A.I. (Artificial Intelligence) - The Other Side of the Story

[stardustpilgrim]

May 28, 2023 13:19:00 GMT -5 zendancer said:

May 28, 2023 12:56:20 GMT -5 andrew said:

Maybe what they are saying is that when the mind is silent, you can still move around a tree, rather than walk into it. There's still the capacity to differentiate (maybe you see that as a 'brain function' rather than a 'mind function'.... I don't know....)

Of course, but what I'm saying is that no intellectual differentiation is necessary. What we are is so intelligent that it knows the world directly through the senses without the necessity of ideational reflection. If we want to say that subconscious mental processing is happening, that's okay, but all I'm doing is pointing to the distinction that the early Greeks made between gnosis and episteme. Animals, young children, and sages know (and interact with) the world via gnosis whereas most adults are in the habit of knowing (and interacting with) the world via episteme.

Predictive processing speaks to one of the most challenging questions in science and philosophy--the nature of the relationships between our minds and reality. The theory, which has been steadily gaining momentum, changes our understanding of this relationship in ways that have far-reaching implications. Contrary to the standard belief that our senses are a passive window onto the world, what is emerging is a picture of an ever-active brain that is always striving to predict what the world might currently have to offer. Those predictions then structure and shape the world of human experience, from the way we interpret a person's facial expression, to our feelings of pain, to our plans for an outing to the cinema.

Nothing we do or experience--if the theory is on track--is untouched by our own expectations. Instead, there is a constant give-and-take in which what we experience reflects not just what the world is currently telling us, but what we--consciously or nonconsciously--were expecting it to tell us. One consequence of this is that we are never simply seeing what's "out there," stripped bare of our own anticipations or insulated from our own past experiences. Instead, all human experience is part phantom--the product of deep-set predictions. We can no more experience the world "prediction and expectation free" than we could surf without a wave. pages xii and xiii, the Preface to The Experience Machine: How Our Minds Predict and shape Reality by Andy Clark, 2023 emphasis sdp