kriminal99

So do your kidneys. So does your liver. So does your bladder. The simple presence of receptors to hormones or even autonomic neurotransmitters does not mean that part of the body is liked to any sort of emotion.

 

By your logic' date=' you can also feel love through your bladder, since it has about as many receptors are the heart, and is, in fact, more responsive to them (as anyone who's ever drunk more than 3 cups of coffee within a few hours can tell you).

 

The heart is a muscule pump that responds to hormones and *autonomic* nervous system stimulation. It generates some feedback, but generally what we feel (scared, for instance) affects the heart, not the other way around. Exceptions are, for instance, when massive blood loss causes hypovolemic shock.

 

I feel thinks in my skin too, like when I get goosebumps. It's the same thing: an *effect* of processes in the brain, not a cause.

 

I don't even think metatron knows what he's posting half the time.

 

Mokele[/quote']

 

The way meta talks about this is not the way I would, and he might claim something about the physical realization of his first person experience based on his way of looking at it that is not necessitated by the information we have in such experience (and then it could be possible that it contradicts something science has observed)

 

But when someone claims something about first person experience, they do not have to be making any claim whatsoever about the physical realization of their first person experience. Anotherwords if I say that I feel something in my arm, he means he damn well feels something in his arm. Even though you if you were to hack off his arm and he still would feel something in the arm he doesn't have for a while, hes still "feeling something in his arm" when he touches a wall or something. He is merely pointing to his first person experience. The fact that the "feeling in his arm" is correlated to a process in the brain is irrelevant.

 

Scientists often have this problem. Once I read an argument about whether lightining was caused by traveling electrons, or instead simply WAS the traveling electrons. The answer is that lightining is CAUSED BY traveling electrons because lightining is defined by the flash of light and accompaying noise by the general populace. The scientist selfishly wants to redefine it as a moving electron because his life revolves around such investigations. But more than this redefining ideas such as lighting like this is silly when you consider that all of our ideas are functions of sense experience.

 

Anotherwords you learn about electrons THROUGH your senses in a classroom. So why would you define lightining as the classroom sense experience that you don't see when you look at the actual phenomenon?

A deck of n cards is laid out in a row on the table. Cards of a second deck with n cards are placed one by one at random on top of the first set of cards.

You get m points if there are m matches between the first and second decks.

a) How many ways are there to get 2 points if n = 4?

b) What is the probability of getting 7 points if n = 9?

I got stuck in this question...could anybody help me out??Thanks!!

Thats a hard one. To begin with, it seems like a little clarification is needed to determine what is "different". Is a match of the same cards at different locations different? Also is it ok to assume that the first deck of n cards contains the same cards in it as the second deck of n cards?

DOH I put my thread like this in the philosophy forum. I didn't realize there was an education forum.

Thread in philosophy forum

My real problem is a bit bigger than any individual pupil or teacher' date=' more a problem with life as a whole, not my life, just life in general.

 

The syllabus is, no matter what you say, totaly dumbed down over the last few years, you only have to pick up one O-Level physics textbook to see the massive difference, todays nation is being dumbed down.

 

Also general pupil attitude and punishment systems are pretty poor.

 

The kid who wants to learn is ever so rare, and those who misbehave are as common as dirt, and so they get a detention, do they care? no, do they talk about it and laugh at it afterwards? yes.... what kinda punishment is it?[/quote']

 

Probably because kids are becoming more intelligent with the information age and beginning to realize how full of crap the mentally inferior older generation is with their arbitrary rules and beliefs and how much the current system resembles facism. This sentiment will have its organized voice soon enough however.

There are more receptors in the brain, but the heart still has some and sure enough you feel things located in your heart sometimes... What is meta claiming beyond this exactly?

Why would the soul connect to the body at a blood pump? That makes about as much sense as claiming the soul connects to the body at the kidneys. After all' date=' they're pretty vital too.

 

Or why not the reproductive organs? Their activity certainly seems to be more tightly correlated to the presence of my love than heart activity changes.

 

If you're going to post this stuff, keep it in Psuedoscience, where it belongs.

