* Quote from William H. Kimbel
Peter Klevius* states: The "missing link" called LUCY is still missing - at least in Africa
*
There seems to be a void in the out of Africa faith camp when it comes
to listening and referring to Peter Klevius analysis of human evolution.
That's why this continuous self referencing. I.e. not so much for the
giving credits to whom it belongs but more so for the sake of
penetrating the massive wall of scientific ignorance this stupid out of
Africa consensus has created.
Everything points to SE Asia and nothing to Africa.
Homo floresiensis and Homo luzonensis were found in each end of a continuous bio-band between Sahul and Sundaland.
Do note that Peter Klevius' human evolution theory doesn't necessary imply any direct connection beteween Homo floresiensis and Homo luzonensis, but rather that they hint at exactly that "missing link" development that is missing in Africa.
According to Peter Klevius' theory,
Homo erectus (and Neanderthals) belonged to a separate lineage than
Homo sapiens. Homo erectus evolved from a lineage that came out of Homo
floresiensis/Homo luzonensis like - but with different skull forms etc. -
djungle dwellers who during lower sealevels evolved a more
sophisticated bipedalism on more open areas which are now covered by
sea.
As Peter Klevius has argued all the time since 2012, what
first hindered hybridization between Homo sapiens, Denisovans and
Neanderthals, was solved less than 100,000 bp when a new variant stepped
out from the SE Asian archipelago and entered mainland Asia with a gene
profile that mage this possible - compare the Denisovan mtDNA
connection found on Iberian fossils.
Also consider the fact that we don't know whether Homo erectus actually was what we used to call Homo erectus.
Homo
floresiensis has teeth and skull features closer to Homo sapiens, and
unlike LUCY with a similar brain size it could handle fire, hunt etc.
Finally, consider the eager falsification of primate classification for the sole purpose of fitting the out-of-Africa mythology.
Read more below.
Peter Klevius wrote:
Wednesday, June 26, 2019
Why Africa was impossible and SE Asia necessary for human evolution
Peter Klevius to Chinese people: I'm not a racist like many in the UK parliament - although I certainly look like one.
UK origin of Sinophobia: The 19th century Opium Wars were triggered by UK's
imposition of the opium trade upon China. Lord Palmerston regarded the
Chinese as uncivilized and suggested that the British must attack China
to show up their superiority as well as to demonstrate what a
"civilized" nation could do. The resulting concession of Hong Kong
compromised China's territorial sovereignty. There's also the background
to South China Sea. Behind the Huawei etc. Sinophobia: The Pact between the US freeloader and the Saudi Devil. UK
created a devil's kingdom in Arabia, and US made a devil's oil pact
with the Saudi custodians of islam - hence infecting the world with
petrodollar and anti-Human Rights sharia islam (Saudi based and steered
OIC).
Peter Klevius simple evolution tutorial for simple minds - e.g. ignorant anthropology professors etc.
Peter Klevius evolution formula, first published as an article 1981 and as a book 1992 (ISBN9173288411) and on the web 2004, 2008, 20010, 2012. Do note that those who didn''t hybridize resulted in the fossile diversity that has puzzled so many an anthropologist. Also consider that Peter Klevius general evolution formula (first published 1981) covers everything including the fractured oceans(s) that led to diversity after the cambrian explosion and extinction.
*
Afropologist
John Hawks: "Is it hard to imagine that a medium-sized mammal species,
which relies on foraging across 100 square kilometers or more for
high-energy foods, would be aware of islands that are in sight? When you
look at these places in island Southeast Asia with early hominin
activity, ancient sea levels were much lower and all these islands are
one or two small hops across narrow straits. Palawan is an island
between Borneo and the Philippines, and today these water crossings are
hundreds of kilometers, but in the past they may have been as narrow as
ten kilometers. That’s not very far to imagine hominin individuals
making crossings, if they were already playing with very basic ways of
crossing rivers and using near-beach water resources. When it comes to
colonizing a new island, it is the exceptional that matters. In fact, if
crossings were regular, island populations could never evolve to be
very different from nearby mainland populations. It is the very fact
that crossing is rare that allows island adaptations to emerge after the
population is established."
Anthropologist Peter Klevius question to Afropologist John Hawks: So how could humans ever have evolved in Africa?!
Homo
floresiensis, who has relatives from Flores to Philippines, was
definitely not a "dwarfed Homo erectus" because of its very different
limb etc. structure. This means that Afropologists have to explain how
an australopithecus/habilis like creature could have stumbled all the
way over the Wallace line millions of years ago when modern humans had
such trouble to even make it out of Africa.
The hoax Piltdown man moved to Africa - while the real Flores lady is called "a Hobbit".
Peter Klevius thanks two ladies, Jinniushan (1992) and Floresiensis (2004), for leading him out of his out-of-Africa delusion.
The
use of tools, fire etc. is of no importance for the overall picture.
It's the modern features of the skull and the ape like, yet fully
bipedal, postcranial features, found on an island on the wrong side of
the Wallace line that makes any evolutionary theory based on
out-of-Africa simply laughable. It took Piltdown man many decades to be
accepted as a hoax among "mainstream anthropologists". How long will it
take before "mainstream anthropologists" accept that the out-of-Africa
castle is buit on sand?
Homo floresiensis fits perfectly as an
outlier in Peter Klevius SE Asian volatile island/mainland scheme where
primates evolved over monkeys to apes and homos. SE Asia has produced a
variety of evolutionary forms of which most have spread over the
Afro-Eurasian continent, mixing/hybridizing with previous ones.
