Arquivo para a ‘Neurociência’ Categoria
Nagel, physicalism and the being
11
Jul
All modern physicalism, the Greek physis is something else, is essentially reductionist, for “every 
reductionist has his favorite analogy, drawn from modern science” (Nagel, 1974).
Although Nagel does not define what is physical for him, he says verbatim in footnote, he states that “beyond interesting, a phenomenology that is objective in this sense may allow questions about the physical basis of experience to take on a more intelligible form “(Nagel, 1974).
Although Aristotle called the pre-Socratics “physikoi“, this has nothing to do with the modern conception, just as physis can not simply be translated by nature.
Two authors who spoke about this Greek concept, for Jaeger: “the word also includes the original source of things, that from which they develop and by which their development is constantly renewed; in other words, the reality underlying the things of our experience, “while Burnet, in turn, states that” in the Greek philosophical language, physis always designates what is primary, fundamental, and persistent, as opposed to secondary, derivative, and transitional”.
It is these conceptions that most closely approximate Nagel, but it can be said that his concept is almost ontological: “But fundamentally an organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something that is to be that organism – something that is to be for the organism. ”
But the important and definitive concept of Nagel is that it may make sense to ask what it is like to be a bat, but it is not conceivable to ask what it is like to be a toaster, physics has limits and if you can go deeper, here about Terrence Deacon’s “Incomplete Nature: the mind emerged to matter”.
Nagel, Thomas (1974). “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?”. The Philosophical Review. 83 (4): 435–450.
It s it possible to simplify philosophy?
10
Jul
Yes and no, as we posted last week, there is complexity in simplification and not
everything that is simple can be correct, most of the times it is a reductionism. But someone who got it, at least in part, was Thomas Nagel, proposed to address such themes as: the world beyond minds, beyond other minds, the old paradox body and mind, how language is possible, there is the free will, which inequalities are unjust, the nature of death, and the meaning of life.
Without saying authors and names is addressing central problems of philosophy, will also use practical examples, didactic and begins with a question on things that is at the core of the question of much of the philosophy: “Would things look different if fact existed only in his mind … what if it was just a giant dream? … (Nagel, 1987). “It is even possible that you do not have a body or a brain – since your beliefs about it come solely from the data of your senses” (NAGEL,1987).
He then begins to divide the currents of philosophy, “the most radical conclusion to draw from here would be that your mind is the only thing that exists”, this is the solipsistic current.
The second position is whether or not an outer world exists, and if it exists, it may or may not be completely different from the way it seems to you – is there no way to know it? “, this is the position of skepticism . “If you can not be sure that the world is out of your mind, there is now yourself, how can you be sure that you existed before ?, and this refers to the problem of time, memory, information, language and being.
In the end, the author states that it is “impossible to seriously believe that all things in the world around you may not exist in reality” (p.20), this may be so evident that we do not need to substantiate, but there would still be three serious questions :
1) Does it make sense that the inner world is all that exists, but that the outside world guarantees that it is not different from what it thinks?
2) If any of these hypotheses are possible, is there any way to prove to yourself that this hypothesis is not really true?
3) If you can not prove that there is anything outside of your own mind, is it right to continue to believe in the existence of an outside world?
If the external world exists, the problem is whether everything moves as a clock, ie, is predetermined, so-called determinism, or if there is free will and things can be chosen, the author speaks of the choice of people between eat a nice piece of cake or a fruit, and the fact that the sun can not choose not to rise at the beginning of the day, but even in nature the physics of the particles show that there is an indeterminism in nature.
Approach this in chapter 6 hence the question of logic will come in chapter 7. If you think that there are both, you must think that there are other minds as well, and these minds will have experiences and vision of things different from yours, is there a way of seeing that the two are right or the wrong two, right or wrong?
He will approach this in chapter 7, and right and wrong before righteousness, will approach this in chapter 8, and death what is, chapter 9 and the meaning of life, chapter 10.
Nagel, Thomas. What Does It All Mean? A Very Short Introduction to Philosophy, UK: Oxford University Press, 1987.
Can a butterfly wing strike cause a tornado?
13
Jun
The so-called butterfly effect, arose from an article by E. Lorenz in 1975 in an
atmospheric forecasting journal and for this reason was a long time concealed as a “phenomenon”.
The first question is this, there is even this article, because it is so little mentioned even more in Brazil since the name of the country appears in the title: “Predictability: Does the Flap of a Butterfly’s Wings in Brazil Set off the Tornado in Texas? “, yes the article does exist.
The other two questions posed by Lorenz himself are: if a single butterfly could generate a tornado, the earlier or subsequent wing beats could also cause the millions of other butterflies as well, and if they could cause they could also avoid them.
