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What I've been thinking about...

Sep 07
- say Alice is trying to describe herself in terms of being composed of either the grammatical structure in the sentences of the story from which she emerges, or whether she is composed of the bleached and pressed wood pulp and ink that are considered page parts of the whole book. -blogger s33 A bit of backstory… a couple of days ago I listened to a philosophy lecture that gave me some new ideas on what I call levels of complexity… perhaps exemplified by the difference between H2O molecules and water, or brain states and mind.  The philosophy lecture touched on this, one of my favorite topics, and suggested two ways such levels might be viewed: Parts and Whole.  To me, this is the most straight-forward (though most unenlightening) way to view things.  The physicality of an engine is made up at the lower levels by its physical parts and the way they interact. Role and Realizer.  The engine could be defined functionally, as a list or set of jobs, inputs, outputs, internal relations, etc.  Maybe we could say this would be the Platonic engine?  The lower level then would be any particular (physical) engine that realizes this functionality definition. This, along with some other points, were new to me, and I was excited to have a new take on some old favorite ideas.  Needing someone to tell (one can’t just start conversations like this with random passers-by), I sent a quick summary to s33, and asked for his thoughts… you know, whenever there’s time. He responded with quite a superb piece of writing (see the whole thing here) from which I extracted the above reference to Alice in Wonderland concieving of herself as either ink and paper, or words and syntax. He continues, suggesting that the character (and by implication our selves) are not found in the cracks of either of these level-crossings: The thing that we care about is ignored completely. The hard problem is painted over with a choice of two flavors of the easy problem. The only way around this, I’m afraid, is through it. Begin with the reality of Alice as the given. We don’t have to believe that she is anything more than a character or that her life is anything other than a story, but if the character and story were really the ground of being for Alice, then the book of pages (brain hardware) and the language typed through those pages (cognitive software) both make sense as ways of stabilizing, controlling, and reproducing aspects of the story. The book is what makes Alice in Wonderland a publicly accessible artifact and the words are what mediate from the public spatial sense to the private temporal sense. The private motive, in turn, to open the book, read the words, and imagine the characters and scenes in the story are what bind the symbols to the private sense experience. Body needs the book, mind needs the words, but story needs the willing self. Reading this put me in mind of a very stunning realization that comes in the middle of reading Jostein Gaarder’s “Sophie’s World”.  I don’t want to spoil it for those who haven’t read it, but the point is that because of how the book is written, the reader finds him/herself wondering if he/she is simply a character in a book somebody else is reading.  What makes the character real (or not), and what makes the us, the readers real (or not)? These questions are exactly what is at stake when we investigate these levels of complexity.  Is the answer to be found in the gap of a certain kind of level crossing (as I’ve often believed)?  Or, as s33 believes, must we strike off in an orthogonal direction to find our selves?

- say Alice is trying to describe herself in terms of being composed of either the grammatical structure in the sentences of the story from which she emerges, or whether she is composed of the bleached and pressed wood pulp and ink that are considered page parts of the whole book.

-blogger s33

A bit of backstory… a couple of days ago I listened to a philosophy lecture that gave me some new ideas on what I call levels of complexity… perhaps exemplified by the difference between H2O molecules and water, or brain states and mind.  The philosophy lecture touched on this, one of my favorite topics, and suggested two ways such levels might be viewed:

  1. Parts and Whole.  To me, this is the most straight-forward (though most unenlightening) way to view things.  The physicality of an engine is made up at the lower levels by its physical parts and the way they interact.
  2. Role and Realizer.  The engine could be defined functionally, as a list or set of jobs, inputs, outputs, internal relations, etc.  Maybe we could say this would be the Platonic engine?  The lower level then would be any particular (physical) engine that realizes this functionality definition.

This, along with some other points, were new to me, and I was excited to have a new take on some old favorite ideas.  Needing someone to tell (one can’t just start conversations like this with random passers-by), I sent a quick summary to s33, and asked for his thoughts… you know, whenever there’s time.

He responded with quite a superb piece of writing (see the whole thing here) from which I extracted the above reference to Alice in Wonderland concieving of herself as either ink and paper, or words and syntax.

He continues, suggesting that the character (and by implication our selves) are not found in the cracks of either of these level-crossings:

The thing that we care about is ignored completely. The hard problem is painted over with a choice of two flavors of the easy problem.

