goldglow

I would have to say there is no experience free of sensory input. As i see it, the only physical organ we have to assimilate our experiences is the brain ,which depends on the senses to receive and assimilate information. The experience is then stored in the brain as knowledge. Again, i would say that dreaming is not a free consciousness , in the sense of a separate consciousness, as dreaming is a part of the whole mechanism of consciousness, and is based on waking experiences. ( DrmDoc in the Medical Science - Anatomy , Physiology and Neuroscience forums is more of an expert than me in this. ) As far as i am aware , there is no part of " me ",( my consciousness), separate from the rest. It is a whole movement, including dreaming. Also, i think there is a difference between the mind and the brain, but this is obviously debatable. Yes- i think i said that in my post : " ...consciousness comes after, not before, birth. " I'm not an expert on amnesia, but i would say that the person must have had something to forget before that thing was forgotten,( I hope that isn't just semantics ), so there must have been some awareness/ consciousness prior to the event that caused the amnesia, so, with regard to amnesia, i agree with your last sentence. I don't know if amnesia reduces the older anmesiac to the state of an infant - motor skills and language seem to be retained. I would be interested to know how a sudden and permanent loss of memory would affect consciousness.

It helps a great deal, and definitely strikes a chord. Thank you. I'll be fascinated to see what happens if i ever go back to that library!

Yes. Thanks. I wouldn't dream of asking for dream-interpretation, ( sorry for that feeble joke! ) , but i am interested in something i can't explain for myself: i very often dreamed of being in a brightly lit library with a staircase leading to other floors above, but, the last time i had this dream, the library was in darkness and the stairway was blocked. Without trying to interpret anything , what could have actually taken place in the unconscious, if that's the case, to change the old dream, when i can think of nothing in my daily life, ( same old same old ), that could have caused this alteration in the " package " received in the dream, nor point to any great revelation from remembering the dream?

Had to look-up " eidetic, " as in " eidetic memory. " As i now know, this explains why Mozart, for example, was able to have complete recall of complex orchestral and choral music after only one hearing, and how Kim Peek, ( the person who was the real-life inspiration for the " Rain Man " movie ) was able to perform astonishing feats of memory despite - or perhaps because of - having been born with FG Syndrome. Thanks. Definition of " eidetic ": "......marked by or involving extraordinarily accurate and vivid recall, especially of visual images. " ( Merriam-Webster dictionary. )

Thanks, You mentioned earlier the 2 measurable states of the brain: conscious and unconscious, with the subconcious acting as a two-way path between the 2 states, if i have understood correctly. I'd like to ask: do you regard the unconcious as a personal " possession ", or is it the Collective Unconscious that C.G. Jung spoke of - a sort of cloud memory - identical to Rupert Sheldrake's " Morphic Resonance ", or even what ancient mystics called the " Akashic Record "?

Watched the video and found it quite interesting, but Shakespeare put it better in MacBeth, Act 2, Scene 2: ".... Sleep, that knits up the ravell'd sleave of care, The death of each day's life, sore labours bath, Balm of hurt minds,great nature's second course, Chief nourisher in life's feast. " Could we say that the brain " defragments " during sleep?

Just to go off on a slight tangent,a 13th century European monarch,Frederick the Second ( a fascinating character ) had a passion for languages ( he spoke 6 ) and wanted to discover what was the first language ever spoken - the " natural language of Adam and Eve " - so he isolated several new-born babies and forbade anyone to ever speak to them. ( This was one of his less bizarre experiments! ). Needless to say, the poor children never spoke any language apart from baby noises. I personally don't know anyone who has congenital deafness, but I imagine they must find themselves in a similar situation to those children in their formative years. In my heart of hearts,I truly hope that no one finds this crass or insensitive, but if anyone following this thread has this degree of hearing-impairment, I would be really interested to know if a lack of a learned language in infancy had an affect on their early thinking-processes. For myself,I can't think of anything without thinking of the word first.

Yes. Amazing.

Thanks, SJ; that sounds right ( no pun intended! ), and, yes, Evelyn Glennie is an amazing musician: i once saw her perform a long medley of different types of music at different tempos, on several separate percussion instruments, moving from one to the other in quick succession, backed by a full orchestra , without missing a single beat- and it was the orchestra that changed tempo as she moved between instruments.

Thanks again, VB.

Fascinating! Thanks,VB, much appreciated. This next question may seem silly,but how do we hear internal body noises like a tummy rumbling or humming to oneself, when, I assume,there is no atmospheric disturbance to stimulate the eardrums?

Great answer. Thanks.

I am puzzled as to how the cochlea can simultaneously differentiate between sounds of different frequencies and pressures. For example, if i sit listening to a string quartet, with all the instruments equidistant from me, ( some playing louder than others ), my eardrums react to the strings vibrations and deliver them, ultimately, to the cochlea, which transforms these vibrations in air into vibrations in fluid. How, then, can the same, single fluid cope with so many different wavelengths of sound and pressure at the same time? P.S. Could i ask the same question about the eardrums too?

