The Essence Of Mind

[TruthSeeker]

Comparison. That's the essence of the mind.

Whenever we think or perceive something, we are making comparisons. When we look at an apple, we identify it as an apple because we compare it with everything surrounding the apple. When we look at an apple and an orange, we are comparing and contrasting them in order to determine what is an "apple" and an "orange". When we analize cause and effect, we are comparing something in terms of time- what it was before and what it is now.

All logic comes down to comparison. From comparisons come all the logical subjects such as epistemology, semantics, etc.

So why don't we use a logic system based specifically on comparison?

[David Quinn]

Well, we do use a logical system based on comparisons all the time, but most people don't realize it. As you point out, logic is all about making comparisons, and its corollory, recognzing identity. There is never an instant when it is not this.

When people make mistakes in their reasoning, it is because they confuse the identity of things and fail to make comparisons properly. A classic example is the Christian defining God to be limitless and infinite, and then, say, rejecting the idea that the chair he sits on is a part of God. In this rejection, he fails to recognize the identity of the definition he has created - most likely, due to the influence of other emotional attachments.

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[TruthSeeker]

Yes

[scameter]

I disagree. I think that we are capable of making comparisons to other things we know, but I do not think that is the basic operation of the mind, or logic. I think that logic is the ability to recognize form, consistency and regularity in things, and to do so in a practical manner. For instance, a bird flying upright instead of upside down is logical because of the bird's body structure and because that is the way they always fly. When something is encountered that is not normal, we are often compulsed to see it as illogical, but after close rational examination is can be truthfully said as logical or illogical. For instance, if there was a bird that fly upside down and was able to, we would be able to logically identify how it is able to do so, and call it logical, even if at first it may seem stupid to think of a bird flying in that manner. It is a matter of functionality, probability and comparison, not just the latter. But, the mind is much more than just logic; it has logic in it, but it also has many other things. For instance, it has emotion, which is a huge influence on it's functioning; it has belief, which influences what is thought about and how things, especially concepts, are considered; imagination, which in fact includes emotion, belief and logic, but with the combined mental manipulation of all three of these around a particular conceptual realm of thought with a particular aim in mind with this function. There are also to other parts of the mind other than the conscious, the conscious being composed mainly of the three things I just listed, but those, even though they influence consciousness, are not usually considered apart of the mind because they are not apart of consciousness; namely, the unconscious and subconscious.

[Thomas Knierim]

Your idea is similar to that of Nicolaus von Cues, a medieval philosopher, who argued that comparison is the starting point of knowledge. Cues said that we derive connections between objects and their relations from comparing them and that we infer statements upon them according to the result of these comparisons. He didn't actually state it quite that concisely, but this is the idea in essence.

In artificial intelligence research, there are similar approaches, for example in pattern recognition and in building ontologies for knowledge bases. The basic idea is to model relationships between patterns, symbols, or terms that represent real world items. The problem here is that comparing things alone won't get you very far. You also need some kind of logical calculus. The word "comparison" already includes the notion of equality and non-equality, but that's as far as it goes. You will find that knowledge representation with only negation and equality operators is extremely cumbersone and crude.

Therefore you need a more elaborate set of operators and rules to make it work. For the most simple system, you require at least the inference rules of propositional calculus. Then you will find that you have to assign predicates and therefore you require predicate logic with the predicates themselves being part of the ontology. Now you have a reasonably flexible system, but you still cannot express notions such as "possibility", "necessity", etc., so you need modality, which means you have to upgrade to a 2nd degree modal logic.

This process of knowledge building has been researched and understood quite well. It is what people have been calling the "semantic web" for some time, which may become a reality in computer applications pretty soon.

To cut a long story short, my point is that simple comparisons are not sufficient to represent knowledge, let alone mind, at least not in a computational sense. Cues's idea was quite interesting, but ultimately wrong.

Cheers, Thomas

[TruthSeeker]

Well, how about hunger? Aren't you comparing being hungry with not being hungry? How about the possibility of being rich? Aren't you comparing it with the possibility of being poor?

How about an example that doesn't use a comparison?

[Thomas Knierim]

I did not argue that comparisons are absent from knowledge representation, but that they are not sufficient.

Cheers, Thomas

[TruthSeeker]

May you show an example where comparison is not enough so that we can build up on how the brain works? I'm trying to understand it...

Have you ever used computer programming theory to understand how the brain work?

[scameter]

Well, how about hunger? Aren't you comparing being hungry with not being hungry? How about the possibility of being rich? Aren't you comparing it with the possibility of being poor?

