Hi
If everything around us, including ourselves are made up of elements from periodic table, and since elements cannot think, then how do we think?

Good question. Perhaps if can answer a simpler but related question first it might shed light on your question. If everything around us, including our muscles are made up of elements from the periodic table and since elements cannot move, then how do our muscles move?

It might also help to recognize that our ability to think, and our organization of the periodic table, are both things that stem from whatever it is that is really going on. So we should not expect an understanding of the periodic table to necessarily generate an understanding of thinking-- they are both just manifestations of our efforts to apply science to answer questions. There may be nothing at all about the periodic table that is directly relevant to thought, or there may be a close connection. Connections are discovered, not built in.

I think thats something do do with the "Soul".

Simple - through chemical reactions, the same way everything that's alive either grows, runs, thinks, dies, or decays.

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If I set the budget, we'd have Ares and more. Unfortunately, I don't set the budget, and Ares is just too expensive and too far out for us to accomplish our goals within the budget we were given.

If we halt the ISS, all versions of Ares, and transport Orion and Altair aboard DIRECTv3's Jupiter family of Shuttle-Derived Launch Vehicles, we just might make it back to the Moon by 2020.

The human brain consists of neurons. They are chemical cells that are capable of sending electrical impulses to each other. They are like transistors except they have more than one dimension.
Memory is not stored in the cells, but the paths between the cells. The more a path is used the thicker it grows.
An input to the brain will take the thicker paths first; which is why when we sense something, it stimulates memory of that sight, smell, etc.
When we react to inputs, the brain compares good reactions to bad reactions from previous memory.
In order to improve there is a comparison process:
If A produces B and C produces D then 'what if' A was forced to produce D?
What would be the result?
This 'what if' process can be considered as 'reason'.
Being able to 'calculate' a result without actually performing it.
This calculation may be considered 'creative thought'.
The action and possible outcomes are 'created' in the brain.

I may be wrong on some of this, so other members can feel free to correct/edit/cut/paste with or without quotes or permission.

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'Sir........, I don't like these numbers.'
'Then hire somebody that can change them!'
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Human thought does appear to involve chemistry, but I'm wondering about "thought" in general. Perhaps thought might use chemistry the way an artist can use a paintbrush-- and could just as easily use a crayon. In that sense, there may be nothing at all about the periodic table that is inherently a required aspect of thought.

They're called emergent properties. When the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

As it's been pointed out, there are examples EVERYWHERE. In fact, pretty much every single thing you interact with is like that. Inhale chloride gas, and it kills you. Try to eat sodium metal, and you'll explode. However, you could not survive without sodium chloride (aka NaCl, aka table salt).

Same with our brain. Thoughts are patterns of neural activity, and they are triggered by other neural activity, which in turn is triggered by other stimuli (such as light from your eyes, or pressure/heat/cold from your skin, etc)

Have you ever tried to have a completely random thought? A TRULY random thought. You'll find that it is impossible. You can ALWAYS find something that triggered a specific thought. For example, you might be trying to have a random thought right now. Of course, you're only trying because you read what I just typed.

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"As long as the prerequisite for that shining paradise is ignorance, bigotry and hate, I say the hell with it." Henry Drummond, inherit the wind.

I'm usually the only person who can understand where the connection comes in. Does that count?

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Gillian

"Now everyone was giving her that kind of look UFOlogists get when they suddenly say, 'Hey, if you shade your eyes you can see it is just a flock of geese after all.'"

"You can't erase icing."

"I can't believe it doesn't work! I found it on the internet, man!"

Those are the best kinds. And I bet I can match you "disconnected thought" for "disconnected thought".

Sometimes I find myself thinking about something that is completely... weird. In looking back to see what triggered it, I run across some very amazing threads.

It's actually kinda fun.

Oh, "When the whole is greater than the sum of its parts" is synergy, every control systems engineer's goal.

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Never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by ignorance or stupidity.
Isaac Asimov

Can the whole ever exceed the sum of the parts, or did some of the parts go unnoticed, or was the act of summing ill defined?

