> but I do always feel weird when I hear any living thing called effectively a thoughtless automaton.
I feel very weird about this too.
This de facto assumption that organisms are mechanisms first, that "higher-order" experiences we are familiar with as humans are at best "emergent" from these mechanisms--I wish people would understand that this is fundamentally as much a belief system, an article of faith, as the many alternatives are.
Saying this doesn't imply that every belief system is equally valuable or scientifically verifiable. But I think it's important to recognize one's axioms and/or biases.
The mechanistic view is certainly compelling and has the appearance of being all-encompassing.
Its all-encompassing appearance may actually be an artifact of how used to the story we've grown. A clockwork universe. We know that one by heart, whether we're scientists or not. We can apply that template to anything, and set about exploring (or reading about) the mechanisms. The fact that there are mechanisms everywhere doesn't prove that mechanism is all there is. That last part is an implicit belief system, a hidden article of faith, and that's how you get Descartes vivisecting dogs, and conscious experience necessarily (as though no other possibility could exist) having to be an "emergent" property.
Yes. Also, one of the most popular alternative views (that a non-“mechanical” soul is the origin of higher-order experiences) is probably even more deeply engrained in many of our cultures and patterns of thought. And operates very similarly, albeit with a different story about how these properties “emerge”.
Yes, that's true. Generally, we see that point of view as a belief, an article of faith (and of course the subject of a lot of disagreement) but we're falsely conditioned to imagine that the purely-mechanical view is free of all that, and it's not.
Occam's razor does support the mechanistic view. It is certainly necessary to explain the entire world, and it is sufficient to explain intelligence. So by Occam's razor we should accept it is the best explanation of intelligence.
That doesn't mean we have to give up on understanding the mechanism. Nor does it mean we shouldn't try to find out if it isn't a sufficient explanation. But calling it an unsupported belief system goes a bit far. It certainly isn't proven scientific theory. And there is room for it to be wrong. But there are good scientific principles behind this belief.
> But calling it an unsupported belief system goes a bit far. It certainly isn't proven scientific theory.
I agree it would be going too far to call it an unsupported belief system. I don't think I implied that it's unsupported, but it is a belief system. My point is that even with support, the underlying, unproven or unprovable assumptions should not be glossed over.
I'm skeptical that we have a mechanistic explanation of intelligence. I think we have sensible-but-unproven hypotheses, partially supported by observations, for how intelligence might evolve/arise. There's a lot of hand-waving between mechanistic principles and an outcome of general intelligence. One can imagine Occam's razor applying, if the hand-waving eventually resolves to something coherent. Until then, it's a combination of good science and fantasy.
Intelligence is just one of many human experiences that are believed/assumed to have mechanistic explanations. We should be careful to recognize the assumptions, however sound they may seem, and not turn them into dogma.
Isometric exercise involves co-contraction of muscle groups. Taichi involves the minimal contraction of muscle to produce posture and movement, and encourages maximum availability for responsive, springy movement in every joint. If you're practicing taichi, you're not exerting force against yourself. Isometric contraction is antithetical to taichi practice.
I wouldn't go so far as to say antithetical. There are lots of positions in taichi that are basically isometric exercises:
* Horse Stance (Ma Bu): This is a foundational stance in Tai Chi (and many other martial arts) that resembles a half squat. Practitioners lower their center of gravity with feet wide apart, bending the knees and keeping the spine straight. Maintaining this position requires muscle engagement similar to an isometric exercise, strengthening the legs, core, and improving balance.
* Pushing Hands (Tui Shou): This exercise involves two practitioners who work against each other's force in a controlled manner, aiming to improve sensitivity, balance, and strength. While it's more dynamic than traditional isometric exercises, it involves moments where pushing against an opponent (or yourself in solo practice) can mimic the muscle engagement of isometric training.
* Holding the Ball: This position involves standing with knees slightly bent, as if holding a large ball in front of you. This posture engages the arms, shoulders, and core muscles in a static manner, similar to an isometric hold, while also improving balance and concentration.
When I think of isometric exercise, I think of co-contracting opposing muscle groups so that the body is exerting more effort than would be minimally necessary to maintain a posture. That kind of exertion would be antithetical to the practice of taichi, but perhaps that wasn't what you meant.
If you meant simply that a posture or position is held against the resistance of gravity or some other resistance (like a partner), then that's isometric contraction by definition, since there is muscle activity but the joints are not moving.
Still, by that definition, describing taichi as a form of isometric exercise doesn't really cut it for me. A fundamental part of practice is to continue discovering how to muscularly engage less, in order to free up the sensitivity, availability, and responsiveness of the body. The phrase "isometric exercise" doesn't conjure up that important aspect in my mind, but that's entirely subjective.