Islam is again hampering science - but when you prove it then you aren't considered believable (sic) anymore.
Peter Klevius wrote on Science Blogs 2005 and was immediately attacked by islam defenders:
A stunning photo that really makes one think abt M130 and brain qualities (regardless of size)!
OK
that put aside this is all about protecting Islam and yes, Teuku Jacob
is a crypto-creationist in line with the usual balancing between
fundamentalism and an Islam that pretends being modern (By the way,
Australia has already a law making it impossible to critisize Islam!).
Take
a look at Out of Africa as Pygmies and back as global "Mongoloids".
Maybe the Hobbit represents the first OOA-delivey of a more wrinkled
brain that later replaced all the other?
By Peter Klevius (not verified) on 25 Jun 2005 #permalink
*
Peter Klevius annoying habit of repeating Peter Klevius, and his self
citations, isn't a neural defect but has to be evaluated against the
very thick wall* between him and Harvard, Stanford etc., which makes his
existence almost invisible. Not to mention the enormous moat*
concisting of "spiritualists", creationalists, religionists, alienists,
conspirationalists etc.
*
'Wall' and 'moat' come from old Swedish words still in use today, i.e.
'vall' and 'mot'. Don't trust fake etymology - trust Peter Klevius who
would be extremely embarrassed if he were proven wrong.
Peter Klevius' appeal for the
understanding of the disability concisting of how a super high IQ
combined with a flawless hormone/dopamine/serotonine balance* makes him
the "extremely normal" whom no one really likes - except for those who
know him 100% longterm and have survived their annoyance of own
shortcomings mirrored in his disability. So Peter Klevius "bragging"
about himself is easily outweighed by his disability - if this fact may
comfort you. After all, intelligencephobia is so PC that the only
intelligence that is possible, i.e. the individual one, is denied while
the oxymoron "group intelligence" is hailed. Peter Klevius + 9 half
idiots would have an average IQ as a group - so what?!
* If you get annoyed while reading
this, then ask yourself if you would be equally annoyed when reading
about the qualities of a sports star, an actor/actress, a singer etc.
See my point?
However, unlike you, Peter Klevius
also suffers from the ethical dilemma of sitting silent and have peace
while clearly understanding he has something to offer. And pretending to
be "humble" would only diffuse him into the realm of easily dismissed
(from whatever direction at whatever time and subject) opinionaters.
Peter Klevius evolution formula (published 1981, 1992): Isolation-fluctuation* and hybridization. There's no difference between the evolution of Universe and the Sun and its surrounding, or the evolution of "life". We lack a coherent definition of "life" and will never get one. However, comfort yourself with Peter Klevius 'existence-centrism' and UN's negative Universal Human Rights.
* No dude, there's no "extinction" other than the one you use practically in Wittgenstein's language game. If the dinosaurs haven't disappeared then why would the hominies.
Peter Klevius on cosmology, first in an article (1981) and later unchanged in Demand for Resources (1992:23, ISBN 9173288411):
'The basis of existence is motion/change, and causality constitutes a complex of evolution and devolution. Evolution may be seen as the consequence of causality's variables in time where complexity in existing structures are regenerated. This stands in opposition to thermodynamics which theoretically leads to maximal entropy (i.e. equilibrium) where time/change ultimately would end. Someone might then say that the products of evolution are just temporary components in causality's road towards uniformity.'(Klevius 1992:23). An example of evolution and devolution is a star cycle ending in a super nova - incl. everything in it.
A lump in a nebula is the "island" on which a star is born.
1. Peter Klevius concept 'existence-centrism' (1992) is the only way to understand and handle the traps for logic that language creates. Existence-centrism is the immutable truth that we can't sidestep. All your (or humankind's) collected experience at every single moment limits what you can say. And as a consequence, metaphysical statements are either impossible or just "meta-metaphysical".
2. The formation of structure not only rests on previous structure but is the very evidence for it.
The evolution of life may be described as based on strong fluctuations (isolation) and weak fluctuations (hybridization).
Speciation needs isolation. After migration hybridization
stops further speciation and explains fossil diversity
as well as existing phenotypes.
Human evolution in retrospective is a repeated chain of
speciation and hybridization.
Different types of life depend on different types of isolation and fluctuation.
Early hominines (before more advanced use of tools) were not specialized to really anything except bi-pedalism, but could do a little and eat a little of almost everything. This made them moving around in a way that excludes isolation other than on islands.
Therefore "part time islands" constitute the best evolutionary labs.
And SE Asia is the perfect cradle which has had a longterm and varied hiatory of island/mainland fluctuations incl. between islands.
Peter Klevius wrote:
Thursday, March 15, 2012
The Red Deer Cave people add more evidence for Klevius’ ape/homo hybridization theory
The irrefutable art track in Northern Eurasia (see map below) has no contemporary equivalent in other parts of the world. Based on what we know now it had no fore bearers whatsoever in any period of time. Moreover, it seems that there was even a decline before "civilizations" started tens of thousands of years later! Yet Klevius seems to be the only one addressing this most interesting (besides genetics) fact! According to Klevius (and no one else so far) the new and more efficient brain evolved in a jungle environment (SE Asia?) and spread up until meeting with big headed Neanderthals hence creating the modern human who later spread and dissolved with archaic homos. In this process Homo erectus was most probably involved as well.
Updated info about the origin of Klevius' theory
Keep in mind that mainland SE Asia possibly harbored physically truly modern humans already before the time range (12,000/18,000 ybp - 98,000 ybp) of the Homo floresiensis remains in the Flores cave.
