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Cognition

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Everything posted by Cognition

  1. I also read several books at a time, although one book will always be the most important. I might stop reading the books when I am reading an article, becuase articles I usually read one-by-one. I have been working now also on a computer-system that stores articles (comparable to Reference manager or ProCite), but not only stores important information about each article but also makes it easier to find each article based on the ideas and concepts in the article, and the system even gives suggestions to the user. It works rather well and it is a great help for me in finding articles back that I have been reading years ago, or even articles that I didn't even consciously considered to be important for a specific subject
  2. Indeed. And that is why all the "circumstantial" evidence is not as solid as it seems at first glance
  3. What I am also very curious about is the "facts" duesberg mentions in his papers. He is saying several things that seem to me to be quite "difficult" for the HIV hypothesis to explain away. He has done a lot of research to retroviruses that might cause Cancer and he says HIV is also of the type "retrovirus": it is a relatively simple virus, with one genome, and it is very strange that people that are infected with it experience a slight disturbance in their health (flu-like symptoms) and that this passes, the body makes anti-bodies and then the virus may stay dormant for years, before people develop AIDS. and even in People that are literally dying from AIDS it is extremely hard to find the virus, while you would expect abundance of the virus in those people....On the other side, it seemd to be extremely difficult to clearly find out the mechanism by which HIV cripples the Immune-system, and Robert Gallo now is convinced "cofactors" have to be part of the explanation. How far is the REAL knowlegde about HIV and AIDS at the end of 2005. Do we know now exactly the mechanism by which HIV cripples the Immune system?
  4. For me conscioussness is not the same as responsiveness, or at all repsonsiveness. A thermostat is also responsive and I don't wanna see that as even the tiniest bit of consciousness. For me conscioussness is only qualia. And that is why I said: you either have it or you don't. And the fact that you are bringing learning into the discussion is not very persuasive either: I can make a neural network that is not at all complex and that learns quite well (ofcourse not in the intricate ways humans do, but we as cognitive scientist think that we are going in the right direction). But it is not consciouss. What I am trying to say is that some other people see things as thinking or memory as prerequisites of consciousness. Or perhaps even responsiveness. And perhaps they are. I can not prove or disprove that. But You are talking about responsiveness and conscioussness in the same context and you are not making it very clear either what YOU mean by consciousness. I have spent years reading about consciousness, because it is a very interesting subject ofcourse. But I concluded for myself that the only thing that is still very problematic with it is the subjective properties of it, that are unlike any physical properties we (or at least I) have ever seen, and that is also why it is so extremely difficult to say anything about consciousness. I think that without the subjective aspect (which I call consciousness) we could still be responsive, we could still learn, remember, think (and here I might get very fierce reactions, because for everyone thinking is so closely associated with conscioussness), etc... I think there are no levels of conscioussness because I don't ever experienced it, and the only consciousness that exists is mine. Not yours, not even my mother or my children that tell me they are consciouss. I just cannot prove that.
  5. thinking is not hard at all. We don't have all the details yet, but I can easily make a neural network on my laptop that learns from several examples and then generalizes this to correctly categorize new examples. And that is thinking, although ofcourse it is not the entire story, but a pretty good start. We are only getting into real trouble when we want to explain consciousness in this way. But it seems to me that most people here assume that consciousness is repsonsible for thinking or am I wrong?
  6. Hi, I have a question and I hope that a molecular biologist or anyone who really knows can give me an answer without immediately ridiculing it. I noticed that some very prominent scientists (especially Peter Duesberg, see his website http://www.duesberg.com) including some Nobel-prize winners like Kary Mullis and Walter Gilbert, are seriously criticising the HIV-hypothesis. How true is all this? Are they just telling lies or is they a real problem here?
  7. I know the work of John Eccles a little and indeed it seems that he is a modern day (substance) dualist. The problem with such a hypothesis is that it ends just there, because we have no way of testing it, since a consciousness in such a view is obviously something "mysterious", almost spirit-like. We can, however, take a position that anyone who doesn't deny consciousness and who is not silly enough to bluntly say that there is nothing MORE than just firings of clusters of neurons and that IS consciousness will not take and that is the fact that any realistic person, in my view, should be a property-dualist. By this I mean to say that brain-processes have physical properties and consciousness can only be known from a subjective viewpoint and has different properties. So, for now I am a property-dualist
  8. I don't think there are levels of consciousness: you are either conscious or you are not. And being aware is not very helpful.....I can say that my thermostat is aware of the temperature in my room and it acts sensibly to changes in the temperature, but is it conscious? Dennett would say it is indeed a kind of consciousness, but I do not agree with that. I once asked him if he could agree with me that reverberations in the brain (or in neural networks) could be a prerequisite for C. and he agreed. I do think that dogs and monkeys may be consciousness also, although I can never prove it, but I have really no idea if it is any different (qualitatively) than ours.
  9. I would be very interested to see the final results in monkeys and Humans with such a "artificial hippocampus". For me it is very hard to believe that it will give the same results as the real hippocampus, unless every incoming connection from the rest of the brain is dealt with individually. If this is not the case (and the article gives me reason to doubt this), if will probably fail, because every single connection from (e.g.) the cortex represents a unique piece of knowledge
  10. Hi bascule, why do you think thought and memory have a very different implementation in the brain? I don't think they have: thought is fueled by the connection-strengts in the brain (in part), and so is memory. Furthermore, I agree with your view on ontologies: memory-structures can be seen as ontologies, but there may be a slight difference also. As I understand the ontologies in computer science they are more formal, while memory-structures in the brain are more loosely created from pure associations.
  11. Hi, The official number of neurons in the brain range between 10 and 100 billion neuron. Let's suppose, for argument's sake, every human being has precisely 100 billion neurons. The average number of connections for each neuron is about 10.000. So that would add up to 10^15 at most. But I heard the original comment also before (which is ofcourse bullshit), but what was actually meant, if I remember correctly (and I have a phenomenal memory, since I have 10^15 connections to use for it...), is that not only the direct connections were meant, but all possible ways from each to any other neuron in the brain. And that is a lot more than 10^15. So, I agree with RyanJ
  12. I must say that I am sorry that I didn't get involved in this thread earlier. But I would like to make a contribution consciousness and about being a dualist or not... I don't like to think as myself as a dualist, but I totally agree with Gib65 when he says that the qualia, or subjective experience is what makes consciousness a "hard" problem. This is what is the core of consciousness for me. And it should be clear that the functioning of on neuron, or 1000 neurons, or 50000 neurons firing in sync, may be the physical correlate of consciousness, it has some very different properties than the subjective qualia, and I have never seen any explanations as to how these physical properties cause the properties of the subjective qualia. So, I must admit that I am a property dualist, but that doesn't mean that I am a metaphysicist.
  13. Hi, I would like a specific topic related to Psychology, social sciences and Cognition. Cognitive Science is science, IMHO, and it is very difficult to find other topics that cover cognition. The only related topic is Neuroscience, but ofcourse cognition entails a lot more than just neuroscience. And I can imagine that not all neuroscientists would love it when their topic would be flooded with cognitive questions
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