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Lester Zick · Guest

Thinking Inside the Envelope

What is it that actually happens when we think? We think about things.
But where is it that we think about them and how?

There really is only one place we can think about things and that is
in the mind - whatever that means - or within the confines of the
brain of the thinking individual. If we choose not acknowledge the
mind in physical terms it is at least clear that whatever we mean by
cognition occurs within the brain of the cognizing individual.

But more importantly everything we think about within the confines of
the brain actually occurs there. In other words not only do our
thoughts occur within the brain but also what is thought about. Just
as our thoughts do not occur outside the brain, the objects of
cognition occur within the brain in conjunction with thoughts and
thinking concerning them.

There really is no alternative. Do we have methods of thinking that
occur outside the brain? Well there are certain critical objections to
this kind of idea. But if thinking only occurs within the brain it is
clear that what is thought about has to occur there as well in
elementary mechanical terms.

Thus we are forced to examine what we can know of things external to
the brain by means of what we can know through methods of cognition
lying exclusively within the brain. This is a very old doctrinal issue
apparently dating to Descartes if not before.

However what is less apparent is any plausibly satisfactory
explanation for this basic idea in mechanical terms. It seems obvious
and has formed a critical path in philosophical speculation ever since
the advent of solipsism. Yet it has never been resolved to the best of
my knowledge in self consistent mechanical terms.

So what are we to make of the idea? It is perhaps more apparent what
we cannot make of the idea. We know whatever we can know of things
outside the mind only in terms of whatever we can know of them within
the mind. Consequently we are limited to knowledge not of things in
themselves but of things as they appear to us within the brain.

But what does this mean exactly? For one thing it means that there is
a physical envelope to which our thinking and things thought about are
confined. We can only know of those things in terms of whatever is
present in the brain. And whatever does not lie within the brain we
cannot know of except in conjectural terms at best.

But if there is no direct knowledge to be had of things as they exist
outside the brain, then what is it exactly that we know of things and
in what terms?

On the other hand what we can know of things in the mind are geometric
and spatial relationships through perspective. We can also know of
ordinal and cardinal relationships among things through perspective.
And we can know as well of logical and temporal precedence through
similar considerations.

Regards - Lester

Lester Zick · Guest

On 20 Oct 2003 05:56:39 GMT, "Mr Michael Bibby"
<s4032484@student.uq.edu.au> in sci.philosophy.meta wrote:

[quote]

Thinking Inside the Envelope

What is it that actually happens when we think? We think about things.
But where is it that we think about them and how?

There really is only one place we can think about things and that is
in the mind - whatever that means - or within the confines of the
brain of the thinking individual. If we choose not acknowledge the
mind in physical terms it is at least clear that whatever we mean by
cognition occurs within the brain of the cognizing individual.

But more importantly everything we think about within the confines of
the brain actually occurs there. In other words not only do our
thoughts occur within the brain but also what is thought about. Just
as our thoughts do not occur outside the brain, the objects of
cognition occur within the brain in conjunction with thoughts and
thinking concerning them.

There really is no alternative. Do we have methods of thinking that
occur outside the brain? Well there are certain critical objections to
this kind of idea. But if thinking only occurs within the brain it is
clear that what is thought about has to occur there as well in
elementary mechanical terms.

Thus we are forced to examine what we can know of things external to
the brain by means of what we can know through methods of cognition
lying exclusively within the brain. This is a very old doctrinal issue
apparently dating to Descartes if not before.

However what is less apparent is any plausibly satisfactory
explanation for this basic idea in mechanical terms. It seems obvious
and has formed a critical path in philosophical speculation ever since
the advent of solipsism. Yet it has never been resolved to the best of
my knowledge in self consistent mechanical terms.

So what are we to make of the idea? It is perhaps more apparent what
we cannot make of the idea. We know whatever we can know of things
outside the mind only in terms of whatever we can know of them within
the mind. Consequently we are limited to knowledge not of things in
themselves but of things as they appear to us within the brain.

But what does this mean exactly? For one thing it means that there is
a physical envelope to which our thinking and things thought about are
confined. We can only know of those things in terms of whatever is
present in the brain. And whatever does not lie within the brain we
cannot know of except in conjectural terms at best.

But if there is no direct knowledge to be had of things as they exist
outside the brain, then what is it exactly that we know of things and
in what terms?

On the other hand what we can know of things in the mind are geometric
and spatial relationships through perspective. We can also know of
ordinal and cardinal relationships among things through perspective.
And we can know as well of logical and temporal precedence through
similar considerations.

Regards - Lester

interesting orientation Lester. I have always maintained that the mind is an
operationally/oganizationally/informationally/semantically closed system. We are
both the centre and the circumference, the line in which all things are
contained and the point to which all things are refered. Experience is a form of
'self reference', i.e., we are on the inside looking out with no outside point
of reference: we refer only to ourselves.

"to deal with an object means for an organisism to deal with its internal
states" (Peschl & Riegler, 1999)

Mickeyd -[/quote]

I can agree with your observations in overall terms. But it>s more the
necessary implications of these circumstances that I>m after.

Certainly the mind is a self contained and self referential system.
But that isn>t really the issue. The really curious thing about this
stituation is that there are definite rules of perspective implied
here that show us what there is outside the mind despite the fact that
the analysis is wholly contained within.

(By the way, The terms mind and brain are conflated above in my post
when just the term brain should have been used. Cognition and the
things thought about are actually contained in the brain. And what we
mean by the term mind actually depends on the nature of the cognition
involved.)

Of course I>m just referring to visual thinking in this context. But I
think similar considerations apply to all types of cognition. We know
that things exist outside the mind because they follow very specific
rules of perspective. And most of what we judge of such things depends
on these rules for the interpretation of external objects.

So I>m not exactly sure what you mean by suggesting that the mind is
an informationally closed system. I can agree that it is an
operationally, organizationally, and semantically closed system. But
the information in the mind about which we cognize is not.

It is true the physical locus of the information is within the brain.
But the information per se reflects what>s outside the brain. And to
this extent it cannot be described as internal to the brain in the
same sense as cognition.

This is why the mind considers information to be objective because it
reflects external circumstances. It may not be exhaustive in physical
terms but it nonetheless reflects what lies outside. Information in
this sense represents a hybrid phenomenon. The means of cognition are
wholly contained within the brain and are completely subjective to
this extent. The information on which the means of cognition operate
however is objective despite being contained within the brain.

This why a theory like solipsism is logically defective. It fails to
recognize the hybrid character of information and just asserts that
information is subjective like the means of cognition just because its
locus lies within the brain. And as a result it fails to grasp the
necessary implications of what it knows of the information it has:
that the information reflects circumstances outside the brain despite
being located within.

Materialism does just the opposite. Out of conviction that information
must actually reflect objective circumstances outside the brain,
materialism just maintains that the means of cognition must reflect
that circumstance as well. Solipsism solves the riddle of cognition by
declaring everything it knows to be subjective because the means of
cognition are whereas materialism declares everything including
cognition to be objective because what can be known is reflective of
objective circumstances.

The nature of information represents the critical path in analyzing
the whole cognitive complex in this regard. And in this sense it
represents the interface between the mind and brain. It is the hybrid
nature of that information that will govern not only what we can know
of reality in external terms but ultimately what we can come to know
of ourselves as thinking individuals as well.

I appreciate your interest.

Regards - Lester

Pat Harrington · Guest

lesterDELzick@worldnet.att.net (Lester Zick) wrote in message news:<3f932a27.26069000@netnews.att.net>...
[quote]Thinking Inside the Envelope

What is it that actually happens when we think? We think about things.
But where is it that we think about them and how?