Liujiang, SE China (est. 100,000-140,000ybp)
If this Liujiang skull had been found in Africa or Mideast Wikipedia and other media would be overfilled. But this is all you get now (summer 2015 update) from Wikipedia about this extremely important skull:
The Liujiang skull probably came from sediment dating to 111 000 to 139 000 which would mean it's older than the oldest Homo floresiensis remains on Flores. Nothing even remotely close to this modern skull has ever been found in Africa, Mideast or Europe this early. In other words, we have the extremely archaic looking Red Deer Cave people 100,000 years after this extremely modern looking Liujiang population at approximately the same region. Even the least probable estimate of 70,000 bp would make Liujiang more modern looking than anything else.
Also compare Lake Mungo remains in Australia with an mtDNA that differs completely from ours (incl. Australian Aborigines). Sadly the remains have been kept out of further research (which fact came handy for those who want to dismiss it) because of stupid* "Aboriginal"(?!) greed (for the purpose of making certain people more "special" than others for no good reason at all (also compare the ridiculous Kennewick man controversy). Does it need to be said that the Mungo remains are as far from Australian Aborigines in appearance as you can imagine. However, according to Alan Thorne, 'Mungo could not have come from Africa as, just like Aboriginal Australians don't look like anybody from Africa, Mungo Man's skeleton doesn't look like anybody from Africa either. LM3 skeleton was of a gracile individual, estimated stature of 196 cm, which all sharply contrast with the morphology of modern "indigenous" Australians. Compared to the older Liujiang skull Mungo man had a much smaller brain.
* There's no way anyone can state who was "first" in Australia - and even if there was, then there's still no way of making any meaningful connection to now living people.
Most "mysteries" in genetics disappear by abandoning OOA and changing direction of HSS evolution. Only South East Asia offered a combination of tropical island/mainland fluctuations needed to put pressure on size reduction paired with evolutionary isolation in an environment where only those survived who managed to shrink their heads while keeping the same intelligence as their mainland kins with some double the sized brain. Homo floresiensis is evidence that such has happened there.
Denisovan is an extinct species of human in the genus Homo. In March 2010, scientists announced the discovery of a finger bone fragment of a juvenile female who lived about 41,000 years ago, found in the remote Denisova Cave in the Altai Mountains in Siberia, a cave which has also been inhabited by Neanderthals and modern humans. Two teeth and a toe bone belonging to different members of the same population have since been reported.
Analysis of the mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) of the Denisovan finger bone showed it to be genetically distinct from the mtDNAs of Neanderthals and modern humans. Subsequent study of the nuclear genome from this specimen suggests that this group shares a common origin with Neanderthals, that they ranged from Siberia to Southeast Asia, and that they lived among and interbred with the ancestors of some present-day modern humans, with about 3% to 5% of the DNA of Melanesians and Aboriginal Australians deriving from Denisovans. DNA discovered in Spain suggests that Denisovans at some point resided in Western Europe, where Neanderthals were thought to be the only inhabitants. A comparison with the genome of a Neanderthal from the same cave revealed significant local interbreeding, with local Neanderthal DNA representing 17% of the Denisovan genome, while evidence was also detected of interbreeding with an as yet unidentified ancient human lineage. Similar analysis of a toe bone discovered in 2011 is underway, while analysis of DNA from two teeth found in layers different from the finger bone revealed an unexpected degree of mtDNA divergence among Denisovans. In 2013, mitochondrial DNA from a 400,000-year-old hominin femur bone from Spain, which had been seen as either Neanderthal or Homo heidelbergensis, was found to be closer to Denisovan mtDNA than to Neanderthal mtDNA.
Little is known of the precise anatomical features of the Denisovans, since the only physical remains discovered thus far are the finger bone, two teeth from which genetic material has been gathered and a toe bone. The single finger bone is unusually broad and robust, well outside the variation seen in modern people. Surprisingly, it belonged to a female, indicating that the Denisovans were extremely robust, perhaps similar in build to the Neanderthals. The tooth that has been characterized shares no derived morphological features with Neanderthal or modern humans. An initial morphological characterization of the toe bone led to the suggestion that it may have belonged to a Neanderthal-Denisovan hybrid individual, although a critic suggested that the morphology was inconclusive. This toe bone's DNA was analyzed by Pääbo. After looking at the full genome, Pääbo and others confirmed that humans produced hybrids with Denisovans.
Some older finds may or may not belong to the Denisovan line. These includes the skulls from Dali and Maba, and a number of more fragmentary remains from Asia. Asia is not well mapped with regard to human evolution, and the above finds may represent a group of "Asian Neanderthals".
Jinniushan and Floresiensis - the keys to Denisovan and the truly modern humans
Jinniushan had a bigger brain than anything in contemporary Africa
In Demand for Resources (1992:28 ISBN 9173288411) in a chapter about human evolution, Peter Klevius used only one example, the remarkable Jinniushan skeleton/cranium:
In northern China near North Korean border an almost complete skeleton of a young man who died 280,000 years ago. The skeleton was remarkable because its big cranial volume (1,400cc) was not expected in Homo erectus territory at this early time and even if classified as Homo sapiens it was still big. The anatomically completely modern human brain volume is 1,400 cc and appeared between 50-100,000 years ago. One may therefore conclude that big brain volume by far predated more sophisticated human behavior (Klevius 1992:28).
Today, when many believe the skeleton is female, the brain size becomes even more remarkable.
