LifeMind

@paulhanke,

Mind is a reflection of life, or an impression of life that can express itself again, like a footprint in the sand can tell us who walked there. Space and time are in life and in the mind, but while the one applies to matter and is woven by natural causality, the other applies to content (cognition and ideas) and is woven by metaphysical finality (the end, or goal, organizes the means and al means are ends themselves, or subgoals). Life is the sensed environment causing things in the sensing organism; mind is the knowing organism finalistically organizing the known environment. And while the organism translates sensing into knowing, the environment retranslates knowing into sensing, when we act out what we believe in, or know.

Good question.

1 Reply

@Ron C de Weijze,

Ron C. de Weijze wrote:

Mind is a reflection of life, or an impression of life that can express itself again, like a footprint in the sand can tell us who walked there.

So, in being able to "replay" this reflection, is mind duplicating the processes of life - only on a different substrate?

2 Replies

@paulhanke,

Biological life, or the durative experience of life? If you are refering to the latter they are the same, there is no way to comprehend life without the mind and vice versa. The self awareness of the mind is what makes us understand in a meaningful way that the biological existence is happening. I think this is really a question of self awareness. For example can dogs have a life other than biological existence? Which is the same as asking can dogs have a mind, or at what cognitive level does self awareness happen?

2 Replies

@GoshisDead,

Some day scientists will be able to give a cognitive level a digital value so as to express when self awareness occurs.
I guarantee it.!!

1 Reply

@GoshisDead,

GoshisDead wrote:

Biological life, or the durative experience of life? If you are refering to the latter they are the same, there is no way to comprehend life without the mind and vice versa. The self awareness of the mind is what makes us understand in a meaningful way that the biological existence is happening. I think this is really a question of self awareness. For example can dogs have a life other than biological existence? Which is the same as asking can dogs have a mind, or at what cognitive level does self awareness happen?

... perhaps going from "life" to "self awareness" is too large a leap to detect any similarities ... what if we take baby steps - say, from life to sensorimotor reaction to cognition to self awareness ... I guess the first question then might be where to draw the line for "mind" - is "mind" all mental activity, or just some privileged subset of (human) mental activity ... then, circling back to the initial question of this discussion: is there a common organizational/processual basis for life and sensorimotor reaction? ... for sensorimotor reaction and cognition? ... for cognition and self awareness? ... and if so to all of the above, does that imply that the same fundamental processes responsible for "life" are also to be found in "mind"? ... Asked another way, how many tools are in nature's toolbox?

1 Reply

@Holiday20310401,

Holiday20310401 wrote:

Some day scientists will be able to give a cognitive level a digital value so as to express when self awareness occurs.
I guarantee it.!!

... ahhhhhh - to be young and certain again! :bigsmile: ... unfortunately, the more I learn, the less I know - for example, take fuzzy logic (Fuzzy logic - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia) ... but don't let an old codger like myself destroy your exuberance! - revel in your youth while you still can!

1 Reply

@paulhanke,

Does everybody here have wikipedia installed in their brains or something. I mean why does everybody give a link to wikipedia whenever they're too lazy to explain the idea to me in their own words.

I think a rule should be no wiki links, it just ticks me off. :rules:

[CENTER] Laughing

Just kidding with yah.

[/CENTER]

1 Reply

@Holiday20310401,

Holiday20310401 wrote:

Does everybody here have wikipedia installed in their brains or something. I mean why does everybody give a link to wikipedia whenever they're too lazy to explain the idea to me in their own words.

... I'm an engineer ... engineers are wonderful at constructing impenetrable descriptions of basic concepts ... they teach us that in college ... take my word for it - you'd much rather have the wikipedia version! Wink

0 Replies

@paulhanke,

paulhanke wrote:

Asked another way, how many tools are in nature's toolbox?

Well, so far we have discovered two. Matter and energy, inluding their opposites. Oh yeah and forces. so that makes three. What is the opposite of a force. I mean when described intervally, matter is positive, gravity ( a force) is negative, and light is 0. So wait, that makes four in a sense. Laughing

Forces, matter, energy, light (which can be defined either way). Is nature a toolbox or a tool? And we are the manipulaters. I'd much rather see it that way.:a-ok:. Because we have causality expressed artificially, like we are a clone of nature's construct, living within its container.