 

Mokele[/quote']

 

Does the blood pump in question have chemical receptors? If so, that might go a long way in connecting physical knowledge with what people experience. Of course the first person experience has priority... Although I'm not arguing that Meta's post is optimized for objectivity, I don't think he is either...

Any time you see infinity in a math equation just replace it as limit x-> infinity with the x where the infinity was. The subconsious meaning of infinity is "always growing". Therefore writing like 1/infinity is equivalent to saying 1 divided by a value which constantly grows, so really all you can do is take a limit.

Where a limit is just to say as x gets closer and closer to a certain value and you have some function of x, then the function will approach some value z until a point where you can no longer distinguish between f(x) and z given a set amount of precision (decimal places you can monitor).

My behaviorism comment was to illustrate that psychologists are interested in more than just mental phenomena, however the questions to which you refer, are lofty goals indeed. I am not quite sure about your TOM examples, I usually just think of the fall of behaviorism as product of the realization that the mind/brain mediates our experience of the world. Whether others are aware of "mind" is another set of questions.

Well, to get my argument just ask yourself how a behaviorist comes up with a factor he is going to test to see if it is correlated with a certain behavior. At first you might just say intuition, or random guessing, or whatever else, but as the factors which are correlated to certain behaviors become less and less obviously correlated to the responses you need more and more complicated reasoning to come up with theories to test. Ultimately you would have to have a complete theory of mind to know what factors to examine.

And why do I' date=' or anyone, give a crap what "the general populace" wants to know? If they want to know it so badly, then they can go to school and get a psychology degree and solve it.

 

Strawman fallacy.

 

Furthermore, as for what to test, it's blatantly obvious from the animal's evolution. You don't test a sloth running through a maze, nor do you expect a snake to be positively reinforced by a carrot. You can predict the sorts of behaviors that can be used simply by physiology, ecology, and evolutionary history.

 

That doesn't mean it can't be of use. You can't *prove* most of science, since it's based on empirical observation. But you *can* reduce the chance that you are wrong to less than a tenth of a percent with suitable experimental design, even in correlational studies.

 

You mean like your own ignorant dismissal of psychology because you can't understand it? I'd bet you've never even actually taken a psych course.

 

Psychology is under no obligation to test every 2-bit crackpot philosophy, and, under certain circumstances, these philosophies are simply untestable wastes of time.

 

No, experienced philosophers don't. You have done both of these. Your homework is to complete this logic sequence.

 

Mokele[/quote']

 

Psychologists are not socially signifigant, neither are any of their arguments which are not convincing to the layman. Why should I believe that a psychologist is any more a credible source on theory of mind than is the local preacher if they do not provide arguments which I find convincing?

 

A strawman fallacy is when someone provides an argument similar to an argument provided by someone else but is more easily defeated. If you were to accuse someone of using such a tactic, you would actually have to provide the real argument and show how it is superior to the opponents version of it.

 

For example, if you were to say that you don't put a sloth in a maze or give a carrot to a snake as a response to my prior argument, when the argument was talking about how things which are correlated to certain behaviors get less obviously related to their causes then you would be using the straw man fallacy because you are using extremely obvious relations. Typically when someone uses a strawman fallacy they will be accusing the other person of saying something "stupid" when in fact they do not understand the person's argument. This shows that their motivation has nothing to do with understanding the nature of the topic but rather making the other person to appear foolish to restore any self esteem lost from being wrong. (Usually made by people who want to believe they are infallably intelligent and for some reason the world has to accomadate this belief so they are justified in such behavior)

 

In any case an example of step in the direction I am speaking of a relation might be that if a person has a bad childhood then they interpret insults made in a certain fashion by friends as compliments or to use behaviorist's rediculous terminology "reinforcement". If you experienced this yourself of course it would be obvious to test it, but if you want to come up with such factors on your own you would have to come up with a first person based theory of mind. Another might be testing which kinds of sounds a person is likely to enjoy. etc. The more remote the factors the more complex your theory of mind has to be to identify them as potential factors, until eventually you don't even need anything but your first person theory of mind.

