What is mind and where did it come from?

[GaryTaylor]

Its programmed language. When does a transmission change to third gear? When does the rabbit on the track cross the finish line. The question should be what model is it or who built it and where are the directions.

We are talking words and supposed paradigm concepts as if everyone knows what a soul is and where it resides and is in agreement.

A computer program, or just a program, is a sequence of instructions, written to perform a specified task. It doesn’t “think” as it can’t form an idea outside the mechanics of its program. A program about sports can’t intentionally change its program and speak of love.

What you have is secondary intention on specifics. It recalls limited information fed to it on specifics. It can’t learn by intention or act by first intentions or reason the validity of its own intent. .

To put this simply the turing test supposes what a mind is from nonsensical conclusions. Is a mind material? A mind can be assembled? Aquinas is right above, we are talking accidents not substance.

And real apple isn’t a plastic apple anymore than Gold is Pyrite.

Can a programmed rabbit on the track decide to dissent, step off the track and head to stands because he decided to speak to a pretty girl? Can a rabbit simply decide it doesn’t want to run today?

 

[inocente]

Edward Feser has an interesting article, " Accept no Imitations " on his most recent blog dealing with the Turning Test and othe problems of the mind.

Feser completely misses the point of Turing’s paper. Turing wants to avoid the trap which Feser falls into, and which you also fell into in titling this thread.

Turing does not want to be caught up in interminable arguments about what is meant by “mind” or “machine” or “thinking”. Sixty years after his paper, philosophers still can’t even agree whether animals or the zombies they themselves invented can think.

Turing tries to avoid all of that by considering purely the acts of thinkers.

I wonder how Feser stores all the info on his blog? Do you think that is all on his hard drive? Probably out on some cloud, don’t you think?

All blog services are in the cloud. Feser gets his from google - the clue is “blogspot” in the address. Anyone can start a free blog there. You can. I looked at addresses you might like and unfortunately the following have already been taken:

aristotle.blogspot.com.es/
aquinas.blogspot.com.es/
thomasaquinas.blogspot.com.es/

 

[GaryTaylor]

I’m unsure how to draw a conclusion about this…

Turing does not want to be caught up in interminable arguments about what is meant by “mind” or “machine” or “thinking”. Sixty years after his paper, philosophers still can’t even agree whether animals or the zombies they themselves invented can think.

Turing tries to avoid all of that by considering purely the acts of thinkers.

How do those two go together?

 

[Bahman]

Edward Feser has an interesting article, " Accept no Imitations " on his most recent blog dealing with the Turning Test and othe problems of the mind. But to find out what’s in it, you have to read it. You know like Pelosi said, " You have to pass the thing before you find out what’s in it. " When I read the article I was thinking of our resident skeptics and one in particular.

edwardfeser.blogspot.com/

Linus2nd

Mind is consciousness and it didn’t come from anywhere.

 

[Linusthe2nd]

Alll Popes since the end of the 13 th century have praised the works of Thomas Aquinas. I urge all Catholic viewers therefore to shrug off the prejudices of modern scientism and modernism give St. Thomas a fair and objective hearing. Contrary to the assertions of some here, he speaks the truth to every age and every discipline.

Faith and Reason, Encyclical of Saint Pope John Paul ll

The enduring originality of the thought of Saint Thomas Aquinas

1. A quite special place in this long development belongs to Saint Thomas, not only because of what he taught but also because of the dialogue which he undertook with the Arab and Jewish thought of his time. In an age when Christian thinkers were rediscovering the treasures of ancient philosophy, and more particularly of Aristotle, Thomas had the great merit of giving pride of place to the harmony which exists between faith and reason. Both the light of reason and the light of faith come from God, he argued; hence there can be no contradiction between them.(44)

More radically, Thomas recognized that nature, philosophy’s proper concern, could contribute to the understanding of divine Revelation. Faith therefore has no fear of reason, but seeks it out and has trust in it. Just as grace builds on nature and brings it to fulfilment,(45) so faith builds upon and perfects reason. Illumined by faith, reason is set free from the fragility and limitations deriving from the disobedience of sin and finds the strength required to rise to the knowledge of the Triune God. Although he made much of the supernatural character of faith, the Angelic Doctor did not overlook the importance of its reasonableness; indeed he was able to plumb the depths and explain the meaning of this reasonableness. Faith is in a sense an “exercise of thought”; and human reason is neither annulled nor debased in assenting to the contents of faith, which are in any case attained by way of free and informed choice.(46)

