The subjective observer is a fictional character

[GrahamH]

If brains contain representations of objects, relationships, generally 'concepts', then new concepts can be generated by semi-random permutation combined with a selection process that might somehow recognise a new combination as a fit with a problem, task to be performed, opportunity etc.

C'mon, that's just gobbledygook. Do you really think that there's any solid explanation within this statement?

I wonder if you understand how evolutionary processes generate novel forms. If you do then think about a brain employing such a process of randomised combination, variation and selection to generate new ideas.

Entirely new ideas do not seem to occur to us. Invention takes existing concepts together with

Hold on. If new ideas/concepts don't occur to us, then how did "existing concepts" ever come into understanding?
The point is that each and every idea/concept must have an origin (they must have been 'new' at some point). Which means, undoubtedly, that the human mind has the capacity to create new ideas/concepts.

Of course new ideas arise, but what is it that is new about them? Is it the elements, or the way the fit together?
I think this is really a topic in it own right, but the premise is that concepts are recognisers of patterns. Neural networks are demonstrably recognisers of patterns and have learning ability. A child looks at the sun and a response forms in her brain. That response is the beginning of a concept of the Sun. The connections that respond when she sees the Sun link to those that respond to yellow colours, round shapes, brightness, moon, sky etc, etc.

The origin of these concepts is the world. To put it sloppily We grow concepts in our brains and our brains link them up. The nature of brains is interconnectedness. Brains make connections between responses to the world. Some of those connected responses are what we call ideas.

New connections are potentially new ideas, but more likely gibberish. A capacity to recognise combinations that are like other combinations that 'work' allows the gibberish to fade away and the stuff that works can be reinforced until it grows into permanence.

I doubt there is any fundamental difference at the neural network level between learning to control your arm and learning arithmetic or forming a concept like 'mother' or 'Sun'. They are different patterns that we learn to recognise because feedback indicates that they work in some way.

[jamest]

Graham, you are supposed to be eradicating all traces of creative thinking from our brains, but you're not doing a very good job.
...

Hold on, you've already rejected the notion of personal and singular review (the subjective observer). Here, you appear to be talking about One who is reviewing 'the data' and comparing it to other data. Sin bin!

You cannot set about rejecting the notion of a subjective observer by utilising him in that rejection.

Look, James, I'm am not denying that people are creative or report a subjective point of view. That would be absurd and it is absurd of you to assume it.

What?!

I am considering how a physical brain might account for this with no appeal to something else. I am questioning the assumption that 'subjectivity' has ontological significance.

Okay, so now we have it in writing: the brain is creative and does have subjective experiences - the very thing that I've been trying to establish since page 1. (James now screaming in utter exasperation). At least now, we can move on to other aspects of the central theme.

Obviously brains are subject to effects from senses, body chemistry and their own internal states. So an individual brain does necessarily have a singular view, if it do any interpretation of 'data'.

Just highlighting, for future reference.

[SpeedOfSound]

I doubt there is any fundamental difference at the neural network level between learning to control your arm and learning arithmetic or forming a concept like 'mother' or 'Sun'. They are different patterns that we learn to recognise because feedback indicates that they work in some way.

This has been verified over and over by experiments. The currency of cortical columns is the same across modalities except for the actual I/O portion.

[GrahamH]

(I will say more about physical recognition later. For the moment I ask you to suppose that neural networks can learn to recognise generalised patterns.)

Whether this accounts for all creativity is too big a question to cover here, and we aren't justifying the claim with science, but in principle physical brains might be creative.

a little on creativity. I have my own theory though it's more of a robbers sack of other peoples research.

The cortical sheet contains about 200,000,000 mini-columns that seem to be the Lego blocks of any given representation. Vernon Mountcastle has persuaded most of this MC structure.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cortical_minicolumn

MC's can contain around 100 neruons and they act as a functional I/O unit. I'm a bit foggy on this but my understanding is that the columns can overlap. One neuron can be used in more than one Lego. They do this with a brain trick that is also called lateral inhibition (like it is in the retina) and it means that for a given set of inputs that the column will 'define itself' by inhibiting a barrel of neurons around it.

There is a Big Myth that we use only 10% of our brains. That has no evidence whatever and never did. It was something the media misunderstood and picked up. By the time we are 24 we have used everything and are reusing all of it.

But due to the structure of MC's you can reuse a neuron without forgetting the old fact. The memory magic is in the connections and there can be up to 10,000 of them per neuron. But the magic is in an even stranger place in actuality. It is in the structure of the network thus formed. One neuronal group can be a part of many completely unrelated concepts and memories.