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For those inclined to oppose human meddling with the structure of the universe or the composition and configuration of objects and groups of objects within the universe, consider:
Whether there is a limit to the magnitude of a modulation of chaos below which order remains invariant? Or, is order but a fiction invented by perspectives applied over finite, however large, time intervals?

To me, the "emergent" part means the whole exceeds the sum of its parts because a new property emerges that could not be predicted ahead of time from the parts (or it is a property that the original parts didn't have). So mindless and immobile chemicals can combine to form conscious, mobile organisms.

Obviously there is a link if you look backwards and then you can trace the causality forwards again to show how it works. But there isn't a tiny man lurking in every atom just waiting to pop out when combined with enough other atoms.

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Spike
:)

And note this gets into all kinds of interesting philosophical questions about the applicability of the scientific method to the study of intelligence. It is certainly possible that this backwards-forwards approach you describe will succeed in teaching us many things about how our own particular intelligence works in practice, but it might or might not be able to penetrate to the heart of what intelligence actually is in principle. The problem is a lot like what happens if you pass a sentence through an automatic translator, and then try to invert the result by passing it back again. Many times, you don't get what you started with. If the scientific method suffers from that problem here, then the backwards-forwards approach will lose the essence of what happened. I think it is a particularly interesting conjecture that there could be key steps in the process that map in a many-to-one way when subjected to objective scientific observation, as if that's true, science will never be able to pass through that screen to see how intelligence really works. Note this would be tantamount to nature encrypting the information before science gets to it-- without the encryption key, science cannot find the unique inversion of the message that can decipher its meaning.

Well, the whole IS the sum of its parts, so in that sense it's not greater than the sum of its parts. Obviously though, this isn't what this is referring to. It's referring to the functions and properties of the whole, not the components of it.

Taking this into account, I don't think you can lose the essence of what happened by studying the simpler parts. You might not have what you are trying to study anymore, but by looking at how the simpler parts work, and by putting them together you can figure out what the whole is doing.

I'm not sure I'm making much sense, so I'll also reply from another angle...

You CAN study the whole in science. One can study something in the level of a whole organism (without dissecting them) by studying its behavior, noting its morphology, etc. You might say that by doing that you are only studying a part of it, but it's a part of the whole whole, so there is no emergent properties from adding up those parts. grr. does that make sense?

well. Maybe I just don't get it. I think you CAN study the whole, without losing its essence, by studying the parts and how they all work. you get a "greater" sum, but you can observe that and then fit what you know about the parts to see how the whole works and what it is.

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"As long as the prerequisite for that shining paradise is ignorance, bigotry and hate, I say the hell with it." Henry Drummond, inherit the wind.

Actually, the situation is more complicated than this. For example, are Shakespeare's plays the sum of the words that go into them? What if the words are in the wrong order, or are translated into a language you personally don't understand? So along with the parts of the plays, to have meaning we need many higher-order concepts like the appropriate order of the parts, and the appropriate context such that the reader can understand. Furthermore, one can ask, how much of the greatness of Shakespeare's plays are provided by us, the reader, rather than purely by the play itself? Does a 5-year old think the plays are as great as a 50-year old might? Would a 50 year-old who has been raised by wolves think they were great? One way that the whole can be more than the sum of the parts is if the very concept of "parts" leaves out a great deal that is important when considering "the whole".

Right, but even more, the whole might not be meaningfully characterized purely by its components. It might itself be an idea, or a process, whose components simply don't encapsulate its importance.
Perfect sense-- especially if you are suggesting that the entire concept of an "emergent" property is limited by an implicit assumption that what it is emerging from is encapsulated in its parts. It might rather be truer that the entire concept of "parts" is not the crucial concept at all, like the letters that are parts of words. For example, atoms may be viewed as "parts" of physical reality, but of course they are not-- for they are concepts of the human mind. And shall we count the laws of physics themselves as additional "parts" of physical reality, or do they have some other importance that is not a "part" of the whole? And what do we do with the fact that the laws are also human conceptualizations, applicable in approximate and idealized situations only? We see many systems that cannot be deconstructed into parts except as a useful exercise in increasing our understanding of those systems. We are playing the parts game, it's called reductionism, but we should not be surprised that "the whole is not the sum of its parts". If I have a chess set, and know the rules of how to move the pieces, I am a chess player-- but not necessarily a very good one.