 

The problems with experimental design are far from being the only issue (not what I was speaking of originally -SM2) but since you brought it up let me elaborate on "this less than a tenth of a percent" bit. Lets say I am going to conduct a "scientific experiment" so I go downtown and petition people to participate. I go to a street corner and start handing out fliers. Little do I know (or perhaps I DO KNOW and am using it on purpose) the people at that street corner have a 66% probability of having a certain personality (because of proximity to a nearby coffee shop for instance) and this personality has a correlaton to the dependent variable of 75%. Now consider that this just one among what could be many potential sources of bias. Do you think they are going to, or be expected to control all of these factors? No. Do you think they could easily take advantage of this to get the results they want without anyone looking at the results being any the wiser? Easily. Less than a tenth of a percent? I think not.

 

But as I said this isn't even what I was talking about. What I was saying is ASSUMING you knew that x physical brain process was 100% correlated to y mental phenomenon, this does not mean they are one and the same. It doesn't mean necessarily the physical process has any potential to explain the mental process. For example, the brain could simply be something metaphorical to a transformer. Maybe it takes energy of an unknown form and changes it into electrical, chemical and mechanical energy. In which case the faculties of raw memoryless, emotionless "awareness" could exist somewhere which is nowhere near the human body. Or even the "raw feels" of what we experience with our senses could be determined by such a foreign faculty.

 

As for your counter accusation, several points.

1) I am not angry

 

2) Scientists do not generally recognize their own ignorance. Its ok to be wrong, its not ok to pose an authority figure and constantly become frusterated with people who do not treat you as an omniscient god.

 

3) I understand the arguments used to back up these types of thinking very well, as well as their motivation, as well as other arguments that I feel are superior. Of course I am always open to hearing personal adjustments or additions to arguments popular among scientific thinking, that doesn't mean I won't be critical of them.

This is exactly the kind of reasoning which a stochastic reasoning agent will demonstrate. And it is wrong.

 

After seeing 99 white swans you should not be fairly confident that the last swan is white. You should be totally uncertain' date=' and for the following reason...

 

Suppose instead of giving you a bag with 100 swans in it, I gave you a bag with only one swan in it. You have never seen a swan before in your life, and you know that the bag contains the only swan in existence. I ask you, what is the probability that all swans are white. Well you haven't looked in the bag yet, you have no clue, you are TOTALLY uncertain.

 

Well this problem with N=1, is equivalent to the other problem with N=100, and you just took out 99 white swans. So why would you be totally uncertain in one case, and partially certain in the other case, when they are one and the same case.[/quote']

 

But in the N=100 case, if you have to guess white or black swan, and if you guess right you get a date with a hot girl, which one are you going to guess? In everyone's experience if you guess white you will be right more often than you are wrong.

 

You might be horrified to know that you cannot think without using induction in general (pretty much the same reasoning used in statistics) by the way . Anotherwords for example you posted in english using certain words because in your experience people would be able to understand you. This is analogous to an infinite swan containing bag where after a large number of trials are swans are white.

 

A control on induction that we can exert however is to recognize when two situations might be different so that we cannot apply the history of one situation to the history of the other. Anotherwords, you say the N=100 case is just like the N=1 case but I disagree. In the real world, as anyone has seen it so far, you would be wrong more often if you said the swan was black then you would if you said it was white. You may be uncertain, but you may also have a motivation to choose one way or the other.

 

I don't think the fact that we could be wrong in either case is a good reason for applying the same history of success we might have in the N=1 case to the N=100 case. Rather to prove the two situations were the same we would need to know everything relevant to determining the outcome, in which case we wouldn't need the two situations to begin with.

I disagree. You can directly measure several "outcomes" in psychology. I'll list them for you:

 

Galvonic Skin Response

Eye tracking

Reaction time

Heart Rate

Hormone levels

Hours of sleep

Non-verbal cues

Language

 

Shall I go on?

 

You can't measure MENTAL phenomena directly BUT you can measure BEHAVIOR directly. Remember behaviorism? Thus' date=' we often infer mental process from behavioral action.

