There are certain points which apply not only to spiritual or noosphere intelligence, but also to plain old mundane brains and go true artificial intelligence ("AGI"). The image below is the most important slide I used at NSF to illustrate the"COPN" topic, which developed the kind of general mathematics needed to understand or create intelligent systems (minds) on ANY of these three hardware platforms.
The core of this is the stream we called "optimization," which means that the system tries to learn how to maximize the expected value of "U", a kind of hard wired cardinal utility function. The cardinal utility function U is just a modern mathematical expression or distillation of Aristotle's ancient concept of TELOS or purpose.
Long before I designed this slide, some neural network researchers would say "The brain is not just any old,random dynamical system or IT design. It is an INTENTIONAL system, a very important special type of system. It is a system which has INTENTIONS... [i.e. purpose, goals, some metric of value]".. There is a long history behind this idea. But instead of reviewing that history, let me just cite a paper which includes a review AND gives empirical evidence that this kind of model fits actual real-time brain data better than the ancient more passive types of brain model assumed in some parts of computational neuroscience:
Bernie Baars recently reminded us that people often need to be reminded of important fundamental things which "they already know but still need to remember and connect" when they take on new tasks, like the PSI or AGI tasks we have discussed here, and more. In fact, whenever we take on ANY challenge where there is some goal, some meaning or purpose in the end, it is important to be clear about the concept of purpose or value in ANY mind including our own.
This leads directly into some key issues discussed in
https://link.springer.com/
For years (age 12 to 15), I tried to reason about that question, and thought I was making progress, but I still remember a letter I received from Bertrand Russell (still in my files) saying "No, it cannot be done. It is simply not possible to deduce a proposition containing the word 'should' unless it is already there in the axioms which you assume." That is what led me at age 15 to decide I should REPHRASE the question, to make it into one with operational meaning but general enough that I could still put my heart and soul into it. Not "What SHOULD I do?" but "What WOULD I (try to) do 'IF I WERE WISE'... if I learned and thought enough to reach a U, a formulation of purpose, which would SATISFY ME, my entire mind, without exclusions and such. A KEY POINT WHICH NONE OF SHOULD EVER FORGET OR NEGLECT: It becomes operational ONLY after we have enough understanding of the word "I" in this question.
This would not really be news either to Shakespeare or to Confucius, who called on us to be "true to ourselves" which requires paying high level conscious attention to the question "who am I?" What IS this "I", concretely?
Obviously, neuroscience and biology in general have a lot to say about this... not only for mundane brains but also for noospheres. The system to define "U" is also a crucial issue in AGI policy; failure to understand and remember this basic fact about "intentional systems" could easily lead go total catastrophes as AGI systems start to manage our planet, designed and regulated by people who do not understand. My concept of basic first-order mundane sanity or sapience is that we must learn to be explicit with ourselves about what our most basic values U really are, connecting our choice to the full range on first person and scientific information available to us, including what can be learned via our "mirror neurons" (second person information).
In PSI education, especially (e.g. for second order sanity, which implies awareness of self as mundane body and soul BOTH together), it is crucial to learn NOT to take this little word "I" for granted.
Just two days ago, I saw a video of a very proud teacher of Vedas in the US, about as enlightened as certain pig-headed Catholic priests my family once told stories about. (There is great diversity both in Catholic priests and in teachers of Vedas.) So proud, yet so utterly imprisoned in the gleeful imaginary world of four white walls surrounding him, full of empty theories unconnected to the messy, confusing realm of real experience. But back when I was reading the Upanishads (partly the famous anthology of Hume) at 15 in Princeton, what struck me most was the distinction it made between self and Self, the little personal I and the larger I defined by considering the viewpoint which would see through ALL the eyes of ALL the conscious humans everywhere. Why not define U as the total conscious happiness across the entire larger Self? That is how I thought of it before I heard from Bertrand Russell. Notice that this was a kind of abstract or mathematical concept; at that age, I did not even believe in soul or noosphere. And yes, there was an attractive young woman who along with Bertrand Russell helped bring me more in connection to earth. Yet the distinction between self and Self is important, and I did not stop learning at age 15.
Many yogins and such imagine that they know what "I" means, who unconsciously assume that "I" is "I" is "I", and ghat the self which engages in astral travel is the same I which wakes up in the morning or has dinner. That tacit assumption is good enough for some purposes, but for PSI it basically does not work. It does not fit reality well enough to provide a sane basis for action and purpose.
This is so fundamental that it calls out for a very long elaboration, connecting it to all aspects of life. But since this is already long for an email post, let me just cut it short. I already talked about the relation between "the beast and the angel" (citing Dante), and the alchymical marriage. I find that the "I" of real PSI connection (typically 3AM until I get out of bed, but also often in special places like the sanzan shrines I showed in photos linked to at werbos.com/religions.htm) is quite different from the "I" of the evening after some Irish cream, and that I need to be conscious of that rhythm both to plan my activities effectively and to prepare for the difficult changes coming to all of us. Like having to rely more on Innernet instead of Internet. And yes, taking more and more conscious advantage of the times when our mind is at a higher level.
