Joy and pain as Firsts are, like all Firsts, raw and unanalyzable. They simply are what they are.
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Posted by
CygnusX1 on 03/06 at 10:30 AM
Can you really break all phenomena down into a trinity of thirds? Is this not merely adding to layers of complexities?
Joy : a fine term indeed, and one I would suggest IS LOVE. Love is merely an abstract term we readily apply and overuse to the point of exhaustion. Joy is pure, and we more readily understand it and it’s feeling.
“Freewill”, realised at the level of mind, permits the ability to sanction or veto, reject or accept, to fundamentally decide “yes” or “no” to each and every formal conscious thought. With choices come uncertainties and speculation and doubt, and finally our fears.
When our choices align to our circumstance, central function and integrity may well increase. Our expectations are met or are close, we are at peace and harmony and happy and positive relationships between body and mind may be peaking.
Fear and pain we can then assume would imply the opposite of these. Pain itself is suffering, we only need to examine the root of each suffering to eliminate or lessen this pain. Again, this is a choice or freewill.
All these understandings, thoughts and feelings must all rely on relationships : thirds. I do not understand where “First’s” apply here. Subjective feelings interact with hormonal and brain chemicals, what is the real agent of this feeling if joy : endorphin?
Posted by
Bryce on 03/07 at 12:23 AM
“What about joy’s opposite?”
“pain and and (sic) pleasure are not necessarily opposites”
Indeed. After a grueling workout, I feel great pleasure, and, at my age, lots of pain. Perhaps pain is the price for pleasure.
Posted by
Vinayagamoorthy on 03/08 at 12:54 AM
I think joy and pain can still be broken down. We should be able to relate it with the pleasure and pain chemicals being secreted in the brain and being recognized by the neurons.
If our expectations are low, we may find the joy related chemicals being secreted more frequently. Of course, once we know all these, we may not settle for less.
I think it is all about seeing entropy decreased somewhere when the overall entropy of the world is still increasing. The more we expect to see the order increasing(than is realistic), the lesser will be the joy. It can even be said that this is purely subjective.
Posted by
mjgeddes on 03/08 at 11:18 AM
I certainly wouldn’t put joy/pain as unanalyzable firsts! No Ben, go back and see what was said in your earlier thread, joy and pain are ‘thirds’, consciousness is the interface (communication system) of the mind, which forms the meta-relationships of the patterns - surely all conscious experience are ‘thirds’?
First layer is the base evolutionary goals (‘the operating system’ of the mind), second layer is the decision making systems (‘the functional components’ of the mind), these first two layers are unconscious. Consciousness is the ‘third’ layer, the inferface system which mediates between the different utility functions of the second layer. (That by the way, is why ‘the third’ (categorization), beats Bayes (the second’), categorization can compare and combine different utility functions, whereas Bayes is rendered helpless by this problem).
Posted by
CygnusX1 on 03/08 at 11:27 AM
@ Ben
Quote : “Joy and pain as Firsts are, like all Firsts, raw and unanalyzable. They simply are what they are.”
If your meaning here is to draw comparisons to Joy and pain as “hard” problems that may be placed to one side for the purposes of uncovering the patterns of relationships to these phenomena? Then I can see your point. If we are only interested in the relationships and deriving the patterns associated, then we do not necessarily need to know what the phenomena of “Joy” is?
I do feel that “Freewill” is still a major player in understanding this search for patternment. Like it or not, believe in it or not. For example, by practising simple and easy mindfulness we can learn to become dispassionate and apathetic to joy and pain, thus lowering their effects, (and preventing chemical suffusion into the brain?) If it is this easy to become dispassionate, what does this tell us about the patterns that we are attempting to uncover?
Quote : ” Minds contain various expectations:.. and they seek out experiences that will cause these patterns to emerge.”
These experiences we seek must be linked to the addiction to, or reliance upon, brain chemicals, or may even point to a more special relationship between these chemicals and physical rewards, (feel good factors?)
Wiki says : ” Dopamine is commonly associated with the pleasure system of the brain, providing feelings of enjoyment and reinforcement to motivate a person proactively to perform certain activities. Dopamine is released (particularly in areas such as the nucleus accumbens and prefrontal cortex) by naturally rewarding experiences such as food, sex, drugs, and neutral stimuli that become associated with them. Recent studies indicate that aggression may also stimulate the release of dopamine in this way.”
>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dopamine
“The term endorphin rush has been adopted in popular speech to refer to feelings of exhilaration brought on by pain, danger, or other forms of stress, supposedly due to the influence of endorphins. When a nerve impulse reaches the spinal cord, endorphins are released which prevent nerve cells from releasing more pain signals. Immediately after injury, endorphins allow animals to feel a sense of power and control over themselves that allows them to persist with activity for an extended time.”
” Another widely publicized effect of endorphin production is the so-called “runner’s high”, which is said to occur when strenuous exercise takes a person over a threshold that activates endorphin production.”
>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endorphin
If the aim is to create artificial machine intelligence, it may be much easier to discard these notions of joy and pain altogether and create a wholly dispassionate machine? This may lead us into dangerous waters however : a vastly intelligent and dispassionate machine to which we assign duties and responsibilities? (Danger Will Robinson!)
Yet for the aims and purposes of mind-uploading we need to deeply understand these relationships of patterns, of “thirds” that you point to. To reverse engineer and map the neural network of a brain/mind seems like a gigantic task, and should we ask if it is really necessary or efficient to do this, to map out each and every connection to 100 billion neurons? I am guessing that a computer or a machine environment and its software need not emulate this complicated topology at all? If indeed this is the aim? Then I can see where your interest in patternment and in relationships is of importance.
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