 

For example, if I want to know how people solve math problems, I obviously can't observe their MENTAL calculation, but I can ASK them to WRITE OUT the steps they take in solving the problem.

 

And I say to the skeptic, does the difference really matter in this case?

 

It might, if you believe that the aid of representing something on paper has an effect on solving the problem (which I suspect for complex problems it might).

 

In addition, it is quite possible to mis-apply scientific methods within any field of science.[/quote']

 

The questions that I was referring to were questions like "how do we form ideas", "how do we think", "what is consiousness" etc. Those tests are not directly testing what the general populace would want to know. Therefore a lot of reasoning is needed in connection with the results to get any useful information out of them.

 

One problem with behaviorism that you wouldn't know what factor to test in relation to a certain behavior without a first person motivated theory of mind. But if you have such a theory developed to a point where you always know what factors to test, you don't need behaviorism anymore because the first person theory contains the information that you REALLY are interested in.

 

Most human reasoning regarding other people's behavior consists of them manipulating their own experiences to mimic what the other person might be experiencing in their own head. (This is what we substitute for measuring someones mental experience) Empathy, anotherwords. This is an important factor of human behavior in itself. Behaviorism doesn't directly advance the ability to do this.

 

@Mokele Those things are just correlated with mental experiences correct? Of course it would be impossible to ever prove that they are one and the same. There are many theories regarding this type of thing, some of them which claim things like how the actual feel of consiousness is a fundamental property of matter. It is difficult for many psychologists to understand these theories so they often are just ignorantly tossed aside as being silly. This is a perfect example of something valuable learned from philosophy - Experienced philosophers don't angrily toss out theories thinking they understand them with a straw man argument in their mind instead.

Brainwashing? Erm' date=' no. We simply state that if we accept these axioms and those rules of logical inference then the following deductions are true, these statements are false, and the system may or may not be incomplete (if it models the natural numbers and is finitely axiomatized then it cannot be complete - Goedel).

 

In what way is that brainwashing or remotely religious? Different parts of mathematics start from different axioms and some even have different rules of logic, but we all admit before hand what they are.

 

Do not confuse the necessary eliding of details in highschool, where the subtleties are omitted and wouldn't be understood, with any attempt at dishonesty.

 

Sadly some people become fixed and think the "baby" explanations are absolutely true.

 

To be honest your post does indicate a lack of exposure to higher level mathematics, and indeed the concepts of axioms etc.

 

We are never anything but honest about axiomatic systems. Why all this antipathy and refusal to accept mathematics simply for what it is; it doesn't pretend to be anything of the things you appear to claim it is.[/quote']

 

You missed the entire point of that post...

 

If there were any truth to the statement "your post does not indicate a lack of exposure to higher level mathematics" then you would be debating one of the arguments I made directly rather than completely dodging them and making false statements to try and decieve people into believing you. This is a good example of intellectual dishonesty or attempted brainwashing.

We are not yet ready for that... We need to finish philosophy in our current state first before we progress to that type of thing.

If someone said that to me I would just calmly ask them how they came to that brilliant conclusion. Especially considering that it isn't really known completely what composes intelligence or "smartness"...

But then you are doing something dishonest. You are depending on errors in the way people think and the weaknesses of induction to cause people to have faith in your "non reality founded" belief set.

Anotherwords on day 1 of math class you tell them 1 +1 = 2. They see this is true in their every day life. Then you tell them a bunch of other stuff they can see in their life. Then you come up with all these random terms and ways of thinking that are not optimized for practicality or based on reality. But because of the way people think they are reluctant to challenge your claims... Even though the stuff you told them that was helpful could have been part of many mathematical belief sets. It also might have been MADE by someone who would follow another belief set because that person believed it was somehow better, and you may just be using it in your belief set to decieve people into thinking you are an authority so they won't doubt you. (You isn't pointing to any one person exactly)

Even as you say we are not claiming any connection to reality, you are relying on people to respect you as a mathematician, which is dependent on people's belief that what you have to say is the not only useful, but the best way of thinking about it.

