What is a model? Typically a model must ignore outliers and often even relevant parts of reality. When it takes the imponderable, assuming mind might be such, into the ponderable, then it is sacrificing much of the reality.

I like to compare the brain to the eye: As the eye is to seeing, so is the brain to thinking. Mind is not physical thing - neither is memory. But during life, the brain is necessary to be self-aware of our thinking.

As we can model the eye and make a camera, one day we likely will build a model of the brain. The computer is not (yet) that model. But neither of these models help us understand consciousness.

LOL - loved it Joe!

William Jackson "whenever given the freedom to think" - great expression! For our thoughts to enjoy freedom our free will must become involved in our thinking. Normally our thoughts flow off to what we like, to where we have mowed grass of thoughts. It takes strong will to blaze new trails or to clear new thought land. No model can grasp free will in thinking.

William,

Your First Post:

I agree with each point. I tend to use the term "Mind Independent Reality" (MIR) for materialist notions. You might be interested in Josef Mitterer with respect to "Consensus Reality" (http://www.univie.ac.at/constructivism/journal/3/3).

Your Second Post:

"In this state everything one thinks 'IS' true." I disagree with the wording but think I may with your intent. I am considering that our models of reality have both Truth and Fidelity. Truth essentially measures internal consistency of a model and such things as coherence between models of reality. Fidelity essentially measures the consistency between a model and reality. I am thinking here in terms of MIR. I model that what we currently call truth is a conflation of Truth and Fidelity. I hope to make allowances that these distinctions can be collapsed if desired.

Your Third Post:

"Secondly, the 'substamentum' or 'scientific nothing' has no distinctions, properties or bounds of any sort ..." I would like to examine this further because I think what you say about the substramentum has merit. My conception of the substramentum (singular in sense) is the base layer beyond which we cannot probe. Implicit is that science has allowed us to probe in layers beyond our naked senses. I refer to these layers (which I leave as indistinct and ill-defined and fuzzy) as the substramen (plural in sense).

Your Fourth Post:

I used "mind" to give a broader sense that brain -- not just neurons but the dance of neural firing patterns. Take out enough brain matter or suppress enough patterns and "mind" disappears. I know mind and brain are used differently, but I don't exactly see the point except differentiating between meat and ideas.

We typically think of an experiment as being isolated, or "hived off" from the externalities. I was trying to convey the same idea about the brain (and mind) -- sound and vibration still invades the inner sanctum of the hive, the hive still experiences solar gain (but the bees control ventilation to maintain viable conditions internally), etc. I hoped to illustrate that, just like the worker bees form the salient interaction with the world, our nerves form the interface between the mind and MIR.

Your third paragraph is why I have recused myself from being a dedicated Radical Constructivist: I can't seem to reconcile away the need for a MIR of some sort AND the ability of different minds to communicate. Well, I can, but that leaves me in the position of a radical skeptic that sits drooling in the corner. From what I've read and assuming a MIR leaves the problem of why we communicate with one another essentially solved.

"The question is not why we do understand each other, but why we do not." For some reason, Nature has seen fit to evolve bodies and then minds. Bodies are quite varied to fit each and every niche. Some bodies can't eat other bodies, etc. In the same way, each mind seems to evolve over hours to years. Bodies seem to take tens of...

Dr. Uphoff,

I know that years of research and thinking are behind your equations. Unfortunately, I don't understand them as given. Could you provide a more extensive reference? My research time-budget is stuffed full, but I'll make space to check out your work if I don't have to spend the extra cycles trying find it.

I am contemplating three models of different scopes. The first is an attempt at postulating how we "know" reality. It does not include Spirit but neither does it exclude it. The second is a high-level theory of self and as such is heavily laden with metaphor. It may speak of Spirit, but not necessarily. The third model, which is only a germ of an idea, is how we SHOULD live our lives. I suspect that Spirit will come to play here.

