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Another new theory of consciousness: Your brain on metaphors

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Interesting item from Chronicle of Higher Education:

Lakoff and Johnson’s program is as anti-Platonic as it’s possible to get. It undermines the argument that human minds can reveal transcendent truths about reality in transparent language. They argue instead that human cognition is embodied—that human concepts are shaped by the physical features of human brains and bodies. “Our physiology provides the concepts for our philosophy,” Lakoff wrote in his introduction to Benjamin Bergen’s 2012 book, Louder Than Words: The New Science of How the Mind Makes Meaning. Marianna Bolognesi, a linguist at the International Center for Intercultural Exchange, in Siena, Italy, puts it this way: “The classical view of cognition is that language is an independent system made with abstract symbols that work independently from our bodies. This view has been challenged by the embodied account of cognition which states that language is tightly connected to our experience. Our bodily experience.”

Neuroscientists agree on what happens with literal sentences like “The player kicked the ball.” The brain reacts as if it were carrying out the described actions. This is called “simulation.” Take the sentence “Harry picked up the glass.” “If you can’t imagine picking up a glass or seeing someone picking up a glass,” Lakoff wrote in a paper with Vittorio Gallese, a professor of human physiology at the University of Parma, in Italy, “then you can’t understand that sentence.” Lakoff argues that the brain understands sentences not just by analyzing syntax and looking up neural dictionaries, but also by igniting its memories of kicking and picking up.

But idioms are a major sticking point. Idioms are usually thought of as dead metaphors, that is, as metaphors that are so familiar that they have become clichés. What does the brain do with “The villain kicked the bucket” (“The villain died”)? What about “The students toed the line” (“The students conformed to the rules”)? Does the brain simulate the verb phrases, or does it treat them as frozen blocks of abstract language? And if it simulates them, what actions does it imagine? If the brain understands language by simulating it, then it should do so even when sentences are not literal.

The findings so far have been contradictory. Lisa Aziz-Zadeh, of the University of Southern California, and her colleagues reported in 2006 that idioms such as “biting off more than you can chew” did not activate the motor cortex. So did Ana Raposo, then at the University of Cambridge, and her colleagues in 2009. On the other hand, Véronique Boulenger, of the Laboratoire Dynamique du Langage, in Lyon, France, reported in the same year that they did, at least for leg and arm verbs.

It is unlikely that idioms are imagined in the brain. Most people are not in fact aware, most of the time, what common idioms reference, and are often mistaken when asked to explain. What does “once in a blue moon” mean? “Never month of Sundays”?”Well, now you’re asking!”? People tend to know when to use these types of expressions without necessarily knowing exactly what they mean, which is superfluous under the circumstances.

If cognition is embodied, that raises problems for artificial intelligence. Since computers don’t have bodies, let alone sensations, what are the implications of these findings for their becoming conscious—that is, achieving strong AI? Lakoff is uncompromising: “It kills it.” Of Ray Kurzweil’s singularity thesis, he says, “I don’t believe it for a second.” Computers can run models of neural processes, he says, but absent bodily experience, those models will never actually be conscious.

On the other hand, roboticists such as Rodney Brooks, an emeritus professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, have suggested that computers could be provided with bodies. For example, they could be given control of robots stuffed with sensors and actuators. Brooks pondered Lakoff’s ideas in his 2002 book, Flesh and Machines, and supposed, “For anything to develop the same sorts of conceptual understanding of the world as we do, it will have to develop the same sorts of metaphors, rooted in a body, that we humans do.” More.

I think we just left Earth orbit here.