Another aspect is that in practice, there is constant motion in the joints in taichi. Holding static postures is a common and useful aspect of training, but the actual use of taichi (a martial art, after all) is entirely dynamic. To an outside observer, a movement might appear as though a practitioner is holding their arm, spine, and head in fixed positions while turning the waist or stepping, but in actuality, every joint should be adapting and moving in concert with its neighbors.
Nothing is held in a fixed position--one reason being that as soon as you're committed to holding something in a fixed position, your partner/opponent will exploit that as a fulcrum to destabilize you.
I'm only a fractal enthusiast, but my impression is that the key distinction that makes these fractals, or at least fractal-like, is not their detail per se, but that there is complexity at every scale. From the article:
> we find intricate structure at every scale
> At every length scale, small changes in the hyperparameters can lead to large changes in training dynamics
Love this take, and I agree. Where do you think this monorail proclivity comes from (assuming it wasn't "predetermined")? My hand-wavy first guess is an interwoven legacy of patriarchy, trauma, and power structures including theological ones that reflected and reinforced it.
Or maybe it's just that we tend to grab shiny things, just like crows and monkeys, and a sense of singular certainty just seems particularly shiny.
I think it is a fairly universal human desire to seek understanding of the world and make sense of it. Accurate modeling of the world and how it works confers safety and power and comparative advantage. This is why philiosophers and religionists have ask the question "why?" Even (especially) children like predictable rules.
> I think it is a fairly universal human desire to seek understanding of the world and make sense of it.
Not remotely universal, and not even related to the desire to seek an understanding of the world. Everyone has an intuition about “free will”; for most people it’s whatever, a given. But then a small minority has a totalizing idea because X means that Free Will is impossible. Then they start this campaign to “disabuse” everyone of that intuition.
There’s very little desire to learn there—people who have the “free will” intuition already “understand”; likewise with the Determinism people. Everyone is certain about the way things are.
I think we might just disagree. As far as we can determine, humans have tried to understand and predict how things work. How and when game migrates. What causes plants to grow, and how we can induce it. What makes a good growing season. We are naturally causal detectives, connecting the idea that eating prevents hunger, or that clothes provide comfort.
Sure, not everyone may care about esoteric questions like the origin of the cosmos, but nobody is free from seeking to understand causality. The former is an offshoot of the later.
> Sure, not everyone may care about esoteric questions like the origin of the cosmos, but nobody is free from seeking to understand causality. The former is an offshoot of the later.
An idea/debate that immediately and violently runs into contradictions when you query for its practical applications is not at all an offshoot of the latter.
They share the same engine of curiosity and desire to understand the world.
I dont think humans could have to cognitive drive to discover practical applications of truth or causality without sometimes running into tough questions.
I think it is evolutionarily and culturally impossible for people to only make practical discoveries when the utility is not apparent until the discovery is made.
Knowledge is power, both socially and evolutionarily.
> Where do you think this monorail proclivity comes from (assuming it wasn't "predetermined")?
I am not a History of Ideas guy (or any guy). But,
1. Some people get very afraid of certain ideas because of the tenuous so-called implications. See Mindfulness (already mentioned): this is very bad according to some because if you believe in it then you necessarily (the monorail) stop fighting any kind of injustice against yourself and others. Because it is apparently impossible to both practice mindfulness as well as to not be a complete doormat to Circumstance.
2. Western thought is very ideas-oriented, to the point of becoming afraid of ideas as primary agents in themselves (what causes things (not as in intentional agents))
3. Western thought absolutely abhors contradiction. Or apparent contradiction. It can’t live with it. It can’t just say “ah, this is impossible for me to explain but it seems that this box can be green and orange at the same time”—nope
4. Related: One often mistakes “contradiction” with “there’s a gap here I can’t explain...” (see next point). This is equally insufferable. Many would rather “resolve” the apparent contradiction by way of some absolutely naive and idiotic theory rather than having to live with this gap of understanding or comprehension. See the popularity and interpretation of what the Turing Test is: Many would apparently rather believe that intelligence is a sufficiently advanced computer program even though they have absolutely no knowledge about the subject of intelligence whatsoever because simply not-knowing is too uncomfortable
5. I hate the “Death of God” idea but it is true now that it is harder to hide behind the God of the Gaps in a secular age; thus in turn apparent contradictions become harder to live with
6. Eventually you end up with very totalizing ideas like Determinism because you are a physicist or a biologist or something; you understand the “substrate” of everything important to humans and everything that seems “extra” to that is just complete idiotic, human-invented nonsense.
> consciousness is an emergent phenomenon
That's a theory that has yet to be tested, not a certainty.