The only way around this, I’m afraid, is through it. Begin with the reality of Alice as the given. We don’t have to believe that she is anything more than a character or that her life is anything other than a story, but if the character and story were really the ground of being for Alice, then the book of pages (brain hardware) and the language typed through those pages (cognitive software) both make sense as ways of stabilizing, controlling, and reproducing aspects of the story. The book is what makes Alice in Wonderland a publicly accessible artifact and the words are what mediate from the public spatial sense to the private temporal sense. The private motive, in turn, to open the book, read the words, and imagine the characters and scenes in the story are what bind the symbols to the private sense experience. Body needs the book, mind needs the words, but story needs the willing self.

Reading this put me in mind of a very stunning realization that comes in the middle of reading Jostein Gaarder’s “Sophie’s World”.  I don’t want to spoil it for those who haven’t read it, but the point is that because of how the book is written, the reader finds him/herself wondering if he/she is simply a character in a book somebody else is reading.  What makes the character real (or not), and what makes the us, the readers real (or not)?

These questions are exactly what is at stake when we investigate these levels of complexity.  Is the answer to be found in the gap of a certain kind of level crossing (as I’ve often believed)?  Or, as s33 believes, must we strike off in an orthogonal direction to find our selves?

Posted 8 months ago

4 notes

philosophy, philosophy of mind, s33, sense, multisense, alice in wonderland, character, books, self, ink, paper, grammar, words, levels, complexity, whole, parts, role, realiser, platonic, consciousness, hard problem, easy problem, brain, cognitive science, jostein gaarder, sophie's world, self-aware, orthogonal, reality,

Aug 19

What Is the Human Genome?

Some wonderful things in this article:

  1. Application of platonism to a real life example (and analysis).
  2. Suggestion for a statistical method for displaying the “most accurate” human genome.
  3. A look under the hood of a “rockstar” science concept.

neurosciencestuff:

The human genome that researchers sequenced at the turn of the century doesn’t really exist as we know it.

The Human Genome project sequenced “the human genome” and is widely credited with setting in motion the most exciting era of fundamental new scientific discovery since Galileo. That’s remarkable, because in important ways “the human genome” that we have labeled as such doesn’t actually exist.

cosmin4000, istockphoto

Plato essentially asserted that things like chairs and dogs, which we observe in this physical world, and even concepts like virtues, are but imperfect representations or instances of some ideal that exists, but not in the material world. Such a Platonic ideal is “the human genome,” a sequence of about 3 billion nucleotides arrayed across a linear scale of position from the start of chromosome 1 to the end of the sex chromosomes. Whether it was obtained from one person or several has so far been shrouded in secrecy for bioethical reasons, but it makes no real difference. What we call the human genome sequence is really just a reference: it cannot account for all the variability that exists in the species, just like no single dog on earth, real or imagined, can fully incorporate all the variability in the characteristics of dogs.

Nor is the human genome we have a “’normal” genome. What would it mean to be “normal” for the nucleotide at position 1,234,547 on chromosome 11?  All we know is that the donor(s) had no identified disease when bled for the cause, but sooner or later some disease will arise. Essentially all available whole genome sequences show potentially disease-producing variants, even including nonfunctional genes, in donors who were unaffected at the time.

Read More

Reblogged 9 months ago from neurosciencestuff

75 notes

genetics, genome, plato, platonic, gene, genes, science, copies, descendants, evolution, biology, statistics, composite,

Jun 20

Big Sugar
"Sleep in Late"
Big Sugar

Some early big sugar.  Such good blues that it surpasses blues cliches.  This is platonic blues.

Posted 11 months ago

4 notes

audio, soundtrack, big sugar, sleep in late, music, platonic, blues,

Jun 16
isomorphismes: from “On Self-Referential Sentences” by Douglas Hofstadter, originally in Scientific American (January 1981), reprinted in Metamagical Themas (1985) via crystilogic

isomorphismes:

from “On Self-Referential Sentences” by Douglas Hofstadter, originally in Scientific American (January 1981), reprinted in Metamagical Themas (1985)

via crystilogic

Reblogged 11 months ago from isomorphismes

161 notes

self-reference, loops, douglas hoffstadter, levels, sentences, paradox, platonic, I, metamagical themas,

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