This is why the Church has been justified in consistently proposing Saint Thomas as a master of thought and a model of the right way to do theology. In this connection, I would recall what my Predecessor, the Servant of God Paul VI, wrote on the occasion of the seventh centenary of the death of the Angelic Doctor: “Without doubt, Thomas possessed supremely the courage of the truth, a freedom of spirit in confronting new problems, the intellectual honesty of those who allow Christianity to be contaminated neither by secular philosophy nor by a prejudiced rejection of it. He passed therefore into the history of Christian thought as a pioneer of the new path of philosophy and universal culture. The key point and almost the kernel of the solution which, with all the brilliance of his prophetic intuition, he gave to the new encounter of faith and reason was a reconciliation between the secularity of the world and the radicality of the Gospel, thus avoiding the unnatural tendency to negate the world and its values while at the same time keeping faith with the supreme and inexorable demands of the supernatural order”.(47)

1. Another of the great insights of Saint Thomas was his perception of the role of the Holy Spirit in the process by which knowledge matures into wisdom. From the first pages of his Summa Theologiae,(48) Aquinas was keen to show the primacy of the wisdom which is the gift of the Holy Spirit and which opens the way to a knowledge of divine realities. His theology allows us to understand what is distinctive of wisdom in its close link with faith and knowledge of the divine. This wisdom comes to know by way of connaturality; it presupposes faith and eventually formulates its right judgement on the basis of the truth of faith itself: “The wisdom named among the gifts of the Holy Spirit is distinct from the wisdom found among the intellectual virtues. This second wisdom is acquired through study, but the first ‘comes from on high’, as Saint James puts it. This also distinguishes it from faith, since faith accepts divine truth as it is. But the gift of wisdom enables judgement according to divine truth”.(49)

Yet the priority accorded this wisdom does not lead the Angelic Doctor to overlook the presence of two other complementary forms of wisdom—philosophical wisdom, which is based upon the capacity of the intellect, for all its natural limitations, to explore reality, and theological wisdom, which is based upon Revelation and which explores the contents of faith, entering the very mystery of God.

w2.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_jp-ii_enc_15101998_fides-et-ratio.html

No I do not apologize for the philosophy of a Catholic philosopher all Popes have praised since the end of the 13 th century. And I urge all Catholic viewers at least to shrug off the prejudices of modern scientism and give St. Thomas a fair and objective hearing. Contrary to the assertions of some here, he speaks the truth to every age and discipline.

Linus2nd

 

[GaryTaylor]

Mind is consciousness and it didn’t come from anywhere.

Computer isn’t consciousness and the best I could see its an accident of man. Perhaps it can even be reduced to a race of man. But it came from somewhere.

 

[Linusthe2nd]

Feser completely misses the point of Turing’s paper. Turing wants to avoid the trap which Feser falls into, and which you also fell into in titling this thread.

Turing does not want to be caught up in interminable arguments about what is meant by “mind” or “machine” or “thinking”. Sixty years after his paper, philosophers still can’t even agree whether animals or the zombies they themselves invented can think.Turing tries to avoid all of that by considering purely the acts of thinkers.

But he excluded the educated classes, who presumably are best to judge.

Linus2nd

 

[GaryTaylor]

the acts

Comparison and not doing well imho.

 

[PseuTonym]

I will define a “machine” as a physical object that produces physical and chemical change by its physical/chemical arrangement.

You changed your wording from “provoke” to “produce.” With your old definition, it seemed that a cookbook was an example of a machine. Under your new definition, is a cookbook an example of a machine?

Do you distinguish between a part or component of a machine and an entire machine?

Do you distinguish between what was designed by human beings and what wasn’t? Do you distinguish between what grows and what is manufactured? Do you distinguish between damage and injury/infection? Do you distinguish between repair and treatment/cure?

It is an attempt to move beyond the overly simplistic explanation of biological life necessarily involving the presence of a soul.

How does misusing the word “machine” (selectively, depending on context) produce a significant contribution to the study of biology?

 

[GEddie]

I’d rather know your opinion.

Fair enough. I don’t want to say too much, as I am unqualified.

But there is a line between living human life and a human being slowly dying; and ISTM that she spent a long time on the shadowy side of that line.

Humanness depends on both biological life and the conscious mind; a dead body is not a human being. And life and mind roughly go together; one must be alive to have a mind, but the body cannot keep alive if the mind is completely and permanently gone.