There really is only one place we can think about things and that is
in the mind - whatever that means - or within the confines of the
brain of the thinking individual. If we choose not acknowledge the
mind in physical terms it is at least clear that whatever we mean by
cognition occurs within the brain of the cognizing individual.

But more importantly everything we think about within the confines of
the brain actually occurs there. In other words not only do our
thoughts occur within the brain but also what is thought about. Just
as our thoughts do not occur outside the brain, the objects of
cognition occur within the brain in conjunction with thoughts and
thinking concerning them.

There really is no alternative. Do we have methods of thinking that
occur outside the brain? Well there are certain critical objections to
this kind of idea. But if thinking only occurs within the brain it is
clear that what is thought about has to occur there as well in
elementary mechanical terms.

Thus we are forced to examine what we can know of things external to
the brain by means of what we can know through methods of cognition
lying exclusively within the brain. This is a very old doctrinal issue
apparently dating to Descartes if not before.

However what is less apparent is any plausibly satisfactory
explanation for this basic idea in mechanical terms. It seems obvious
and has formed a critical path in philosophical speculation ever since
the advent of solipsism. Yet it has never been resolved to the best of
my knowledge in self consistent mechanical terms.

So what are we to make of the idea? It is perhaps more apparent what
we cannot make of the idea. We know whatever we can know of things
outside the mind only in terms of whatever we can know of them within
the mind. Consequently we are limited to knowledge not of things in
themselves but of things as they appear to us within the brain.

But what does this mean exactly? For one thing it means that there is
a physical envelope to which our thinking and things thought about are
confined. We can only know of those things in terms of whatever is
present in the brain. And whatever does not lie within the brain we
cannot know of except in conjectural terms at best.

But if there is no direct knowledge to be had of things as they exist
outside the brain, then what is it exactly that we know of things and
in what terms?

On the other hand what we can know of things in the mind are geometric
and spatial relationships through perspective. We can also know of
ordinal and cardinal relationships among things through perspective.
And we can know as well of logical and temporal precedence through
similar considerations.

Regards - Lester
[/quote]

Lester,
Good paper!! I especially like the final paragraph, as it
flashed a bit of religious Gestalt in me. Don>t get me wrong, I have
an almost absolute loathing for the concept of a three-in-one, triune
God but I couldn>t help noticing the similarity to it in what you
wrote.
1) The ordinal/cardinal relationships are the building blocks
used to create abstract thoughts--God the Father, the beginning and
the end.
2) The rules of logical (LOGOS?) and temporal precedence that
allow us to manipulate the building blocks--God the Son, the means
through which the Father can be interpreted in a "No one gets to the
Father but by me" kind of way.
3) The geometrical and spatial relationships of our perspective
formed by the application of the logic to the ordinal, which helps to
meaningfully communicate the abstract in our mind (and form the basis
of meaningful language) and enable us to use it in the real world--God
the Holy Spirit, the actual useful, applied data and collective
subconscious information that everyone seems to relate to.
Again, please don>t mistake me for a Christian, devout or
other...it>s just not the case; but I can>t stand to let go of a
decent correlary between any aspect of good scientific thought and
established religious belief.
Cheers,
Pat

Lester Zick · Guest

On 22 Oct 2003 03:09:25 GMT, "Mr Michael Bibby"
<s4032484@student.uq.edu.au> in sci.philosophy.meta wrote:

[. . .]

[quote]The notion of representationalism i.e., truth as correspondence with reality, is
completely and utterly meaningless to those of us who only have access to the
‘reproductions’ (i.e., perceptions, theoretical models, linguistic descriptions
etc.) and not the ‘originals’ (i.e., reality). That is, we cannot compare the
picture with the real thing to see if it is a faithful copy; we can only compare
it with more pictures. Jerry Fodor, an eminent cognitive scientists, believes
that mental states represent (symbolize, stand for, map onto) states in the
world, a view which is held by many and perhaps best exemplified by James
McClelland, also a cognitive scientists, when he said; “the mind is a physical
device that performs operations on physical objects, which are not the things
themselves but representations of those things” (Baumgartner & Payr, 1995,
p.134). Compare this ‘representationalists’ account of cognition which views the
mind as an “information processing device” that “performs operations upon
symbolic representations” with that of a Constructivist where the notion of
outside reality is made redundant; “to deal with an object means for an organism
to deal with its own internal states” (Peschl & Riegler, 1999, p. 141). So, ask
your self: does representation need reality?

Mickeyd, there are a couple of things which occur to me here. I>m not
sure I see the distinction. Everyone seems to be saying pretty much
the same thing to wit cognition operates internally on representations
of external phenomena. And this is a view I>d agree with. Perhaps it>s
a distinction without a difference.

I>m sure there are practical differences in terminology, mechanics,
and applicability, but I really don>t see any insofar as information
itself is concerned. The only issue of significance among the various
positions is the origin, nature, and significance of the information
operated on by cognitive processes internal to an organism.

To this extent representation does need reality according to what it
represents as information. Of course the general idea of reality is
poorly understood. It is not the same as external existence for
example. Nor is it the same as the subjective processes internal to an
organism.

However let me just add that the only thing of interest to me lies in
the accurate explanation for what information is, where it comes from,
and how it is operated on in cognitive terms.

this does not make a whole lot of sense for two reasons. firstly, you did not
address my criticisms levelled against the notion of 'representationalism'.
secondly, you seem to forget that we define just what information is, it seems
rather strang to define something and then look for a reason why it is thus and
not otherwise- this simply begs the question. 'Information', as i always say, is
a 'black box explanatory principle' it explains what we want it to explain.

[/quote]
MickeyD - I thought I had addressed your criticisms. But let me see if
I can make myself a little clearer.

Your description of constructivism as an organism dealing with an
object in terms its own internal states doesn>t seem to be any
different from what you characterize as representationalism. Both only
deal with their own internal states.

So I just don>t see the distinction unless what constructivism
suggests is that the objects organisms deal with do not correspond
with external reality at all in which case the doctrine is tantamount
to solipsism. And solipsism is logically fallacious for reasons
previously cited because it denies what it knows of objects in terms
of perspective as lying outside the organism and presumably in some
external reality context apart from the organism.

Now I don>t pretend to be an expert on various epistemological
doctrines. But you criticize representationalism for dealing with
copies of real things rather than the actual real things. And you
observe that you can never compare those copies with the real things
themselves but only with more copies. So what? Is the knowledge
obtained of the real things any less real because it has to be deduced
from copies - assuming it is produced from copies?

It is true that we have to rely on the interface that produces copies
and copied information. But whatever is deduced from the information
however obtained is nonetheless valid whether or not deduced from an
accurate copy. If your complaint is that one can never know a real
thing in itself apart from copied pictures then I can only suggest
trying to grasp a whole star in its totality.

In point of fact the definition of information is not just whatever we
would like it to be. It is whatever it is according to whatever
cognitive processing permits and requires of it. So the only question
is how those faculties function and why and what they need in order to
function. And if this begs the question then the question begs the
question.

Now let me point out that I have no particular interest in doctrines
like representationalism, constructivism, solipsism, etc. Nor do I
know exactly what they mean by mapping, copies, pictures, reality,
etc. And I don>t intend to waste time trying to find out.

There may be elements of truth in a great many schools of thought on
cognition. But I don>t like doctrinal approaches to science -
especially considering how little the various schools seem to be able
to explain of their own cognitive failures in scientific terms.

So I can>t really answer for one school>s take on a particular aspect
of cognition. What I can do is address a variety of related issues in
self consistent analytical terms. And what I am aiming at is nothing
more than a simple mechanical explanation for cognition that shows how
and why it functions and has to function in the terms it does.

