Do you consider thought to be a 100% physical manifestation?

[hellokeith]

Some wrinkles on the brain, some bio-chemical and bio-electric interactions. So it is only a matter of research, technology, and time until thought will be completely measurable, correct?

 

[CSMR]

The best you can do is link certain types of thought to physical phenomena. E.g. a person thinks "I think therefore I am" when there is a certain chemical in his brain.

But for physics to describe all thoughts first you have to describe all thoughts and then correlate with physics and describing all thoughts is not possible mathematically or not. There are some thoughts that have not even been thought yet.

So... not 100%

Edit: deleted the first sentence, which did not correspond to a definite thought. It was clear on the oscilloscope that there was something wrong with it.

 

[CycloWizard]

Originally posted by: CSMR
Physics cannot describe thoughts because mathematics cannot capture the variety of thoughts.

The best you can do is link certain types of thought to physical phenomena. E.g. a person thinks "I think therefore I am" when there is a certain chemical in his brain.

But for physics to describe all thoughts first you have to describe all thoughts and then correlate with physics and describing all thoughts is not possible mathematically or not.

So... not 100%

Sure you can describe them mathematically. You just have to define your solution space as the set of all complex thoughts, since some thoughts are purely imaginary.

 

[Gannon]

Yes, brain damage pretty much proves that thought is a physical manifestation, without oxygen the brain does not function properly.

 

[Ruptga]

I see what he's asking: is my consciousness just the weird pattern of electro-chemical reactions going on inside me? I may as be the first to say it; if so, do computers think? Their hardware doesn't adapt like ours does (not without surgery I mean), but it's the same concept, pathways forming circuits and whatnot.

Anyway, even if our minds are completely physical in that sense, it's going to be a loooong time before we directly interface minds with computers. Neurons (I think) have several input and output branches, so there's a lot more connection combinations (per nueron) than you can have with transistors. Someone else around here was asking about trits instead of bits, maybe when we make that work well we can begin to hack minds.

Actually come to think of it, we have long been making transistors smaller than cells, so we can probably compensate for the inputs/outputs thing by using a ton of transistors, maybe even make a transistor-based neuron as a starting point. Come to think of it, a while ago on DT there was an article about an artificial retina prototype, they'd based the physical layout of it off of human retinas.

Also, chips are measured in mm^2, while our brain obviously takes up a lot more space.

 

[bobsmith1492]

Originally posted by: Gannon
Yes, brain damage pretty much proves that thought is a physical manifestation, without oxygen the brain does not function properly.

Not necessarily; if there were a soul/mind/some non-physical entity that was the center of the thought or decision making process and the brain were the interface with the body, then damage to the brain could prevent the soul from controlling the body effectively...

 

[Jeff7]

Originally posted by: ADDAvenger
Also, chips are measured in mm^2, while our brain obviously takes up a lot more space.

This is why I don't put much stock in the argument that computers will never be as intelligent as humans. A computer does most of its work on a tiny chip. Our brains are measured in terms of volume, not surface area, and there's a lot there. Take a computer "chip" with the same volume as a human brain, and see what you can get out of it. Make it a quantum processor, and I think you'd get something that'd easily best any human in terms of intelligence.
The problem lies in the software: It'd need basic programming to allow it to store and interpret information about its surroundings. A truly intelligent program would be able to update and improve itself over time, just as a human infant does.


Concerning the original post, I think that our conscious thought is simply the result of interactions between the cells in our brains. It's continuous and complex processing, which gives it the appearance of having some sort of substance to our own conscious observation.
I think it would also be "possible" to take a freeze frame of a brain, and predict its future actions based on select stimuli. It'd require a scan with high atomic precision - the temperature, motion, and position of all atoms would be needed, all at the same time. Whether or not good old Mr. Heisenberg would present a problem here might depend on just how far into the future you want to analyze the brain's behavior.

 

[everman]

Read "The Singularity Is Near" by Ray Kurzweil, it's a fun book all about things in this area. One interesting thing is the idea of enhancing our own brains with technology, our brains are really slow since they rely on chemical reactions, imagine if your brain's circuits ran at the speed of light? We could end up with 99.9% of our brain power being from technological enhancements, the original biological portion would be dwarfed in terms of processing power. Once we're at 99.99% technologically enhanced brain, with just that bit of flesh left, what's to stop us from uploading our brain to anywhere with a kind of network connection? Would we be immortal? What happens when you make a copy? It's fun to think about

 

[PhatoseAlpha]

Thought is 0% physical. It's a process and a pattern. What's defining the pattern and process are as largely irrelevant as what machine is running any given program. It's the organization and interaction that makes thought thought.

 

[Gannon]

ugh, thought is physical, your brain cells use energy, brain cells are both born and die in the mind throughout your lifetime. It's ridiculous to think thought is somehow decoupled from cellular automata.