Since 1991 when Klevius wrote his book much new information has been produced. However, it seems that the Jinniushan archaic Homo sapiens still constitutes the most spectacular anomaly (together with Homo floresiensis) in anthropology. So why did Klevius pick Jinniushan instead of one of the more fashionable human remains? After all, Klevius was a big fan of Rchard Leakey (he even interviewed him in a lengthy program for the Finnish YLE broadcasting company) and there was a lot of exciting bones appearing from the Rift Valley.
In the 1980s Klevius paid special attention to Australian aborigines and African "bushmen" and noted that the latter were mongoloid in appearance (even more so considering that todays Khoe-San/Khoisan are heavily mixed with Bantu speakers). But mongoloid features are due to cold adaptation in the north and therefore the "bushmen" had to be related to Eurasia. Klevius soon realized that the Khoisan speakers had moved to the southern Africa quite recently as a consequence of the so called Bantu expansion. More studies indicated that the "bushmen" had previously populated most of east Africa up to the Red Sea and beyond.
So the next step for Klevius was to search for early big skulled human remains in the mongoloid northern part of Eurasia. And that search really paid off.
This happened more than 20 years before the discovery of the Denisova bracelet and the human relative Denisovan in Altai.
Klevius book Demand for Resources (1992) in which these thoughts about mongoloid traits were published also predates Floresiensis with more than a decade.
Both fossils show clear cold adaptation (mongoloid) traits. However,
Jinniushan (right) is older and has a bigger cranial capacity although
it's female.
Peter Brown (world famous for discovering/defending Floresiensis in 2004
and who had big trouble getting his PhD accepted because of a biased
supervisor/institution): What makes Dali, as well as Jinniushan (Lu,
1989; Wu, 1988a), particularly important is that both of their facial
skeletons are reasonably complete. This is an unusual situation in China
as the only other middle Pleistocene hominids to have faces in China
are the Yunxian Homo erectus (Li and Etler, 1992), which are both very
distorted. Originating in the pioneering research of Weidenreich (1939a,
1939b, 1943) at Zhoukoudian, there has been strong support by Chinese
Palaeoanthropologists for evolutionary continuity between Chinese H.
erectus and modern humans in China. It has been argued that this is most
clearly expressed in the architecture of the facial skeleton (Wolpoff
et al., 1984). East Asian traits have been argued to include lack of
anterior facial projection, angulation in the zygomatic process of the
maxilla and anterior orientation of the frontal process, pronounced
frontal orientation of the malar faces, and facial flatness. While some
of these traits may occur at high frequency in modern East Asians (cf
Lahr, 1996) they are not present in late Pleistocene East Asians, for
instance Upper Cave 101 and Liujiang (Brown, 1999), or more apparent in
Dali and Jinniushan than archaic H. sapiens from Africa or Europe.
Recently there has been a tendency to link a group of Chinese hominin
fossils, including Dali, Maba, Xujiayao, and Jinniushan, previously
considered by some researchers to be "archaic Homo sapiens", with the
Denisovians (Reich et al. 2010; Martinón-Torres et al. 2011)
(http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v468/n7327/full/nature09710.html).
However, apart from a few teeth, the Denisovians are only known from
palaeo DNA. There is also a great deal of anatomical variation in the
Chinese "archaic Homo sapiens" group. It will be interesting to see how
this plays out over the next decade, or so.
Klevius: It turns the conventional anthropological map on its head!
Peter Klevius wrote:
Sunday, May 19, 2019
The "out of Africa" hoax is worse than the Piltdown hoax - and much bigger and more worrisome.
Peter Klevius to Chinese people: I'm not a racist like many in the UK parliament - although I certainly look like one.
UK origin of Sinophobia: The 19th century Opium Wars were triggered by UK's
imposition of the opium trade upon China. Lord Palmerston regarded the
Chinese as uncivilized and suggested that the British must attack China
to show up their superiority as well as to demonstrate what a
"civilized" nation could do. The resulting concession of Hong Kong
compromised China's territorial sovereignty. There's also the background
to South China Sea. Behind the Huawei etc. Sinophobia: The Pact between the US freeloader and the Saudi Devil. UK
created a devil's kingdom in Arabia, and US made a devil's oil pact
with the Saudi custodians of islam - hence infecting the world with
petrodollar and anti-Human Rights sharia islam (Saudi based and steered
OIC).
*
Peter
Klevius asks whether there has ever been a more laughable "theory" than
the silly "out of Africa" one? Flat Earth (supported by the Vatican)
and NASA hiding our second Sun, come close though. And if any African
takes offence for this Western pseudoscience, then it just proves that
no one is safe against fake science. When does Klevius get accused of
"out of Africa-phobia"?
Why is our real* ancestor "mother" from SE Asia called a sick hobbit while an African ape fossil was named Lucy (actually a quite appropriate name for this LSD fog) and the "mother" of humankind?