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Comments
Thanks you for that leodpbornagain77
September 7, 2014
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Thanks BA for your observations. The OP is not merely tangential to Plato's thinking about form vs substance. ID types insist that information precedes and is independent of its material expression. What exactly is a 'concept' in our material brains? Let alone consciousness. Your quote of John 1:1-3 is appropriate. Hebrews 11:3 is also good. Or Hebrews 10:1... shadows of the real to come. The NT authors, by revelation, were way ahead of the curve when they claimed that the Word came first and creation after. You might like this: The Word Timeless truth to a time-lapse twilight and Pavane, Op. 50. Sun and clouds waltz in the processional. Selected excerpts from John 1:1-14.leodp
September 7, 2014
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OT: Steve Krstulovich (of FERMI lab) - The Glory of Jehovah Will Be Revealed - video https://vimeo.com/103421915 covers: Quantum Computers, LHC, SUSY, Higgs boson (20 minute mark), CMB anomalies, Expanding Universe, Dark Matter, Black holes, Ice Cube Neutrino detector, BICEP2, Inflation, Planck Satellite, Standard Model is incomplete, String theory is 'post-modern physics', Amplituhedron, 'We are missing something really big', falsifiability?, Science as politics,,, Jonah, Assyrian Empire, Archeological evidence for fulfilled prophecies of the Bible,,,bornagain77
September 7, 2014
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OT: John Lennox - Science and the God Question - video http://faithandscience.ag.org/videos/session1/ John Lennox's first plenary session at the 2014 Faith & Science Conference.bornagain77
September 7, 2014
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Researchers Succeed in Quantum Teleportation of Light Waves - April 2011 Excerpt: In this experiment, researchers in Australia and Japan were able to transfer quantum information from one place to another without having to physically move it. It was destroyed in one place and instantly resurrected in another, “alive” again and unchanged. This is a major advance, as previous teleportation experiments were either very slow or caused some information to be lost. http://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2011-04/quantum-teleportation-breakthrough-could-lead-instantanous-computing How Teleportation Will Work - Excerpt: In 1993, the idea of teleportation moved out of the realm of science fiction and into the world of theoretical possibility. It was then that physicist Charles Bennett and a team of researchers at IBM confirmed that quantum teleportation was possible, but only if the original object being teleported was destroyed. — As predicted, the original photon no longer existed once the replica was made. http://science.howstuffworks.com/science-vs-myth/everyday-myths/teleportation1.htm Quantum Teleportation – IBM Research Page Excerpt: “it would destroy the original (photon) in the process,,” http://researcher.ibm.com/view_project.php?id=2862
In fact an entire human can, theoretically, be reduced to quantum information and teleported to another location in the universe:
Quantum Teleportation Of A Human? – video https://vimeo.com/75163272 Will Human Teleportation Ever Be Possible? As experiments in relocating particles advance, will we be able to say, "Beam me up, Scotty" one day soon? By Corey S. Powell|Monday, June 16, 2014 Excerpt: Note a fascinating common thread through all these possibilities. Whether you regard yourself as a pile of atoms, a DNA sequence, a series of sensory inputs or an elaborate computer file, in all of these interpretations you are nothing but a stack of data. According to the principle of unitarity, quantum information is never lost. Put them together, and those two statements lead to a staggering corollary: At the most fundamental level, the laws of physics say you are immortal. http://discovermagazine.com/2014/julyaug/20-the-ups-and-downs-of-teleportation
Thus not only is information not reducible to a energy-matter basis, as is presupposed in reductive materialism (and Darwinism), but in actuality both energy and matter ultimately reduce to a information basis as is presupposed in Christian Theism (John1:1). Moreover, if information were merely abstract as is held in reductive materialism, then we should not be able, 'merely by taking thought', to probe the deepest mysteries of reality with mathematics:
"You find it strange that I consider the comprehensibility of the world (to the extent that we are authorized to speak of such a comprehensibility) as a miracle or as an eternal mystery. Well, a priori, one should expect a chaotic world, which cannot be grasped by the mind in any way .. the kind of order created by Newton's theory of gravitation, for example, is wholly different. Even if a man proposes the axioms of the theory, the success of such a project presupposes a high degree of ordering of the objective world, and this could not be expected a priori. That is the 'miracle' which is constantly reinforced as our knowedge expands." Albert Einstein - Letters to Solovine p 131. The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences - Eugene Wigner - 1960 Excerpt: ,,certainly it is hard to believe that our reasoning power was brought, by Darwin's process of natural selection, to the perfection which it seems to possess.,,, It is difficult to avoid the impression that a miracle confronts us here, quite comparable in its striking nature to the miracle that the human mind can string a thousand arguments together without getting itself into contradictions, or to the two miracles of the existence of laws of nature and of the human mind's capacity to divine them.,,, The miracle of the appropriateness of the language of mathematics for the formulation of the laws of physics is a wonderful gift which we neither understand nor deserve. We should be grateful for it and hope that it will remain valid in future research and that it will extend, for better or for worse, to our pleasure, even though perhaps also to our bafflement, to wide branches of learning. per Dartmouth An Interview with David Berlinski - Jonathan Witt Berlinski: There is no argument against religion that is not also an argument against mathematics. Mathematicians are capable of grasping a world of objects that lies beyond space and time …. Interviewer:… Come again(?) … Berlinski: No need to come again: I got to where I was going