I don't think so. I think that when one is hungry or desires to be rich, one is going on the concept of rich and the feeling of hunger. If one becomes hungry, they feel it more than think it; they can then realize it and consider what to do about it, but one could also ignore it, such as in fasting, although other animals do not do this. Being rich is a concept we have learned to mean having things in large quantity that are luxurious and cause pleasure, and that you are capable of feeling secure and happy from this. Many people want it, and yet some are capable of not wanting it, and again, other animals don't have this concept.

May you show an example where comparison is not enough so that we can build up on how the brain works? I'm trying to understand it...

:P You're trying to understand the brain, something millions of people have thought about and worked on for thousands of years, in one thread or idea? Good luck.

[Thomas Knierim]

TruthSeeker: May you show an example where comparison is not enough so that we can build up on how the brain works? I'm trying to understand it...

Okay.

Think of two yellow objects. Does it make sense to say one is yellower than the other? No. Usually we say that one object has a lighter or fainter colour than the other. So we need two predicates: "yellow" and "light" and therefore we need a connective between these predicates, the "and" operator. Now imagine it is dark and you cannot see colours. Colours and faintness are conditional. They depend on light. So we need an "if...then" operator to express that if there is light then the object is light yellow. We also need modality to express that the object has properties which depend on conditions. All of these are elements of formal logic which are semantically not reducible to comparisons.

What concerns knowledge representation, consider the following example. Let's say we want to represent all living things in a knowledge base and we start with assertions about species. Some examples of assertions are: "A chimpanzee is not an elephant.", "a chimpanzee is a monkey", "a chimpanzee is not giraffe", and so on. Assertions of the form "is a", or "is not a", or "is like a" represent comparisons. In order to classify a single species correctly, we would need millions of assertions (or comparisons), so it doesn't seem to be such a great idea to fall back on simple assertions. Instead we can use the Linnean system of classification. This leads to assertions that represent logical syllogisms, such as "All elephants are elephantidae", "all elephantidae are proboscidaea", and "all proboscidaea are mammalia".

Now we can express the entire class of mammalia with less than 7,000 syllogistic assertions, instead of millions or billions of direct comparisons. However, we need a somewhat more complex logic in order to represent the Linnean system.

Cheers, Thomas

[TruthSeeker]

Think of two yellow objects. Does it make sense to say one is yellower than the other? No. Usually we say that one object has a lighter or fainter colour than the other. So we need two predicates: "yellow" and "light" and therefore we need a connective between these predicates, the "and" operator. Now imagine it is dark and you cannot see colours. Colours and faintness are conditional. They depend on light. So we need an "if...then" operator to express that if there is light then the object is light yellow.
Yes. Those operators are used not only in logic but also in computer programming...

Doesn't "and" use a comparison? When you say "apple and orange", the "and" is contrasting the two objects. The "and" operator distinguishes the objects as two separate objects. The "or" operator, in the other hand, make a different comparison. It disitinguishes the objects and separates them as two (let's say) "options".

Maybe a better word is "relationship" rather then comparison. It seems there is an hierarchy of logic. It goes somewhat like that:

1) Identification: first you have to identify something as an object, and define its characteristics, before you can make any comparisons.
2) Comparison: you look at an object and distinguish it from the environment and other objects.
3) Relationships: You analize the relationships between the objects.

In computer programming, you do the same thing. First you identify your variables:

int a = 1;
int b = 13;

Then you compare them...

int a= int c;

And the analize relationships, with "if" for example...
(sorry haven't done this for a couple of years...)

What concerns knowledge representation, consider the following example. Let's say we want to represent all living things in a knowledge base and we start with assertions about species. Some examples of assertions are: "A chimpanzee is not an elephant.", "a chimpanzee is a monkey", "a chimpanzee is not giraffe", and so on. Assertions of the form "is a", or "is not a", or "is like a" represent comparisons. In order to classify a single species correctly, we would need millions of assertions (or comparisons), so it doesn't seem to be such a great idea to fall back on simple assertions. Instead we can use the Linnean system of classification. This leads to assertions that represent logical syllogisms, such as "All elephants are elephantidae", "all elephantidae are proboscidaea", and "all proboscidaea are mammalia".
Yes... similarly, in computer programming you can have hierarchies of objects... ;)

[mehta]

Comparisons are one of the parameter to define the existence of a thing but certainly not everything....

[Brahmanyan]

Mind is an interesting phenomenan of creation. It is not an organ, neither it is the movement or creation of an organ. Mind is just collection thoughts. If there is no thought there is no Mind. There is no Mind in the" presemt". Because there is no thought in the "Present". Mental activity is only on the past or future. Mind can travel faster than the fastest. Mind has no specific place of stay it can jump from subject to subject like monkey. Uncontrolled Mind will bring only misery to the person. Meditation is one of the methods to bring peace to mind.

This I consider as the Essence of Mind.