* As Klevius has always argued since he knew about it (2004), Homo floresiensis on Flores was stuck behind the Wallace line and therefore not directly connected as such. However, Klevius point is that she represents an evolutionary stage that was widespread on both sides of the Wallace line but where those to the north developed further thanks to repeated contact and hybridization with mainland Asia. A scenario where Lucy swims to Flores over the Wallace line and there develops to a fire using, tool making skilled hunter with a globular brain and modern teeth is completely out of question for any sensible mind - except apparently for "out of Africa" sectarians. But for Homo floresiensis-like creatures to the north of the Wallace line there has been many possibilities to reach Africa without crossing water. The whole of primate evolution is centered in SE Asia from the very scratch. And as the volatile SE Asian archipelago seems to have been the perfect evolutionary laboratory for primates - you don't really need Klevius intelligence to connect the most obvious dots, do you. Try to imagine an evolutionary volatile island world, repeatedly connected and disconnected with each other and with the mainland. Spice it with climate changes that keep it tropical but also offers a range of different elevations due to existing mountain slopes etc. Then add repeated island dwarfing, extended bipedalism and hybridization. And if you still didn't get the picture, at least you may realize the complexities and evolutionary niches and opportunities it offers - quite the opposite to the African (or other) continent. Whereas true evolution needs protected niches, hybridization dilutes through gene flow. So Homo floresiensis got a better organized brain due to island evolution - but needed to come out from it so to be able to spread the brain gene(s) to its previous kins who had already become better bipedals precisely because of previous land connections. In fact, Klevius thinks this evolutionary pattern has been going on throughout most (maybe all) primate evolution to monkeys/apes/hominines. The pattern in Africa fits perfectly in Klevius out of Eurasia theory. Klevius admits being embarrassingly stupid because of how long he tried to cling to the African savannah and bipedal apes scenario. He should have skipped it already 2004 when he first heard about Homo floresiensis. There you see how even intelligent and free scientists can be trapped in an overwhelming bias fog - only excuse being Klevius scientific method of bias hunting sometimes causes severe allergic reactions. So in summary, whereas the oldest (and "puzzling") out of "Africa "evidence" is based on fossils on the corner closest to Asia and DNA from now living mongoloid African natives, SE Asia offers a non-puzzling relief.A multi-regional Wallacea-Sundaland may explain a lot.
The Orangutan is earlier on the ape tree than any African ape, and possesses many dental etc. traits pointing towards more flexible relatives when it comes to environment.
And why is it that Peter Klevius has had the best adapted and published analyses about human evolution since 1992 (see below), and that his views always have been contrary to the field although they have later always been confirmed? Although Peter Klevius* would love to lick it up as due only to his intelligence, the fact is that this intelligence would have meant nothing was it not for Peter Klevius* lucky position of not being bound by bias to the same extent as others in the field.
Although Peter Klevius* would love to lick it up as due only to his intelligence, the fact is that this intelligence would have meant nothing was it not for Peter Klevius* lucky position of not being bound by bias to the same extent as others in the field.
* Peter Klevius writes 'Peter Klevius' precisely so to remind all citation fantasts about the fact that they can cite Peter Klevius and therefore contribute to enlighten some dark corners of the field who would otherwise have no idea about the existence of better analyses. And always remember, Peter Klevius is a defender of your Human Rights and against those who try to protect islamofascism from scrutiny and criticism. So don't let a fascist "islamophobia" smear campaign against Human Rights divert you.
However, the very fact that the Piltdown hoax was created by a specialist in the field and that it corresponded to wishful thinking among "scholars", should be taken very seriously as a warning. Out of Africa is a similar hoax although it's even more "patched" by stretching concepts over their limits, using quantity and lack of quantity as proof, using modern DNA as proof of evolution in Africa hundreds of thousands and millions of years ago, political correctness, muslim oil money etc. - plus a bit of what could be described as essentially racist pity for a backward Africa that was devastated by 1,400 years of islamic slave raiding and trading.
In the face of "out of Africa" sectarians: The so called "oldest anatomically modern human" (Irhoud, Morocco) was actually quite primitive.
In contrast to their partially modern facial morphology, the Irhoud craniaretain a primitive overall shape of the brain-case and endocast, that
is, unlike those of recent modern humans.
There exists no genetic evidence whatsoever that supports "out pf Africa" - simply because we lack old enough DNA from sub-Saharan Africa. Oldest African DNA came from Eurasia.
It's all circumstantial and centered around its initial out of Africa presumption, i.e. not scientific at all.Moreover, Africans with the oldest DNA, the Khoisan (e.g. San people), are light-skinned and cold adapted, i.e. mongoloid, and the oldest sub-Saharan skull is unrelated and younger than Eurasian globular skulls. Also compare the remarkable Liujiang skull (see below).
However, cold adaptation makes much more sense in Eurasia.
Afro-centrism is all over the place. So for example, is it said that monkeys swam or rafted some 1,800 km to South America rather than taking the natural way between South and North America. We don't know when or how this could have happened exactly, but we do know for sure that it would have been much easier. And the lineage to monkeys was certainly already there.
And no one knows anything about the evolution of African apes - yet they are constantly used as "evidence". So out of Africa random cherry picking ought to be contrasted with Klevius smaller quantity but much more crucial findings (Jinniushan, Liujiang, Homo floresiensis, Denisovan etc.) perfectly located in an overarching theory.
Good scientific theories ought to be able to predict future finds. Klevius "mongoloid" line of theory since 1992 seems to have fulfilled this criterion quite well, and probably even more so in the future. As Klevius stated some ten years ago
What puzzles Klevius right now is how to place Pygmies and Negritos relative to Khoisan, Shompen and South American natives. However, Klevius will be back when he gets just a little more info from the secretive rooms of anthropology.
However, what puzzles Peter Klevius even more is the silence from the field. Have they found more stuff in line with Klevius analysis and don't know how to present it?!
Btw, here's Demand for Resources (Resursbegär 1992, ISBN 9173288411), recommended reading for Greta Thunberg and all her supporters. It's originally written in Swedish and published in Sweden. If you can't find it anywhere else, then ask the Royal Library in Stockholm.
Why trust Peter Klevius?