 

[Gannon]

Originally posted by: bobsmith1492

Originally posted by: Gannon
Yes, brain damage pretty much proves that thought is a physical manifestation, without oxygen the brain does not function properly.

Not necessarily; if there were a soul/mind/some non-physical entity that was the center of the thought or decision making process and the brain were the interface with the body, then damage to the brain could prevent the soul from controlling the body effectively...

Sleep proves beyond all doubt that thought is conscious and physical entity, anesthesia proves it because anesthesia itself can shut down the brain in most people to a completely unconscious death state (as you would experience it in terms of you consciousness being "off").

Non-physicalism is nonsense, there is no evidence at all of non-physical thought, all thought is contained inside your brain. If I deprived you of oxygen you would go unconscious and soon experience brain death, no more thought, no more consciousness.

Only religious people believe in the fairy fairly land of things that exist that have no physical basis. A Non-physical entity that can interact with a physical entity is not even possible to conceptualize without contradiction. Since at some point that "non physical thing" has to "touch" that physical thing and turn knobs or control chemical reactions, and at that point ANY hint of physical interaction makes the "non physical" physical by definition by breaching the idea of "nonphysicalness" and infecting it with concepts of physicalness like "interface", "touch", etc. The idea of nonphysicality is breached through the law of non-contradiction.

 

[PhatoseAlpha]

Hardly ridiculous. It's a matter of the definition. I'm not calling souls or ghosts in the machines or anything like that. I'm saying that thought is a pattern plus a process - and the fact that the 'hardware' that the thought is running on is incidental to thought itself. The fact that it's running on physical hardware has lots of practical implications, yes - since the physical nature and organization are what determines the pattern and the rules of processing - but it's not a neccessity for thought itself to exist.

A brain and physical world thinks - but the thought is organization. The brain is just the bits being organized and processed.

This isn't to say the brain is irrelevant or we have immortal souls which move on to other planes when we die or anything like that. Since our thought runs on physical hardware, the physical side is intimate to thought in humans. But that's a detail, not part of the nature of thought itself.

Only religious people believe in the fairy fairly land of things that exist that have no physical basis.

And mathematicians.



@Above: You're considering only human thought here, not thought itself. That's an awfully big difference. Malfunctioning or altering hardware can certainly cause difference in function in a computer program - but the program itself is still organization.

 

[bobsmith1492]

Originally posted by: Gannon

Originally posted by: bobsmith1492

Originally posted by: Gannon
Yes, brain damage pretty much proves that thought is a physical manifestation, without oxygen the brain does not function properly.

Not necessarily; if there were a soul/mind/some non-physical entity that was the center of the thought or decision making process and the brain were the interface with the body, then damage to the brain could prevent the soul from controlling the body effectively...

Sleep proves beyond all doubt that thought is conscious and physical entity, anesthesia proves it because anesthesia itself can shut down the brain in most people to a completely unconscious death state (as you would experience it in terms of you consciousness being "off").

Non-physicalism is nonsense, there is no evidence at all of non-physical thought, all thought is contained inside your brain. If I deprived you of oxygen you would go unconscious and soon experience brain death, no more thought, no more consciousness.

Only religious people believe in the fairy fairly land of things that exist that have no physical basis. A Non-physical entity that can interact with a physical entity is not even possible to conceptualize without contradiction. Since at some point that "non physical thing" has to "touch" that physical thing and turn knobs or control chemical reactions, and at that point ANY hint of physical interaction makes the "non physical" physical by definition by breaching the idea of "nonphysicalness" and infecting it with concepts of physicalness like "interface", "touch", etc. The idea of nonphysicality is breached through the law of non-contradiction.

So it's impossible to have some sort of an interface?

Also, I read about an experiment in which they probed a lady's brain with stimuli that made her appendages move. When they asked her why she moved, she said she didn't - they made her do it. That sounds to me like she considers herself independent of her physical brain? I suppose it could be said that since she didn't decide to move by natural processes, it didn't seem like she was controlling her actions, but still, it is interesting to think about.

 

[hellokeith]

Holographic storage discs are coming to market this year. For those who subscribe to the thought=100% physical theory, a thought is nothing more than a 3d video with some metadata (smell, temperature, personal feeling, etc) tacked onto it.

 

[NanoStuff]

Originally posted by: hellokeith
Holographic storage discs are coming to market this year. For those who subscribe to the thought=100% physical theory, a thought is nothing more than a 3d video with some metadata (smell, temperature, personal feeling, etc) tacked onto it.

Yup, that's more or less what it is.

 

[StopSign]

Originally posted by: bobsmith1492

Originally posted by: Gannon
Yes, brain damage pretty much proves that thought is a physical manifestation, without oxygen the brain does not function properly.

Not necessarily; if there were a soul/mind/some non-physical entity that was the center of the thought or decision making process and the brain were the interface with the body, then damage to the brain could prevent the soul from controlling the body effectively...

Hogwash!

 

[Braznor]

Isn't thought different from consiousness?

