Edwin,

"the primary function of the brain is filtering"

And navigation.

Non-linear and linear.

Hi Akinbo,

An excellent question: can computers be aware?

Considering that I posit awareness in the field, locally concentrated near mass flow, then to some extent the answer would have to be yes. But I'm sure you're asking can they be aware "like humans" (or dogs, etc.).

I don't think so, for the following reasons. If local awareness depends on velocity of mass flow, both the velocity of electrons and the mass flow are very small. (The electron's high mass density complicates this answer, but I don't think it changes the result.) Even more significant is the organization of the flow. Computer flows (as currently constituted) are sequentially clocked and have no pattern that relates to reality. By this I mean that I can design the processor that processes the scene from a microprocessor, an FPGA, a gate array, a custom integrated circuit, or even vacuum tubes (in theory!). Each of these implementations will be completely different in the sense that, while executing exactly the same algorithm, the timing and spatial distribution of pulsed movement of electrons will be very different in each circuit. And in none of the circuits will the flow have any analogous relation to the scene being processed.

Contrast this with the way brains work. For simplicity take a rat's whiskers. The whiskers are laid out on his face in approximately 5 x 5 array and the nerves from the area preserve the pattern in the brain! That is, the nerves travel to a corresponding 5 x 5 array network in the brain. Thus the brain actually models the space being sensed (i.e., the root of the whiskers). There is nothing corresponding to this organization in computers.

Additionally I believe all mass flows in brains are complex 3-D flows (that vary in time) while all computers flows are essentially 2-D. And the gated flows of vesicles across synaptic gaps and the train of pulses in the axons are essentially analog (i.e, proportional) while computer flows are completely digital, flow or no flow. So brains have 3-D flows that vary in time and provide parallel analog processing of signals that, I believe, effectively model a 3-D world being observed by the brain. Computers have 2-D pulsed flows that vary spatially in ways essentially uncorrelated with the 3-D world being sensed. These I believe are very significant aspects that relate to say drones that see and shoot down missiles.

If the computer is "aware of" anything, it will effectively be aware of noise. And the vaunted ability of computers to "rewire" or "reprogram" themselves, so exciting when one first hears about it, has not produced any remarkable results that I know of.

The Dragon software that I'm using to write this comment inputs my voice and outputs ASCII text, but has absolutely zero awareness of the meaning of the words, which yet are easily interpreted by your learned brain structures. Despite the NSA's efforts to change this situation, the best they can do is recognize suspicious patterns that are then brought to the attention of a human intelligence.

I hope the sense of the above comes through. I see these problems is inherent, and not really subject to solution by those who favor AI. Nor do I believe anything essential changes with "quantum computers", which I do not believe will ever approach silicon-based computing except, perhaps, on simple factoring problems that are of no real import.

There is another aspect that touches on your question 3.) above so I will handle it in another comment.

Thank you for your most interesting questions that go to the heart of the matter.

Edwin Eugene Klingman

Edwin,

You say: "It may be that you do not recognize a difference between awareness and thinking, which is largely what I base my discussion on."

I don't believe that the dividing line between awareness and thinking is as sharp as you suggest or that the formal language adequate for describing one is different from that for describing the other.

Otherwise--if we assume a two-stage information processing system (awareness "thinking")--we would get an immensely more complex scientific picture requiring another formal mechanism, and we would be faced with an impossible question of how and why the next information system ("thinking") arose.

Lev,

One way to think of it might be that awareness is the medium and thinking is the message. The energy/field and the form it takes.

Lev,

We simply have a difference of opinion on this point. Computers and pattern recognition are very simple and at the same time very impressive. The speech recognition software I am using continues to amaze me, and there are countless such examples. But I am quite sure that 'awareness' is a separate order of being. It is not just "very efficient" processing, or anything of that nature. Thus computers can effectively "think" but are not (and will not be) "aware".

On the other hand, unfocussed awareness is an amorphous thing that is almost impossible to define, so that in that sense you are correct that there is no hard and fast dividing line separating awareness from thinking because we never experience awareness completely separate from thinking.

If these were simple, easy to explain issues, the problem would have been solved millennia ago, when it was first discussed.

In my abstract I state that the nature of reality is a matter of belief. This fact is clearly on display in the FQXi contests.

Sure Edwin, best wishes and good luck with your essay!

Doesn't "sure" here means "of course"?

Cheers, Lev

Akinbo,

In an earlier comment above you ask the tough question, about "the not-two aspect of reality". You note that Parmenides said "of necessity one thing exists, viz., the existent and nothing else."

If this is true then several questions arise: how to conceive of or represent this fact. And whether this is merely a conception or whether one can be aware of this fact in direct fashion.

I choose, as a physicist, to identify the "one thing" as the primordial gravity field, and attempt to show how our current universe, including us, can and did evolve from this one thing. To do so I necessarily include in the nature of the field the aspect of awareness, based partly on the self-interaction of the field that is necessary for the one thing to evolve (since nothing else existed!) and partly on a conclusion that I have reached that awareness, as I experience it, cannot be created from material building blocks, but must be inherent in the Participatory Universe that Wheeler intuited.