I see! Thanks,Swansont. That explains a lot to me.

Thanks,both.

Identical atomic clocks were used in an experiment to test the theory that,for moving bodies,time slows down. The clocks used the oscillations of caesium atoms to achieve results as accurately as possible, and found that the theory was correct. Does this mean that the caesium oscillations slowed down in the moving clock or is it more complex than that?

I don't think you can say this is a different time measurement for ice-cubes and plastic ,Randolpin: yes, plastic may last longer than ice-cubes, but a second for the plastic is a second for the ice-cubes too. The plastic just exists for more seconds than the ice-cubes.

Thanks,K. I can't argue with any of that, but "..... not by bread alone....", and all that, has importance too, i think, ( for human beings anyway), now that we are more than just hunter/gatherers. Don't think i can add any more to this thread. Thanks for putting up with me. I'll watch from the sidelines from now on.

.........to sentient thought , other than the operation of some sort of " hardware and software "in brains and computers.( Forgive my paraphrasing ).I think i see what you mean: thought is a mechanical activity of the brain ( Germans think in German, Spaniards think in Spanish etc. ) - as the heart beats and the lungs breathe, so the brain thinks. It's a vital tool for survival. Further, thought arises from it's database of memory, ( it's programming ,if you like ), in response to some demand for reply: the database being all the knowledge garnered throughout life and stored in the brain-cells as memory. The database ,then, is the only source for thought: in other words there is no thinker, only thought. The thinker is the thought, constrained by the parameters of the memory/database. If this is correct, then The Strong AI theory is also correct and thought is thought is thought. So in reference to S.A.I. Theory, as you said: " case closed." What i was stumbling towards (the " more ") was that, in the case of we humans, even though the brain can never be free of thought, it can be free from the hegemony of thought through the capacity of insight, which is something apart from thought, but perhaps that's another topic by itself. In light of this, could any programmed intelligence possibly go beyond it's algorithms without this insight which is proscribed by the S.A.I Theory? If it did,would/could a computer, ( " Eugene Goostman" perhaps! ), know it had passed the Turing Test?

I think we really do have free will, because we are not confined to action arising from instinct alone: using thought, we can decide what to do. Thought has replaced instinct in human beings so we are free to do as we wish, without waiting for any animal impetus or stimulus.We still have instincts, of course, which in certain circumstances can take over and act faster than thought, but usually only under circumstances of extreme danger when there is no time to think. I have had personal experience of this when i was attacked by a cow. ( Don't laugh too much - i was only 9! ).

Would that not require some form of biosynthesis which machines cannot undergo? Also, though i might be wrong, i don't think intelligence and knowledge are the same thing, so even though a computer had all the knowledge available, as in the story above, it would still not have intelligence.It would be possible, of course, for unscrupulous developers to programme a machine to run amok, ( though that would not be under the machine's own volition ) , and there is always the threat from malicious hackers so i do respect the concerns of others much more qualified than me in these matters.

I once read a short sci-fi story: in the far distant future, all intelligent life-forms in the Universe had put their combined knowledge into a colossal super-computer. The first question was: " is there a God ? " " Yes, " replied the computer, " now there is." I don't think there is any danger of technology becoming more intelligent than human beings ; yes, computers can do many things far quicker than we can, but the limits of our knowledge will always be the limit of their knowledge, so they can never take over the world and become Gods. We can always pull the plug out.

Eise has asked: " Why do we have awareness and a stone hasn't " ? Is it because we have the human brain and the stone hasn't ? A stone cannot know what a stone is, no more than fire can know what fire is, but someone or something has to know, and it is only through the human brain that the Universe can consciously know itself. This is why the Universe, over aeons, has evolved the human brain - it isn't my brain, or your brain, or his brain, or her brain, it is the human brain that is far, far older than any of us. The consciousness of the brain is the only consciousness of the Universe and is one movement, and without the human brain, the Universe is without Self- awareness. This doesn't make us gods- we are the horse, not the rider. Sorry to come on seeming so heavy; we can play with this and make it fun. Tell me i'm talking through my bottom.

To return to the very beginning, if i may, i think the Weak AI Theorem is correct ,as the Strong AI Theorem is valid, too. Thought is a mechanical activity of the brain, based on memory, bused by synapses and neurotransmitters, so the brain is the hardware, the memory is the software and the synapses are the circuitry. Seeing that thought is matter, machines are definitely able to be given a capacity for mimicing thought. The human brain, however, has a silent consciousness beyond thought , call it real intelligence, which can act upon thought, and which could never be replicated in a machine/computer, however sophisticatedly engineered. When you look at your cat, K, and she looks at you, it is the Universe looking at Itself in silence: machines, however artificially intelligent, could never go beyond the limitations of thought.

Thanks, they do. Much appreciated.