[MD] Heads or tails?

[Hamilton Priday]

Case, Platt --

 Quoting Case <Case at iSpots.com>:
> In short this talk of inorganic matter having purpose and values strikes 
> me
> as animism. Imbuing the mindless with mind and agency seem to me to be a
> regression in understanding not an advance.

Quoting Platt <pholden at davtv.com>:
> Which begs the question, "How does mind emerge from the mindless?"
> Science is still struggling with the answer wouldn't you agree?

I wonder if the preposition "with" instead of "for" in your (rhetorical) 
question was intentional.  Honestly, Platt, I don't think Science is 
struggling "to find" an answer.  By the beginning of the twentieth century 
the physiologists, neurophysicists, eugenicists, anthropologists, and 
psychiatrists whose research constitutes the Science of Mankind had pretty 
much concluded that "mind" is an integrative sensory function of biological 
evolution.

This paragraph from Richard Vitzthum's "Philosophical Materialism" is a 
typical summation of the objectivist view of mind as a physiological 
"computer".  From it you can see why the cognitive scientists are exploiting 
AI as the logical step to mind enhancement.

"The bottom line of this theoretical approach, of course, is that the mind 
is reducible to natural processes that can be translated into the language 
of math and physics.  Neuronal networks are computing mechanisms that 
effortlessly transform multi-dimensional vectors of one kind of mathematical 
value into other vectors of mathematical value.  Visual space being changed 
into motor space has been mentioned, but a great deal of work has already 
also been done along these lines on how we see and hear.  Images from the 
eyes' retinas are translated into neuronal signals and processed through 
countless neural networks simultaneously so quickly that it seems to the 
viewer she is seeing the external world on a mirror in her mind, whereas in 
fact her brain is recreating and re-representing everything "out there" 
from, as it were, scratch.  So too with sound. Varying air pressures 
entering the ear are translated into electrical impulses which are then 
massively and instantly parallel-processed into noises that seem to be 
coming to us, direct and unmediated, from the external world.  But in fact 
they too, like our vision, are the result of incredibly complex processes of 
vector transformation among multi-dimensional coordinate systems performed 
by the countless neural networks of our brain."

If the objectivists "struggle with this answer", it is most likely the 
result of an internal conflict over whether their functional description of 
mental processes accurately represents what we mean by "conscious 
awareness."   A computer can process information and spit out analyses.  A 
seismometer can "sense" movements in the earth's crust and plot their 
amplitude in Richter units.  Knowledge can be recorded on paper or tape and 
stored as a body of "intelligence".  A stretched elastic band has a "memory" 
that returns it to its initial length.  But none of these devices has 
proprietary awareness of what it detects, records, or analyzes.  It does not 
KNOW that it senses.  Which is why conscious awareness cannot be reduced to 
digits, signals, and patterns.

I must say, though, it's extraordinary for me to be siding with Case in an 
exchange with Platt.  Wonders never cease!

Essentially yours,
Ham