But this then implies, as Amos noted above, that we can, being evolved parts of the one thing, be directly aware of the one thing. Yet if this is the case, why is not everyone aware of this, and further, what does it mean to be aware of it?

In my essay I discuss how the existence of a threshold allows the creation of "two-state" systems, idealized as logic gates and the interconnection of these gates can produce numbers and such numbers can be generated by energy input to the 'counter'. I then discuss how we can, algorithmically, treat these numbers to derive 'feature vectors' which are the essential ingredients of physics. This process can be internalized in our brains to represent the world as "things", or what Zen calls "the Ten Thousand things".

Now whether awareness arises from the biological fact of putting the right building blocks in the right order, or from its inherent existence as a primordial field, in either case human beings identify as 'separate individuals', generally denoted by the term 'ego'.

If all we are is 'meat machines' then that's probably as far as we can go. But if awareness is the core property of the universe, then one might expect that it's possible to have some direct indication of this. Unfortunately, the nature of ego is to divide the universe into 'me' and 'not-me', an inherent two-fold reality.

Is it possible to transcend this? Many reports claim that is.

Abraham Maslow's studies, related in "The Peak Experience" claim that many people naturally have episodes wherein they experience the 'one-ness' of the universe, also termed 'being one-with the universe'.

William James in "Varieties of Religious Experience" came to the same conclusion.

Jill Bolte Taylor's "My Stroke of Insight" describes the state as she (a neuro-anatomist) experienced it while having a stroke.

Innumerable reports of LSD and psilocybin experience indicate the same thing.

All cultures have a mystical tradition based on experiences of this sort.

In my opinion every one of us was born with this general awareness, before our brains learned to distinguish 'me' from 'it' based on sensory input.

I also believe it is essentially a 'topological' awareness, based on *connectivity*, wherein the metric overlay of 'distance' is (almost) completely suppressed.

What is absolutely certain is that it can neither be adequately described in words (or math) nor can it be reached by talking, reading, or "thinking" about it. It is apparently reached through a biological state, either naturally, as Maslow and James report, or chemically induced, or stroke induced. Those who have never experienced it (or have forgotten the experience) tend to believe it's hogwash (or possibly codswallop). However it would appear that millions have experienced it, and the general consensus is that it's 1.) real, 2.) extremely positive, and 3.) has 'religious' overtones.

According to Zen and the Tao, it cannot be reached with words, but for a taste of the experience, I find D T Suzuki's translation of "Inscribed on the Believing Mind" to be exquisite.

I hope this adequately addresses the 'not-two' question.

Best regards,

Edwin Eugene Klingman

PS. This may seem to border on 'mystical', but I personally find it far less mystical than the belief that "math lives in some Platonic realm". It is based on direct experience, not abstract concept.

    Edwin

    You do not have to argue with me, just point out where my statement is wrong. It is a simple statement, therefore, where it is wrong, according to you, must also be simple to explain.

    There is no room for beliefs in science, physical existence as manifest to us is the only subject of concern.

    Paul

    Lev

    "Of course, we don't know what "awareness" means scientifically"

    Yes we do. You are falling into the same trap as Edwin and many others, by not first differentiating the knowable from the not-knowable. We can only know (be aware) of what is manifest to us (hypothesis being in effect virtual sensing). In other words , physical existence is that form of existence which is all that is potentially knowable to us. Whether we can attain knowledge of all that is doubtful, but another issue, the point is that the potential was there. Whether there is an alternative is irrelevant, because we cannot know it. And knowing it, ie being aware of it, involves the receipt of physical input (supplemented by the hypothesising of input which could have been received had some identifiable physical issue not prevented that). The subsequent processing of this input received is irrelevant, as that is not physics. The utilisation of representational devices to express this knowledge is another matter.

    Paul

    Edwin

    "Now whether awareness arises from the biological fact of putting the right building blocks in the right order, or from its inherent existence as a primordial field, in either case human beings identify as 'separate individuals', generally denoted by the term 'ego'"

    What evidence is there that this is a physical process, which you are labelling as awareness (and I cannot understand what it could be-not what you want it to be- other than what is normally termed awareness)was existent from the outset, and not just the result of an evolutionary process?

    And incidentally, physical existence is not just the province of humans, it is all that is potentially knowable by any sentient organism. Indeed, if a non-human landed on this planet and could explain a way to utilise a different sense which has not developed here, that would be included too.

    Paul

    Paul,

    I would ask, politely, that you refrain from commenting on my blog, and I will do so on yours. I do not accept your idea that the world is a movie, one sequential frame after another. Nor do I credit your claim that you "have no beliefs". But I do not go on your blog and constantly attack your position. I know you are impressed with your arguments, because you spread them everywhere, but they are not welcome here. Cannot you control yourself?