Indeed. It is arguable. So at what point do you think the programming takes over?

If a point is reached where human thought is indiscernible and only the programming operates the body (which we already have, in part, in the instance of long-term coma), you would be over that line, IMNAAHO.

 

[PseuTonym]

Turing does not want to be caught up in interminable arguments about what is meant by “mind” or “machine” or “thinking”.

Turing tries to avoid all of that by considering purely the acts of thinkers.

After a thinker dies, people ordinarily are interested in getting access to private notes that were not intended for publication, but that disclose trains of thoughts. Such private notes might includes notes written in the margins of books owned by the thinker. However, the actions involved in creating such private notes play no role in the Turing test. So focusing purely on the actions of thinkers is not enough to give us the Turing test.

The Turing test is about acting as in dramatic performance rather than acting as in action. Whatever goal an actual human thinker was pursuing while alive, the goal of the Turing test is not to pursue that goal, but to instead to pursue the goal of appearing to be a thinker.

I would not judge Turing the thinker based on his invention of the “Turing test.” An idea might have zero value, but that does not necessarily tell us anything about the thinker who thought of the idea. There are a lot of dead ends. That some dead ends have captured the imagination of the general public tells us more about the general public than about the thinker.

 

[blase6]

You changed your wording from “provoke” to “produce.” With your old definition, it seemed that a cookbook was an example of a machine. Under your new definition, is a cookbook an example of a machine?

Do you distinguish between a part or component of a machine and an entire machine?

Do you distinguish between what was designed by human beings and what wasn’t? Do you distinguish between what grows and what is manufactured? Do you distinguish between damage and injury/infection? Do you distinguish between repair and treatment/cure?

According to my understanding of “machine”, man-made objects that move themselves in some way at some point, viruses, bacteria, plants, animals, and the human body are all machines. It is difficult to set boundaries for definitions in a blurry world, which is part of the reason I do not like the idea of “substance” and “accident” applied to physical objects.

Every conceivable part of a machine works together with other parts so closely that the whole machine can only be described accurately as a combination of the parts, not existing as a real objective substance independent of parts. This would apply to man-made and God-made machines.

God has created machines that work towards their own survival and reproduce. We see this in all organisms. So when a human being constructs a “machine”, it is the same as an organism in a sense, that they both carry out physical changes. Our machines don’t grow or have the ability to reproduce yet, but it would not be beyond our capability to design them for those functions, taking in mind how those would not necessarily be improvements. Damage and repair do not have much real difference in man-made and God-made machines, except that God has designed a lot of organisms to have self-repairing functions to some extent.

How does misusing the word “machine” (selectively, depending on context) produce a significant contribution to the study of biology?

I don’t know. I am trying to develop a philosophically sound definition of “machine” to show that there is little significant difference between biological functions and mechanical functions.

 

[PseuTonym]

I am trying to develop a philosophically sound definition of “machine” to show that there is little significant difference between biological functions and mechanical functions.

If you are interested in biology, then you need to distinguish between living and non-living. The following describes a machine (or is it a machine?) that keeps the liver organ of a human being alive:

Machine that preserves liver outside body offers new hope to transplant patients

Link:
telegraph.co.uk/news/health/news/9933528/Machine-that-preserves-liver-outside-body-offers-new-hope-to-transplant-patients.html

The device preserves livers and helps damaged tissue to repair itself.
At present, donated livers are cooled to 4C (39.2F) to preserve them, but this process does not stop them from deteriorating and they can only be stored for about 12 hours.
The machine warms the organ to body temperature and circulates a combination of blood, oxygen and nutrients through it, allowing it to function just as it would inside a human body.

Researchers are confident they will be able to keep donor organs alive for 24 hours, and pre-clinical tests suggest it may be possible to preserve them for 72 hours or more.
So far two patients have received livers in pilot trials to test the machine at London’s King’s College Hospital. Neither has suffered any complications.

Professor Constantin Coussios, of Oxford University’s department of engineering science, who is one of the device’s inventors, said he had been amazed by the successful trials.

Professor Nigel Heaton, director of transplant surgery at King’s College Hospital, said: “Buying the surgeon extra time extends the options open to our patients, many of whom would otherwise die waiting for an organ to become available.”

Some 650 liver transplants are performed in the UK each year.

 

[GEddie]

To an extent, the Human Body is, indeed, a complex machine. Body’s limbs, muscles, neck, lungs, etc, all conform to mechanical principles (as they must, in a physical body).