:lol:Fuzzy set theory. Fuzzy set theory is to analog as the common comtemporary view is to binary, digital.

:a-thought:Artificial Neural networks perhaps don't work to establish consciousness because they are concisely precise in relation to the cause and effect. If an exact cause is stated or inputed then execute the exact output to coincide with the initial.
Conscious would imply a margin, not lineality to cause and effect links. Here is the causality of the conscious mind.

[ATTACH]18[/ATTACH]

Intention through a limited perspective allows for cause and effect to gradient. Now what is the force that allows for that gradient or is it simply limited perspective? Consider the star shape itself. I could have made it any shape, it makes no difference as long as there is a boundary, which is like the limits of our insight. Here is causality of computer processor.

[ATTACH]19[/ATTACH]

Artificial is linear and there is no limited perspective because the computer has the full perspective of the knowledge it is processing for its intentions. Consider the outer lines in the second picture. They are like the perspective, but they are not there, because they are not part of any cause.

[CENTER]Now what would the diagrams look like if causality worked in a cycle? Laughing

[/CENTER]

1 Reply

@Holiday20310401,

Holiday20310401 wrote:

Now what would the diagrams look like if causality worked in a cycle?

... ... life? ... ...

1 Reply

@paulhanke,

It is not a big jump to self awareness, self awareness is the minimum one must have to have a mind, how else would one recognize that one has a mind.

1 Reply

@paulhanke,

paulhanke wrote:

So, in being able to "replay" this reflection, is mind duplicating the processes of life - only on a different substrate?

Yes it duplicates aspects on different substrates, including those of the mind, enabling us to recollect interrelated elements from all aspects or perspectives to reconstruct life as it was, or better, if we think it is worth the effort.

1 Reply

@GoshisDead,

GoshisDead wrote:

It is not a big jump to self awareness, self awareness is the minimum one must have to have a mind, how else would one recognize that one has a mind.

... let's boil down what we mean by life ... is a rock alive? no ... is a virus alive? maybe ... is a bacteria alive? certainly ... so you're saying then that the jump from a bacteria to self awareness isn't a big one? ...

1 Reply

@Ron C de Weijze,

Ron C. de Weijze wrote:

Yes it duplicates aspects on different substrates, including those of the mind, enabling us to recollect interrelated elements from all aspects or perspectives to reconstruct life as it was, or better, if we think it is worth the effort.

... is that cool, or what?! :bigsmile: ... if you're right, then to understand the fundamental processes of life is to understand the fundamental processes of mind (and vice versa) ... so what do these processes look like? ... and if we were to discover and understand them, would we truly have found the "Theory of Everything" that has eluded physicists for so long? (maybe they were just looking in the wrong place! Wink

)

0 Replies

@paulhanke,

This is why in my original post i made the following distinction then asdded the inquiry about self awareness.

Quote:

Biological life, or the durative experience of life?

1 Reply

@GoshisDead,

GoshisDead wrote:

This is why in my original post i made the following distinction then asdded the inquiry about self awareness.

... sorry - lost track of your thought Wink

... okay, given your starting point - that there is no difference between life-as-durative-experience and mind - let's try switching levels:

Are mind and society more than just different aspects of humanity? Is there an essential sameness to them? That is, when nature invented society did she more or less reuse the same tools that she used when she invented mind?

1 Reply

@paulhanke,

Some would say that culture and the self have very strong functional correlations. More than one thinker has equated the will and mass thought of a nation or people to a nation's spirit or mind. Others have called it a superorganism or collective conscience. I would like some clarification on what you would like from this question if possible.

Functionally society/culture/ethnicity/grouping naturally create group identities, think thought, act according to codes, work within set frames, a culture can experience as a group leaving lasting social scars an entire nations at times. Cultures weep, mourn, they are self aware. They are dynamic and synergistic. Much like the mind that is so much more in mosaic than the sum of its parts, culture/society/the group cannot be easily defined in relation to its autonomy, its life, if you will.

1 Reply

@GoshisDead,

GoshisDead wrote:

Cultures weep, mourn, they are self aware. They are dynamic and synergistic. Much like the mind that is so much more in mosaic than the sum of its parts, culture/society/the group cannot be easily defined in relation to its autonomy, its life, if you will.

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