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Subject: Re: [OM] IMG: The American Airlines Flagship Detroit
From: Bob Whitmire <fujixbob@xxxxxxxxx>
Date: Wed, 22 Jun 2016 11:02:27 -0400
Do you subscribe to The Skeptical Inquirer? If you don't, you should.
(Committee for Skeptical Inquiry) My aunt subscribes and every summer when
she returns to Round Pond she delivers a handful of past issues to me. I
enjoy them, and have learned a lot. They occupy the pinnacle of reason, so
reasonable, in fact, they give me a headache. <g>

One of their founders and long-time contributors, the late Martin Gardner,
was a mathematical genius and a whiz at logic and reason. He wrote puzzles
for Scientific American. He retired to the town in North Carolina where I
grew up, and where I worked as a newspaperman for many years. I had lunch
with Martin on a number of occasions, at his house and in local
restaurants. Alas, the reason for these lunches were not for friendly
jousting of the Numinous v. the Scientific, but rather so he could upbraid
me for various contents of the newspaper, most of which I had no say over
at all, such as ads in the back for fat-devouring pills, first month free
and $18.95 a month thereafter. but the meetings were fun; it's always
enjoyable to be in the presence of real intellect, even if you don't
particularly agree with it. (I rarely disagreed with his data, only the
conclusions he drew from it.) And I did from time to time try to convince
myself I saw a twinkle in his eye.)

I believe you and I may have been at cross purposes. The "ghost in the
machine" is not the proper metaphor for what I've been talking about, and I
don't think Aquinas ever said much about the Unconscious as I mean it. To
torture the metaphor into something more like what I mean would be to
phrase it, "The machine in the ghost." But then I'm not talking about
machines, but rather people; nor am I talking about ghosts, or spirits, or
souls, but rather an unprovable force that permeates the universe, an as
yet hidden and misunderstood force, but a force nevertheless, just like the
strong force and the weak force, only different. <g> You might roll your
eyes, but I would point as an example of sort of what I'm talking about to
George Lucas's "The Force" in Star Wars. I would never have given it much
thought, except I learned that Lucas was and is an ardent admirer of Joseph
Campbell, who liked to talk about the "ineffable mystery." Star Wars,
entertainment; Campbell, gravitas.

I read through the paper, and found it fascinating. I can't really take
exception to anything to say, except that I believe their paradigm is too
limited. For one thing, they backed the wrong horse. Freud is so passe.
Jung is the man. Just ask Moose. <g> The paper also was overflowing with
'may' and 'might' and 'suggests' and 'perhaps' and 'could be taken,' etc.
This is expected in scientific writing of this sort because it can be
suicide to be too declarative. On must always hedge one's bets. But again,
I think we were talking at cross purposes, because the subconscious and
unconscious they wrote about were
working milliseconds before conscious action. I'm not sure that constitutes
the unconscious Jung was talking about. It merely shows that some areas of
the brain go to work milliseconds before other areas of the brain, but
there's no trace in the writing about anything operating at a deeper,
perhaps undiscoverable level.

I know. You can't prove the unprovable, or discover the undiscoverable. Not
going to happen. <g> But we must also remember to pay tribute to
theoretical physics, and such practical stuff as that which is observed is
changed by the act of observation. And then there's action at a distance.
And a renewed appreciation of the ether, what I like to call the "nothing
is really something phenomenon." All of these point to forces connecting
everything, and I take it to mean that those forces may pass information or
exert influence on individual consciousness. No, I'm not talking about
astrology. <g>

And so on. Long winded, perhaps as unclear as ever. Not very rigorous, but
this is e-mail. <wink> And certainly not enough to get in the way of good
beer, eh?

But do look into the Skeptical Inquirer, if you already haven't. One of my
favorite feature pieces from the batch my aunt brought me last year as an
extended inquiry into whether religion has and has had a positive effect,
or a negative effect, on the evolving human culture. Some degree of effort
went into the piece. The authors, and indeed most if not all of the SI
staff and contributors are hard-core atheists, and it was with some
interest and appreciation that I read the article which reluctantly and
grudgingly admitted that such data as was available suggested that overall,
religion operates slightly on the plus side of doing good. That must have
been hard. (Me, I'm a classic agnostic. I just don't know. But in today's
polarized world, that makes me a functional atheist. I don't shout it from
the rooftops like Richard Dawkins, but I'm pretty much there, nevertheless.)

Hope you and Marnie are enjoying this stretch of lovely weather.

--Bob

On Fri, Jun 17, 2016 at 4:46 PM, Mike Gordon via olympus <
olympus@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

>
> I heard the head of CSAIL  (The Computer Science and Artificial
> Intelligence Laboratory  at MIT) speak.  The AI lab started in 1959 and
> great progress has been made with
> the bruit force heuristic approach (sometimes using neural networks) but
> it has been difficult  to impart the common sense of a 3 year old into a
> machine.  We don't fully understand the neurological basis of
> cognition/consciousness
> but are getting  closer.  The tools were crude  and we couldn't visualize
> the neural systems anywhere but form "10,000 feet" above them.  Functional
> MRI and PET scans got us down to 2000 ft but optogenetics  down to 150 ft.
> One can  follow  many  neurons at a time
> but it is difficult to detect signals through more than a few cell layers
> in active 3D live brains.  Another breakthrough or two in the tools
> employed  and we may get there.
>
> There is really no hard evidence that we are anything but our wet-ware. I
> don't know how the dualist argument persists.  Where is the "ghost in the
> machine?"  There are many thousands of examples,  but screw up the foxp2
> gene and the affected people can't even
> form plural forms of nouns out of singular nouns.   Even the neurologic
> basis of unconscious visual/emotional etc processes are being unraveled.
>
> http://www.nyu.edu/gsas/dept/philo/faculty/block/papers/BerlinTreatment.pdf
>
> I think this human exceptionalism  regarding both our  neural
> organization  (more than wet-ware) and place in the universe   had become
> hard wired into western culture.  The record so far is dismal--always has
> been flat wrong.
> I blame Thomas Aquinas for formalizing the notion but  am sure their are
> other culprits.
>
> We are our wet-ware but doesn't mean I admire our certified Neanderthal or
> His Mooseness any less, Mike
-- 
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