Posts by 81stcolumn
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Craig -
I reckon you do have a right to be concerned when Cullen seems to be doing a winstard. I guess the kind phrase is disappointing. I won't concede however that the Herald's activities are without bias and depending on your ideology, without menace in the political domain. To my perhaps inexperienced eyes they seem to have upped the ante with recent events.
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I can only hope that the Herald is able to apply such diligence to all matters in need of clarification. I will in due course be contacting them to see if they will correct some pretty shoddy reporting regarding one of my clients.....
Craig: This is about the Herald not about Cullen.
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Oh and super post thanks RB.
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i) Perhaps a bit left field, but much of the angst around this issue has not been helped by the modern marketing of prescription drugs in the wider population.
ii) Steve I would urge you to stop and ponder the dilemma for the medical profession of figuring out who can and cannot have a real drug as opposed to a placebo or indeed who would be qualified to make such a determination.
iii) Some people would argue that there comes a point where brains, thoughts and chemicals become the same thing.
iv) Spare a thought for the poor buggers who go against big pharma with research. I know one at the moment who is pretty unhappy. These people as you can imagine really don't care who they insult.
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Andrew - It is sad to see that with alleged experience there is neither insight nor empathy; something with which I am entirely familiar. I know exactly where you are coming from. A place as ill judged and unimaginative as your post.
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The Zoo thing IMHO is quite complex. I'm quite amenable to the idea that in the absence of viable habitats many Zoo's now provide a repository for animals that would not otherwise exist today if indeed not in the future (notwithstanding that species do go extinct in the course of evolution). What concerns me still is the Ark type argument when species are disappearing at such an alarming rate - which ones do you save ? The implied popularity contest makes me a little uncomfortable.
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Ben - I get the Maths to Logic and back thing, and the modelling of dynamic systems on formal logic devices is entirely consistent with Turings early proposals. Incidentally where cognitive psychologists arguably went wrong was in assuming that brains contained anything that corresponded with bounded symbols and consistent logic. The best that can be said about logic is that it is brain local which is an alternative to Fodors treatment of modularity. From my POV I'm curious about what you mean when you say "getting dynamic systems to implement digital style thinking processing" the concept seems to turn my brain to fudge.
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With an apple logo on it ! How could you !
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Sorry if that came out a bit garbled I've just finished my first round of meetings to investigate the most efficient method of turning intelligent adults into Turing machines !
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Neuroscience makes it fairly clear that it's caused by brains, but that's not the same thing.
i) Neuroscience does make it clear that something is caused by brains and you might wish to attribute to it the properties of consciousness as you choose to define it. But I'm gonna call you out over suggesting that neuroscience would separate cause and effect/consequence in this way. Hence that Neuroscience accepts the the notion that it isn't the same thing.
ii) Even if such a proposal were acceptable we still get caught in the Dualist sandwich of explaining how activity becomes another otherwise defined property of our conscious experience. This then falls into a cycle of regress and/or is subject to a parsimony argument.
For this reason I am quite fond of dynamic (dynamical if you must...ich) systems models of mind in so far as they adopt a neo-behaviourist approach to causal mechanisms. The redeeming feature being that they allow consciousness and associated states to be highly changeable and include a vast range of antecedents (constraints) that define a range of conscious states might emerge from the meshing of brain states with perception. Hence, the room, the keyboard and my day are all part of my consciousness and that this will change the instant I close my eyes; in certain circumstances it may change quite profoundly (non linear change) in response to small but critical shifts in circumstances. But the big point is that this approach has no baggage associated with information theory (symbolism, formal logic and strong modularity). The shortcoming is the ever grumbling issue of what representation is or isn't with respect to brain/mind and of course the dirty detail of causal mechanisms.