You can surely do that, and expect it to reap great rewards. I think the larger issue is more about the question of whether or not that approach can really give you everything you might want to know, rather than just something you might want to know.

Another way of looking at it is that the functions required to describe thought are uncomputable, but we're limited by being Turing machines. Or something analogous that.

Still, I'm not so pessimistic as that. We have a pretty good grasp of nature. We can solve the required physical models pretty exactly (though it might take forever to solve the actual equations). Plenty of work has been done and is being done on emergent behaviour. Even if the many-to-one mapping you describe exists, careful science can still come up with some pretty useful generalizations and laws.

Plus, we have machines that learn! And play chess! Those are investigations into the nature of intelligence, and we are already getting results.

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"It's turtles all the way down."

Yes, that does seem like the kind of thing I'm wondering about, as a possibility anyway.
I completely agree, and I think it is a deep puzzle as to why the scientific approach is so useful. Personally, I think that science has things it works great on, and things that it doesn't work well on at all, but the latter we hardly notice because we are so preconditioned to ask the kinds of questions science can answer. Thus the equation you often see is "science works so well because it has access to all truth", rather than the more likely accurate "science works so well because we are very selective about what we try to know."
No doubt-- inroads are being made, my question is, at what point will we say "now we understand intelligence", or will there always be elements of intelligence that intelligence itself has no access to-- the source code that is behind our own intelligence and might prove encrypted or incomputable when addressed by the scientific method. The question is relevant in terms of our attitudes toward alternative means of access to this type of wisdom.

The problem I see with that is that words are symbols for ideas. They're not actually making up anything. The whole meaning happens in the brain. Shakespear's plays are not an emergent property of the words, they're an emergent property of the brain.

ok. let's take an idea as an example. I'm assuming you would agree that an idea is a pattern of neural activity right? Well, if you know where the components are, what they are doing, how they react, and other things, you can know the whole and you CAN know the importance, because you know what triggered it and what it will trigger, therefore you know its importance.

When one looks at the components of something in order to understand the whole, one doesn't put it in a blender and then say it is made up of quarks and electrons. You have to know the position of the components, how they interact, and a lot of other things in order to see the whole. To use the Shakespeare analogy, you have to know the language, the history, etc.

What else might you want to know?

You lost me with your other paragraph.

What other questions do you have in mind?

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"As long as the prerequisite for that shining paradise is ignorance, bigotry and hate, I say the hell with it." Henry Drummond, inherit the wind.

I agree, and yet, we expect that what emerges has some level of similarity from person to person, or literary criticism would be futile (some argue it already is, but that seems extreme). That emergent similarity is clearly both because our brains are similar, and because it's the same play-- there is something emergent in a great play, and part of it is in the play itself, and part of it is in the brain that considers the play. So we see that it is not the parts of the whole that we must understand, it is the parts of the emergence itself that really matter. But what if an emergent property is itself more than the sum of its parts? And so on. Thus I think the concept of "emergence" from the physical parts is insufficiently complex, because of the problem of identifying what is meant by a "part".
Actually, I wouldn't-- I would say that a pattern of neural activity is the projection of an idea onto what we know about the physical brain. What an idea really is is quite a bit more than that, it is perhaps the most sublime thing that humanity is capable of, and is hardly completely described by a pattern of neural activity. Ah, but that's just it-- this is not the whole of the idea. The "whole" of the idea requires so much more-- for example, it requires context. This is a little like saying, a word is just a collection of letters, right? Well, yes and no...
Yes, now you have it-- the wholeness involves context, among other things. But context involves what is outside the whole, so now we see that the whole is not only more than the sum of its parts, it is more than the whole! Or put differently, there is ever only one whole, and any effort to break it down into sub-wholes, and contributing parts of sub-wholes, etc., will always lose some part of it. All one can hope is that what is lost is not too important, as is often true in science, but in other situations, it is less successful.
Ah, so many. Why am I here? Does my life have meaning to anything beyond other lives it affects? If I were the only living thing in the universe, and I lived and died, would it matter more than a rock falling off a ledge? If we can form a question, and have no idea at all how to answer it, is the fault with the question, or the available modes of answering? That's just the tip of the iceberg, but notice how we avoid questions like that-- a lifetime of experience, and lifetimes of genetic accumulation, have conditioned us to view those questions as fruitless to pursue. Yet, they are still there.