What Lorenz proposed in general terms + and that minuscule perturbations do not increase or decrease the frequency of events like tornados, the question he puts in his article is that the immediate influence of a single butterfly can make the presence of a tornado evolve in two different situations, being able in some very early instance to decide its presence or not.
This small event can be fundamental, linked to others, able to modify the regime of the winds and the temperature in a vast region, would spend hours and the meeting of the masses of air can provoke a heavy rain in areas that before was determined sun.
Hence Poincare enunciated in 1908 as “sensitivity of the initial conditions,” but it must be said that the formulation of Lorenz’s chaotic systems distanced itself much from what is called nonlinear systems in mathematics, from the idea that linear is the most common, while unstable or chaotic are unconventional.
Most systems are unstable, and this is fundamental, Heisenberg of whom we spoke in our previous post, said: “quantum physics has defeated the causality and certainty that stable and predictable systems offer us, its phrase is famous:” Physics quantum provided the definitive refutation of the principle of causality. ”
Small actions, in human systems, can also cause huge differences and lead human systems to stability or not
The dualism of Kant
06
Jun
Although Kant made a critique of Descartes, he did not penetrate the
question body and consciousness (or mind as many want), but in what he considered the core of Cartesian thought to be the “representation” of things (phenomena):
“All our intuition is no more than the representation of a phenomenon; the things we perceive are not in themselves as we perceive them, nor the relations between them are in themselves as they appear to us;
It is by what he calls a “thing” that can be confused as the phenomenon, but it is the thesis that the human being has a kind of software in his head that interprets the world: the brain is not a container to where they are ” tossed “the objects of the world, he” naturally “processes the culture of the world and sees it in a certain way.
If I lived in our time I would say that it is a painting, not a photograph, and yet I would say that the two are “representations” because it is not possible to conceive the objective reality, only subjective, that is, in the subject’s mind, dualistic
Its kind of dualism is the opposition between the concepts of “derived intuition” on the one hand, and “original intuition”, on the other hand, not an original culture but intuition.
Already the “derived intuition” is, according to Kant, the “sensible intuition” of the human being; and “original intuition” is the “intellectual intuition” that Kant says is divine and not cultural.
Do not be happy the religious, although most understand this as “transcendence” and gave in the “vague” religiosity of today, which states that any intuition is of the “Holy Spirit”, without relation to objectivity, here is the Pure Kant.
The great Kantian problem that will reflect in philosophy, that which Marx said of the old Hegelians, where Man and God are in totally separate realities and without some possibility of ontological interaction, is the “dead” God.
The Kantian thought that I consider the most essential is that:
“And if we take from the center our subject, or even the subjective constitution of the sensibility in general, the whole constitution, all relations of objects in space and time, as well as space and time, would disappear because, as phenomena, they can not exist in themselves, but only in us. ”
When modern physics discovers that space and time are not absolute, Kant’s center of gravity is “swayed” and objectivity is questioned because the subject becomes part of the phenomenon, so it is not only representation, but “ontological” part.
The rationalistic dualism
05
Jun
The basis of all Western rationalism lies in Cartesian dualism, its most essential
foundation being in res-extensive and res-cogitans, at bottom is the idea that there is a “thinking” and a “bodily” substance, mistranslated as body-mind dichotomy, in fact in terms of current philosophy is the idea that separates corporeity from historical consciousness.
Gadamer treated this in a very thorough way, first separating romantic historical consciousness, analyzing Dilthey, and then the question of theory and practice, commending the theory, against the “practitioners” who are basically modern empiricists.
Extensive Rex is what we call a thing as a material substance, while res cogitans is the thought substance, or thinking thing; in fact, the body-mind dualism is the psychophysicist, which can also be thought in present terms as body-consciousness.
The Cartesian code then what is it? is something that does not suspend the ego, the self of contemporary individualism, so it may also be called ego cogitans, as some authors do, case of Husserl and Gadamer.
The ideas that Descartes have phenomenological roots are mistaken, the reading of Husserl’s text: “from naive objectivism to transcendental subjectivism,” thus finding the “absolute rational foundation” of all positive sciences is a hasty interpretation, since they will be questioned and “included at a single stroke in the parenthesis of the epokhé,” it being known that the epokhe, as well as prior to Cartesian thought, had for ancient philosophy a complete “emptying” of categories and of the ego itself to penetrate a-letheia.
So the being of the cogitans is not, to be essential, but only residual; , not because of the transcendental reduction to “every conceivable entity for me and every sphere of being of such a being” to the absolute ego, but through logical and mathematical abstraction, having nothing to do with the transcendent.
Husserl is clear in pointing out that in § 10 of Cartesian Meditations entitled “How Descartes lacked transcendental guidance,” it is possible to grasp the pure self and its cogitationes.
The cogito ergo sum is therefore not an epokhé, for it does not suspend its own ego and its preconceptions and the tabula rasa which will be an addition of Kant will also have problems.