If you are constantly searching for ways to optimize and revise the mathematical belief set, then you are doing the best you can and there can be nothing wrong with that. Even if every mathematician does not do so but some sort of specialize in it, and then the rest just remain open to these ideas and consider their worth then there can be nothing wrong with the situation. However if you, for selfish emotional reasons, reject all alternative ideas, and fail to investigate new ways of thinking, then what you are doing is basically brainwashing.

The issue I have with religious groups is their methods of persuasion. If youve attended any religious sermon before you probably know that the majority of their arguments are metaphors of one form or another, and they make no argument to connect the two situations being related in the metaphor. Anotherwords, they are circumventing each person's faculty of reason in order to get them to submit to their views. In this sense mathematicians are behaving in the same way.

Of course if one day people become more aware of their weaknesses and how to get around them this will become less of an issue. The only ideas which will ever gain any social signifigance are those which are perfectly logical. I am working towards this myself, but I have no way of knowing if I or anyone else will ever be succesful in this.

The cases where -1 "has" a square root is no doubt a result of an earlier lack of connection between mathematics and reality. Anotherwords for example if you try to model something in real life space where logicaly there can be no reason why the height of a location from an imaginary axis can not have a square root despite the fact it is behind wherever you put the imaginary x-axis. So if you want to keep thinking the way you have been of course you have to make up ideas like sqrt(-1) (which may in some way contradict themselves) in order for your belief set to be able to accoplish something in reality.

EDIT: When I was talking about contradictory statements, as I said before the belief set may be coherent. (Meaning if you think about it a certain way, the statements are not contradictory) However when you fail to make a complete connection to reality, but you still want to accomplish certain things in reality using your belief set, you end up having to make silly statements as I mentioned before, or at best end up having to redefine common terms to suit your needs. Also if you begin changing things in a belief set to suit any need other than consistency, then you are going to end up with contradictions even within your belief set. If the math belief set was perfectly grounded in reality, then the need to accoplish things in the real world and the need for consistency would be one and the same.

heheh Uh I think I didn't get my point across really well...

Its kind of hard to put into words but my point is that the subconsious definition of time is "difference between observable events" We have an internal clock so if we don't see anything going on outside of us (and I mean absolutely nothing changing) we can still gauge time by this. But the point is time would have no meaning if nothing was changing anyways.

Thought experiment: You stare at a clock, and nothing else is moving, nothing changing, no internal clocks either (or imagine all you have is your internal clock). The clock ticks once, and then again but the second time a longer amount of time passes before it ticks. Would you have any way to tell that the second tick took longer before it happened? How could you?

Whats the point? The subconsious definition of time is something like the difference between events. The smallest possible unit of time is the smallest amount of time in between two events. The smallest possible unit of time recognizable by a human depends on the physical nature of the mind (refresh rate? frequency?)

which logic is being redifined here? i dont understand.

 

if you take a set of objects and perform certain operations on them' date=' sometimes you will realize that the set isnt closed under that operation.

 

for example, when the greeks tried to take the square root of 2, they couldnt fathom the existence of a number not part of the rational numbers. do the so called "irrational" numbers lead to a contradiction? i would hope to think not.

 

so when you've got the idea of the square root of a negative number, the solution falls outside the original set of numbers. so just as math was plunged into irrational numbers to find solutions to square roots of "non-square" numbers, the "imaginary" number was created and the complex number system was used to find solutions to square roots of negative numbers.

 

"irrational" and "imaginary" arent meant to be taken literally.

 

they're perfectly valid number systems which allow calculations to be made.

 

just because you cant have 3[i']i[/i] apples doesnt mean that the number system is a fallacy. i mean you cant have pi apples either (no matter how hard you try).

I figure what the greeks probably couldn't fathom (and with good reason) is how the rational numbers could be dense and yet not contain all possible numerical values. That is a logical contradiction.

Of course irrational "numbers" aren't really numbers at all they are just non-mathematical infinite algorithms for creating numbers, motivated by the need to measure lengths in directions they already shrunk into infinitely small points in their primitive coordinate system (or similar needs)... Even if there was no alternative to this system, there would be no need to call them numbers since practically they are only ever treated as rationals - the result of said algorithm after following it to a certain point where the decimal of the precision you want no longer changes...