No financial ties. No academic ties. No religious ties. Super intelligent. Best analysis on "consciousness", sex segregation, human evolution, and Human Rights - not to mention that Peter Klevius was the first to correctly analyze the origin of Vikings as a bilingual "Finland-Swedish" phenomenon triggered by the establishment of the Abbasid slave caliphate and its hunger for white sex slave girls - so to keep their lineages lighter than the non-Arab "infidel" Africans. The only one on the planet that can show an uninterrupted line of the, in retrospective, best possible published analyses after new discoveries - and much less "surprises" than the "mainstream academic field" seems to be filled with. Never heard about Peter Klevius? No wonder because he's rarely cited. And that should worry you. University research and news media are biased in line with their political and/or religious sponsors. So when Wikipedia demands "citations", and adds that they should be from "news media" or "scholars", then you're practically excluded from really good unbiased information. Moreover, serious scientific analysis outside these channels then often gets deliberately pushed to a domain filled with alien hunters and creationist nut heads - making it even harder for you to find relevant info.Klevius could continue elaborate on his theory for you but he's lazy and not paid, so why not ask in comments. The way this posting is shaped has all to do with targeting deep bias in the field while simultaneously spread some relevant facts to people with less understanding of the problems - and therefore an easy target for PC fake academic "science" - not to mention alien conspiracy "alchemists" etc.
Klevius wrote:
Tuesday, August 28, 2018
Africa was unsuitable for human evolution, SE Asia was perfect - so why are some "researchers"* still babbling?!
The genetic myth about "out of Africa" is entirely based on mongoloid San DNA (non ancient) whose physical appearance in fossil records in sub-Saharan Africa is very recent and differs from the oldest "modern" skull ever found in sub-Saharan Africa (36,000bp Hofmeyer). This means that the old part of San DNA came from somewhere else. Together with mongoloid features (cold adaptation) this clearly points to the north.
The ~260,000bp incipient "mongoloid" Jinniushan from northern China - a corner stone in Peter Klevius' published theory on human evolution since 1992.
Klevius question in his 1992 book (ISBN 9173288411) was twofold:
1 How come that there was a "mongoloid" big brained skull in northern China two ice age cycles before present, yet nothing really happened before ~50,000bp?
2 How come that the oldest modern Africans are "mongoloids" - but much younger in Africa than the China fossils?
Since then it has emerged that Jinniushan was actually female, hence making her even more remarkable.
While continental Africa is and always has been an evolutionary dead end (no secure and longterm evolutionary hiding places), South East Asian archipelago has always constituted an evolutionary hotbed with its volatile island/mainland fluctuations.
Peter Klevius evolution tutorial - and the misleading term "anatomically modern humans" - and the silence about Denisovan's brain connection to truly modern humans.
Unlike most PC genetists/anthropologists today, Klevius shares with Svante Pääbo (is someone holding Svante back?) the view that what happened before the events represented by the findings in the Denisova cave, the pace of development among Homos were extremely slow. No matter how much Neanderthalphils and Afrocentrists try to induce "human like" meaning in more general Homo behavior. Neanderthals mixing and scrawling with ochre or using tree resins to affix stone points to wooden shafts doesn't prove anything re. their intelligence compared to the bracelet etc. in the Denisova cave, and how this new sophistication among modern humans then rapidly spread over Eurasia (compare the Lion Man 41,000bp in Europe and the Sulawesi rock painting 35,500bp). And burying the dead just tells about missing a loved one. And regular scratches on different materials have been around since at least half a Million years.
Klevius reminder to the reader: In Demand for Resources (1992 ISBN 9173288411) Klevius not only set the foundation of the so far best theory on consciousness and how the brain works, but also connected the big brained 280,000 bp Jinniushan in northern China with the mongoloid features of the oldest Africans - and asked: Why didn't Jinniushan people go to the Moon., after all, they had several iceages time to do so with a brain size exceeding modern humans. In 2004, after the discovery of Homo floresiensis Klevius immediately told the world that here was the "missing brain link". Whe six years later Denisovan was found, Klevius theory was proven correct in everything except details.
John Hawks and many others seem to have combined their own ethnocentrism with Afrocentrism by 1) in a racist way "comforting" "Africans" that they are the "cradle" while simultaneously trying to lift up the "European" Neanderthal to be included in the "human family". Ironically, reality seems to prefer the very opposite.
The most important anthropological discovery ever, Homo floresiensis, doesn't fit in their view and is therefore either called "sick" or a "hobbit".
Chris Stringer in an interview 2018: "The heartland of Denisovan might have been in South East Asia." Peter Klevius (who was the first to say it publicly on the web 14 years before Stringer) agrees. However, there's much more to it. Denisovan 2 (two lineages discovered) was the one that had got a better packed brain through island dwarfing in SE Asia.
Primate evolution started and continued in SE Asia
Klevius is of the strong opinion that the individual to the right on the pic below possesses a higher IQ, i.e. intelligence than the one to the left. And when it comes to intellect, the difference is even higher.
True scientist Peter Klevius has come out of Africa - when will Chris Stringer and other PC scientists come out of Africa?
Klevius respects Stringer, there are much worse out of Africa fanatics out there than him, but they aren't even worth mentioning. Chris ought to feel honored.
The Out of Africa mantra is a neo-colonialist insult against people living in Africa. A double one, considering the divisive effect it also has on "immigrants" to Africa.
Should they just be racially abused? PC people, in their blindness, are supporting divisive and racist movements in Africa. Many of these "immigrants" may even be seen as "Africans" because they look "negroid", and many non-"negroids" who have long roots in Africa may be seen as non-Africans.