Ah! Ok. I agree. You can never understand the whole whole without understanding ALL of its parts, which is practically impossible. You'd have to know where every single quark, neutrino, photon, electron, and other stuff is in the universe.

However... while you might not be able to understand specific wholes, you can understand the general whole. What you are saying only applies to specific wholes- say, the mind of a single person. However, I think you CAN get a very good understanding of the general whole, say, the "human mind" (whatever that means, lol).

I still don't like that analogy. As you said, it's the same play. You get similarities from person to person because they are receiving the same stimulus... the whole "emerging" of the properties happens in the brain.

If you mean that all copies of the plays have some sort of emergent property, well... I think that the parts of a whole have to be interacting with each other in order to make new properties emerge.

I think the problem is in the questions, not the available modes of answering. That question, for example, can be answered by science... you are here to pass on your genes. That's the whole purpose of your genes, they are all trying to affect you in such a way that leads to more copies of that particular gene. If you don't like the answer science provides then tough, but science does provide an answer.

That puts a value judgment on your life vs the act of a rock falling off a ledge. Values are a human invention, so it's a nonsense question.

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"As long as the prerequisite for that shining paradise is ignorance, bigotry and hate, I say the hell with it." Henry Drummond, inherit the wind.

Absolutely brilliant question. Haven't the slightest clue to an answer for this but I have got to admire the question. Perhaps all answers can be related to questions, perhaps not all questions have answers to them and some of the answers are secret.

Before you contemplate the rock fall in the afterlife maybe the search for the undiscovered answer will lead to a larger number of questions but that's what adds such spice to our lives while we live them.

Also brilliant I don't feel any desire to cut or indeed try to change this.
Einstein said something to the effect that our predjudices are locked in by the time we reach 18.

What if it was just as you said here we used just the thickest connections. In effect we become human machines. Unless by some incredible effort we escape our preset parameters we set for ourselves we are doomed to a logical existence that we finished programming for ourselves as teenagers.

I am 46 and aware of the urgent spreading mid-life crisis of my body but we seldom look at our minds just remain happy that they function.

What if the real mid-life crisis is more than our bodies calcifying but the connection that our own brain has to reality has simply grown too thick?

We would very easily be surplanted by an artificial intelligence that as part of it most basic parameters was to keep looking for answers out of its pre-programmed initial logic. What sort of circuitry do humans require to revitalise the brain or explore new options and as such find greater meaning in life?

Cheers Mike

In regards to the Shakespeare plays and intelligence. By taking an entirely different perspective, positive v. negative, (stating different premises) we can arrive at different conclusions. The conclusions them become premises, and on it goes.

The quality of these connections, premise to conclusions, roughly fall in two categories, rational (serious) or silly (foolish), depending on what your intent is. Nonetheless, how close these connections are from premise to conclusion we call “intelligences”, to lack of intelligence.

Serious thinking—Santa has a beard, so Santa does not shave.

Silly thinking----Santa has a beard, so love bugs can live cozy warm.

Santa does not need to exist; neither do the characters in Shakespeare have to exist for formal logic to work.

Science draws the line –if there is no evidence for Santa, then the entire functions of logic are not worth the time to mess with regarding Santa, and the thinking is serious.