    Okay, Edwin. Will keep my mind open and "aware". If you dont have it, you may like to read this classic on Parmenides. http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/parmenides.1b.txt

    Cheerio

    Doctor Klingman,

    This essay is indubitably the best essay so far presented in this competition. As a doddering amateur realist, I would just like to make one comment. I contend in my essay BITTERS, that reality is unique, once.

    There is no way I can thank you for bringing to my attention the results of the Planck 2013 expedition: "Planck satellite data shows with high precision that we live in a remarkable simple universe."

      Dear Joe,

      Thank you very much for that appraisal.

      I have read your essay and am in basic agreement with you. But there are aspects of reality -- perhaps "chaotic attractors" -- that produce 'repetition' or 'near repetition'. As I point out, without such we would not even have language, as nothing would ever be stable enough to describe. Thus for example, while no two snowflakes are alike, we can make reasonable approximations of how much sunlight is reflected from Antarctica from trillions of snowflakes. That is what science is about. But your reminder of the nature of reality is very welcome.

      Best regards,

      Edwin Eugene Klingman

      Akinbo,

      I read the Parmenides paper. Very interesting. I would be interested in what you see as the main thing to be taken from it.

      Thank you Edwin for your careful and satisfactory responses to my questions.

      What you say that " Rather than derive gravity from some imaginary field, I simply accept it as real and try to derive everything else from that reality, starting only with the idea that it must evolve" makes sense - In a self-acting system there is no 'primal motive force' as it would be in a car engine. There the pistons turn the gears that turn the wheel - it is wrong to start with the wheel. But in the type of system you describe it is reversible at least in the local micro volumes. Hope that is right.

      I noticed the chirality of the arrow because in my own paper I did all the illustrations using a special font I created for the top-like rotating nodes. And it all followed the left hand rule. I revised the font and illustrations when I discovered that!

      Oops I will now have to revise the web page describing the font as well because the nodes there still rotated left-handedly!

      Cheers

      Vladimir

      Edwin,

      Re your iconoclastic survey of the status of modern physics.... Bravo! Your insights into the wild and wooly world of physics research are a refreshing .... well, just refreshing says it best.

      The difficulties of experimental testing of extrema theories, like particle physics and cosmology, seem to tempt some of our colleagues to cheat on sci method testing in order to stoke the imagination. When objective analysis leads to an impasse, a resort is made to bypass testing or to shave away hairy problems with Occam's Razor, a subjective and unscientific standard.

      Special thanks are in order for the revealing review of the QED skeleton in the closet. Apparently QED is really only Quantum ElectrON Dynamics, finely tuned parametrically to agree with electron testing, but QMD would require another tune-up for the muon... perhaps another alpha 'constant' and doubling of the parametric set? And then noting that QED has all the predictive power of Darwinism.... breathtaking expository precision but nonexistent predictions.

      Interesting, Edwin... Why isn't this specificity trumpeted along with the 6 sigma QED compliance with reality?

      "Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world!".....said Archimedes. Now this has been updated to, "Give me enough 'tunable parameters' and I shall completely curve-fit reality with least-squares laws!

      "Planck satellite data shows with high precision that we live in a remarkably simple universe.".... but maybe too simplistic. More than the inflationary paradigm is in trouble, post Planck-2013... just the iceberg's tip, Edwin.

      The CMB as officially interpreted: the remnant radiation from the surface of last BB scattering, capturing the primeval structure of temp differences then, for all time and all places. We are looking - we are told - back in time 13 billion years to the first formation of matter.

      However, a series of unexpected multiple multipole alignments had appeared in the COBE and WMAP sky scans, but were assumed to be temporary artifacts that the Planck survey would erase.... Instead, Planck affirmed the anomalies even more credibly.

      The combination of a complete lack of any known systematic error, and long odds against random alignment was such a threat to the BB model that the combo has earned the initial low-alignment anomaly the nickname - "Axis of Evil". The axial correlation between multipole harmonics evident in all 3 CMB sky scans matched the local sky geometry to a very high CL.... the Leo direction, equinoxes, ecliptic and galactic planes were all there. And now there are more.... a lot more. All of these anomalies contradict the standard model of the universe and have no explanation in the LCDM, the standard Big Bang model. We are told we are seeing a pattern ubiquitous in space and formed far back in time, yet what we see is what is in the sky now - the local symmetries and celestial landmarks of our solar system and galaxy. As if when peering into deep space with our telescopes, we would actually see the surrounding buildings and trees in our own backyard! And how is it that the Andromedans see our solar and galactic alignments in their local sky?

      There are not one, not two, but three giant elephants in the living room.

      1) What explains this evidence so contradictory to the conventional cosmology for the CMB, BB, LCDM and even the Copernican principle?

      2) Why is this evidence treated as non-emergent in the world of physics?

      3) Why is the vast CMB universe seemingly centered on an insignificant planet like Earth?

      All the best,

      Robert