<digression>
> Every atom in your brain behaves according to the laws of particle physics...
These are assumptions. They're very plausible and useful ones. They may turn out to be absolutely correct, but it's still worth noting that they are theories.
"Every atom behaves..." so far, so good, yes it does.
"...according to the laws of particle physics"-- presumably yes, with this caveat: The existence of a complete set of inviolable "laws" that explain _all_ physical behavior is an article of faith. It's a plausible potential outcome of the extremely practical process of collective scientific inquiry that so far seems to hold up, but still-- the concept of a set of laws as programs and constraints for absolutely all physical phenomena is fundamentally a philosophy. It has proven to be extremely useful, but it's not a proven or even probable fact. It's a powerful axiom.
</digression>
> ...and somehow consciousness emerges out of that.
Back to the assumption that consciousness is a phenomenon that emerges from the physical activity of a brain:
Is a (functional) brain both necessary and sufficient for consciousness to "emerge"? I don't know, I'm just a person interested in this stuff, but I think it's an important question without a definite answer.
We tend to assume that having a brain is a necessary requirement for consciousness, but testing for consciousness (not to be confused with mere rationality) is difficult, as far as I know. I can't prove that a stone, plant, or region of spacetime has no consciousness.
Even if we came up with a test for "consciousness", and that this test _did_ prove that a brain (or a similarly complex network) is necessary for consciousness to appear, there is still the issue of whether the brain is sufficient. How would we know?
Whatever it is that we call consciousness may emerge from the complex physical phenomena of brain activity, as you said. Or the brain may be a catalyst for the phenomena we label consciousness. Or a brain (or human body) may only be a prerequisite for us, with our current capacities, to be able to observe the experience we have come to label "consciousness".
"Light" used to mean only the visible spectrum, until we understood there was more to it: Light went beyond the limits of what we had up til then used to recognize its existence, and indeed it occurred even in what we had called "darkness", and blue things didn't contain blueness in and of themselves, nor were blue things producing blue light.
I'm not advocating for any particular alternate theory, or proposing that consciousness operates outside of known physical constraints, I'm just a stickler for reminding ourselves what concepts are articles of faith, even in science itself
I don't think "article of faith" is the right phrase. For every possible hypothesis, we attach a prior probability and then we update those probabilities when new evidence comes in. If accepting a given hypothesis would require changing a lot of other hypotheses that we have high confidence in, then we should attach a low prior probability to it. I don't have to take it on faith that a low probability hypothesis is false; the default position is to assume that it is false until compelling evidence to the contrary appears.
For example, I can hypothesize that a fifth fundamental force is needed to explain consciousness, but then I need to modify the standard model of particle physics to account for new interactions. I have a high confidence that the standard model is correct in the domains relevant to the evolution of life on Earth, namely chemistry and biology. So my default assumption is that we don't need to introduce new laws of physics to explain consciousness.
>Is a (functional) brain both necessary and sufficient for consciousness to "emerge"?
I think you misread my post as implying that a brain is required for consciousness. Our baseline for talking about consciousness is consciousness in humans, and all of the medical evidence suggests that human consciousness is associated with brain activity. But I see no reason to believe that something made out of silicon or other non-organic materials couldn't be conscious if it implemented the same kind of processes that we find in the brain.
Studies like this one https://www.sciencenews.org/article/scientists-spinal-fluid-... suggest that visual (at least, and perhaps other) stimulation increases blood flow in the brain, and the lack thereof can increase the flow of cerebrospinal fluid, which flushes out toxic substances. This study was done with waking subjects, but the article points out that the process is much more pronounced in sleep.
Perhaps this process occurs in naps as well, helping to refresh the brain on a biochemical level.
I feel very weird about this too.
This de facto assumption that organisms are mechanisms first, that "higher-order" experiences we are familiar with as humans are at best "emergent" from these mechanisms--I wish people would understand that this is fundamentally as much a belief system, an article of faith, as the many alternatives are.
Saying this doesn't imply that every belief system is equally valuable or scientifically verifiable. But I think it's important to recognize one's axioms and/or biases.
The mechanistic view is certainly compelling and has the appearance of being all-encompassing.
Its all-encompassing appearance may actually be an artifact of how used to the story we've grown. A clockwork universe. We know that one by heart, whether we're scientists or not. We can apply that template to anything, and set about exploring (or reading about) the mechanisms. The fact that there are mechanisms everywhere doesn't prove that mechanism is all there is. That last part is an implicit belief system, a hidden article of faith, and that's how you get Descartes vivisecting dogs, and conscious experience necessarily (as though no other possibility could exist) having to be an "emergent" property.