But none of this is how thoughts are formed. Are we asking what are the chemical mechanics of desire and motivations in the formulation of thoughts or are we asking what is the definition of “I”.

We understand in part how a mussel in the arm works at our command, but that does not make us stronger just by knowing. Moreover, knowing the chemical functions of the brain does not necessarily make us more intelligent, more rational, nor to cause “knowledge” to magically appear.

The definition of “I” has been solved long ago by the old Greeks as “separate from all things with the power to enforce that separateness.” We are not our thoughts, not the tree outside, not our hands, and not the combinations of chemicals of the brain. However, this does not say what we are. Perhaps in this “void” is the basis of our curiosity, the drive, and the motivations to constantly seek knowledge beyond ourselves, just so we can say again--- that is not I. As soon as we say that is “I”, existence by definition would stop to that degree, as there would not be an individual independent (separate) from all things.

It certainly feeds our self-concept to say “the whole is greater than the parts”, (I love that word “great” as self-defining) but there is no indication of this, but the contrary could be true “the whole is less than all the parts”, as we pack plenty of baggage being objective to a purpose. So I prefer just being separate from all things at this point. I can fan my own ego very well without being a “god”.

As usual, these philosophical ramblings do not go anywhere; they just peter out in silliness, not hardly worth my time to write out. Yes, I can be replaced by a computer at some time, but that computer is not "I", I'm not a computer.



Don

I guess what I mean is, the stimulus is the same, and the brains are similar, so we are not surprised that what emerges is similar. But the question is, did the "emergence" happen because of the action of the brain on the play, or because of the action of the play on the brain? It's not just word games, it is necessary to answer this when we analyze "the whole" in terms of "the sum of the parts". Most people, when analyzing a play, will look at the parts of the play, rather than the parts of the brain. Yet we've agreed that the play without the brain is just a bunch of letters. My point is that here "the whole" includes both the play and the brain, neither one alone can tell us what we want to know here. Furthermore, we can't even get what we want just from the play and the brain, because there is a lifetime of experience that has conditioned that brain in ways we could never possibly understand by looking at the brain, we'd have to look at the lifetime. So now we have the play, the brain, and the lifetime, and they are all parts of "the whole" we are analyzing. So this is what I mean-- you can't analyze the whole as an emergent result of its parts without recognizing that to analyze the whole, we must see it as a part of something else! The whole is not the sum of its parts, because the "whole" that we are analyzing is a part.
Well, that's not saying much, really-- we can use any means we like to answer any question, what we really want is the true answer. But I agree that there probably is no such thing-- there is only the answer you get when you apply a particular approach to finding an answer. That's the point I've made over and over in the "science vs. religion" thread, and boy I'll tell you there are some people who just can't hear that. If you don't believe me, check out that thread.


Not just values, but questions themselves are human inventions, as words are human inventions. How do you tell when a question is nonsense? Is it not made of words that have meaning, like other questions? It sounds like you are defining a question as "nonsense" when there is no way to answer it, but again, that might be the problem of the techniques used to find an answer, not a problem with the question. It is even possible that some questions are more important than their answers.

Having not looked at the S v R thread (I'll look later, I'm kind of supposed to be studying for exams and all... and it's a pretty huge thread. I've been TRYING to stay out of it lol), I must say that yeah you can apply different approaches to the problem but history has shown that science is the only one we should be bothering with.

Well... that's what logic is for... it's not just OUR inability to answer such things, but that it's impossible to do so because you need something else. What exactly do you mean by would it "matter"? "matter" to what? The problem is in the question.

...But anyway I think I'm just going to quit the debate. I think we're getting into really murky ground where words are just representing vague, abstract ideas, without real meaning behind them.

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"As long as the prerequisite for that shining paradise is ignorance, bigotry and hate, I say the hell with it." Henry Drummond, inherit the wind.

This answer to "why am I here" may be a valid answer within a scientific framework, but it does not even remotely provide an answer outside of this domain. But you seem to cope with this by saying..