[redraven]

So I'm not going to jump in about wisdom and compassion... :lol:

I wonder if you're not right about the relationship thing. In Western philosophy this time, Buber said that things exist in relationship. Ultimately he believed that relationship was between being and God, but I wonder if it isn't the relationship of being to itself. An inward directed world.

Also, the use of dialectic logic uses comparisons between two opposing concepts to find a synthesis, but it is not much used anymore.

Has anyone ever tried to model dialectic Thomas? I'm really curious. It started as rhetoric, a battle between two people, but Hegel did it sort of himself... Is that making any sense. Have a computer compare concepts to find a third better one? Actually I think it has been done. Just curious.

[______]

Mind is an interesting phenomenan of creation. It is not an organ, neither it is the movement or creation of an organ.

<_< Perhaps a byproduct of the brain? Or even of thoughts?

[CSwriter1]

This is off subject, but the original statement about our brains constantly comparing things, motivated me to google animal color vision, and I came to a site that gives a fascinating explanation of physical color and biological preception of color. Hum, Psyche and I were discussing color and number awhile back, and this is sort in that line.
Eye, Brain, and Visionmonkeys, all have well-developed color vision. Nocturnal animals whose vi- sion is specialized for dim light seldom have good color vision, which suggests ...
neuro.med.harvard.edu/site/dh/b40.htm - 23k - Cached - Similar pages
"A visual pigment has the special property that when it absorbs a photon of light, it changes its molecular shape and at the same time releases energy".

Closer to the subject, our thinking isn't as simple as comparing this to that, but is more interactive and wholistic. More like a colidascope. Like what we realize, is not as simple as comparing things. We conceptualize, and our understanding of something can completely change when have a new concept. For example, believing a God's will or demons make us sick, and then learning it is bacteria and viruses that cause infect and disease. Whoo! this is a completely different way of preceiving reality! and one reason the bible doesn't work real well for people, because now they have to rationalize Jesus chasing demons out of people and the whole God thing, and why bad things happen to good people, and how much God controls things.

That is, we may compare this and that and have an idea, but with more knowledge, what we thought was so, can be completely wrong, so a logic based on comparison would be useless. We come to truth not by contrasting this with the that, but by knowing this and that. That is, we come to truth by seeing "The Bigger View". :)

[CSwriter1]

Scameter, what you said reminds me of an experiement done on chimps to determine their reasoning capability. Can the chimp conceptualize as humans do?

Take the bird flying upside down. Would the chimp think something usual if the bird were flying upside down, meaning the chimp holds a concept that birds fly righside up and something is unusal if the bird flies upside down? This is more than a comparison. It is also a concept of what "should be" and what isn't quite right. The conclusion of the experiement is yes, the chimp does conceptualize.

With the chimp the experimenter had a bird and cooed to it and petted it, and did the same with an inanimate object. The chimp seemed to under the difference between a living thing and inanimate object, even though the bird was only a represenatation of a living bird.

[ranjitskohli]

Basically it is what is called "Conditioned Consciousness" we label and name everything that is perceived by sense perception. We are able to identify apple as apple and orange as orange because of conditioned consciousness throughout our lifetime our mind and perceptions are conditioned regarding the material matter in such a way. That is the reason when even we think of something material within our mind, immediately a picture is generated within our mind. Like when we think of apple immediately an image of apple appears in our mind.

[Starry_Canopy]

This is similar to the view expressed by Edward De Bono in his book "The Mechanism of the Mind". Basically that everything we perceive is by seeing the nearest mental pattern that it 'fits' best and modifying that pattern a wee bit to account for the new 'perception'.

As the Soldier for Truth said, the mind could well be just a by product/ reflection of all the electrical and chemical patterns constantly changing in our brain and body as the latter goes through its various experiences. But then, who is the "I" who feels/ thinks all this?

In a Buddhist Monastry, the teacher had given an excercise to the students - "Expand on the theme: The mind is like a mirror...".

The students expounded such learnings as - "The mind is like a mirror. Experiences that we undergo are like the dust that settles on it. The spiritual excercises that we do wipe away the dust so that the mirror can reflect reality in its fullness" etc.

There was a sweeper in that monastry who had been paying attention to all the discussions going on over the years. He wrote his own answer and added it anonymously to the others' answers.

When the teacher was reading out the answers, he came across it - "If there is no mirror, where does dust settle?"

When it was known that the sweeper had written that, the other students got angry with him and drove him away from the monastry as it was not supposed to be his call and that he was spoiling their carefully planned programme by introducing irrelevant and extraneous thoughts to it.

That night, the sweeper had a visit in his refuge from the Teacher. The Teacher gave him his bowl and staff and told him that he was the next in line to carry on the teaching and went away.