 

[blackllotus]

Originally posted by: everman
Read "The Singularity Is Near" by Ray Kurzweil, it's a fun book all about things in this area. One interesting thing is the idea of enhancing our own brains with technology, our brains are really slow since they rely on chemical reactions, imagine if your brain's circuits ran at the speed of light? We could end up with 99.9% of our brain power being from technological enhancements, the original biological portion would be dwarfed in terms of processing power. Once we're at 99.99% technologically enhanced brain, with just that bit of flesh left, what's to stop us from uploading our brain to anywhere with a kind of network connection? Would we be immortal? What happens when you make a copy? It's fun to think about

Great book. What I find the most exciting is that the creation of truely intelligent programs/machines may occur within our lifetimes, albeit when most of us are on the senior side of the age spectrum. The creation of machine intelligence will clearly be the biggest technological revolution humanity will ever go through and I find the idea of living through it very appealing. According to Kurzweil, we will have $1000 computers that can perform the same number of computations per second as our brain by around 2030 assuming current technological trends keep up.

 

[Ruptga]

Originally posted by: StopSign

Originally posted by: bobsmith1492

Originally posted by: Gannon
Yes, brain damage pretty much proves that thought is a physical manifestation, without oxygen the brain does not function properly.

Not necessarily; if there were a soul/mind/some non-physical entity that was the center of the thought or decision making process and the brain were the interface with the body, then damage to the brain could prevent the soul from controlling the body effectively...

Hogwash!

Nah, it's a reasonable musing. Though to be fair to all, it is just a musing because there is no way to confirm or deny it scientifically.

 

[Gannon]

Originally posted by: ADDAvenger

Originally posted by: StopSign

Originally posted by: bobsmith1492

Originally posted by: Gannon
Yes, brain damage pretty much proves that thought is a physical manifestation, without oxygen the brain does not function properly.

Not necessarily; if there were a soul/mind/some non-physical entity that was the center of the thought or decision making process and the brain were the interface with the body, then damage to the brain could prevent the soul from controlling the body effectively...

Hogwash!

Nah, it's a reasonable musing. Though to be fair to all, it is just a musing because there is no way to confirm or deny it scientifically.

It's not a reasonable musing, otherwise you would experience consciousness before you were even born in the Egg that was fertalized to become you. Your thought and consciousness is nothing more then an enormous collective of neurons. There is no "physical-less interface". You have all kinds of contradictory nonscientific nonsense if you believe in such tripe.

 

[IEC]

Originally posted by: hellokeith
Some wrinkles on the brain, some bio-chemical and bio-electric interactions. So it is only a matter of research, technology, and time until thought will be completely measurable, correct?

It better not be, lest we have "though-crimes" :evil:

 

[StopSign]

Which is why you should start practicing double think right now just in case. I already know a few people who are fairly proficient.

 

[Ruptga]

Originally posted by: Gannon

Originally posted by: ADDAvenger

Originally posted by: StopSign

Originally posted by: bobsmith1492

Originally posted by: Gannon
Yes, brain damage pretty much proves that thought is a physical manifestation, without oxygen the brain does not function properly.

Not necessarily; if there were a soul/mind/some non-physical entity that was the center of the thought or decision making process and the brain were the interface with the body, then damage to the brain could prevent the soul from controlling the body effectively...

Hogwash!

Nah, it's a reasonable musing. Though to be fair to all, it is just a musing because there is no way to confirm or deny it scientifically.

It's not a reasonable musing, otherwise you would experience consciousness before you were even born in the Egg that was fertalized to become you. Your thought and consciousness is nothing more then an enormous collective of neurons. There is no "physical-less interface". You have all kinds of contradictory nonscientific nonsense if you believe in such tripe.

That is an interesting thought about being conscious before we were even in the womb; though just as a point of argument, your earliest memory is probably around age three or four, maybe even age two, but I'm pretty sure we were all conscious before age three, otherwise two year-olds wouldn't be able to speak or walk at all. So, if that is true, then it is possible to be conscious without necessarily having any memories of it (somewhat like sleepwalking).

You're pretty confident, so I'm sure you can enumerate some of the specific contradictory nonscientific nonsense that would have to be involved. But as an aside, see if you can post it without using such a flame-ish tone, you've been pretty intolerant in the posts I've seen on this thread.

 

[PhatoseAlpha]

There's a more basic objection. If an interface exists - IE, this brain stuff can affect the physical and is affected by the physical - what reason do you have to call it anything other then a new type of physical phenomenon?

 

[Ruptga]

What reason would we have to call it a physical phenomenon? If there truly is something like this, it's nothing like the scientific community has ever observed before, so I don't see why we'd want to make any assumptions about it. Of course from a traditional scientific standpoint you'd assume it's something "physical" (even if it's not tactile, but some kind of weird energy), and maybe it is, maybe we just need to tweak our definition of what is physical.

edited for a random word that didn't get backspaced