Why do we need stored memories in the brain?

[AV1611VET]

There's a world of difference between "pushy" and raising millions of dollars to buy politicians who will legislate Christian beliefs.

Nah.

Ever heard of "separation of church and state"?

 

[Akita Suggagaki]

"Patients such as H.M., who have lesions in the hippocampus on both sides of the brain, not only lose the ability to form new memories, but also lose memories for events that occurred in the years preceding the onset of their amnesia. The memories of events that took place in the distant past remain intact, whereas those that occurred at intermediate times are lost in a graded manner. This finding suggests that, with time, the hippocampus becomes less important for a given memory, and the frontal cortex more so."

Where Are Old Memories Stored in the Brain?.

I can only infer that having a limited, local, brain based, file system like memory is an important aspect of the human experience. That is important for us to exeprience the limitations.

 

[Akita Suggagaki]

There's a world of difference between "pushy" and raising millions of dollars to buy politicians who will legislate Christian beliefs.

Well lets face it, anyone with the where-with-all does it. It is legal. Is it immoral? I don't think so.

 

[bekkilyn]

They won't come after me like that anymore, but their attitude is always hostile.

Frankly, I believe religious fundamentalists (of any faith) would be inclined to come after you should the laws ever change in their favor. In fact, they would be inclined to "witch hunt" against those of their own faith as well should there be any doctrinal differences or any sort of behavior that seems suspicious to their world view. We've seen it throughout history over and over, and we continue to see it today in many areas around the world. There really is no time to ever be less than vigilant against the very real threats of religious fundamentalism. It's why separation of church and state is important when it comes to true religious liberty as it helps defend against the fundamentalists of the majority religion to legislate and enforce their views (up to and including physical violence) against those who either don't share them, or have lost favor with them in some way.

 

[Sorn]

There's a world of difference between "pushy" and raising millions of dollars to buy politicians who will legislate Christian beliefs.

To fair the followers of any countries majority religion would always like to have laws enacted to favor and encourage that religion. Most Christian nations are ones that believe in separation of state & church (& do a pretty good job most of the time) and most non-Christian nations do not.

If there was a nation where the bulk of its citizens regarded themselves as witches then there would probably be pressure to have laws that encouraged their beliefs, with a cauldron in every official govt building or some such thing etc

 

[Sorn]

I think that choice itself is just one of those non-empirical phenomena that is written into the fabric of reality, which is only available to certain entities of a certain complexity and above (I’m not trying to fall into a materialism debate, but materialism needs to be true to phrase certain questions the way that you are phrasing them). No matter how deep and well thought out a person’s rationale is for what reality is, we all will come to some sort of bottom foundation of “This is just how things are.” We recognize choices all over the place, and we are very good at being able to point it out when we see it, and we’re also great at being able to say when something is just mindless matter in motion, it’s intuitive for us unless we are skating in the middle somewhere between the two, something like an insect maybe. Perhaps this innate ability is why people are extra sensitive to the AI issue.

We are also very skilled with understanding empirical data and causal chains, it’s our gift, but I think that we lack a capacity for other kinds of understandings to reality, so we try to force feed everything into the model of materialistic cause & effect explanations because that is where our skills lie. If all you have is a hammer everything looks like a nail lol.

It’s really a spectacular hammer that we have no doubt about that! But it’s still a hammer. We are not so skilled at describing things like what feelings are, but even worse such question are very difficult to even understand what a coherent answer would even look like. How can I point out “Feeling embarrassed” to you in a science lab? Pointing out the physical brain states that correlate to the experiential feeling of being embarrassed seems like it’s fundamentally off the mark in some critical way. It seems off just like it would seem a bit off to point to a person acting out being embarrassed, and then calling that the official explanation of feeling embarrassing. But we always wanna go there though, to a physical causal chain explanation, it’s like a dog wanting to bite everything instead of picking things up with its paws. I just don’t think we have the capacity to ontologically grasp certain concepts like qualia, yet they just happen to be the most real instances of real that we could ever know, nothing can ever be more real to you than your experiences.

I mostly see these mind body problems starting off with assuming this knowledge anyway, starting off with “Suppose that we reach the point of complete exhaustive knowledge of physical brain states...” If we had two exact cell for cell cloned twins, both telling us that they are experiencing the same exact brain states, states that many previous test subjects have identified to match up with the brain state of feeling embarrassed, the problem with knowing if they are telling the truth or not is that there’s no empirical way to verify if both clones are telling the truth, if one is telling the truth and the other is a qualia zombie, or if they are both qualia zombies. Now it IS an extremely good inference that they are both telling the truth, but it’s out of the hands of physical verification, you are limited to having to take their word for it.