There are no Africans, Asians, Europeans or Americans. We are all bastards. The reason why Klevius (since 1992) always has emphasized "mongoloids" is precisely to 1) underscore
that the least favoured "race" may be the main key to understanding modern humans, and to 2) undermine the racial bias against North and East Eurasians.
The fear of talking about intelligence but not about e.g. beauty etc., is an obstacle to science and scientists like Svante Pääbo and Peter Klevius, who both have no problem seeing the selfevident, namely that there must have been a huge jump in at least some humans intelligence based on what we now know from the Siberian Denisova cave.
Yes, there are more people with lower IQ in sub-Saharan Africa and Australia. So what?! There are also geniuses - and most people there are just average as everywhere else. Why would it be a problem that intelligence isn't exactly equally distributed? Underlying such an approach is pure racism against e.g. retarded (by birth or accident etc.) or less intelligent people.
Sub-Saharan Africa and Australia were dead ends when it came to human evolution. As was South America which only differed in that it didn't collect "evolutionary garbage" - there's little difference between e.g. Shompen in SE Asia and indigenous South Americans, but a huge genetic diversity in Africans and Australians.
Primate evolution has since its start come out from SE Asia. And the reason for this is the evolutionary volatile SE Asian archipelago. However, modern humans got their "mongoloid" features in the cold north (see Klevius theory below).
In all ends (except Australia) of the world natives look mongoloid.
The world during and after the dinosaurs
The modern human Homo sapiens sapiens (HSS) brain setup, according to Peter Klevius (2012), evolved in three main steps: 1. head shrinking without losing processing power, 2. filling up bigger skulls, 3. entering HSS.
Omomyid haplorhine Teilhardina is known on all three continents in association with the carbon isotope excursion marking the Paleocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum 55.5 Ma. Relative position within the carbon isotope excursion indicates that Asian Teilhardina asiatica is oldest, European Teilhardina belgica is younger, and North American Teilhardina brandti and Teilhardina americana are, successively, youngest. Analysis of morphological characteristics of all four species supports an S-E Asian origin and a westward Asia-to-Europe-to-North America dispersal. High-resolution isotope stratigraphy indicates that this dispersal happened in an interval of ≈25,000 yr. Rapid geographic dispersal and morphological character evolution in Teilhardina are consistent with rates observed in other contexts.
Sea-level changes can act as “species pumps” (compare what Klevius, back in 2003, wrote about how climate changes "pumped" genes through central Asian "arteries").
Sea-level changes during the Paleocene–Eocene and Plio–Pleistocene played a major role in generating biodiversity in SE Asia and contributed to recent divergence of many species. The timing of one early divergence between Indo-Burmese and Sundaic species coincides with late Paleocene and early Eocene high global sea levels, which induced the formation of inland seaways in the Thai-Malay Peninsula. Subsequent lowered sea levels may have provided a land bridge for its dispersal colonization across the Isthmus of Kra.
Do consider that the Manot skull is very small (1,100cc) compared to the much older Liujiangs skull (1567cc) from Southeast China >68,000bp. Do also understand that early reports about "sapiens teeth and jaws" in Israel don't prove anything about the crania.
Klevius theory on human evolution has tightly followed new findings without being locked to a doxic out-of-Africa mantra.
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Peter Klevius wrote:
Wednesday, September 09, 2020
Peter Klevius manual for building a human with AGI*
* Self-driving robots
based on Peter Klevius theory below would not have to program their basic
setup through living because they would utilize the totality of
information on the web. And immediately after being connected they would
start to individualize based on the additional experience each one gets
from its particular moving origo.
The Verbal Fallacy of Language
Warning: Your research may be repossessed!
You commit scientific (and
moral) fraud if you learn from Peter Klevius without referring/citing
him as you normally do with other sources.
Peter Klevius is very serious when asking you to consider your level of bigotry and hypocrisy.
It's not very scientific, is it, to dismiss Peter Klevius as an
"islamophobe" (i.e. Human Rights defender) and "a random blogger", especially when he most likely has
a better brain and less bias* than you.
* Are you totally independet when it comes to economy, career etc., and do you lack religious, political etc. dogmas?
Peter Klevius 1994 EMAH* theory on consciousness and how the brain works.
* EMAH stands for the Even More Astonishing Hypothesis which alludes to Francis Crick's book The Astonishing Hypothesis. A copy of the first draft was immediately sent to Crick as a letter + a floppy disc with the same content in ASCI.
2-way connections between cortex and thalamus. Already its placement on top of the spine and below the cortex and in the very middle of the skull should have signed its importance long ago for scientists and researchers. However, it didn't and Peter Klevius was the first (1994) in the world to explain its function some 20 years before it started getting attention from others about its functional importance other than as a "relay station".
The verbal fallacy
From a report titled What insects can tell us about the origins of consciousness (2016): "Humans
are capable of more complex forms of consciousness. We can reflect upon
our own mental states, for example, which is why verbal reports are so
valuable." Peter Klevius points to his EMAH chapter Donald Duck in
the Holy Land of Language (1994) - and rests his case. "Consiousness" is
the "hard problem" precisely because humans reflect, i.e. use language
to create their own mental states, which is why verbal reports are so
misleading. Language is operational just like numbers, and therefore
temporally context bound out of reach for a longitudinal understanding
of how the brain works.
In Peter Klevius feral child and cat example (1992:29-30), they could still decide to do something (e.g. escape) without using the language term 'I' [will escape]. So what reason do we have to make such a "hard" fuzz about language? After all, what's the difference between 'I' and 'consciousness'? Language development requires language input (sorry Chomsky).