I think that when you do have time, it would be worth your while reading the Science v Religion thread. An exposure to debate that challenges the assumption of science as an all embracing authority as opposed to a shared platform of differing truths, each with their own domain of validity, may give you pause for thought.

Goodness, history "shows" no such thing at all! That is a perfectly nonscientific claim, which is obviously based on a value judgement not on science. (You see, I'll pull you into that thread over here!) But to stay on the topic of understanding thought, one can certainly choose to apply the approach of science, and see what you get. When you do that, you find that, as I've said, "the whole" is not only more than "its parts", it is itself so much a part of something else that it cannot be understood as a whole without also understanding it as a part. Science has trouble with that, it is better at reductionism, so we instead isolate the whole and look at the action of its parts. In so doing, there is much we learn, but there is much we cannot learn. The only way to know is to see what you get, but it is simply nonsense to claim that history has shown that no other way has value.


Logic only works inside a formal system, it doesn't tell you how to translate what you want to know into that formal system. The translation is manual and imperfect, it is not part of logic, and logic "tells" us nothing about how to do it. A chosen approach, informed by experience, tells us that, subjectively.
Indeed, that is just what I'm saying.
Ah, but when words get to that point, it means you are really starting to be their masters, not their slaves! That's exactly where the "real meaning" lives, at the point where real insight becomes possible, even though it can be frustrating to be out there on "the edge" of reason. We don't like to see that there is an edge!

What else has increased our knowledge of the universe more than science? Or given us more technology than science?

I thought you were arguing that the problem was with the method of getting the answer, not the question?

Well, I'd love to but I'm not making any promises. I currently have 15 pages in my immediate-to-do favorites list, and a bunch more in my regular to-do list. I also have a bunch of books to read, study for exams, etc.

I see it the other way around. You're the slave when you confuse reality with the symbols used to represent it.

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"As long as the prerequisite for that shining paradise is ignorance, bigotry and hate, I say the hell with it." Henry Drummond, inherit the wind.

Using scientific logic on your claim, it is not necessary for me to argue that anything has contributed more than science, only that it has contributed enough to not be a "waste of time". Indeed, deciding on a basis to even choose what constitutes a "larger" contibution would be virtually impossible, I could simply argue that art was the world's greatest invention by far, by virtue of how it liberates human creativity, and how could you refute it in an absolute way?

The question I was referring to is "matter to what?" The "problem" I meant was not a bad problem, like having cancer, but a good problem, like solving a puzzle. The problem to solve is, matter to what? That is the key question, so that's where the problem centers.
But we are communicating with symbols, not with reality. Hence we must first understand what our symbols mean, before we can say anything at all about reality. I fear the "slavery" you refer to here is simply the human condition-- we start out the slaves of our symbols, for they are all we have to try and communicate with. We only become masters when we recognize that the issue is not how to best apply our preconceived definitions of what our words already mean, but rather, how best to choose what it is that we need our words to mean. This is true mastery of language-- mathematicians and physicists, for example, do it all the time.

I believe this is an excellent thread, and a great topic. I see lots of intelligent discussions, with meaningful questions and answers.

I see science as a powerful tool, but not the only tool in the toolbox. Mastery of the language of mathematics and physics can help understand how reality works, but does not necessarily grant understanding of why. We may never truly know why we are here, but for me, part of the journey of life is understanding more about it. I am not a spiritualistic person, and as such I believe there is a reason for everything.

As for how we think, I think we are getting closer to that answer. It is not just a function of how many parts are in the system, but also how they are interconnected with each other. One day we may uncover the secret of thought, and apply that to machines in such a way that they are truly intelligent.

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"4th Law of Modern Thermodynamics: Where Mihoshi is, Chaos Reigns." ~W. Hakubi
"Gun control is hitting your target; Recycling is reloading your brass." ~ Lex of Dirty Work.

I suspect the first problem is the meaning of the word "Religion" is not the same.