>> ^berticus:

jung had salient insights into human consciousness?
where?
next you'll be telling me freud was really great too.


If you don't get it, there's no use explaining.

It's...wasted breath.

He coined the term "synchronicity" which so many have tried to denigrate into "coincidence."

But it is much more than that, and only the aware will comprehend.

He recognized the archetypes that transcended cultures, around the world, through the centuries.

Anybody who calls bullshit on C.G. Jung hasn't done his homework.

jung had salient insights into human consciousness?

where?

next you'll be telling me freud was really great too.

i responded to your comment but i felt it only honest to post on your page.
here is what i posted:

oh come on rebuilder.
i understand you may disagree but you watch a 4 minute video and conclude this mans statement is nonsense.
ok...fair enough.
so..rebuilder.
are you telling us that you do not experience dreams?
that if and when you do these dreams are entirely linear in nature?
they follow the confines of the measurement of time?
really?
reeeeeally?
is THIS what you are trying to tell us all?
disagree with jung all you like but please my friend and i say this in the most gentle and human way:
think before you speak.

have you ever read any of jung's work?
while not as influential as freud and not nearly as controversial as R.D lang jung has offered some very salient insights into the human consciousness.
he was a humanist.

oh come on rebuilder.
i understand you may disagree but you watch a 4 minute video and conclude this mans statement is nonsense.
ok...fair enough.
so..rebuilder.
are you telling us that you do not experience dreams?
that if and when you do these dreams are entirely linear in nature?
they follow the confines of the measurement of time?
really?
reeeeeally?
is THIS what you are trying to tell us all?
disagree with jung all you like but please my friend and i say this in the most gentle and human way:
think before you speak.

have you ever read any of jung's work?
while not as influential as freud and not nearly as controversial as R.D lang jung has offered some very salient insights into the human consciousness.
he was a humanist.

I get what you're saying, but I still think what he's proposing necessarily forces people to make value judgments that are beyond science. While science can find evidence of empathy in the brain it can't tell us whether such empathy is necessarily good or bad. Say there is a society that is more "empathetic" than another society and that first society is more materially well off. You can't jump to the conclusion that empathy is good for survival, because there are hundreds of variables that affect the wealth of a nation and furthermore correlation does not necessarily mean causation. It could very well be the case that being materially well off creates a more empathetic society (or creates the conditions that allow such a society to arise). Or it could just be a total fluke.

That's what I found unclear in his speech--how exactly is science making value judgments? Science is providing facts about the world, but it still requires human consciousness to interpret those facts in a meaningful way. And people will interpret the facts differently and this will lead to conflict (global warming, the various string theories, etc.). How that conflict is resolved (whether with words or guns, for instance) will depend on a lot of things--including the values of those participating in the conflict. So it seems like a Catch-22 to me. You're using science to try to come up with value judgments about things, but in order to do that you have to make value judgments about the data you've collected. You're right back where you started.

Changing topics a bit here, I find his argument about the Muslim dress code frivolous. He is specifically cherry-picking by using Taliban-style extremely fundamentalist Islam as representative of all Islamic beliefs. It is true that certain Islamic governments have created laws to enforce a power divide between men and women but it is equally true that not all Muslims share this view and that Islamic countries vary widely in what is considered appropriate dress. The Koran itself admonishes both men and women to be modest in their dress and actions. Obviously certain Islamic scholars have ignored the "men" part and focused on the women in order to pursue their own agendas and strengthen their own power. Sam Harris blames religion for this but I blame human nature. It doesn't matter whether we are talking about religion, a political ideology, law, or any other organized system--there will be humans in the world who will attempt to twist and exploit it to their own advantage and to the disadvantage of those they don't care about. The crusade against religion that people like Dawkins and Harris are waging is, in my opinion, a waste of time. If you really want to change the world, find a way to change fundamental human nature.

Ironically, I believe this is the true purpose of religion--to encourage us to change our base desires or harness them for use towards a greater good. For me, whether a God or gods actually exist is irrelevant. If religion can help people to overcome their own innate self-destructive or selfish tendencies and work together for the good of humankind, then it is a useful tool. But all tools can equally be used as weapons. That doesn't mean you get rid of the tool, though. The problems of religion that both Harris and Dawkins talk about aren't problems with religion per se but with how certain people have interpreted religion in ways that are self-serving. I don't think religion needs to be destroyed. But I do agree with Sam Harris that we need to be vigilant against those who would use religion--or any other organized system for that matter--in order to pursue their own ends, and we need to be willing to call a spade a spade and not keep silent for fear of being considered ethnocentric. That's why I have no problem criticizing the Taliban's interpretation of the Koran and Islamic law. It seems to me to be a thinly veiled grab for power and dominance that uses religion as its cover. I could say the same thing about the drive to ban gay marriages in the U.S. or a host of other issues. My point is that these things are not representative of religions as a whole but instead are examples of discrete individuals (mis-)using religions to further their own agendas.