Regards - Lester

Lester Zick · Guest

On 21 Oct 2003 16:13:45 -0700, PatrickDHarrington@hotmail.com (Pat
Harrington) in sci.philosophy.meta wrote:

[quote]lesterDELzick@worldnet.att.net (Lester Zick) wrote in message news:<3f932a27.26069000@netnews.att.net>...
Thinking Inside the Envelope

What is it that actually happens when we think? We think about things.
But where is it that we think about them and how?

There really is only one place we can think about things and that is
in the mind - whatever that means - or within the confines of the
brain of the thinking individual. If we choose not acknowledge the
mind in physical terms it is at least clear that whatever we mean by
cognition occurs within the brain of the cognizing individual.

But more importantly everything we think about within the confines of
the brain actually occurs there. In other words not only do our
thoughts occur within the brain but also what is thought about. Just
as our thoughts do not occur outside the brain, the objects of
cognition occur within the brain in conjunction with thoughts and
thinking concerning them.

There really is no alternative. Do we have methods of thinking that
occur outside the brain? Well there are certain critical objections to
this kind of idea. But if thinking only occurs within the brain it is
clear that what is thought about has to occur there as well in
elementary mechanical terms.

Thus we are forced to examine what we can know of things external to
the brain by means of what we can know through methods of cognition
lying exclusively within the brain. This is a very old doctrinal issue
apparently dating to Descartes if not before.

However what is less apparent is any plausibly satisfactory
explanation for this basic idea in mechanical terms. It seems obvious
and has formed a critical path in philosophical speculation ever since
the advent of solipsism. Yet it has never been resolved to the best of
my knowledge in self consistent mechanical terms.

So what are we to make of the idea? It is perhaps more apparent what
we cannot make of the idea. We know whatever we can know of things
outside the mind only in terms of whatever we can know of them within
the mind. Consequently we are limited to knowledge not of things in
themselves but of things as they appear to us within the brain.

But what does this mean exactly? For one thing it means that there is
a physical envelope to which our thinking and things thought about are
confined. We can only know of those things in terms of whatever is
present in the brain. And whatever does not lie within the brain we
cannot know of except in conjectural terms at best.

But if there is no direct knowledge to be had of things as they exist
outside the brain, then what is it exactly that we know of things and
in what terms?

On the other hand what we can know of things in the mind are geometric
and spatial relationships through perspective. We can also know of
ordinal and cardinal relationships among things through perspective.
And we can know as well of logical and temporal precedence through
similar considerations.

Regards - Lester

Lester,
Good paper!! I especially like the final paragraph, as it
flashed a bit of religious Gestalt in me. Don>t get me wrong, I have
an almost absolute loathing for the concept of a three-in-one, triune
God but I couldn>t help noticing the similarity to it in what you
wrote.
1) The ordinal/cardinal relationships are the building blocks
used to create abstract thoughts--God the Father, the beginning and
the end.
2) The rules of logical (LOGOS?) and temporal precedence that
allow us to manipulate the building blocks--God the Son, the means
through which the Father can be interpreted in a "No one gets to the
Father but by me" kind of way.
3) The geometrical and spatial relationships of our perspective
formed by the application of the logic to the ordinal, which helps to
meaningfully communicate the abstract in our mind (and form the basis
of meaningful language) and enable us to use it in the real world--God
the Holy Spirit, the actual useful, applied data and collective
subconscious information that everyone seems to relate to.
Again, please don>t mistake me for a Christian, devout or
other...it>s just not the case; but I can>t stand to let go of a
decent correlary between any aspect of good scientific thought and
established religious belief.
Cheers,
Pat
[/quote]
Hi Pat -

It>s interesting that you make these comments. I have often considered
that trinitarian Christianity may hold somewhat greater intellectual
appeal just because it is trinitarian rather than holistic in the
sense of other monotheistic religions. What I can>t say for sure is
what if anything the trinity actually refers to in analytical terms
but there are potential similarities.

Nor am I religious in the conventional doctrinal sense. This puts me
in mind of a conversation I recently had with Pavan03 who seemed to
believe that the idea of scientific explanations for consciousness and
cognition implied a necessary lack of religious faith - that one would
have to be an atheist, agnostic, or at worst a deist.

My reply was that even assuming god to exist there would be no
necessary reason to conclude that he/she/it would take any interest in
the workings of cognition as a mechanical process any more than the
outcome of a football game or a war. We just don>t know and have no
reason to believe one way or the other. What we can find out though is
how consciousness and cognition do work and let a problematic god
figure out the implications.

Regards - Lester

Pat Harrington · Guest

lesterDELzick@worldnet.att.net (Lester Zick) wrote in message news:<3f96a63d.61667649@netnews.att.net>...
[quote]On 21 Oct 2003 16:13:45 -0700, PatrickDHarrington@hotmail.com (Pat
Harrington) in sci.philosophy.meta wrote:

lesterDELzick@worldnet.att.net (Lester Zick) wrote in message news:<3f932a27.26069000@netnews.att.net>...
Thinking Inside the Envelope

What is it that actually happens when we think? We think about things.
But where is it that we think about them and how?

There really is only one place we can think about things and that is
in the mind - whatever that means - or within the confines of the
brain of the thinking individual. If we choose not acknowledge the
mind in physical terms it is at least clear that whatever we mean by
cognition occurs within the brain of the cognizing individual.

But more importantly everything we think about within the confines of
the brain actually occurs there. In other words not only do our
thoughts occur within the brain but also what is thought about. Just
as our thoughts do not occur outside the brain, the objects of
cognition occur within the brain in conjunction with thoughts and
thinking concerning them.

There really is no alternative. Do we have methods of thinking that
occur outside the brain? Well there are certain critical objections to
this kind of idea. But if thinking only occurs within the brain it is
clear that what is thought about has to occur there as well in
elementary mechanical terms.

Thus we are forced to examine what we can know of things external to
the brain by means of what we can know through methods of cognition
lying exclusively within the brain. This is a very old doctrinal issue
apparently dating to Descartes if not before.

However what is less apparent is any plausibly satisfactory
explanation for this basic idea in mechanical terms. It seems obvious
and has formed a critical path in philosophical speculation ever since
the advent of solipsism. Yet it has never been resolved to the best of
my knowledge in self consistent mechanical terms.

So what are we to make of the idea? It is perhaps more apparent what
we cannot make of the idea. We know whatever we can know of things
outside the mind only in terms of whatever we can know of them within
the mind. Consequently we are limited to knowledge not of things in
themselves but of things as they appear to us within the brain.

But what does this mean exactly? For one thing it means that there is
a physical envelope to which our thinking and things thought about are
confined. We can only know of those things in terms of whatever is
present in the brain. And whatever does not lie within the brain we
cannot know of except in conjectural terms at best.

But if there is no direct knowledge to be had of things as they exist
outside the brain, then what is it exactly that we know of things and
in what terms?

On the other hand what we can know of things in the mind are geometric
and spatial relationships through perspective. We can also know of
ordinal and cardinal relationships among things through perspective.
And we can know as well of logical and temporal precedence through
similar considerations.

Regards - Lester

Lester,
Good paper!! I especially like the final paragraph, as it
flashed a bit of religious Gestalt in me. Don>t get me wrong, I have
an almost absolute loathing for the concept of a three-in-one, triune
God but I couldn>t help noticing the similarity to it in what you
wrote.
1) The ordinal/cardinal relationships are the building blocks
used to create abstract thoughts--God the Father, the beginning and
the end.
2) The rules of logical (LOGOS?) and temporal precedence that
allow us to manipulate the building blocks--God the Son, the means
through which the Father can be interpreted in a "No one gets to the
Father but by me" kind of way.
3) The geometrical and spatial relationships of our perspective
formed by the application of the logic to the ordinal, which helps to
meaningfully communicate the abstract in our mind (and form the basis
of meaningful language) and enable us to use it in the real world--God
the Holy Spirit, the actual useful, applied data and collective
subconscious information that everyone seems to relate to.
Again, please don>t mistake me for a Christian, devout or
other...it>s just not the case; but I can>t stand to let go of a
decent correlary between any aspect of good scientific thought and
established religious belief.
Cheers,
Pat

Hi Pat -

It>s interesting that you make these comments. I have often considered
that trinitarian Christianity may hold somewhat greater intellectual
appeal just because it is trinitarian rather than holistic in the
sense of other monotheistic religions. What I can>t say for sure is
what if anything the trinity actually refers to in analytical terms
but there are potential similarities.

