Re: The Matrix as Metaphysics, David J. Chalmers

"Greysky" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in message
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> "Immortalist" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in message
> news:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> >
> > "Uncle Al" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in message
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> > > Immortalist wrote:
> > > >
> > > > The Matrix as Metaphysics, David J. Chalmers
> > > [snip 2025 lines of utter bullshit]
> > >
> > > If this is the way philosophy treats ideas, then philosophy doesn't
> > > deserve to have any.  One is reminded of the wired ducks' heads scene
> > > in writer Terry Black's "Dead Heat."  I know Terry.  The producers
> > > mightily pissed him off in an interminable "concept" meeting, so he
> > > wrote a scene so unremediably awful that even those pinheads would be
> > > aghast and disgusted and cut the crap.
> > >
> >
> > How close to the Matrix can we get when discussing metaphysics before we
> > violate your rule of comparisons?
> >
> > > They loved it.  They gave it extra air time.  So goes philosophy.
> > >
> > > "How many philosophers does it take to change a lightbulb?"
> >
> > 1 or more.
> >
> > > "What is a philosopher?"
> > >
> >
> > a lover of lightbulbs.
> >
> I have a theory about light bulbs: The wall switch is connected by a wire
to
> a little bell inside the glass bulb. When someone flips the switch, the
bell
> jingles and a little man inside the bulb proceeds to either begin to
> furiously rub two sticks together and make light from the resultant fire,
> or, stop rubbing the sticks together thereby causing the fire to die out
and
> stop producing light. What the little man does depends on the previous
state
> he was in, and how much firewood he still has (when the wood runs out the
> man dies and the bulb needs to be replaced).
>
> What so you say to my hypothesis? That the little man is a philosopher??
>

I suppose there might be conditions where such an illustration is necessary.
In support of your attempt to do metaphysics I have some back up sources
here about these little men you seek:

Here's the primary little men:
http://www.hedweb.com/philsoph/somato.htm
http://freud.tau.ac.il/~shakhar/neuro/images/nerveman.gif

http://pharyngula.org/~pzmyers/neuro/chap9/homunculi.jpg
http://tinyurl.com/x9f6
http://tinyurl.com/tn4u

Here we see one side of the debate where secondary little men are behind the
little man, which must fight or debate a path through similar little men on
the sensory divide of the sensory/motor cortex [don't forget the little men
in the other hemisphere also]:

http://www.driesen.com/secondary_motor_cortex.htm

Further in levels of abstraction and instinctual inference of event meaning,
we see where the daily battle proceeds and trots out being.

http://www-dsv.cea.fr/thema/shfj/web/demo_reconnaissance/gif/fox.jpg
http://www-dsv.cea.fr/thema/shfj/web/demo_reconnaissance/french/propor.htm

But back to maps, here is one of the four primary little guys, what they
actually look like before they -proceed-. This is what part of the real you
body representation lookth like:

http://www.hedweb.com/philsoph/somato.htm

------------------------------

Neuroscientist Antonio Damasio on;
Spinoza, Emotion, Body & Healthy Rationalization.

1. Spinoza [thought] "the human mind is the very idea or knowledge of the
human body"...continuous signals from the body to the brain provide a
continuous backdrop for the mind. It doubtful that we could be conscious in
the usual sense of the term if we did not have a backdrop.

2. Body signalling is also the essential substrate for feelings. When we
have an emotion we alter the state of the body in a variety of ways, and
then we register the resulting changes in the brain's body maps and feel the
emotions. Emotions come first, feelings second.

3. The substance of feelings, the heart of feelings, is really a perception
of what has changed in our organism, in our bodies during an emotion.
Emotions are unlearned responses to certain classes of stimuli. We are
equipped to have emotions, thanks to evolution. When we emote we alter the
state of the organism in a rather profound manner - the internal milieu, the
viscera, the musculature - and we behave in a particular way.

4. The collection of these changes is the emotion, a rather public affair
which helps us deal with a threat (think of fear) or with an opportunity
(eat or drink or mate). Feelings are the perception of these changes
together with the perception of the object or situation that gave rise to
the emotion in the first place. In essence, this is James's idea, although
Spinoza envisioned something similar. James was attacked for this proposal.

5. My view [differs] in that we do not need to have huge changes in the body
itself, at least not all the time. Rather, we can have direct changes in the
maps of the body within the brain. Those maps are constantly looking at the
whole organism, surveying what is going on in the viscera, in the internal
milieu chemically, in the musculoskeletal system, in the vestibular system
and so on.

6. However, we can bypass the whole body altogether and have, say, the
pre-frontal cortex or the amygdala change the state of the body maps
directly. In those circumstances, a very rapid alteration of the mapping of
the organism can be achieved, which may, to a certain extent, falsify what
is really going on the organism.