Sorry for writing so much. Took me a while to sort out all my thoughts on the matter. If you made it this far, thanks for reading.

>> ^mgittle:


I don't think it's about majority vs. minority happiness the way you make it sound. It's not 51% vs. 49%. If you accept his argument at the end regarding the father killing his gay child out of "love", then you must accept that there exists a type of love/empathy that is healthy for a vast majority of a population.
For example, in Turkish, there are two words for love. One is the type of love one feels for their parents, siblings, close friends/community. The other is more like passion/infatuation and would never be used for family/friends. We lack this basic word-based distinction in English, so the idea of love often gets strangely twisted between the multiple types and sometimes requires convoluted explanations of one's feelings. This distinction is important because I believe the former type requires empathy to feel, and the latter type is more instinctual and does not require empathy.
Therefore, if you can argue that empathy is a good survival trait because it creates a stronger nation/culture/etc, then there must be scientific evidence for empathy in the brain and evidence that certain individuals lack empathetic brains for whatever reason.
I don't think he's arguing that "good for the majority = good for everyone" is something that works 100% of the time. Clearly, personal freedom is important, but when personal freedom/morality encroaches on the freedoms of others (such as his argument that culture forces "voluntary" body covering, or the aforementioned father-killing-gay-son argument) it is no longer a good thing for anyone involved.

Noam, I live for music, the quest for continual elevation of my own and the collective human consciousness, and bacon.

Jedi mind trick.

The human consciousness is a malleable thing to waste.

First of all, these are two brilliant people faced with an uncertain question about an unclear topic. To have any meaningful conversation for any longer than 30 mins is a feat in and of itself. Bravo to everyone involved for their time and energy!

Since this is the internets, I will of course give my opinion. AI was something I wrote much about in college. First, I stared like the man on our left. I was a technologist, I believed in the power of computing and simulation. Facts were only things that were verifiable and proven through rigorous trial and error. In an effort to discover the truths of the universe. I had the utmost zeal for technology solving all the worlds problems, and that it could realize any possible challenge. After years of study and introduction to many different areas and ways of thinking, I had a, what I consider, more realistic understanding about technology and philosophy. With that said, lets get some meat!

Let us go over some of the things they mentioned. First, the Chinese room argument.
This is a thought experiment where a man goes into a room. It is locked and only has a small slot for access. In the room with the man is a typewriter and book of Chinese. The man does not speak Chinese, but the book has explanations of how to respond to certain symbol sets. It does not offer translated meaning or things of this nature. It is simply if you see "This" then type "That". It is pure syntax, no meaning is applied.

Now, a second man comes to the slot of the room. He inserts a sentence into the slot and waits. The man inside the box looks at the paper, looks at this guide and begins to churn out his output. He slides the output through the slot and the second man receives it. He reads it and it appears that the response is from something that knows Chinese. Something that understood what he said and replied. However, this is not what happen. The person inside knows nothing of how to speak that language, he was only responding syntactically to other syntax. This is not intelligence, rather, more definitely, this is not understanding.

Much to my disappointment I became aware of this thought experiment. Because currently, this is how ALL software is realized. The hardware is essentially dumb, it does nothing except what the software tells it to do. This means at best, a computer in its current form can never have understanding. So at best, this conversation has to be about new, different computers that doesn't work on the same syntactical model that we have today.

The counter to this was that humans can be understood in the same way a computer can, were as the hardware is just doing what the brain is telling it to. That we are just state machines with brains being the software and the body being the dumb hardware. This would imply that humans also do not have understanding. However, we do, and that is where the problem is.

Now, we must be clear on what understanding means before we move further. Understanding is hard to flesh out briefly, but I will try. Experiencing the color blue is more than just experiencing a certain wavelength a light. It has a context that goes beyond just the facts of it, you experience blueness! Blue has a real experienced value. You have done more than just become aware of it, you have experience of it. More over, you can actually think back upon the experience itself, it is more than just a wavelength to you, not only is it blue, but you have an experience of blue to reflect on with all sorts of other things relating to it.