[/quote]
Well, the one thing that Trinitarian beliefs add is a layer of mystery
and the mind loves a mystery, if for no other reason than that
exercise is generally good for organs that can be exercised. I
thought I had offered an explanation as to what the trinity might
refer to in analytical terms in my response above. Let me clarify it.
The Father is the raw data of abstract numeric concepts that is
manipulated by the Son, who is the rules by which the data can be
manipulated resulting in the Holy Spirit or the resultant geometric
framework upon which and around which physics would naturally form
given that energy is the substance with which work can be done based
on God the Father as the raw abstract data from which to work. A good
analogy for it might be an Artificial Intelligence programme, only
it>s real intelligence. The Father is the data in the database, the
Son is the rules by which that data can be handled and the Holy Spirit
is the output of the program. This would make the universe analogous
to the energy, i.e., the computer itself including the executing
programme that runs the rules against the database; and so it is
through the mechanics of the material universe that the Holy Spirit is
able to use the rules laid down by the Son and communicate with the
Father.

[quote]Nor am I religious in the conventional doctrinal sense. This puts me
in mind of a conversation I recently had with Pavan03 who seemed to
believe that the idea of scientific explanations for consciousness and
cognition implied a necessary lack of religious faith - that one would
have to be an atheist, agnostic, or at worst a deist.

[/quote]
For me, every time science explains something new it increases my
awe of the incredibly elegant machine that is our space-time
continuum.

[quote]My reply was that even assuming god to exist there would be no
necessary reason to conclude that he/she/it would take any interest in
the workings of cognition as a mechanical process any more than the
outcome of a football game or a war. We just don>t know and have no
reason to believe one way or the other. What we can find out though is
how consciousness and cognition do work and let a problematic god
figure out the implications.

[/quote]
In my one-object world-view, we are that problematic God and we
are figuring out the implications, quite literally, as we speak. I
seem to remember, although I can>t find it anywhere, that Buddha had
once said something along the lines of "I>m sure that, if there was a
God, I would find it very surprising indeed that he would trouble
himself about our lot". Although mankind might think itself the most
intelligent thing around these parts, mankind should, perhaps, get out
a bit more. I think we haven>t seen even one millionth of a percent
of the kinds of experiences that the universe has to offer. I think
the odds are pretty good for life in the vastness of space-time and,
considering we>re only a few hundred-thousand years of evolution away
from non-speaking creatures, there>s every likelihood that there are
creatures greatly more intelligent than we are. But then again, we
are reasonably bright and a lot of technology>s advances are down to
available data rather than the ability to manipulate it.
All the Best,
Pat

[quote]
Regards - Lester[/quote]

Lester Zick · Guest

On 22 Oct 2003 17:53:39 -0700, PatrickDHarrington@hotmail.com (Pat
Harrington) in sci.cognitive wrote:

[quote]lesterDELzick@worldnet.att.net (Lester Zick) wrote in message news:<3f96a63d.61667649@netnews.att.net>...
On 21 Oct 2003 16:13:45 -0700, PatrickDHarrington@hotmail.com (Pat
Harrington) in sci.philosophy.meta wrote:

lesterDELzick@worldnet.att.net (Lester Zick) wrote in message news:<3f932a27.26069000@netnews.att.net>...
Thinking Inside the Envelope

What is it that actually happens when we think? We think about things.
But where is it that we think about them and how?

There really is only one place we can think about things and that is
in the mind - whatever that means - or within the confines of the
brain of the thinking individual. If we choose not acknowledge the
mind in physical terms it is at least clear that whatever we mean by
cognition occurs within the brain of the cognizing individual.

But more importantly everything we think about within the confines of
the brain actually occurs there. In other words not only do our
thoughts occur within the brain but also what is thought about. Just
as our thoughts do not occur outside the brain, the objects of
cognition occur within the brain in conjunction with thoughts and
thinking concerning them.

There really is no alternative. Do we have methods of thinking that
occur outside the brain? Well there are certain critical objections to
this kind of idea. But if thinking only occurs within the brain it is
clear that what is thought about has to occur there as well in
elementary mechanical terms.

Thus we are forced to examine what we can know of things external to
the brain by means of what we can know through methods of cognition
lying exclusively within the brain. This is a very old doctrinal issue
apparently dating to Descartes if not before.

However what is less apparent is any plausibly satisfactory
explanation for this basic idea in mechanical terms. It seems obvious
and has formed a critical path in philosophical speculation ever since
the advent of solipsism. Yet it has never been resolved to the best of
my knowledge in self consistent mechanical terms.

So what are we to make of the idea? It is perhaps more apparent what
we cannot make of the idea. We know whatever we can know of things
outside the mind only in terms of whatever we can know of them within
the mind. Consequently we are limited to knowledge not of things in
themselves but of things as they appear to us within the brain.

But what does this mean exactly? For one thing it means that there is
a physical envelope to which our thinking and things thought about are
confined. We can only know of those things in terms of whatever is
present in the brain. And whatever does not lie within the brain we
cannot know of except in conjectural terms at best.

But if there is no direct knowledge to be had of things as they exist
outside the brain, then what is it exactly that we know of things and
in what terms?

On the other hand what we can know of things in the mind are geometric
and spatial relationships through perspective. We can also know of
ordinal and cardinal relationships among things through perspective.
And we can know as well of logical and temporal precedence through
similar considerations.

Regards - Lester

Lester,
Good paper!! I especially like the final paragraph, as it
flashed a bit of religious Gestalt in me. Don>t get me wrong, I have
an almost absolute loathing for the concept of a three-in-one, triune
God but I couldn>t help noticing the similarity to it in what you
wrote.
1) The ordinal/cardinal relationships are the building blocks
used to create abstract thoughts--God the Father, the beginning and
the end.
2) The rules of logical (LOGOS?) and temporal precedence that
allow us to manipulate the building blocks--God the Son, the means
through which the Father can be interpreted in a "No one gets to the
Father but by me" kind of way.
3) The geometrical and spatial relationships of our perspective
formed by the application of the logic to the ordinal, which helps to
meaningfully communicate the abstract in our mind (and form the basis
of meaningful language) and enable us to use it in the real world--God
the Holy Spirit, the actual useful, applied data and collective
subconscious information that everyone seems to relate to.
Again, please don>t mistake me for a Christian, devout or
other...it>s just not the case; but I can>t stand to let go of a
decent correlary between any aspect of good scientific thought and
established religious belief.
Cheers,
Pat

Hi Pat -

It>s interesting that you make these comments. I have often considered
that trinitarian Christianity may hold somewhat greater intellectual
appeal just because it is trinitarian rather than holistic in the
sense of other monotheistic religions. What I can>t say for sure is
what if anything the trinity actually refers to in analytical terms
but there are potential similarities.

Well, the one thing that Trinitarian beliefs add is a layer of mystery
and the mind loves a mystery, if for no other reason than that
exercise is generally good for organs that can be exercised. I
thought I had offered an explanation as to what the trinity might
refer to in analytical terms in my response above. Let me clarify it.
[/quote]
You did. I just don>t know whether that>s the correct answer in
analytical terms or not. There are lots of conceivable ways to explain
trinitarian theology by means of analogy. But at this point I don>t
have any idea whether there is any reason for doing so and what the
correct explanation would be if one were needed.