I believe that Science only pushes back frontiers but does not eliminate Spirit. So I suppose I have an admixture of science and mysticism in my thinking. For now, I prefer to keep them separate in my models, but the idea of regaining our whole nature appeals to me.

Thomas: "Nature has seen fit to evolve bodies and then minds" - not even Darwin would agree with this. Is it not possible that bodies and minds evolved as mirror images of each other until the upright Human where they could co-exist? Do they not continue to evolve?

Andrew,

I feel freewill is an essential feature of the mind. I sense that it has components of determinism, variability of events (randomness), and recursion within the brain. A goal of mine is to "explain" it in these terms. However, I hold freewill as closely allied with Spirit. So even if I can come to fully accept a model incorporating (and explaining) freewill, I strongly suspect that I will feel in my heart that there is something more.

Andrew,

I hold that mind supervenes on the neural system. Very early on, the neural system was not so differentiated from the body. Consider an amoeba: it moves up a food gradient and maybe toward or away from light. Perhaps we can consider the amoeba's mind and body mirroring one another. I hold that with greater specialization of the neural system (beyond the notochord associated neural tube, for example), we see development of mind that forms a model of the world around it. At some point, the brain (and the supervening mind) becomes sophisticated enough to form a model of itself. Most people exclusively believe we are the only species with a mind. I disagree. I see elements of mind in my dog, even my chickens. So far, I haven't found elements of mind in a single bee. I MIGHT see some primitive elements of mind in an entire hive.

I do beleive that bodies and minds continue to evolve. But I suspect that nature has about hit the limit with processing encapsulated in bone and meat. We are moving toward the next probable evolution in mind. First the augmented human, then the self-aware machine (whatever that means).

William,

"Where I disagree with Mitterer, is that my philosophy remains dualist. This escapes various problems when discussing epistemology; for example in your passage above, fidelity measures correspondence between a reality and [we need a concept here.]"

I appreciate (what I know of) Mitterer's non-dualism because it informs my thinking but I also embrace a form of dualism. I choose to model MIR as possibly unknowable. In the attempt to be coherent, I replace the generally accepted idea of Truth with Validity, which may be Internal (truth value), External (fidelity) and Integral (justification). Please see attached for a schematic that needs some explanation but also a bit of updating.

In the model I am working on, Fidelity measures the validity between phenomena and the respective predictions of the class of models called knowledge. So my phrasing would be, "Fidelity is a validity measure of models with respect to reality."

Yes, I restrict truth to models (Propositions) that fit criteria of validated process, input, output, scope, etc. I believe that Fidelity is the best we can do for models (Knowledge) with respect to MIR: precisely because of the loop. IF the loop can be shown benign, as Keith Lehrer attempts, then we can collapse truth and Fidelity into what most people now call Truth (and argue incessantly over because their Truth is True and the other guy's is somehow wrong).

So, Newton's Laws (Knowledge) are not True, but they have high Fidelity (given proper scope, input, process, output, etc. AND that we Believe them).

And results in "Classical" Set Theory (Propositions) have truth value of "true" (whether we Believe it or not) when the scope is objects that are sets, input is accepted axioms, process is formal logic without error, and output is in formal notation.

Everything is a model. I may have all the evidence in the world that hydrogen and oxygen under STP combine to form H2O. But hydrogen and oxygen and even water are models that I have extracted from phenomena. So are electrons, protons, neutrons, etc. Because we've started from a naive position, we tend to think of these as forming different levels: water is one level, hydrogen and oxygen (even H2O) are one level "deeper", subatomic particles below that, etc. That is why I introduced the term "substramen".

The substramentum is meant to be the lowest level we model (or, as you have led me to contemplate, the level below that: NOTHING). Unfortunately, the terms "substramentum", "substramen", and "superstramen" lack definitional rigor. Actually, it all lacks rigor. The MOE (Model Of Everythigng :- ) is still in its inception phase.

As a finite immaterial, spiritual substance consisting of three distinct cognitive rational faculties: the memory, the reason, and the will.