The man in the room had no understanding of Chinese. It was gibberish to him. He can only do what he was told in his special language.

The next is a typical fallacy that I have used from time to time without realizing it. It is easy to do and it is made in this presentation. Appeal To complexity in a slightly modified form. That, we don't understand how human consciousness as the brain is complex. And, in fact, it is in that complexity that the emergent property of consciousness comes from. This of course is not necessarily true or untrue, but he is stating this as a fact of consciousness in computing being a possibility because of this.

Let us use another example. Let us say that we have broadcasting towers all over the USA. They are broadcasting all sorts of different programs to all sorts of different people. It is a complex web of towers and receivers but it all seems to work out ok. So, are we to conclude that radio towers are conscious? Of course not, but that is what are are doing with the human experience of consciousness. Lets look at that quickly.

When you experience something, you experience every one of your scenes simultaneously. You remember the sounds, the tastes, the sights...it is all there. However, your brain never really has a point in which all points connect. Your consciousness is something that seems to violate the laws of physics, that things are happening in different locations in space at different times, but for your consciousness, at the same time. This isn't something that is reducible to brain states, and not something that is physically possible in computer technology as we know it. It doesn't matter if it is parallel or not, if things don't touch but are somehow related this is mystifying; and as a result, unreproducible. Perhaps consciousnesses is reducible to one point in the brain we haven't found, but so far, there is no such thing.

I have already gone on way to long, and I could go on for about 20 more pages. I still have my thesis on it laying around here somewhere. I LOVE THIS TOPIC, but my studies have lead me to believe that creating an ACTUAL intelligence isn't possible with current digital technology. Let me remind everyone that digital computing hasn't changed since basically Leibniz , and that was in the 1600s. In other words, AI, or Computers with Consciousness is NOT possible with state machine logic.

I would like to point out one more fallacy the pro-AI guy was (and let me be clear, I love the idea of AI too, so I am pro as well! But I just think it is impossible) that simulations of of brain states is simulacrum, not experience. Simulacrum difference from actual experience because it begs the question, is this thing ACTUALLY experiencing anything other than a brain state. For instance, the color blue is not necessarily equal to any particular brain state. Brain states alone do not sufficiently explain human consciousnesses, to assume that a proper modeling of them is anything other than just another simulacrum is without cause. In short, a simulacrum does not an experience make. (The people in the painting aren't experiencing a wonderful day)

>> ^shole:
in ten to twenty years we will have a form of combined worldwide human consciousness

We are Borg. Resistance is futile. You will be assimilated.

the internet is the most important human invention since penicillin or electricity
what we have now and for ten years from now are just baby steps
in ten to twenty years we will have a form of combined worldwide human consciousness
stuff like iran-twitter and 'the anonymous' and the unstoppable piracy are just the first signs of this
even if his points were valid, which they aren't, what is the value of a really minor annoyance to one country next to the evolution of the human mind?

Supreme court decisions are meaningless. Law is meaningless. Presidential edicts are meaningless.

Everything you need to know on abortion is this: Human rights derive from human consciousness; unborn children don't have it; abortion is 100% morally neutral; those who oppose the human right to authority over ones own body and life are criminals; all pro-lifers should be executed. If you want to torture them a bit first, that's totally fine too.

Yeah, it is absolutely amazing how long behaviorism reigned--particularly in the field of second language learning--despite the fundamental flaw that it basically ignored human consciousness on the grounds that it couldn't be empirically measured.

On the other hand, some of Frankl's logotherapy theory is a little out there too in my opinion.

Sometimes I think I can see specific insights Carl has, as directly stemming from his recreational enjoyment of marijuana smoking. I'm not disparaging these insights, they are virtually all logically sound and rationally defensible. Its just that they are non-obvious, highly unconventional ways of viewing phenomena and humanity that we either typically take for granted or are oblivious to altogether. I think the most striking example of this is when he states that "We are (ie. human consciousness) the universe experiencing itself" in Cosmos. It seems like new agey piffle at first glance, but if you know a little about physics; the big bang, stellar nucleosynthesis, formation of planets, etc. chemistry and biology; evolution, hypothetical origins of life, brain complexity and neurology; then the statement takes on a whole new reality. We are the product of a mechanistic material universe and so we actually seem to be at least one of the ways that the universe 'knows itself'. These sorts of insights, while they could have been made in a completely sober state, bear the earmarks of cannabis influenced rumination. But whatever the method he arrived at these deep truths about nature, we should be eternally grateful. Some of us miss you so much Carl.