the first time. The number four, after all, did not come into existence at a particular time, and it is not going to go out of existence at another time. It is neither here nor there. Nonetheless we are in some sense able to grasp the number by a faculty of our minds. Mathematical intuition is utterly mysterious. So for that matter is the fact that mathematical objects such as a Lie Group or a differentiable manifold have the power to interact with elementary particles or accelerating forces. But these are precisely the claims that theologians have always made as well – that human beings are capable by an exercise of their devotional abilities to come to some understanding of the deity; and the deity, although beyond space and time, is capable of interacting with material objects. http://tofspot.blogspot.com/2013/10/found-upon-web-and-reprinted-here.html Mathematics is the language with which God has written the universe. Galileo Galilei “Geometry is unique and eternal, a reflection from the mind of God. That mankind shares in it is because man is an image of God.” – Johannes Kepler
Another clue that we are made in God's image is that the thing that most dramatically separates us from animals is our ability to process information. In fact the three Rs, reading, writing, and arithmatic, i.e. the ability to process information, is the very first thing to be taught to children when they enter elementary school. And yet it is information processing, i.e. reading, writing, and arithmatic, that is found to be foundational to life
Signature in the Cell by Stephen Meyer - video clip https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TVkdQhNdzHU
Verse and Music:
John 1:1-4 In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by Him, and without Him was not anything made that was made. In Him was life, and that life was the Light of men. Casting Crowns - The Word Is Alive https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9itgOBAxSc
supplemental note:
Conversations with William Dembski--The Thesis of Being as Communion - video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cYAsaU9IvnI
bornagain77
September 7, 2014
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"Physics is the only real science. The rest are just stamp collecting." Ernest Rutherford
The researchers claim that,,,
“The classical view of cognition is that language is an independent system made with abstract symbols that work independently from our bodies. This view has been challenged by the embodied account of cognition which states that language is tightly connected to our experience. Our bodily experience.”
Trying to provide empirical evidence for this reductionist view of information 'emerging' from the brain they tried,,,
"stuffing volunteers into fMRI scanners and having them read sentences"
Moreover, the article itself admitted to conflicting results for the experiments,,,
The findings so far have been contradictory. Lisa Aziz-Zadeh, of the University of Southern California, and her colleagues reported in 2006 that idioms such as “biting off more than you can chew” did not activate the motor cortex.
Color me less than impressed with their research and results,,, Their experiment reminds me of this article from Dr. Egnor lamenting the fact that materialistic scientists studying brain wave patterns are constantly deceiving themselves into believing that they have actually given a coherent explanation for conscious experience:
Fallacies of Contemporary Neuroscience: "A Vast Collection of Answers, with No Memory of the Questions" - Michael Egnor - February 20, 2014 Excerpt: [Scruton:] Neuroenvy... consist[s] of a vast collection of answers, with no memory of the questions. And the answers are encased in neurononsense of the following kind: 'The brains of social animals are wired to feel pleasure in the exercise of social dispositions such as grooming and co-operation, and to feel pain when shunned, scolded, or excluded. Neurochemicals such as vasopressin and oxytocin mediate pair-bonding, parent-offspring bonding, and probably also bonding to kith and kin...' (Patricia Churchland). As though we didn't know already that people feel pleasure in grooming and co-operating, and as though it adds anything to say that their brains are 'wired' to this effect, or that 'neurochemicals' might possibly be involved in producing it. This is pseudoscience of the first order, and owes what scant plausibility it possesses to the fact that it simply repeats the matter that it fails to explain. It perfectly illustrates the prevailing academic disorder, which is the loss of questions. http://www.evolutionnews.org/2014/02/fallacies_of_co082351.html
As to the primary question they forgot to ask, i.e. 'No Memory of the Questions', in this present study highlighted in the OP, I would say the elephant in the living room question that they forgot to ask is, 'Is it even possible for information to 'emerge' from a material basis?'. And the answer to that most important of foundational questions the answer is a resounding NO! It is humorous to note in their attempt to provide evidence that information can reduce to the material processes of the brain that no one has ever seen material processes generate any non-trivial levels of information.
Book Review - Meyer, Stephen C. Signature in the Cell. New York: HarperCollins, 2009. Excerpt: As early as the 1960s, those who approached the problem of the origin of life from the standpoint of information theory and combinatorics observed that something was terribly amiss. Even if you grant the most generous assumptions: that every elementary particle in the observable universe is a chemical laboratory randomly splicing amino acids into proteins every Planck time for the entire history of the universe, there is a vanishingly small probability that even a single functionally folded protein of 150 amino acids would have been created. Now of course, elementary particles aren't chemical laboratories, nor does peptide synthesis take place where most of the baryonic mass of the universe resides: in stars or interstellar and intergalactic clouds. If you look at the chemistry, it gets even worse—almost indescribably so: the precursor molecules of many of these macromolecular structures cannot form under the same prebiotic conditions—they must be catalysed by enzymes created only by preexisting living cells, and the reactions required to assemble them into the molecules of biology will only go when mediated by other enzymes, assembled in the cell by precisely specified information in the genome. So, it comes down to this: Where did that information come from? The simplest known free living organism (although you may quibble about this, given that it's a parasite) has a genome of 582,970 base pairs, or about one megabit (assuming two bits of information for each nucleotide, of which there are four possibilities). Now, if you go back to the universe of elementary particle Planck time chemical labs and work the numbers, you find that in the finite time our universe has existed, you could have produced about 500 bits of structured, functional information by random search. Yet here we have a minimal information string which is (if you understand combinatorics) so indescribably improbable to have originated by chance that adjectives fail. http://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/reading_list/indices/book_726.html