Likewise it’s an extremely good inference that AI is a qualia zombie and emotionally dark inside. But scientifically I can’t prove you wrong (beyond the inference) if you keep insisting that it is feeling emotions, coming to free decisions, etc. Actually, if you could somehow prove to me that AI is alive (short of very complicated biological splicing with human tissue that might make sense in a structural way) I would consider it to be an extreme piece of evidence for the supernatural.

Every single task performed by a computer is complete gibberish and meaningless on a materialism model, and the input & output only means anything at all if a mind first assigns meaning to all of the symbols. Black electronic line segments on a calculator screen that transforms through the aesthetic process of “5” “+” “5” “=“ “10” has absolutely no meaning whatsoever. It only has meaning if logical minds have arbitrarily decided that “5” refers to the concept of 5, and “+” refers to the concept of addition, etc...combined with minds then setting up an algorithm designed to accurately make these symbols match up to our arbitrarily made up math language, and so on. The uselessness of a super computer would follow the same line of reasoning as well, absent a mind that meticulously programmed it, yet to a much more impressive degree than a calculator obviously.

I could be wrong but I thought that we already got there. Off the top of my head I’m thinking that if a computer was able to beat the greatest chess player in the world then surely it’s output is over the heads of any of the programmers. Maybe it’s a different story if we talk about having a team of people slowly unpacking everything that it did after the fact.

"Off the top of my head I’m thinking that if a computer was able to beat the greatest chess player in the world then surely it’s output is over the heads of any of the programmers. "
Strictly speaking, such a computer is not doing anything a chess grandmaster couldn't do its just that it would take the human an impractically long time to do it. Years would be spent on just one game.
So its output is not above the heads of programmers, but the quantity of its output is.

 

[Akita Suggagaki]

Kinesin and microtubule memory storage

microtubule memories - Bing video

 

[AV1611VET]

"Off the top of my head I’m thinking that if a computer was able to beat the greatest chess player in the world then surely it’s output is over the heads of any of the programmers. "

Stockfish

 

[awitch]

Nah.

Ever heard of "separation of church and state"?

Yes, and Christians have been chipping away at it for years.

 

[awitch]

If there was a nation where the bulk of its citizens regarded themselves as witches then there would probably be pressure to have laws that encouraged their beliefs, with a cauldron in every official govt building or some such thing etc

Very much disagree. Our beliefs are wide and very personal. It is completely nonsensical and immoral for us to proselytize or push others to follow our paths. But if there was, I would oppose it just as strongly as any other religion.

 

[awitch]

Frankly, I believe religious fundamentalists (of any faith) would be inclined to come after you should the laws ever change in their favor. In fact, they would be inclined to "witch hunt" against those of their own faith as well should there be any doctrinal differences or any sort of behavior that seems suspicious to their world view. We've seen it throughout history over and over, and we continue to see it today in many areas around the world. There really is no time to ever be less than vigilant against the very real threats of religious fundamentalism. It's why separation of church and state is important when it comes to true religious liberty as it helps defend against the fundamentalists of the majority religion to legislate and enforce their views (up to and including physical violence) against those who either don't share them, or have lost favor with them in some way.

As far as public stoning, I don't see that happening.
But Pagan friends all have stories about harassment, destruction of property, and threats because they were Pagan. I've witnessed some instances myself.

 

[AV1611VET]

Very much disagree. Our beliefs are wide and very personal. It is completely nonsensical and immoral for us to proselytize or push others to follow our paths. But if there was, I would oppose it just as strongly as any other religion.

Then how did the School of Wicca get federal tax exemption?

 

[AV1611VET]

I've witnessed some instances myself.

Did you call the cops?

 

[awitch]

Then how did the School of Wicca get federal tax exemption?

They submitted the forms.
Not sure how that relates to legislating their beliefs, though.

 

[Jok]

My hypothesis is that neither humans nor computers are alive in the way that humans perceive themselves to be alive. Humans perception of life is a deception.

Are you talking about experiments that show that our brains create shortcuts to details sometimes?

The human brain sometimes cannot see a cause-and-effect explanation for its behavior, so it imagines something that transcends the physical world must be exercising "freewill" - a soul/spirit.

I don’t think that the physical universe covers all of the bases of explaining what the whole universe is, minds are just as much a part of the universe as wood, and also the word Emergence is just to say that things take place when A, B, and C come together and we have no idea why since it’s beyond any explanation of our physical laws. So that even a non-theistic worldview is simply blind to a large portion of ultimate reality, so not being able to exhaustively explain what free will is doesn’t have to involve an appeal to a theistic God.

Going back to what I said last time, no matter what you believe you eventually reach a bottom point of “This is simply the way that things are in reality.” Actually living out a life with free will is good evidence for me that free will is real. At the end of the day people could be making a hubris claim that “If we can’t ontologically understand and explain what free will is then it has to be fake.”