My unique idea is that there is some crosstalk to this process. There has to be. If a neuron fires it is likely to fire again. If I'm an engineer and I have happened to store my kid swinging with some facts about bridges with overlap than I am likely to contribute to my team an idea about swings and bridges.

We are each astronomically unique in our creativity as a result of this sort of thing. It's really quite obvious in people with ADD( attention deficit disorder). I talked yesterday about the contradiction of having a same overall structure with our actual neural networks being completely unique.

The same oddness is present in neural networks. We can all learn what a chair is but the fine grained neural net that supports it is completely unrecognizable between two individuals. I have a term for that that I use in other philosophical concepts. Ontologically shallow. Bernard Baars just calls it degeneracy.

Any given session of thought, conversation, and bombardment of the senses is going to create massive electrical storms that pour over these columnar networks and across the entire brain. Like sheets of rain in a gale.

So my big question is not why are we creative but how and the hell do we stop ourselves from being too fucking off-the-wall creative and get anything done at all.

(Numerous papers by Mountcastle and Baars are my source for all of this.)

Thanks for that.

I presume there must be neural mechanisms that can recognise useful from gibberish and relate is some way to our sense of reality and truth. Since most ideas that make it to an attentional state are not gibberish I assume it is not part of that system. Stepping back from brains, in computing terms relevance is a metric used in searches and it is calculated, crudely put, as a weighted sum of links to other things already known about. On many sites they work on 'people who liked what you like also liked this, so you might like it too'. It could also access semantic information, such as if the topic is an orange that has associates with the colour, and fruit, and citrus taste, and vitamins and sunshine and trees. If I think of an orange then things related to the things related to oranges may become active and might get some focus.

If some activity related to, say, gravel, happens to intersect with activity for for an orange it might lack enough common links to propagate further (destructive interference?).

[jamest]

James. You have been corrected by Graham and I yesterday about your misinterpreting what he said about creativity and SE. If you don't read the current posts and correct your course according to further explanations then things are going to get personal and heated again.

They are?

Last night you said that creativity has not been addressed. All of my posts about the brain addressed it. So has Graham. I would like you to read my brain posts and tell me how what I have described could possibly NOT allow for individual creativity and variance with similar environmental input.

Well, you'll have to forgive me because I've been focusing my time upon Graham's ideas.

No one here but you EVER said that human brains could not respond in uniquely creative ways!

Really? Then I guess Graham's attempts to reject the purely creative aspect behind certain concepts/ideas - such as 'God' and 'solipsism' - must have been a mirage or something.

[GrahamH]

Okay, so now we have it in writing: the brain is creative and does have subjective experiences - the very thing that I've been trying to establish since page 1. (James now screaming in utter exasperation). At least now, we can move on to other aspects of the central theme.

WTF do you think this topic is about, if not accounting for how brains give rise to reports of subjective experience, involving no subjective substance?

"The subjective observer is a fictional character" ( in a non-subjective narrative constructed by the brain)

What you want to establish is that special sauce is required to account for it and that subjective substance is the mind of God, not brains.

Am I wrong about that?

[GrahamH]

Really? Then I guess Graham's attempts to reject the purely creative aspect behind certain concepts/ideas - such as 'God' and 'solipsism' - must
have been a mirage or something.

I was pointing out something about the nature of creativity, not denying that we are creative! You have a naive notion that 'minds create ideas from pure mental essence' or something like that. I pointed out that ideas come from reflections of the physical world.

So yes, you are seeing mirages, maybe because you don't want to look too closely at the illusory world of the senses.

[SpeedOfSound]

Really? Then I guess Graham's attempts to reject the purely creative aspect behind certain concepts/ideas - such as 'God' and 'solipsism' - must have been a mirage or something.

No Just further evidence of your stubborn refusal to listen to what people are really saying. We are hear to help you work on this very common character defect.

[SpeedOfSound]

Thanks for that.

I presume there must be neural mechanisms that can recognise useful from gibberish and relate is some way to our sense of reality and truth. Since most ideas that make it to an attentional state are not gibberish I assume it is not part of that system. Stepping back from brains, in computing terms relevance is a metric used in searches and it is calculated, crudely put, as a weighted sum of links to other things already known about. On many sites they work on 'people who liked what you like also liked this, so you might like it too'. It could also access semantic information, such as if the topic is an orange that has associates with the colour, and fruit, and citrus taste, and vitamins and sunshine and trees. If I think of an orange then things related to the things related to oranges may become active and might get some focus.

