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From: rlr@pyuxn.UUCP (Rich Rosen)
Newsgroups: net.ai,net.philosophy,net.rumor,net.misc
Subject: Re: A Quick Question - Mind and Brain
Message-ID: <770@pyuxn.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 22-Jun-84 10:11:16 EDT
Article-I.D.: pyuxn.770
Posted: Fri Jun 22 10:11:16 1984
Date-Received: Sat, 23-Jun-84 03:19:26 EDT
References: <769@pyuxn.UUCP> <838@shark.UUCP>
Organization: Bell Communications Research, Piscataway N.J.
Lines: 63

[from shark!hutch]
> | Intuition is nothing more than one's subconscious employing logical
> | thought faster than the conscious brain can understand or realize it.
> | What's all the fuss about?  And where's the difference between the
> | "brain" and the "mind"? What can this "mind" do that the physical brain
> | doesn't?
> | --
> | "I take your opinions and multiply them by -1."
> | 					Rich Rosen    pyuxn!rlr
> 
> Thank you, Rich, for so succinctly laying to rest all the questions
> mankind has ever had about self and mind and consciousness.

You're welcome.  It only takes a miniscule amount of logic and a careful
shave with my Occam's Electric Razor.  The point is, for all this talk of
"soul" and "mind", I've never seen anything that points to a *need* (from a
logical point of view) for anything external to "physicalism" to describe
the goings-on in the human brain.

> Now, how about proving it.  Oh, and by the way, what is a "subconscious"
> and how do you differentiate between a "conscious" brain and a "subconscious"
> in any meaningful way?
> And once you have told us exactly what a physical brain can do, then we
> can tell you what a mind could do that it doesn't.

Let's place the burden of proof on the proper set of shoulders.  If anyone is
proposing a view of intelligence involving a "mind" (defined as that part of
intellect not part of the physical brain), then they had better describe some
phenomena which physical processes cannot account for.

[from eosp1!robison]
> I'm not comfortable with Rich Rosen's assertion that intuition
> is just the mind's unconscious LOGICAL reasoning that happens
> too fast for the conscious to track.  If intuition is simply
> ordinary logical reasoning, we should be just as able to
> simulate it as we can other tyes of reasoning.  In fact, attempts
> to simulate intuition account for some rather noteworthy successes
> and failures, and seem to require a number of discoveries before
> we can make much real progress.  E.g.:

My statement was probably a little too concise there.  It seems like the
brain may be able to extract patterns through an elaborate pattern matching
process that can be triggered by random (or pseudo-random) "browsing", such
that a small subsection of a matched thought pattern can trigger the recall
(or synthesis) of an entire thought element.  (Whatever that means...)

> Artists and composers use intuition as part of the process of
> creating art.  It is likely that one of the benefits they gain
> from intuition is that a good work of art has many more internal
> relationships among its parts than the creator could have planned.
> It is hard to see how this result can be derived from "logical"
> reasoning of any ordinary deductive or inductive kind.  It is
> easier to see how artists obtain this result by making various
> kinds of intuitive decisions to limit their scope of free choice
> in the creative process.

Logical may not be the right word, since the process does seem to be either
conscious or intentional.  The "click" or "flash" that often is said to
coincide with intuitive realizations seems like an interrupt from a sub-
conscious process that, after random (or pseudo-random) searching, has found
a "match".
-- 
"Submitted for your approval..."		  Rich Rosen    pyuxn!rlr