Jun 26, 2012 -- 7:03AM, Faustus5 wrote:

Jun 25, 2012 -- 6:31PM, Beingofone wrote:

Faust:

This is quite the challenge. I cannot seem to find a single bit or scrap of 'data' to refute.

Then why did you post a quote about inadequate data when you don't know shit about anything under discussion?

Er uh - because its inadequate. In fact, there is no evidence - none, nada, zero, doughnut etc.

Jun 25, 2012 -- 6:31PM, Beingofone wrote:

Very typical when dealing with what causes the thinker to think and make choices by the blind believers in rigid materialism.

Very typical when dealing with people who actually know nothing about science but pretend to.

Jun 25, 2012 -- 6:31PM, Beingofone wrote:

If you would point out a single bit of data that tells us where the thinker is, I will be most excited to address the mysterious piece of missing evidence.

Why don't you get a basic education on the subject matter so that if someone gave you the data that cognitive neuroscience uses, you might actually have a chance of understanding what it means? I don't cast pearls before swine.

You cannot provide any evidence and you want me to try to refute non existing data.

Then call names when I cannot find any evidence and you cannot seem to point to any.

Do you realize you are not making a lick of sense at all? Probably not; as is my experience with fundamentalist types.

Jun 26, 2012 -- 10:16PM, Beingofone wrote:

r uh - because its inadequate. In fact, there is no evidence - none, nada, zero, doughnut etc.

Spoken like a true know-nothing who hasn't studied the subject in any degree whatsoever.

Jun 25, 2012 -- 6:31PM, Beingofone wrote:

If you would point out a single bit of data that tells us where the thinker is, I will be most excited to address the mysterious piece of missing evidence.

The fact that you would say something like this just reinforces the fact that you fundamentally don't understand how science works. You are acting exactly like a creationist, who blindly thinks that models in science are ever established by "a single bit of data".

That's never the case. Models are established by intensive analysis of tens of thousands of documented experiments and tens of thousands of data points. And you have to have an education in the language of that analysis before you can even evalutate the data itself.

You obviously lack that education, given the way that you reacted to the passages I quoted--it all went right over your head. So it wouldn't matter how many books or papers I suggested you read.  You wouldn't understand a word of it. And yes--you would literally have to read entire books and papers before you even had a chance of qualifying as someone whose opinion mattered.

Jun 25, 2012 -- 6:31PM, Beingofone wrote:

You cannot provide any evidence and you want me to try to refute non existing data.

Put up or shut up.

Go to a library. Get The Cognitive Neuroscience of Consciousness, edited by Stanislas Deehaune. Tell me what mistakes the scientists in that book made.  If you aren't willing to do this, then you've just admitted that you are in over your head and always will be.

And we all know that you won't bother, so just admit it now.

Jun 9, 2012 -- 12:45PM, stardustpilgrim wrote:

Tesla had a great understanding of electricity and was a great inventor. He was a proponent of AC vs Edison's DC. One day he was walking and a poem came to mind. From the words of the poem, on the spot Tesla invented the alternating current motor. A few seconds previous, the alternating current motor didn't exist. Then it existed only in the mind of Tesla. Then he actually built an alternating current motor.

Information appeared in Tesla's mind, from nothing out of thin air. Then Tesla turned the information into the matter and energy of a working electrical motor.

?

sdp 

SDP,

Great example.  Information science can reduce much of the event to its thermodynamic parts.  Calories were burned for mental work in the physical brain.  What was gained, in exchange for the calories was structure.  Structure in a mental simulation of the physical world.

I would use the term "information object" as what was constructed in the mind of Tesla.  And physically, this new information object started changing real world probability regarding future events, the moment of its existence in Tesla's mind. 

stardust

Information appeared in Tesla's mind, from nothing out of thin air.

Hardly.

The brain has function centers - modules, if you like - for storing, recalling, comparing, considering, talking and reading, body movement, resolving priority conflicts, and so on.  The modules communicate with each other, and because this communication is itself a brain function (as distinct from coincidental) we're good at it - use it for jokes, art, inventions, problem solving and so on.  Taking Tesla's account at face value, the ingredients of the discovery were already in his mind when under the stimulus of the song he perceived a connection between individual things he already knew.

If he hadn't known already those things, he couldn't have made the necessary connection.

stardust

But would you call what was going on inside Tesla's head information about how (aspects of) the universe is structured?

That's one of those what-do-you-mean-by-information questions, no?

Tesla would have perceived the relationship between concepts he already had.  I imagine it would be a bit like walking the dog when suddenly you realize what you can give your mother for her birthday, and a bit like staring at a chess puzzle and having that AHA! moment - both inspiration and cultivated ways and talents of thinking.

I very strongly doubt that he was working from information=data - rather information=concepts he already had.

Does that not show that information is causal?

Not information=data.  Information=stimulating perceptions and ideas, sure.