[quote]The Father is the raw data of abstract numeric concepts that is
manipulated by the Son, who is the rules by which the data can be
manipulated resulting in the Holy Spirit or the resultant geometric
framework upon which and around which physics would naturally form
given that energy is the substance with which work can be done based
on God the Father as the raw abstract data from which to work. A good
analogy for it might be an Artificial Intelligence programme, only
it>s real intelligence. The Father is the data in the database, the
Son is the rules by which that data can be handled and the Holy Spirit
is the output of the program. This would make the universe analogous
to the energy, i.e., the computer itself including the executing
programme that runs the rules against the database; and so it is
through the mechanics of the material universe that the Holy Spirit is
able to use the rules laid down by the Son and communicate with the
Father.

Nor am I religious in the conventional doctrinal sense. This puts me
in mind of a conversation I recently had with Pavan03 who seemed to
believe that the idea of scientific explanations for consciousness and
cognition implied a necessary lack of religious faith - that one would
have to be an atheist, agnostic, or at worst a deist.

For me, every time science explains something new it increases my
awe of the incredibly elegant machine that is our space-time
continuum.

My reply was that even assuming god to exist there would be no
necessary reason to conclude that he/she/it would take any interest in
the workings of cognition as a mechanical process any more than the
outcome of a football game or a war. We just don>t know and have no
reason to believe one way or the other. What we can find out though is
how consciousness and cognition do work and let a problematic god
figure out the implications.

In my one-object world-view, we are that problematic God and we
are figuring out the implications, quite literally, as we speak.
[/quote]
I>m not sure what a one-object world-view is or implies, but there is
a sense in which you may be correct.
[quote] I
seem to remember, although I can>t find it anywhere, that Buddha had
once said something along the lines of "I>m sure that, if there was a
God, I would find it very surprising indeed that he would trouble
himself about our lot".
[/quote]
This may have been the original inspiration for my observation. I seem
to remember having read it before.

[quote] Although mankind might think itself the most
intelligent thing around these parts, mankind should, perhaps, get out
a bit more. I think we haven>t seen even one millionth of a percent
of the kinds of experiences that the universe has to offer. I think
the odds are pretty good for life in the vastness of space-time and,
considering we>re only a few hundred-thousand years of evolution away
from non-speaking creatures, there>s every likelihood that there are
creatures greatly more intelligent than we are. But then again, we
are reasonably bright and a lot of technology>s advances are down to
available data rather than the ability to manipulate it.
All the Best,
Pat
[/quote]
Hard to tell. One thing I>m pretty sure of though is that we>ll have
to do it all in the three basic spatial dimensions.

Regards - Lester

Pat Harrington · Guest

lesterDELzick@worldnet.att.net (Lester Zick) wrote in message news:<3f97e76e.71653748@netnews.att.net>...
[quote]On 22 Oct 2003 17:53:39 -0700, PatrickDHarrington@hotmail.com (Pat
Harrington) in sci.cognitive wrote:

lesterDELzick@worldnet.att.net (Lester Zick) wrote in message news:<3f96a63d.61667649@netnews.att.net>...
On 21 Oct 2003 16:13:45 -0700, PatrickDHarrington@hotmail.com (Pat
Harrington) in sci.philosophy.meta wrote:

lesterDELzick@worldnet.att.net (Lester Zick) wrote in message news:<3f932a27.26069000@netnews.att.net>...
Thinking Inside the Envelope

What is it that actually happens when we think? We think about things.
But where is it that we think about them and how?

There really is only one place we can think about things and that is
in the mind - whatever that means - or within the confines of the
brain of the thinking individual. If we choose not acknowledge the
mind in physical terms it is at least clear that whatever we mean by
cognition occurs within the brain of the cognizing individual.

But more importantly everything we think about within the confines of
the brain actually occurs there. In other words not only do our
thoughts occur within the brain but also what is thought about. Just
as our thoughts do not occur outside the brain, the objects of
cognition occur within the brain in conjunction with thoughts and
thinking concerning them.

There really is no alternative. Do we have methods of thinking that
occur outside the brain? Well there are certain critical objections to
this kind of idea. But if thinking only occurs within the brain it is
clear that what is thought about has to occur there as well in
elementary mechanical terms.

Thus we are forced to examine what we can know of things external to
the brain by means of what we can know through methods of cognition
lying exclusively within the brain. This is a very old doctrinal issue
apparently dating to Descartes if not before.

However what is less apparent is any plausibly satisfactory
explanation for this basic idea in mechanical terms. It seems obvious
and has formed a critical path in philosophical speculation ever since
the advent of solipsism. Yet it has never been resolved to the best of
my knowledge in self consistent mechanical terms.

So what are we to make of the idea? It is perhaps more apparent what
we cannot make of the idea. We know whatever we can know of things
outside the mind only in terms of whatever we can know of them within
the mind. Consequently we are limited to knowledge not of things in
themselves but of things as they appear to us within the brain.

But what does this mean exactly? For one thing it means that there is
a physical envelope to which our thinking and things thought about are
confined. We can only know of those things in terms of whatever is
present in the brain. And whatever does not lie within the brain we
cannot know of except in conjectural terms at best.

But if there is no direct knowledge to be had of things as they exist
outside the brain, then what is it exactly that we know of things and
in what terms?

On the other hand what we can know of things in the mind are geometric
and spatial relationships through perspective. We can also know of
ordinal and cardinal relationships among things through perspective.
And we can know as well of logical and temporal precedence through
similar considerations.

Regards - Lester

Lester,
Good paper!! I especially like the final paragraph, as it
flashed a bit of religious Gestalt in me. Don>t get me wrong, I have
an almost absolute loathing for the concept of a three-in-one, triune
God but I couldn>t help noticing the similarity to it in what you
wrote.
1) The ordinal/cardinal relationships are the building blocks
used to create abstract thoughts--God the Father, the beginning and
the end.
2) The rules of logical (LOGOS?) and temporal precedence that
allow us to manipulate the building blocks--God the Son, the means
through which the Father can be interpreted in a "No one gets to the
Father but by me" kind of way.
3) The geometrical and spatial relationships of our perspective
formed by the application of the logic to the ordinal, which helps to
meaningfully communicate the abstract in our mind (and form the basis
of meaningful language) and enable us to use it in the real world--God
the Holy Spirit, the actual useful, applied data and collective
subconscious information that everyone seems to relate to.
Again, please don>t mistake me for a Christian, devout or
other...it>s just not the case; but I can>t stand to let go of a
decent correlary between any aspect of good scientific thought and
established religious belief.
Cheers,
Pat

Hi Pat -

It>s interesting that you make these comments. I have often considered
that trinitarian Christianity may hold somewhat greater intellectual
appeal just because it is trinitarian rather than holistic in the
sense of other monotheistic religions. What I can>t say for sure is
what if anything the trinity actually refers to in analytical terms
but there are potential similarities.

Well, the one thing that Trinitarian beliefs add is a layer of mystery
and the mind loves a mystery, if for no other reason than that
exercise is generally good for organs that can be exercised. I
thought I had offered an explanation as to what the trinity might
refer to in analytical terms in my response above. Let me clarify it.

You did. I just don>t know whether that>s the correct answer in
analytical terms or not. There are lots of conceivable ways to explain
trinitarian theology by means of analogy. But at this point I don>t
have any idea whether there is any reason for doing so and what the
correct explanation would be if one were needed.

[/quote]
I couldn>t agree with you more. I was just performing a synthesis in
a particular way; I can>t, for a moment, say anything more other than
it>s a reasonable analogy. Even if it were on the correct lines, it
isn>t detailed enough to warrant much more than a third or fourth
glance.