If some activity related to, say, gravel, happens to intersect with activity for for an orange it might lack enough common links to propagate further (destructive interference?).

Yes. There is another wonderful mechanism that also uses the common brain trick of lateral inhibition. It's the thalamo-cortical complex. The thalamus has a little net of special neurons around it called the NRT(latin acronym) thalamic reticular nucleus.

It allows recognizing things in a top down manner. It takes a lot of trees seen to make a concept of a tree. This complex sorts things out by how often the pattern has been input. You will see an object, then a sign, then a stop sign, then THAT stop sign then some bird-shit or graffiti on that stop sign. They have scanned this, timed it and there is much evidence.

Every recognition of a pattern deepens the lines of the pattern. It is in this bit of magic where you can start to understand the subjective experience.

But I haven't completely answered your question yet. I've just told you about categories. Making sense of concepts and rejecting noisy unreal ones is a bigger subject. More later I hope.

The more is important to understanding how our SE feels the way it does and also in understanding dreams and the unconscious.

[jamest]

I wonder if you understand how evolutionary processes generate novel forms. If you do then think about a brain employing such a process of randomised combination, variation and selection to generate new ideas.

Yes, I understand the process of natural selection.

Of course new ideas arise, but what is it that is new about them? Is it the elements, or the way the fit together?
I think this is really a topic in it own right, but the premise is that concepts are recognisers of patterns.

Patterns within the brain, you must mean?

A child looks at the sun and a response forms in her brain. That response is the beginning of a concept of the Sun. The connections that respond when she sees the Sun link to those that respond to yellow colours, round shapes, brightness, moon, sky etc, etc.

So, you're saying that there's a specific physical structure within the brain that correlates with every quality we know about the sun? I'm looking for clarity here, before I proceed to discuss your ideas.

It seems to me that you are reducing each 'thing' and quality that comprises of experience to particular brain structure, or local events, within the brain. Is this essentially correct?

[jamest]

What you want to establish is that special sauce is required to account for it and that subjective substance is the mind of God, not brains.

Am I wrong about that?

Well, I want to establish that your model of experience has logical problems which would render your conclusion about 'subjective observers' as null & void.

[jamest]

Really? Then I guess Graham's attempts to reject the purely creative aspect behind certain concepts/ideas - such as 'God' and 'solipsism' - must have been a mirage or something.

No Just further evidence of your stubborn refusal to listen to what people are really saying. We are hear to help you work on this very common character defect.

Thanks for that, Oprah.

[SpeedOfSound]

Of course new ideas arise, but what is it that is new about them? Is it the elements, or the way the fit together?
I think this is really a topic in it own right, but the premise is that concepts are recognisers of patterns.

Patterns within the brain, you must mean?

A child looks at the sun and a response forms in her brain. That response is the beginning of a concept of the Sun. The connections that respond when she sees the Sun link to those that respond to yellow colours, round shapes, brightness, moon, sky etc, etc.

So, you're saying that there's a specific physical structure within the brain that correlates with every quality we know about the sun? I'm looking for clarity here, before I proceed to discuss your ideas.

It seems to me that you are reducing each 'thing' and quality that comprises of experience to particular brain structure, or local events, within the brain. Is this essentially correct?

No. He is not going Fodor on us. He is saying that the sun carves these patterns and these patterns end up in the brain as fuzzy neural nets that represent the qualities of the sun.

[SpeedOfSound]

Really? Then I guess Graham's attempts to reject the purely creative aspect behind certain concepts/ideas - such as 'God' and 'solipsism' - must have been a mirage or something.

No Just further evidence of your stubborn refusal to listen to what people are really saying. We are hear to help you work on this very common character defect.

Thanks for that, Oprah.

You are sooo welcome. My intentions with you and Little Idiot have always been to rid you of that last clinging to the obfuscated ego/self of the cosmic mind and get you on down the road to Enlightenment.

We are just here to help.

[jamest]

So, you're saying that there's a specific physical structure within the brain that correlates with every quality we know about the sun? I'm looking for clarity here, before I proceed to discuss your ideas.

It seems to me that you are reducing each 'thing' and quality that comprises of experience to particular brain structure, or local events, within the brain. Is this essentially correct?

No. He is not going Fodor on us. He is saying that the sun carves these patterns and these patterns end up in the brain as fuzzy neural nets that represent the qualities of the sun.

Well, I don't see how that is a response in the negative to my question. "Fuzzy neural nets" that represent the qualities of the sun, are essentially physical structures/events.