=========================== =================================== After I posted this, a comment and reply:
On Fri, Feb 21, 2020 at 6:21 PM Bernard Baars <baarsbj@gmail.com> wrote:
Ooops!
Thank you , Bernie, for pointing out a major hole in my brief history, leaving out how today's culture would address a question like "Who am I? And so what utility function U would it be sane or rational for me to maximize? What is my purpose?"
Back when I was a teenager (and no, Bernie, I have not failed to grow up a bit), I lived in a very special culture of freedom, where it was ASSUMED that conscious rational people have an active, living, conscious sense of free will. And so when I asked myself "what would **I** do if I were wise?", I was naturally thinking of myself as a human being. At that time, I thought of myself as a simple mundane human being, with no dark matter or extramundane soul included. Yes, there were bosses back then and corporations, but we thought of them as ENVIRONMENTS in which people would act, and respect what their environment would do but still CHOOSE. I became deeply interested in the MOTIVATION side of the human brain, the evolutionary mechanisms which gave rise to the behavior of U calculating organs in the brain like hypothalamus and epithalamus.
But nowadays... even as some of us worry about efforts to make robots and computers more independent, more competent in decision making, and more "human," we also face equally scary efforts to "make humans into artificial robots," to make humans more robotic, more controlled, more obedient, and less consciously aware of themselves as free creatures (even when wearing chains) responsible for ALL of their actions and choices from the level of twitching to the level of anything they do with any of their muscles.
Just as our understanding of how the brain works is MUCH deeper when we make full use of 20KHz deep brain data, you are right that we could get better understanding of the Spengler type QUESTIONS by making use of stuff like real time social network type data not only on the defense mechanisms studied by Vaillant, but also on changes in how people approach "who am I?" and other aspects reflective of the state of the noosphere and mundane cultures (including evidence of what Spengler called "weltaunschaung").
This aspect of "consciousness" is extremely important, but once again I need to avoid writing down the MANY things which come to mind... and thank those patient enough to get this far!
====================== ================ Ok, Deepak Chopra got this far. So here is one sgtep deeper: Because Deepak is playing an important role in the noosphere, and does his best to take the difficult moral highground, I was happy to watch his video from start to finish.
Please forgive if I try to be slow and careful in reply... and Deepak, please forgive me if I am even so still not slow and careful ENOUGH. It is a tricky subject.
One of the first main questions he addresses in the video is "Where causes people to feel so much suffering on earth?"
He suggests a possible response which many Buddhists, Hindus and Western mystics have used: "the suffering is just an illusion.\It is not real."
One of the first times I encountered that response, in an elaborate and thoughtful discussion, was in discussions with Joel Whitten, author of https://www.amazon.com/
But that does not REALLY mean that our choices, plans and strategies do not matter at all!!
Even more: if there is some probability p that they don't matter, and 1-p that they do, the rational procedure is to act on the assumption that they do. It just makes the problem trickier.
I asked Joel long ago: "If life is just a school, what is the curriculum? How do we know when we are just wasting time (his book gives examples not unlike things we have seen in some of the lists)? What subjects do we really need to learn?" He said: "I have actually done (PSI) research on that. My new book gets deeper and more explicit on that, but even my earlier pop stuff gives clues, despite being written for a more general audience." I suppose it would belong on a (large) annotated reading and resource list for this list!
This issue also has some relation to the debate between Zen and Tibetan Buddhism in Tricycle Magazine a few years ago, which mentioned on the other list. I apologize that I cannot give you the citation and link right now, but it should not be TOO hard to find. There was a grand debate between two leading teachers of Buddhbism in the US, leaders of each school here. It ended with one or two word summaries. The Tibetan said "mindfulness." The Zen said "No mind." I am 100% aligned with the former over the latter. ACTUAL Zen and TIbetan Buddhists hold different views, or phrasings which change the basic meanings, but I will never forget witnessing with my own eyes (both inner and outer together then) an old Zen style monk in Korea in such great weird pain, exactly like the dying musician in the underworld in the cartoon Coco (but with a weird rictus of a pseudosmile, a grimace like that described in Voyage to Arcturus by Lindsay, another important book). the great void is not the same as true nothingness, and detachment with mindfulness is not the same as annihilation of all the selves. All the pain is real. And all calls for facing up to reality, to consciousness. Now if only the folks making climate policy could truly understand that...
In the end, we need to be vigilant against the defense mechanism called "defense" in Vaillant's work./ Those of us on a real path, really strengthening brain and soul, need to be ever MORE vigilant of the twin delusions of helplessness and of gradeur, the scylla and charybdis of personal development.
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Friday, February 21, 2020
Neural math foundations: Telos, Purpose, Utility and Identity
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