[quote]The Father is the raw data of abstract numeric concepts that is
manipulated by the Son, who is the rules by which the data can be
manipulated resulting in the Holy Spirit or the resultant geometric
framework upon which and around which physics would naturally form
given that energy is the substance with which work can be done based
on God the Father as the raw abstract data from which to work. A good
analogy for it might be an Artificial Intelligence programme, only
it>s real intelligence. The Father is the data in the database, the
Son is the rules by which that data can be handled and the Holy Spirit
is the output of the program. This would make the universe analogous
to the energy, i.e., the computer itself including the executing
programme that runs the rules against the database; and so it is
through the mechanics of the material universe that the Holy Spirit is
able to use the rules laid down by the Son and communicate with the
Father.

Nor am I religious in the conventional doctrinal sense. This puts me
in mind of a conversation I recently had with Pavan03 who seemed to
believe that the idea of scientific explanations for consciousness and
cognition implied a necessary lack of religious faith - that one would
have to be an atheist, agnostic, or at worst a deist.

For me, every time science explains something new it increases my
awe of the incredibly elegant machine that is our space-time
continuum.

My reply was that even assuming god to exist there would be no
necessary reason to conclude that he/she/it would take any interest in
the workings of cognition as a mechanical process any more than the
outcome of a football game or a war. We just don>t know and have no
reason to believe one way or the other. What we can find out though is
how consciousness and cognition do work and let a problematic god
figure out the implications.

In my one-object world-view, we are that problematic God and we
are figuring out the implications, quite literally, as we speak.

I>m not sure what a one-object world-view is or implies, but there is
a sense in which you may be correct.
[/quote]
Perhaps it could be better elicited by the newly made-up word:
Monotheoinfrascientarianism: n. A world-view in which the believer
believes that the universe is made up of energy that is connected in
such a way that all energy is actually one object and that that object
exhibits the qualities of omniscience, omnipresence and omnipotence,
yet maintaining that everything that occurs is a perfectly rational
reasonable series of events based on the physics of how energy relates
to itself.

[quote] I
seem to remember, although I can>t find it anywhere, that Buddha had
once said something along the lines of "I>m sure that, if there was a
God, I would find it very surprising indeed that he would trouble
himself about our lot".

This may have been the original inspiration for my observation. I seem
to remember having read it before.

Although mankind might think itself the most
intelligent thing around these parts, mankind should, perhaps, get out
a bit more. I think we haven>t seen even one millionth of a percent
of the kinds of experiences that the universe has to offer. I think
the odds are pretty good for life in the vastness of space-time and,
considering we>re only a few hundred-thousand years of evolution away
from non-speaking creatures, there>s every likelihood that there are
creatures greatly more intelligent than we are. But then again, we
are reasonably bright and a lot of technology>s advances are down to
available data rather than the ability to manipulate it.
All the Best,
Pat

Hard to tell. One thing I>m pretty sure of though is that we>ll have
to do it all in the three basic spatial dimensions.

[/quote]
Perhaps not all, but certainly the bleeding obvious, i.e., 99.99%!!
Cheers,
Pat

> Regards - Lester

Michael Olea · Guest

in article 3f932a27.26069000@netnews.att.net, Lester Zick at
lesterDELzick@worldnet.att.net wrote on 10/19/03 4:24 PM:

[quote]
Thinking Inside the Envelope
[/quote]
think:
1) to form or have in mind
...
4) a: to reflect on: PONDER
b: to determine by reflecting
5) to call to mind: REMEMBER ...

thinking:
1) the action of using one>s mind to produce thoughts
2) a: OPINION, JUDGEMENT (I>d like to know your ~ on this)
b: thought that is characteristic (as of a period, group, or person)

cognition:
the act or process of knowing
including both awareness and judgement; also:
a product of this act

awareness:
having or showing realization, perception, or knowledge

judgement:
the capacity for judging: DISCERNMENT

[quote]
What is it that actually happens when we think? We think about things.
But where is it that we think about them and how?
[/quote]
What, Where, How (and we can even investigate Why)...

These are empirical questions, and they are yielding more and more
to empirical methods - advances in noninvasive real-time imaging
techniques (e.g fMRI - functional magenetic resonance imaging,
and direct recording - via implanted electrodes - of single neurons,
and now ever larger populations of neurons). Here are some answers
to the what and where questions:

It depends on what we think about: think about a purple cow wearing
a hula skirt, and neurons within regions of primary visual cortex
become active; think of the slippery feel of a wet bar of soap, and
somatosensory cortex becomes active, think about a clap of thunder,
and auditory cortex becomes active. Now think about the proposition
that the square root of two is irrational (cannot be expressed as the
ratio of two integers) - I>m guessing that prefrontal cortex becomes
active.

It is interesting that imagination and perception use some of the
same machinery - thinking about a purple cow activates some of
the same neurons that looking at one does. This is in fact a crucial
clue to how recognition (re-cognition, an apt term) works. More
on that later. But what of the square root of two? And why did I
leave out olfaction (think of the smell of coffee in the morning -
what happens, where, how, and why)?

[quote]
There really is only one place we can think about things and that is
in the mind - whatever that means -
[/quote]
This is a tautology, is it not?

[quote]or within the confines of the brain of the thinking individual.
[/quote]
That>s better: an assertion that could be false, hence is meaningful.

[quote]If we choose not acknowledge the
mind in physical terms it is at least clear that whatever we mean by
cognition occurs within the brain of the cognizing individual.
[/quote]
This might be true, but it is not at all clear that it MUST be true,
especialy for WHATEVER we mean by cognition. On what basis can we
a priori rule out that some form of cognition occurs in, say, the
spinal cord, or in more distal components of the nervous system, or
even in other kinds of tissue (muscle memory, say), or even in the
nucleus of single-celled eucaryotes, or in the molecular machinery
of bacteria? These days it is well established that at least some
kinds of memory are encoded in the coupling strengths of synapses
forming neural circuits (see, for example, the work of Eric Kandel),
but at one time there was much enthusiasm for the notion that memories
could be stored in molecules, specificaly RNA molecules (the prospect
of taking a differential calculus pill raised a stir). There were
experiments of the sort where planaria were trained on some task,
ground up and fed to untrained planaria, to see if the enriched planaria
would learn the task any faster. Same sort of thing was done with rats
(they did not grind up the rats; they injected "extract of trained rat
brain" into the brains of untrained rats; sorry I cannot be more specific
about the details, my old psychology texts got sold after the .calm storm).
In fact learning WAS accelerated, though follow-up experiments showed that
grinding up untrained planaria and feeding them to other untrained planaria
also accelerated learning - just the presence of some molecules in extra
abundance promotes the formation of memories without actually encoding
specific memories. There is, however, a biological system active in
all normal mammals, and lying entirely outside the brain, entirely
outside the nervous system altogether, that forms memories and acts
upon them - that would be the adatptive immune system:

The immune system needs to be able to identify and ultimately
destroy foreign invaders. To do so, it utilizes two major types of
immune cells, T cells and B cells (or, collectively, lymphocytes).
Lymphocytes display a large variety of cell surface receptors
that can recognize and respond to an unlimited number of
pathogens, a feature that is the hallmark of the ³adaptive¹¹
immune system. To react to such a variety of invaders, the
immune system needs to generate vast numbers of receptors.
If the number of different types of receptors present on
lymphocytes were encoded by individual genes, the entire
human genome would have to be devoted to lymphocyte receptors.
To establish the necessary level of diversity, B-and T-cell receptor
(BCR and TCR, respectively) genes are created by recombining preexisting
gene segments. Thus, different combinations of a finite set of gene
segments give rise to receptors that can recognize unlimited numbers
of foreign invaders....

