Posted by alexandra_k on July 30, 2005, at 18:12:40
In reply to the brain (mind)--wider than the sky » alexandra_k, posted by smokeymadison on July 29, 2005, at 12:54:02
> is it fair to assume that what we consider the mind to be contains our "self," real or imagined?
You could think of the mind as a container and the self to be the contents of mind / consciousness... Or... You could think of the self as one and the same thing as the contents of mind / consciousness... Or... You could think of the self as the interrelationship between the contents of mind / consciousness. They would be three different theories... I like to think of the self as a mechanism that processes the contents of consciousness to produce behaviour. The mind / self just is whatever takes in the contents of consciousness and delivers behaviours. And ultimately... In people that function is performed by the brain.
And the self just is a certain kind of mind...
(One that is sufficiently complex like ours. Animals have rudimentary selves...)>if so, and if the mind has no bounds, as implied in this poem, then how can our "selves" have bounds, or even exist as closed systems within the mind?
Thats an interesting question :-)
You can draw a picture of a horse.
Your picture of the horse is itself 2 cm tall.
The horse your picture is of is 17 hands high.
The representation has different characteristics from what is represented.
We see objects in the world, not 2d images on the back of a little tiny retina...There are an indefinate number of gramatically correct sentances in any natural language (English, for example). Given a fixed number of words at any one point in time there is an indefinate number of meaningfully different sentances that are gramatical. Consider... I have one kumquats, I have two kumquats, I have three kumquats etc etc. Also: you can add 'and' fairly much as you like to add another clause onto a sentance.
So language itself is finite (finite number of words at any one point in time, finite number of rules for determining gramatically correct sentances).
Thought has this property as well. There are a fixed number of ideas or contents... There are finite rules on how ideas can be combined to result in meaningful thoughts.
Language and thought have recursive rules that allow us to get infinity (or at least an indefinite amount) from the finite stock of ideas / words that we started from.
So... Because of the kinds of rules that govern mental / brain processes... Our brains can generate novelty etc. It seems as though... It is tardis like... And in a sense it is - but I think you can explain that appearance.
> -are we are capable of what our mind is capable?
> -how can we be studied with traditional scientific methods if we are not closed systems?I think we are closed systems.
Environment + genes -> thoughts, perceptions, beliefs, desires, memories, goals etc etc -> behaviour.
Physical processes all the way...
But sometimes you have an abstract description of a physical process.What does all money have in common on the physical level? Not a lot... You have to specify what counts as money or not at a level of description where you specify its function rather than its intrinsic properties.
Action and mental states must be given similar treatment...
> i have said a lot about memory as a key factor in the structure of what we think of as our self. another idea--memory itself is not purely a personal construct. much of it depends on the environment to be formed and then to be retrieved. an event has to be significant enough (the environment provokes a response) to be "stored." in order to retrieve the memory, something in the environment has to trigger an association in order for us to remember. so even that which we tend to think of as "us," based upon our memories, depends greatly upon that which is beyond our physical brain.Yeah. I think this is Locke... The mind is a blank slate, a tabula rasa. Imprints are made on the blank slate, imprints which are dim copies of sense impressions. I guess remembering is supposed to be 'finding' or 'locating' the picture in memory.
Plato talked about the avairy metaphor. It is like a man goes into an avairy and wants to grab hold of a bird (memory imprint). How does he know what he is looking for? Why does he need the bird if he already knows what he is looking for? Paradoxes about memory arise from this...
Remembering isn't so very much about accessing a veridical representation of the past that has been preserved like a photograph. The act of remembering is something that is done in the present. Remembering is an active process in much the same way that learning is an active process. Sure you can just 'soak up' the learning or recollect a memory inprint but this isn't typically what we do when we are learning or remembring.
To really learn stuff you need to be active. To play around with it and try to encode it via multilple pathways. To really remember stuff we are typically active as well.
There is a lot of stuff out there (incl experiments) to show that memory is essentially constructive. Stories we tell ourself in the present.
I don't want to emphasise the constructive nature of it tooooooooooooo much. I think there are reality constraints in the pic we do have. It is just that we might have a hard time figuring out what is veridical vs what is confabulated..
poster:alexandra_k
thread:531091
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/write/20050621/msgs/535773.html