Identity (Identity)

by xeno6696 , Sonoran Desert, Wednesday, September 09, 2009, 03:18 (5343 days ago) @ David Turell

I'm sorry. I'm with Penrose. If a Pet scan lights up the amygdala, you still don't know all the connections,or exactly how it functions. Pet scans tell us functions of areas. Not how to connect the billions upon billions of neurons thru trillions of synapses. 
> > Apropos of my comment that recognizing a brain area that lights up for a given stimulus doesn't really tell you how it is working 'inside':
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> Here is an excellent study showing how complicated one neuron is and how connections are modified as we learn. There is a whole system for that emphasis. Still with Penrose.
> 
> http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/09/090907142302.htm-There's another fundamental difference in how you and I think, that masterfully impacts our views; our education. -The problem with a biological approach is that all you can ever do is observe. You can't create. All you can ever do is describe and document complexity. You can accrue data and make correlations, and though you do make models, they are always simple. -Computing (as I mentioned when I first joined) takes an entirely different approach to such a question. It asks us to literally build a model of what it is we're trying to study, because at least in computer science, it can't be said you understand something without being able to build a working model of it. -The complexity seems intractable to you--perhaps for the very reason that the awe you get from the life sciences is in observation of the natural world. A biologist can no more build a tree or an ape. You can study the cells, you can determine the structure of the DNA, you can do a great many things--but because you can't build a *real* model of what you're studying, understanding the... "thing in itself," is an avenue that is naturally closed to you. So you side with Penrose.-The world that I'm in, is one where it is possible to map the complexity of biochemical reactions (such as what that mathematical biology group is doing here at UNO) and believe it or not, this mapping has never been done before. -http://www.pnas.org/content/105/6/1913.full.pdf+html-For the first time--through the "magic" of model-building we're figuring out the complexities of biochemistry. I am not arguing for materialism or immaterialism here; the knowledge that the complexity of life is no longer something that cannot be studied drastically shapes the way I look at these problems. If more information from these studies agrees, cells themselves are a form of AI that can be directly modeled, allowing us to be able to create a great many kinds of models that would never have existed before. (Albeit, no solution to the origins question.)

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\"Why is it, Master, that ascetics fight with ascetics?\"

\"It is, brahmin, because of attachment to views, adherence to views, fixation on views, addiction to views, obsession with views, holding firmly to views that ascetics fight with ascetics.\"