Oral, written and electronic history of Shannon
21
May
There are good reasons for a certain lack of knowledge and criticism, often unfair, to Claude Shannon.
There is a rare interview in July 1982 by Robert Price, curiously called “Oral-History” in which he states:
“Well, back in ’42…computers were just emerging, so to speak. They had things like the ENIAC down at University of Pennsylvania…Now they were slow, they were very cumbersome and huge and all, there were computers that would fill a couple rooms this size and they would have about the ability of one of the little calculators that you can buy now for $10. But nevertheless we could see the potential of this, the thing that happened here if things ever got cheaper and we could ever make the up- time better, sort of keep the machines working for more than ten minutes, things like that. It was really very exciting.
We had dreams, Turing and I used to talk about the possibility of simulating entirely the human brain, could we really get a computer which would be the equivalent of the human brain or even a lot better? And it seemed easier then than it does now maybe. We both thought that this should be possible in not very long, in ten or 15 years. Such was not the case, it hasn’t been done in thirty years.”
The written work of Claude Shannon is well known, it is in his main work Mathematical Theory of Communication, which begins with an article with the same name published in the magazine of Bell Laboratories in 1948, and that has a revised version and corrected in the site of the Department of Mathematics, Harvard.
Finally, the great contribution of Shannon, besides that its presented diagram is always incomplete because they take from him the source of information and the destination of the information, and this makes the information “without signification” and without sense.
But his great contribution is in fact the information in the artifact, what are the limits of “noise” (not only this) but he himself states in his work that he will deal with information in a strict sense, that is, in the artifact
Androids has dreams?
18
May
The two films of Blade Runner were inspired by the book Androids dream of electric sheep ?
by Philip K Dick is reissued in 50-year commemorative edition (1968-2018) with unpublished writings: a letter from the author to the producers of Blade Runner in which prophesies the success of the production and the last interview granted by Dick, published in 1982 in the journal The Twilight Zone Magazine at the time of the launching of the film.
The exclusive preface signed by Argentine writer and journalist Rodrigo Frésan, a lover of science fiction and Dick’s work chronicling the troubled and impressive life of the author, and a brilliant scenarios they call “post-apocalyptic” by Douglas Kellner and Steven Best, professors respectively from the University of California and the University of Texas.
Add to this a postface written by the translator of the book, Ronaldo Bressane, who compares Androides with Blade Runner and comments on aspects of the work not explored in the cinema, such as environmental concern, besides the religious and metaphysical questions present in the text.
Religious and metaphysical issues are so current that they deserve an up-to-date view of what we think is our inner universe, our values and our relationship to the natural and yet transcendental world, in the non-immediate sense.
What is nature beyond nature and what is man beyond human is neither trans-nature nor trans-human only, but to look at it properly it will be necessary to have a transdisciplinary look, not to see from the side apocalyptic and pessimistic only.
Artificial Intelligence is undoubtedly an inspiration for the next few years, thinking of it is not thinking outside the spirit and human interiority, but it’s just questioning what it is, Blade Runner 2049 did this, but success was small, we preferred Robocop.
If inner life was reduced in modernity it is not due to current and upcoming advances, but due to the fact that sometimes we attribute to humans robots attitudes and not the opposite, because the current robots still have mechanical reasoning and a limited logic.
AI and artifacts
16
May
Norvig and Russel’s book (2010) at the outset brings a table about thinking humanly and 
rationally, and acting humanly and rationally, the complete table for Artificial Intelligence is incomplete, even if considering the literature in the area on issues such as autonomy and consciousness.
Let us first analyze the four main quotations that are in the table of figure 1.1. of the book exemplified next, on Artificial Intelligence.
Thinking Humanly
“The exciting new effort to make computers think . . . machines with minds, in the
full and literal sense.” (Haugeland, 1985)
“ The automation of activities that we associate with human thinking, activities such as decision-making, problem solving, learning . . .” (Bellman, 1978)
Thinking Rationally
“The study of mental faculties through the use of computational models.” (Charniak and McDermott, 1985)
“The study of the computations that make it possible to perceive, reason, and act.” (Winston, 1992)
Acting Humanly
“The art of creating machines that perform functions that require intelligence when performed by people.” (Kurzweil, 1990)
“The study of how to make computers do things at which, at the moment, people are better.” (Rich and Knight, 1991)
Acting Rationally
“Computational Intelligence is the study of the design of intelligent agents.” (Poole et al., 1998)
“AI . . . is concerned with intelligent behavior in artifacts.” (Nilsson, 1998)
I understood from this framework that I am acting rationally, and that definitions and Poole and Nilsson are useful for my studies, but something is lacking, which is consciousness and autonomy, and in this sense the picture is incomplete.