However, a computer designed to find cause-and-effect explanations for everything might also be unable to explain its own behavior and imagine that it has a transcendent soul. Thus a computer can be as "alive" and "conscious" as a human. (I don't necessarily believe this. I believe in transcendent souls and so forth, but sometimes I feel a bit cynical about it too.)

Why would a bunch of bits that are nothing more than 1s or 0s (absence or presence of electrical current) make this leap you refer to of “wanting” to describe things? Technically it’s just running an algorithm and it’s not “Finding” things in the way that we use the word find in other situations. If materialism is true however then you have a good point, there wouldn’t be a difference in how the word find or want is used between computers or people. However, from what we know the only way that we can design something so that it wants in the sense that humans want, is to organize a computer in some way that includes biological tissue, organs, brain matter, etc. If you found stuff like that when you dismantle your computer then you could be in step with the evidence of what causes self awareness to emerge.

From the ten thousand foot level, the chess program played a good game of chess, and that was what the programmers expected. What if the chess program said "I refuse to play chess! I want to play checkers!"

That’s what I think can never happen, short of merging the computer engineering department with the biology department in some fancy way.

 

[Jok]

"Off the top of my head I’m thinking that if a computer was able to beat the greatest chess player in the world then surely it’s output is over the heads of any of the programmers. "
Strictly speaking, such a computer is not doing anything a chess grandmaster couldn't do its just that it would take the human an impractically long time to do it. Years would be spent on just one game.
So its output is not above the heads of programmers, but the quantity of its output is.

I had a feeling that it was a bad example. And maybe I’m just wrong, all I’m going by is that I vaguely recall hearing that programmers have now lost the ability to keep track of what their own programs do. Maybe it was just misinformation that I heard. Feel free to straighten me out on this lol.

 

[Akita Suggagaki]

Thus a computer can be as "alive" and "conscious" as a human. (I don't necessarily believe this. I believe in transcendent souls and so forth, but sometimes I feel a bit cynical about it too.)

I think we always have to leave the door open for the subtlest of the subtle. How far down can we go into the deep structure of mater? We come to a technological limitation. We have no idea what is beyond it just as early humans had no idea of atom and quantum realms. Perhaps "transcendence" is a matter of subtlety.

 

[cloudyday2]

Are you talking about experiments that show that our brains create shortcuts to details sometimes?

I don’t think that the physical universe covers all of the bases of explaining what the whole universe is, minds are just as much a part of the universe as wood, and also the word Emergence is just to say that things take place when A, B, and C come together and we have no idea why since it’s beyond any explanation of our physical laws. So that even a non-theistic worldview is simply blind to a large portion of ultimate reality, so not being able to exhaustively explain what free will is doesn’t have to involve an appeal to a theistic God.

Going back to what I said last time, no matter what you believe you eventually reach a bottom point of “This is simply the way that things are in reality.” Actually living out a life with free will is good evidence for me that free will is real. At the end of the day people could be making a hubris claim that “If we can’t ontologically understand and explain what free will is then it has to be fake.”

Why would a bunch of bits that are nothing more than 1s or 0s (absence or presence of electrical current) make this leap you refer to of “wanting” to describe things? Technically it’s just running an algorithm and it’s not “Finding” things in the way that we use the word find in other situations. If materialism is true however then you have a good point, there wouldn’t be a difference in how the word find or want is used between computers or people. However, from what we know the only way that we can design something so that it wants in the sense that humans want, is to organize a computer in some way that includes biological tissue, organs, brain matter, etc. If you found stuff like that when you dismantle your computer then you could be in step with the evidence of what causes self awareness to emerge.

That’s what I think can never happen, short of merging the computer engineering department with the biology department in some fancy way.

Emergent things are simply flim-flam. An emergent thing is chemistry and biology in human brains. Without the brains that believe in emergent things there are no emergent things. Alien minds looking at the same physical things would likely imagine very different emergent things as approximations and conveniences in their thinking.

So there isn't much difference between humans and computers except that humans have been evolving for millions of years and computers have only had a few decades. Soon they will surpass us and put us in nature reserves (if they keep us around for anything at all).

 

[cloudyday2]

I think we always have to leave the door open for the subtlest of the subtle. How far down can we go into the deep structure of mater? We come to a technological limitation. We have no idea what is beyond it just as early humans had no idea of atom and quantum realms. Perhaps "transcendence" is a matter of subtlety.

When I have tried to think about how transcendence might work I have struggled. It is too subtle for me. LOL

 

[bekkilyn]

As far as public stoning, I don't see that happening.
But Pagan friends all have stories about harassment, destruction of property, and threats because they were Pagan. I've witnessed some instances myself.

I've seen it too. Not quite as much recently, but definitely during the time of "Satanic panic". Ignorance at its finest, I suppose.