Quoted from:

V(D)J Recombination and the Evolution of the Adaptive Immune System
Eleonora Market and F.Nina Papavasiliou*

*To whom correspondence should be addressed.
E-mail:papavasiliou@rockefeller.edu

Volume 1 |Issue 1 |Page 024 PLoS Biology |http://biology.plosjournals.

I will simply add that this system "remembers" antigens it has encountered
in the past, and thus responds much more quickly to new occurences of the
same invaders - this is the basis of immunization.

Is this "cognition"? It is a form of "recognition", one that is enhanced by
memory of past encounters, so it has at least some of the functions that
whatever we mean by cognition must have; and it operates outside the
brain of, indeed, outside the awareness of, the antigen recognizing
individual.

[quote]
But more importantly everything we think about within the confines of
the brain actually occurs there. In other words not only do our
thoughts occur within the brain but also what is thought about. Just
as our thoughts do not occur outside the brain, the objects of
cognition occur within the brain in conjunction with thoughts and
thinking concerning them.
[/quote]
My first impulse was to reject this on the face of it - I can think about
events that occured "out there", say the first human landing on the moon.
But, modulo caveats above, you are right - it is only in my mind, after all,
that a lunar landing has occured. I can only think about this event,
wherever it occured, if at all, through whaterver mental mechanisms inform
me that such an event did occur - memories, encodings, what you will.

This has implications, both theoretical and practical. On the
practical side there is the matter of the reliability of eye-witness
testimony. A witness, asked to recall and describe roughly how fast a car
was going when it "slammed into the tree" will report, on average, higher
velocities, than a witness to the same event asked the same question,
but with "slammed" replaced by "bumped". This is no isolated curio, but
the tip of the ice-burg of a deep problem in jurisprudence. In controled
experiments, subjects view video clips, and are then asked about details
of what they witnessed - their reports are systematicaly biased by how the
questions are posed. Asked "where was the guard when you heard the first
gunshot" they are more likely, later, to report having seen a gun (no gun
actualy appeared in the video) than if asked "where was the guard when you
heard the car backfire".

It was a bit misleading of me to speak of memories as being "stored", as if
recall could pull up a static fiducial record - that is not how human
episodic memory works. We store the gist of events (where gist depends on
what is important to us at the time), and fill in details more by inference
than by recall. When we remember, we atually recreate the experience anew;
sensory cortex is activated; whatever equilibrium state it achieves is
influenced by a variety of factors - its state at the time of memory
reconstruction; and this very act of reconstruction is in itself an event
that will influence how we remember the original experience the next time
around. It is amazing that memory is as accurate as it is, given all the
possibilities for going astray - but it is not uniformly accurate: we
remember the "gist" of events with a great deal more accuracy than the
details. There is an adaptive economy to this way of remembering.

When I was about ten years old, I remember, there was a phone call one
evening. It was some kind of study - I was asked to recall details of a
cartoon that aired the night before. I was embarrassed when, time after
time, I was unable to recall specifics. I kept making excuses - "well, I
was in and out a lot, I was helping my mom make dinner, so I wasn>t really
paying attention". I was, during the interview, trying to reconcile the
fact that I knew I had a good memory, yet could not recall a single specific
incident I was asked about. Only a couple of hours or so after the interview
did I realize that I had not watched cartoons at all the night before - we
had left the TV off because of a thunder storm. DOH!

Ok, ok; I made up the part about the thunderstorm. All I REALLY remember is
that 1: for some reason we had left the TV off the night before the
interview, 2: put on the spot to answer questions about a show I usually
watched, but had not watched in that instance, I forgot that I had not
watched it, 3: I was embarrassed at not being able to answer the woman>s
questions (yes, I remember it was a woman>s voice on the line) - I felt
insulted by what I took to be condesention in her tone, 4: later, definitely
after the interview, I remembered that I in fact had not watched the show at
all, 5: a random detail - she asked me something about a cannonball
(probably I remember that because I liked the rhythm and melody in the word
"cannonball"). So, the gist is clear, pre-but-nearly-pubescent young male,
who prides himself on mental prowess, is deeply embarrassed by abject
failure to answer questions from a female, who regards him, unfairly,
as dumb. The details are a little fuzzy. I know I was in the kitchen during
the interview - that>s where the phone was. And I can conjure up a vision
of the kitchen, but that is just some generic blend of "the kitchen"
impressions. The gist of episodic memory is discrete - there is no averaging
over impressions; things happened one way or another; we either recall them
or we don>t; but details, sensory details, are fuzzy impressionistic
amalgams. And when parts of the gist are not clear we will, with some
hesitation, and suggestibly, confabulate to form a consistent picture of
what we "remember". An introspective phenomenolgical enquiry along these
lines is Roger Schank>s fascinating "Dynamic memory: A theory of reminding
and learning in computers and people". But have I strayed off topic?
Look, there is no way I could have known about the DAMN CANNONBALL - just so
we>re clear on that, ok?

[quote]
There really is no alternative. Do we have methods of thinking that
occur outside the brain? Well there are certain critical objections to
this kind of idea. But if thinking only occurs within the brain it is
clear that what is thought about has to occur there as well in
elementary mechanical terms.
[/quote]
Later, not now, I will want to talk about the mechanics of information
processing in the elementary units of brain function - certain eucaryotic
cells commonly known as neurons.

[quote]
Thus we are forced to examine what we can know of things external to
the brain by means of what we can know through methods of cognition
lying exclusively within the brain. This is a very old doctrinal issue
apparently dating to Descartes if not before.
[/quote]
This is what I was getting at (see my premature comments on "Why
There is an Envelope") with talk of regular expressions, finite
state machines, context-free grammars, push-down automata, single-layer
and multi-layer perceptrons. So, in brief, "methods of cognition" are
constrained by "methods of representation". The human brain, vastly
rich in structure, is nonetheless constrained in what it can represent,
hence limited in what it can know, think about, or imagine. Imagine
that. Less trivialy, some such limits are actualy adaptive. The
acquisition of language (see Steven Pinker>s "The Language Instinct:
How The Mind Creates Language") is a case in point. Now, Pinker>s
hella-fine book, itself a popularized distillation of a vast subject,
Noam Chomsky>s voluminous works never far below the surface, is over
400 pages long. It would be rash to try to summarize all that. Even
so, for the purposes of my limited point here, I>ll just say that
human children rapidly and unerringly acquire the lanuage of their
peers precisely because the human brain is exquisitely limited - is
geneticaly hard-wired to learn a universal grammar, a sharply restricted
subset of grammaticaly viable hypotheses logicaly consistent with
sample speech in the experience of three-year-olds (who have already
inductively aquired sophisticated rules of grammar).

But wait, there>s more - rules of grammar can be arbitrary, so long
as they are shared they serve the purpose of communication. They
are in that sense a special case. The human (primate, mammalian)
visual system operates under more severe constraints, it had better
reflect reality, better distinguish bears from bosoms if its posessor
is to have lunch more likely than be lunch. Yet even here less is
more. The inverse problem posed by vision, to deduce a three
dimensional time-varying scene from its two dimensional projection
onto a pair of slightly separated retinas is woefully ill-posed, in
a strict mathematical sense - there are in general vastly more variables
than there are constraints. Nonetheless the visual system is a marvel,
an inference engine without known equal at accurately arriving at an
interpretation of a scene above and beyond what facts allow. It plays
hunches, takes calculated risks, rejects out of hand many ifinities of
interpretations consistent with the visual evidence. It can, under
contrived circumstances, be fooled, its logical short-cuts caught in the
act of "unwarrented" assumptions (this is the scientific appeal of studying
visual illusions - they tease out the hueristic mechanisms that make normal
vision possible). Consider the Necker cube - you>ve seen it, stare at it
for a while and it flip flops from popping in to popping out - it flip flops
between two possible three dimensional interpretations - only two. Thing
is, there are infinitely many interpretations consistent with the visual
evidence, not the least of which is the one we actually know to be true -
lines on a flat page - yet we see only two interpretations out of the
inifinty of possibilities. The human visual system is hard-wired to wrest
from the infinity of logicaly possible scenes only a judiceous subset of
interpretations, ususally a subset of one. Seeing is deceiving. Our visual
systems are limited by their very structure in what they can conceive. This
is, on average, a good thing.