7. Antonio Damasio proposed this mechanism of feeling in the early 1990s -
the as-if-body-mechanism. Now we have plenty of evidence for this mechanism:
for example, the discovery of "mirror neurons" shows that we can construct a
very complex model of the body inside our brain, an internal model of our
organism actually, and that we manipulte that model for a variety of
purposes.

8. Suppose I have some pretty upset feelings about what the boss is going to
do to my budget. I would be feeling this through my body rather than just
cognitively wanting to hit him. If there were no change in your body maps, I
doubt whether I would feel anything. The word "feeling" would not apply.

9. In reality, we don't separate emotion from cognition like layers in a
cake. Emotion is in the loop of reason all the time. We have inherited an
incredibly complex emotional apparatus which, in evolution, was tied to
certain classes of objects and situations that were fairly narrow - things
that were threatening, that could cause anger or trigger compassion, shame
or embarrassment. But now we have added to that repertoire of emotional
triggers many other objects and situations we have learned in our lives, so
we do have the possibility of responding emotively to all sorts of
situations, like the example of a budget deficit.

10. As you imagine good and bad situations, whatever you imagine is actually
creating an emotional state and feeling states that accompany it, like a
choir singing on the side and singing underneath the score. We cannot have
much in the way of ideas that are purely "cognitive" without having
accompanying emotions and feelings. They are just there all the time.

11. Neuroscience supports Spinoza's ideas that the human mind consists of
images and mental representations of the body and studies enable some of
these processes to be teased apart.

- Patients with bilateral damage to the amygdala have an inability to
experience fear. Because they do not have the emotion of fear, they do not
feel fear. They also cannot recognise fear in the facial expression of
others.

- There are other patients who show damage in the very maps of the brain
where we are postulating feelings must arise from, and lo and behold, you
can get the strange situation of having patients who emote and yet do not
have the proper feeling related to their emotion, which suggests that in
fact there is a breakdown in body mapping.

- Patients with damage to the ventromedial frontal lobe have problems with
another class of emotion, the social emotions: shame, embarrassment, guilt,
compassion, a sense of moral indignation. Damage to this region of the brain
can interfere with decision making.

- : Those patients, with damage to the ventromedial frontal lobe, treat the
world in a very unemotionally marked way. So even if they have to make a
decision that is rather simple - do we go out for lunch or do we stay in -
they cannot decide rapidly and reasonably but will argue the pros and cons,
especially if they are intelligent. They will say: "Ah, going out is a nice
idea because actually the weather is very nice. However, many people must be
out today so the restaurants must be full because the weather is so good, so
maybe we should stay in. But if we stay in we do not have the food, so we
would probably have to order in, then there would be a lot of delay anyway,
so maybe we should go out. Or should we?"

- The patients lose the reasonableness of deciding, they lose common sense,
and are totally immersed in this fruitless analysis. And this points to what
I think emotion contributes to decision making, covertly or overtly, which
is to make some options immediately endorsable or immediately rejectable.
Which, of course, means that in our decision making we use the facts that
come from general knowledge and our prior emotional experience of similar
situations, namely, the reward or punishment associated with similar
situations in the past.

12. You have all these nice (biasing_mechanisms) that are helping your
navigation and speeding things up for you. They are really the baggage of
your experience of a variety of situations, good, bad, indifferent, valuable
and trivial. This is not separable from emotion because all of your
experiences occur in an emotion-full world.

13. We do not live in a neutral world. Our experiences are always
emotionally loaded and we make use of that experience. And if we lose our
ventromedial frontal lobe, we are suddenly deprived of the baggage of our
emotional experience and we are in trouble. And this points to something
interesting: since we are a little bit at the mercy of our emotions, it also
means that the way we cultivate the connection of emotions to different
contents is quite critical.

14. It's an interesting idea because that is where the environment comes in
so powerfully, some people say: "Oh, so you're saying that our decisions are
at the mercy of emotions and of course emotions came to use via evolution
and genes, and so we are over-determined." The reasoning is absurd, because
even if it is true that emotions are planted in us by evolution, the way we
have cultivated our relations with the world depends entirely on how we were
educated or our family ideals or the social environment, and of course we
can end up being Mother Theresa or some bad guy.

15. Spinoza did had a God but not one conceived in the image of humans. For
him, God is nature. You cannot pray to Spinoza's God and you need not fear
Him because He will not punish you. What you should fear is your own
behaviour. When you fail to be less than kind to others, you punish
yourself, there and then, and deny yourself the opportunity to achieve inner
peace and happiness, there and then.

16. Spinoza's salvation is about (repeated_occasions) of the kind of
happiness that, cumulatively, make for a healthy mental condition. The
Spinoza solution also asks the individual to attempt a break between the
stimuli that can trigger negative emotions - passions such as fear, anger,
jealousy - and the very mechanisms that enact emotion. The individual should
(substitute) those emotionally_competent_stimuli that are capable of
triggering positive, nourishing emotions. Spinoza's solution hinges on the
mind's power over the emotional process.


> Greysky
> www.allocations.cc
>
>