What I am arguing here is that mathematicians, to have to get around their contradictions, end up having to make statements like "a number isn't really a number its kinda like a number but has this that and the other attributes instead" and other such gibberish. In whatever warped world this eventually puts you in, it might even be said that their belief set is coherent, but they are still contradicting common terms and getting farther and farther away from being able to claim that math is in any way motivated by reality. (Which eventually would make mathematicians religious fanatics as opposed to bastions of reason)

I can't have pi apples because theres no such thing (in the real world) as a perfect circle, perhaps because theres no such thing as an infinitely small length... and therefore no such thing as a ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter...

@ Matt

IMO The numbers that actually exist are the natural numbers alone. We have no reason to believe that anything exists in infinitely small quantities. Without those, any fraction is really a discreet natural number system on a different scale. But then we might use rational numbers to avoid scales where we have like 2000000000 molecules of water for a subjectively small amount of water. IMO Irrational numbers are not numbers, but rather as described above. Once defined to a certain precision they reach the point of discreet units (and decimal places of the irrational number past that point become irrelevant), and if we knew how far they could be broken down on the original scale then they could just be considered rational in that scale.

If a logical calculus is effectively created (I know what types of problems have been run into trying this and why) then "irrational numbers" might eventually be considered objects of this system rather than numbers, and numbers will be left as simple quantities.

You realize that just using someone's surname like that could be considered rude?

 

Imaginary numbers have no relevance and do not exist?

 

Right' date=' ok, point out a number that does "exist" whateve exist means. I suspect that you believe that reals exist and that R^2 exists (the plane - but if you care to send me one of these in the post I'll be most impressed), and since the complex numbers are simply an algebraic structure on R^2 I have no idea what you're waffling on about.

 

I don't think you understand the mathematical use of the word 'contradiction', or even 'exists' for that matter.[/quote']

 

Oh thats your real name?

 

Ok so existence is a bad way of putting it. How about self contradiction? Or relevance to reality?

 

Q^2? Maybe something similar as an arena for using a spatial metaphor to model a relation between two factors, but not as a continuum but rather discreet some sort of discreet "space" depending on the smallest unit of what you are measuring. (Even if it is something like energy) Not as some kind of space like real life space...

 

Real numbers, at any point to which they are defined numerically, are equivalent to some rational value. We will never need an infinite amount of precision so they will never have any relevance as a "number". The only reason we consider them is because of the difficulty in trying to model real life space with axes...

 

Real life space is a continuum, not defined by little perpendicular axes that are infinitely small in all but 2 directions...

If you are talking about imaginary numbers other than to say that they have no relevance and do not exist then one can assume you believe they have some relevance. So it seems we can get a question from his original statement after all... And to answer this question I think it is a contradiction. I realize I misread your original post though, grime...

@ zap's post- This is exactly what I meant by mathematicians often trying to redefine logic... You can't give something a definition that contradicts the definitions of the composing ideas.

What issue' date=' Johnny? You haven't raised an issue. What on are you getting at? sqrt(-1) is just some object that may or may not exist within some field.

 

If you were to say, does sqrt(-1)=1 lead to any contradiction (in any field except one of characteristic two) then yes, because you're saying 1=-1. But just (sqrt(-1)? it is not a well formed question. an object can not lead to contradictions until you try to relate it to other things.[/quote']

 

I disagree. Having to resort to saying sqrt(-1) exists and -1=1 because you are attempting to model real life space with a primitive euclidean coordinate system, or rather just saying -1=1 IS a logical contradiction...

 

What you are trying to do is to redefine logic itself to get around the fact that you have contradicted yourself...

Thats called human nature perhaps we should instead be questioning why we think we should care about everyone else to begin with.

Psychology is for the most part an ill-concieved misapplication of the ideas that allowed people to succesfully investigate the classical sciences... The difference for the most part being the lack of ability to directly test the outcome of every question they might want to answer.

The truth is there is plenty of information contained in common experience to answer any (non-physical) question about the human mind... but you have to know what to do with it.