[quote]
However what is less apparent is any plausibly satisfactory
explanation for this basic idea in mechanical terms. It seems obvious
and has formed a critical path in philosophical speculation ever since
the advent of solipsism. Yet it has never been resolved to the best of
my knowledge in self consistent mechanical terms.
[/quote]
I was with you, more or less, up till now, pilgrim. Here, you go way out
on a limb. What can I say? The sciences of the mind have made ENORMOUS
advances just in the last 10 years (see Steven Pinker>s "How The Mind
Works", V. S. Ramachandran>s "Phantoms in the Brain", Rao, Olshausen, and
Lewicki>s "Probabilistic Models of the Brain", Rieke, Warland, van
Steveninck, and Bialek>s "Spikes: Exploring the Neural Code", Stephen
Palmer>s "Vision Science: Photons to Phenomenology", Shimon Ullman>s
"High-Level Vision: Object Recognition and Visual Cognition", Matt Ridley>s
"Nature via Nurture", Judith Rich Harris' "The Nurture Assumtion: Why
Children Turn Out The Way They Do", Michael Gazzaniga>s "The Mind>s Self",
and, just for ducks, Fodor>s "The Mind Doesn>t Work That Way" - just to
name a few thouroughly plausible, highly satisfactory explanations in
physicaly based, information-theory aware, utterly modern, yes, mechanical
terms of how some aspects of cognition work). Does anybody know how the
mind works? Oh, hell no. But a great deal is known, more every day. The
brain is vast, subtle, and extremely complex, as well it should be. But
there is nothing in principle to suggest it cannot continue to be explained,
mechanicaly, in the way much of it has been, and more of it is being,
explained. I must have misunderstood, again, your claim.

[quote]
So what are we to make of the idea? It is perhaps more apparent what
we cannot make of the idea. We know whatever we can know of things
outside the mind only in terms of whatever we can know of them within
the mind. Consequently we are limited to knowledge not of things in
themselves but of things as they appear to us within the brain.
[/quote]
Yep.

[quote]
But what does this mean exactly? For one thing it means that there is
a physical envelope to which our thinking and things thought about are
confined. We can only know of those things in terms of whatever is
present in the brain. And whatever does not lie within the brain we
cannot know of except in conjectural terms at best.
[/quote]
Well, no - he have more than conjecture. Knowledge of all things, in the
brain or out, is provisional, probabilistic, limited, but decidedly not
merely conjectural.

[quote]
But if there is no direct knowledge to be had of things as they exist
outside the brain, then what is it exactly that we know of things and
in what terms?
[/quote]
We know, unequivicaly, that the square root of two is irrational. Ah,
but this is an inside the brain construct. Ok. We have a concept of
number - it has served our survival well. Two bears go into a cave,
one comes out. Is it safe to go into the cave? Who among you will
say, ah, but the very notion of bearhood is knowable in conjectural
terms at best, and any conclusion that there is a cave, or that this
or that set of events has transpired is unknowable - I>ll go into
the cave now?

[quote]
On the other hand what we can know of things in the mind are geometric
and spatial relationships through perspective. We can also know of
ordinal and cardinal relationships among things through perspective.
And we can know as well of logical and temporal precedence through
similar considerations.
[/quote]
Is it ironic, then, that Euclid>s 5th postulate is now a hypothesis, an
empirical question, and in some doubt? Space is curved. Or it is>nt. It
is an open, empirical question. And as for ordinal relationships, they
too take something of a beating under special relativity. Event A happens
first, then event B happens second, says observer X in her frame of
reference. Nope, says observer Y, the events were simultaneous. Ha, you are
both wrong, Event B preceeded A, says observer Z. Who is right? All of
them - it all depends on your frame of reference.

You raised questions, damn good questions, Lester, and now you want to
postulate a bedrock of verities to build upon, but these too are open to
question.

[quote]

Regards - Lester

[/quote]
Cheers - Nezahualcoyotl

Lester Zick · Guest

On Tue, 04 Nov 2003 08:15:09 GMT, Michael Olea <oleaj@sbcglobal.net>
in sci.cognitive wrote:

[quote]in article 3f932a27.26069000@netnews.att.net, Lester Zick at
lesterDELzick@worldnet.att.net wrote on 10/19/03 4:24 PM:

Michael - I appreciate the candor and perspicacity of your post. The[/quote]
points you raise are all significant and deserve consideration and
response. I am personally very less well versed in neurology than
yourself but I think I>m on a critical path to the whole problem of
the mind/brain dichotomy. That>s really the thrust of my perspective
and approach.

I think I>m going to reply in pieces as time allows. So if I miss
things or don>t respond adequately please let me know. I think some of
the things you comment on are addressed more fully in the post
Differential Cognition. As noted previously this is just the first of
three essays intended to elucidate the problem in definitive terms.
[quote]
Thinking Inside the Envelope

think:
1) to form or have in mind
...
4) a: to reflect on: PONDER
b: to determine by reflecting
5) to call to mind: REMEMBER ...

thinking:
1) the action of using one>s mind to produce thoughts
2) a: OPINION, JUDGEMENT (I>d like to know your ~ on this)
[/quote]
Certainly agreed. I consider that there are two types of thinking in
the sense of producing thoughts: 1) the formation or production of
what I term judgments in elementary terms and 2) the construction of
exact analytically sound arguments.

The first is quite often conflated with the second by adducing
collateral considerations and offering them as arguments simulating
analytical sequences: ie. god exists because without him we couldn>t
be what we are, etc. In exact terms an argument is nothing more than
the applicable considerations bridging two things showing how they
relate in analytically necessary terms.

[quote]b: thought that is characteristic (as of a period, group, or person)

cognition:
the act or process of knowing
including both awareness and judgement; also:
a product of this act

awareness:
having or showing realization, perception, or knowledge

judgement:
the capacity for judging: DISCERNMENT
[/quote]
These are all correct interpretations of contemporary thinking on the
subject of thought and cognition and I see no problem in using them as
a conceptual basis for further analysis. Of course you have to realize
these kinds of definitions are not exact. So if I mix metaphors and
call thinking cognition or vice versa it is not with the intent of
dodging issues or begging the question, it>s because the distinction
in ordinary usage isn>t significant. There may or may not be valid
distinctions in terminology in critical analytical contexts such as
distinctions in the meanings of terms like free will, thought vs.
abstract thought and so forth. But these will come to light later on
as mechanical rationales and considerations become apparent.
[quote]

What is it that actually happens when we think? We think about things.
But where is it that we think about them and how?

What, Where, How (and we can even investigate Why)...
[/quote]
Actually these are not empirical questions at all at least in the
sense I>m approaching the subject (in reference to comments below).
At the moment I could care less about the visual cortex, prefrontal
lobes, the hypothalmus, etc. or the nervous system for that matter.
Although the point you raise with respect to thought occuring in the
nervous system as distinct from the brain is quite reasonable I>m not
drawing that fine a distinction in using the term brain at this
juncture. Basically I consider the brain and nervous system the same
for the purposes of what I>m addressing.

There is no question that neuroscience is producing vast insights on
the functioning of the brain even with respect to abstract t


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