In fact there is a null hypothesis in place stating that material processes will never generate information:
The Capabilities of Chaos and Complexity: David L. Abel - Null Hypothesis For Information Generation - 2009 Excerpt of conclusion pg. 42: "To focus the scientific community’s attention on its own tendencies toward overzealous metaphysical imagination bordering on “wish-fulfillment,” we propose the following readily falsifiable null hypothesis, and invite rigorous experimental attempts to falsify it: “Physicodynamics cannot spontaneously traverse The Cybernetic Cut: physicodynamics alone cannot organize itself into formally functional systems requiring algorithmic optimization, computational halting, and circuit integration.” A single exception of non trivial, unaided spontaneous optimization of formal function by truly natural process would falsify this null hypothesis." http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2662469/ Can We Falsify Any Of The Following Null Hypothesis (For Information Generation) 1) Mathematical Logic 2) Algorithmic Optimization 3) Cybernetic Programming 4) Computational Halting 5) Integrated Circuits 6) Organization (e.g. homeostatic optimization far from equilibrium) 7) Material Symbol Systems (e.g. genetics) 8) Any Goal Oriented bona fide system 9) Language 10) Formal function of any kind 11) Utilitarian work http://mdpi.com/1422-0067/10/1/247/ag Is Life Unique? David L. Abel - January 2012 Concluding Statement: The scientific method itself cannot be reduced to mass and energy. Neither can language, translation, coding and decoding, mathematics, logic theory, programming, symbol systems, the integration of circuits, computation, categorizations, results tabulation, the drawing and discussion of conclusions. The prevailing Kuhnian paradigm rut of philosophic physicalism is obstructing scientific progress, biology in particular. There is more to life than chemistry. All known life is cybernetic. Control is choice-contingent and formal, not physicodynamic. http://www.mdpi.com/2075-1729/2/1/106/
Moreover, as counter intutive as it may be for reductive materialists to believe, material reduces to information, information does not reduce to material,,, In making this point clear, first it is important to learn that ‘non-local’, beyond space and time, quantum entanglement (A. Aspect, A. Zeilinger, etc..) can be used as a ‘quantum information channel’,,,
Quantum Entanglement and Information Quantum entanglement is a physical resource, like energy, associated with the peculiar nonclassical correlations that are possible between separated quantum systems. Entanglement can be measured, transformed, and purified. A pair of quantum systems in an entangled state can be used as a quantum information channel to perform computational and cryptographic tasks that are impossible for classical systems. The general study of the information-processing capabilities of quantum systems is the subject of quantum information theory. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qt-entangle/
And by using this ‘non-local’, beyond space and time, ‘quantum information channel’ of entanglement, such as they use in quantum computation, physicists have reduced material to quantum information. (of note: energy is completely reduced to quantum information, whereas matter is semi-completely reduced, with the caveat being that matter can be reduced to energy via e=mc2).
Ions have been teleported successfully for the first time by two independent research groups Excerpt: In fact, copying isn’t quite the right word for it. In order to reproduce the quantum state of one atom in a second atom, the original has to be destroyed. This is unavoidable – it is enforced by the laws of quantum mechanics, which stipulate that you can’t ‘clone’ a quantum state. In principle, however, the ‘copy’ can be indistinguishable from the original,,, http://www.rsc.org/chemistryworld/Issues/2004/October/beammeup.asp Atom takes a quantum leap – 2009 Excerpt: Ytterbium ions have been ‘teleported’ over a distance of a metre.,,, “What you’re moving is information, not the actual atoms,” says Chris Monroe, from the Joint Quantum Institute at the University of Maryland in College Park and an author of the paper. But as two particles of the same type differ only in their quantum states, the transfer of quantum information is equivalent to moving the first particle to the location of the second. http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/2171769/posts Scientists Report Finding Reliable Way to Teleport Data By JOHN MARKOFF - MAY 29, 2014 Excerpt: They report that they have achieved perfectly accurate teleportation of quantum information over short distances. They are now seeking to repeat their experiment over the distance of more than a kilometer. If they are able to repeatedly show that entanglement works at this distance, it will be a definitive demonstration of the entanglement phenomenon and quantum mechanical theory. http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/30/science/scientists-report-finding-reliable-way-to-teleport-data.html?_r=2
bornagain77
September 7, 2014
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I should have written, 'living human body/physiology'.Axel
September 6, 2014
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I think it's beyond risible that these 'artificial intelligence' bods speculate about a human contraption even remotely approaching the multi-layered complexity of a human body (or E-Coli cell), never mind a human mind.Axel
September 6, 2014
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