However, in the context of comparing a natural product (the human mind) to the results of human effort (“machines”), using the word machine to describe natural beings is misleading and, in fact, begs the question.

ICXC NIKA.

 

[blase6]

If you are interested in biology, then you need to distinguish between living and non-living. The following describes a machine (or is it a machine?) that keeps the liver organ of a human being alive:

Machine that preserves liver outside body offers new hope to transplant patients

Link:
telegraph.co.uk/news/health/news/9933528/Machine-that-preserves-liver-outside-body-offers-new-hope-to-transplant-patients.html

Unless you believe in souls of non-persons there is not a clear distinction between “living” and “non-living”. We think organisms “die” when they stop functioning. A machine can “die” to. But organisms are designed to go on functioning up to death, and then they decompose. A man-made machine can “die” many times as long as it is continually started up and maintained.

 

[GEddie]

Unless you believe in souls of non-persons there is not a clear distinction between “living” and “non-living”. We think organisms “die” when they stop functioning. A machine can “die” to. But organisms are designed to go on functioning up to death, and then they decompose. A man-made machine can “die” many times as long as it is continually started up and maintained.

Except for viruses (the body kind), there is indeed a sharp line between life and nonlife.

Life (other than viruses) is organized by cells, is self-replicating, and within the cells (or a larger boundary, such as the human skin) is a self-maintaining island of low entropy. Once that self-maintaining process breaks down, it cannot be resumed.

Man made machines are not cells and do not contain them, and do not self-maintain against entropy. They can be restarted again and again because they are NOT alive, up until entropy likewise gets the better of them.

It is no coincidence that the physically smallest part (a switch, a “Jesus bolt” in aviation, or a stuck bearing) can stop a machine or crash a plane, etc. Small parts are precisely the most likely to be affected by entropic change.

This is not the case in biological life. Physically small parts of the human body are no more likely to fail than the larger ones.

ICXC NIKA.

 

[blase6]

Except for viruses (the body kind), there is indeed a sharp line between life and nonlife.

Life (other than viruses) is organized by cells, is self-replicating, and within the cells (or a larger boundary, such as the human skin) is a self-maintaining island of low entropy. Once that self-maintaining process breaks down, it cannot be resumed.

Man made machines are not cells and do not contain them, and do not self-maintain against entropy. They can be restarted again and again because they are NOT alive, up until entropy likewise gets the better of them.

It is no coincidence that the physically smallest part (a switch, a “Jesus bolt” in aviation, or a stuck bearing) can stop a machine or crash a plane, etc. Small parts are precisely the most likely to be affected by entropic change.

This is not the case in biological life. Physically small parts of the human body are no more likely to fail than the larger ones.

ICXC NIKA.

Someday, at least in theory, we could replicate cellular life in machines. My point is that both biological machines and mechanical man-made machines do the same thing, which is to either move physically or to change chemicals.

 

[inocente]

I’m unsure how to draw a conclusion about this…
inocente;12752773:

Turing does not want to be caught up in interminable arguments about what is meant by “mind” or “machine” or “thinking”. Sixty years after his paper, philosophers still can’t even agree whether animals or the zombies

they themselves invented can think.

Turing tries to avoid all of that by considering purely the acts of thinkers.

How do those two go together?

Intelligent is as intelligent does, and stupid is as stupid does. We don’t a priori decide all female students must be stupid and all male students must be intelligent, we test all of them using the same exam.

 

[GaryTaylor]

Intelligent is as intelligent does, and stupid is as stupid does. We don’t a priori decide all female students must be stupid and all male students must be intelligent, we test all of them using the same exam.

Yes thats what we are discussing the difference between real intelligence and stupidity I suppose.

 

[inocente]

Assuming that he [Feser] has read Turning correctly I think he scored big.

We already know Linus Feser.

But there are many far better critiques of Turing’s paper than Feser, who doesn’t even realize Turing is trying for a probabilistic outcome rather than a water-tight argument.

He [Turing] should have known you can’t publish anything without getting involved in interminable arguments. Just look at these forums!

That’s exactly my point. Sixty year’s after the paper was published they still argue. Whether Turing is right or wrong, he started a debate which Feser has not added to.

But he excluded the educated classes, who presumably are best to judge.

You’ve referred to “educated classes” before, as if there is some cadre of authority figures we must bow before and worship. Who are these people? On what basis do you exclude Turing from their ranks? Are you a member of these “educated classes”? Do they have a secret handshake or something?