run the maze.
So the learned memory of this behavior was either located inside of vital control areas of the brain (which seems unlikely) or was not located in any one portion of the brain, or was located in several portions of the brain.
This experiment has led me to view the self as a redundant, competing set of spacially seperate “algorithms” which can all act on most parts of the brain. Perhaps they even do so simultaneously and specialize in the automation of certain tasks (like speech, writing, hearing, seeing) and only take up the slack from damaged or non-functional algorithms if it is found that they cannot work anymore.
Victims of strokes, for instance, can relearn to speak after some time. I think this betrays the idea that the self is “a” thing, but rather hume’s collection of “things” which can relate information amongst themselves.
Introspection, then, yields one “algorithm”'s examination of others (something which it can and does do anyway as a matter of course). When we wish to examine that algorithm, another “takes over”.
Our language is built on the idea of a singular self, so the above phrasing is convenient, not implicatory. It is difficult to describe the notion of competing and cooperating systems as “self” which can all result in similar “feelings”, as the notion of “feeling the same thing” seems to imply a central and singular “feeler” which is, of course, not what I want to say, but language doesn’t easily offer me a way out.
A central “feeler” could exist, of course, in the same way that there is a central thing which relays visual data, a central thing which relays auditory data, and so on. The stuff of consciousness, then, IMO, are these competing and cooperating algorithms, and the notion of “self” is a sixth sense of sorts. Perhaps a place where algorithms share information.
Thanks for the refresher. I too regret the loss of those threads. Other than the bicker with another poster (whose monicker tact disallows my mentioning), it was quite fun and would be entertaining to reread.
Let’s leave aside the physics for the moment and recap the patterns of the world and our perceptions of them, with special attention to points relevent to universals and realism. As I recall my position was that patterns exist, but that our perceptions of patterns are another thing altogether and are all that we can ever “know.” Thus that “universals” are, by definition, outside our purview. Thus “red” is not a “universal” it is a perception that requires the act of perception to exist, a function of cone recptors stimulating LGN cells, up through levels of visual cortex, in response to a range of light reflecting off particular objects. The pattern of light reflectence is there, but the perception of it is another thing.
The physics gets dicier. Space itself arising from nothingness, not vacuum, but no space, no time, just a relationship between particles that have no mass or expanse themselves (those properties result fro the nature of the particles and their interactions), and exist without space to exist in, is a hard concept for me to get my puny brain around. But one doesn’t need to evoke process physics to get that view, many mainstream physicists concur that that is just the way it is. Is this the same as Plato’s ideal forms, in which patterns are the forms? I don’t think so, and I don’t think that I take a realist position, but at least I now understand why you think so.
And Churchill agrees with your sense that the self is actually an overlapping, looping, partially redundant, widely distributed, set of concepts coordinated in ways yet poorly understood. To my view, the “self” in that sentient consciousness sense is the dominant resonant pattern(s) of the moment, the winner of the competition for the resources of the prefrontal cortex and other substrate of what gets called “working memory”, “a place where algorithms share information.”
It’s scary when we agree, isn’t it?
Heh… we never agree for long, though! 
Let’s see, if I disagree with that statement then I’m proving myself wrong by disagreeing … if I agree that the statement is true then I’m disproving the statement … where is Xeno when you need him? 
What a zen group you all are.
Erek