But the question of consciousness is a fact, if we think a person may be aware, but an artifact, not Thomas Nagel’s argument, we can in the opposite sense think of AI “weak” and IA “strong” definitions given by John Searle, to differentiate whether machines are thinking rationally and humanly (strong AI) or just thinking and acting rationally (weak IA).
This led to another field that is today called general IA and deep IA.
NORVIG, P.; RUSSEL, P. (2010) Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach 3nd ed., Upper Saddle River, New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 2010.
Possible and impossible changes
11
May
At other times, the proportions, the changes that occurred in previous stages, also caused a strong
impression on the people, but the most influential disruptive technologies, glasses and telescopes, allowed the first printed books to be read, and thanks to the telescopes, the Copernican revolution took place.
The change of paradigms that happens causes astonishment, but what needs to be done in fact, what is possible in a more distant reality and what can happen in the next years, I already indicated in some post, The “Physics of the impossible”, by Michio Kaku (2008).
The author quotes Einstein’s phrase at the beginning of this book: “If an idea does not seem absurd at first, then it will not have any future,” it takes a strong and shocking thought like this to understand that if we should bet on innovation, is the historical moment of this, you must understand that most disruptive things will initially be absurd.
Speaking of more distant things, at the beginning of the microcomputers, it was stated that they would not be useful to many people, the mouse was clumsy and “little anatomical” when it appeared, and there is still a lot of distrust in “artificial intelligence”, not only between laypeople on the subject, among scholars as well, others idealize an “electronic brain”, but neither Sophia (the first robot to have citizenship) and Alexa Amazon really has “intelligence.”
What has to be stopped, and this in Copernicus’s time was worth for the theocentric vision, today there is also an anti-technology sociopathy that borders on fundamentalism, if there are injustices and inequalities they must be combated on the plane in which they are in the social and political.
Roland Barthes said that every denial of language “is a death”, with the adoption of technology by millions of people this death becomes a conflict, first between generations, and then between different conceptions of development and education.
To the scholars I make the recommendation of Heidegger, affirmed on the radio and the television that only half a dozen people understood the process and of course with the financial power can control the publishings of these medias, but also one can answer in the religious field.
The reading of the evangelist Mark, Mc 16,17-18 “The signs that will accompany those who believe will be these: they will cast out demons in my name, they will speak new tongues; If they take snakes or drink any deadly poison, it will not hurt them; when they lay their hands on the sick, they shall be healed. ”
This needs to be updated for the new interpretations of this bible text.
KAKU, M. (2008) The Physics of the Impossible: a scientific exploration of the world of fasers, force fields, teleportation, and time travel. NY: Doubleday.
Trends in Artificial Intelligence
10
May
By the late 1980s the promises and challenges of artificial intelligence seemed to crumble Hans Moracev’s 
phrase: “It is easy to make computers display adult-level performance on intelligence tests or play checkers, and it is difficult or impossible to give them the one-year-old’s abilities when it comes to perception and mobility, “in his 1988 book” MInd Children. ”
Also one of the greatest precursors of AI (Artificial Intelligence) Marvin Minsky and co-founder of the Laboratory of Artificial Intelligence, declared in the late 90s: “The history of AI is funny, because the first real deeds were beautiful things, a machine that made demonstrations in logic and did well in the course of calculation. But then, trying to make machines capable of answering questions about simple historical, machine … 1st. year of basic education. Today there is no machine that can achieve this. “(KAKU, 2001, p 131)
Minsky, along with another AI forerunner: Seymor Papert, came to glimpse a theory of The Society of Mind, which sought to explain how what we call intelligence could be a product of the interaction of non-intelligent parts, but the path of AI would be the other, both died in the year 2016 seeing the turn of the AI, without seeing the “society of the mind” emerge.
Thanks to a demand from the nascent Web whose data lacked “meaning,” AI’s work will join the efforts of Web designers to develop the so-called Semantic Web.
There were already devices softbots, or simply bots, software robots that navigated the raw data looking for “to capture some information,” in practice were scripts written for the Web or the Internet, which could now have a nobler function than stealing data.
The idea of intelligent agents has been revived, coming from fragments of code, it has a different function on the Web, that of tracking semi-structured data, storing them in differentiated databases, which are no longer Structured Query Language (SQL) but look for questions within the questions and answers that are made on the Web, then these banks are called No-SQL, and they will also serve as a basis for Big-Data.
The emerging challenge now is to build taxonomies and ontologies with this scattered, semi-structured Web information that is not always responding to a well-crafted questionnaire or logical reasoning within a clear formal construction.
In this context the linked data emerged, the idea of linking data of the resources in the Web, investigating them within the URI (Uniform Resource Identifier) that are the records and location of data in the Web.
The disturbing scenario in the late 1990s had a semantic turn in the 2000’s.
KAKU, M. (2008) The Physics of the Impossible: a scientific exploration of the world of fasers, force fields, teleportation, and time travel. NY: Doubleday.
