dream-wake

another component of this might have something to do with the difference between being asleep and being awake. Now (p. 136) they're talking about how the brain is active during sleep in similar patterns to when awake (during REM sleep anyway) but that it functions without outside inputs, just with inputs from itself. one thing that could be a problem in terms of objectivity would be if something like consistency with observations was a criterion, then you'd have to make sure somehow that the observations were coming from outside and not from yourself. but perhaps there is some other way of telling whether you're alsleep or not. I always think back to Hinton's Sleep-Wake algorithm, and how it worked by doing backpropagation from outside-inouts durint the Wake phase, and then did backpropagation from its own projections during the Sleep phase. And there are reasons why people have to sleep and dream to maintain their sanity. Whatever these reasons are, there must be some process that we undergo during dreaming, that may or may not have something to do with Hinton's algorithm, and so it might be possible to tell the difference between brains that have slept too little, brains that have slept enough, and brains that have not slept enough. So maybe whatever this criterion would be for distinguishing them could also be some kind of criterion of objectivity. too little dreaming would likely mean not being internally consistent. too much dreaming would likely mean not being connected with reality. just a thought.

Consciousness, cont.

now on p. 127 there's something more to do with objectivity...
they're talking about how to apply information theory to brains, and how this presents 2 problems: that there's no "neural code", and that there's no external intelligent observer, or at least not within the system itself. so they decide to talk about differences that make a difference to the brain itself.
- A simple approach is to consider the system as its own "observer."

I had been thinking that a possible comp paper topic might be something like "Practical Notions of Objectivity" and maybe this is all coming together a little bit more. I'd like to go further into some of the things I was saying in my paper for Laura's class, both the bits about the types of objectivity, and about strategies for getting objective results. maybe also the bits about how this applies to AI, but mostly the more theoretical part, about objectivity in evaluations of intelligence. This could be made a bit more general, and so apply more widely than just to AI, so that it could also have to do with neuroscience / philosophy of mind. an example there would be these confusing questions about consciousness and how objectivity / subjectivity is also a blocking point there. I'm still confused, obviously, but maybe this is the beginning of some kind of direction.

I'm still undecided whether it woulld be better to take the Cognitive Neuroscience course I'm signed up for, or the Metaphysics and Epistemology Core course in the Philosophy Dept. I think both are important things to have as foundations, but I don't know what should come first. I'm leaning towards M & E, because I feel less sure of myself in that area, and for the philosophy comp, being good at that angle might be more important. So I should maybe do the CNBC courses a little later, or only where I can fit them in without fucking up anything else. The main consideration against that is that I feel guilty about hot being as involved in the CNBC as perhaps I should be. I guess it doesn't matter that much, as long as I take all the courses eventually. The only possible one for next semester is the computational course, but I wanted to take that after doing the rest of them so that I'd know enough to make an informed choice about what sort of project to do for that course, since I have this idea of doing a good project that might be publishable. So I guess I could just not do a CNBC course this year.

anyway, I think I'm going to try to use this blog as a place to take some notes and record some thoughts about things that might end up in my comp paper.

Consciousness: How Matter Becomes Imagination

by Gerald M. Edelman and Giulio Tononi
Penguin Books: 2000

some notes on this book. The chapter i'm in is about the unity of conscious experience. for one thing, i'm a bit sceptical about how they can claim that one of the primary characteristics of consciousness is that it's unified and can contain only one thought or decision, while at the same time talk about things like split brain patients, who can be conscious of 2 things at once, or make 2 decisions at the same time. maybe each of those consciousnesses is unified, but it's not really clear whether it's impossible for others to be able to do similar things. maybe it just takes practice. not sure if this matters.

second, from the cases where after strokes people's consciousness re-unifies itself and the person becomes unaware that anything is missing, this makes it very clear how we could have gaping holes in our normal perceptions of reality and not even be able to conceive of the fact that this is so, so strong is the impression that our field of view is complete. ... consequences for epistemology and objectivity...