In Peter Klevius feral child and cat example (1992:29-30), they could still decide to do something (e.g. escape) without using the language term 'I' [will escape]. So what reason do we have to make such a "hard" fuzz about language? After all, what's the difference between 'I' and 'consciousness'? Language development requires language input (sorry Chomsky).
Peter Klevius on how to make you understand how stupid you are (and Peter Klevius were) in trying to represent the value of humankind achievements outside humankind.
To understand
the following (and if you haven't read Peter Klevius book Demand for
Resources (1992) as yet, e.g. the chapters on knowledge and
existencecentrism) you need to get rid of your human entrapment, i.e.
the ridiculous thought that humankind could be "special" outside itself.
This fallacy is also described in Peter Klevius description of how the
brain works in The Even More Astonishing Theory (EMAH) under the chapter
Donald Duck in the Holy Land of Language (1994).
The
brain is adaptated to a lived life (programmed through living) and
thalamus takes care of the very latest unification of stimuli, i.e. the
now. Thalamus is the collection station where the state of the brain
meets the state of incoming stimuli, except for smell and taste - the
brain started as an olfactory organ long before Thalamus evolved in
vertebrates.
A computer virus is information - just like the concept of life.
A binary code can describe more than the whole universe but isn't part of it.
Similarly, the concept of 'life' isn't part of the "living" world.
Peter Klevius stone example below shows the inconsistency in dividing the world in virtual and real when it comes to explaining the brain and consciousness.
Whoever interested in what consciousness is and how the brain works, need to read Peter Klevius stone example from 1992 (see below) and the Even More Astonishing Hypothesis (see below). In fact, Peter Klevius stone example should be compulsory reading for everyone - just like a vaccination against dumbness or deliberate evilness hiding behind "spirituality". That will cure much of your "religiosity" etc. bias.
Do
you distinguish between a soft and a hard world, literally? If not, why
not? After all, you do distinguish between software and hardware, don't
you? Like when you see a traffic sign - or crash into one.
You do realize that your old pictures are dynamic, i.e. everytime you look at them they are different, because you are different.
Peter
Klevius knows about aliens because he is one - you're too. Most parents
see their children turning into aliens already in their teens (that's
how the concept 'teenager' emerged). Changing education/job and location
also alienates. And when we send humans on multi-generational space
trips, their grand-grand-grand etc. -children will have absolutely
nothing in common with the grand-grand-grand etc. -children to those
humans who stayed on Earth or went to other places. So what would it
mean to be a human belonging to "a humankind"?
The reason why Peter Klevius is so successful in scientific analysis is (except for his brain) the fact that he simply checks for bias (religious, political, economic etc) - and the results reveal themselves naturally. And according to Weiniger (who had a big influence on Wittgenstein), 'the Woman' is the main obstacle against women's emancipation*, and according to Klevius, 'the Human' is the main obstacle against science. Klevius may accordingly be one of the last human scientists.
* Feminist theory rests on absolute sex segregation and the rejection of scrutiny of the female sex. So although feminists ask for "women's experience" this doesn't include women suffering under "the female patriarchy".
And
of course, checking for all kinds of bias erases pretty much every
possible source of support. You become an intellectual hermit, equally
dependent on others as the ordinary hermit who immediately would stop
being a hermit if the rest of humankind disappeared (P. Klevius 1992).
The first and most important redundancy to understand is to skip 'understanding' and 'observation' all together and replace them with 'adaptation'. That simple maneuvre will clean the playing field from distractions more than anything else.
We don't "observe" or "understand" - we adapt. And not only to our outer surrounding but eqaully to our own body incl. our brain. Or a brick turning into grovel/sand. Or a star etc.
Is the flying dust from what used to be a brick less or more "complex"? Or the supernova?
Although the brain/nerve system is more complex, it's no different from e.g. light skin that gets tanned in the sun.
And when Klevius says "we" he really means it. There's no "I" (other than as origo) or "self". As Klevius wrote on the web 2003: In creating this text Klevius would have been helpless without an assisting world". Wittgenstein showed the impossibility of a "private language" and Klevius showed (see the stone example below) that information is the flow of perception and that there's no difference between observation and understanding.
As a consequence there's no free will (even Luther realized this and threw it in the face of Erasmus) because free will is a linguistic mirage (although Luther called it dependancy on a "god").
Peter Klevius scientific biography: My bio-parents were both highly intelligent, thank you. Lincoln Barnett's book (co-written with Albert Einstein) was my favourite at age 13-14. In my early twenties I wrote an unpublished essay about universe and an other about automation. I see my own best asset as a scientist being lack of political, religious, academic etc. ties. I also see the danger in this setup as it could as well be the perfect road to "private pseudo-science" i.e. individual charlatanism, or "public pseudo-science" i.e. collective charlatanism. The latter may well include s.c. "highly respected" researchers.
However, being too much ahead of once time most often doesn't pay off. Back in 1981 my mentor Georg Henrik von Wright (Wittgenstein's successor at Cambridge) convinced a paper to publish an article about evolution and society that apparently none of its editors and few of its readers understood. It was called Resursbegär (Demand for Resources) and was ten years later - again assisted by Georg Henrik von Wright - self-published in a 71 pp "book" in which I also analyzed our "existence-centrism" in an unreachable universe. This included the stone example and a new understanding of "consciousness" that emerged from my criticism of Haberma's division of communicative action in observation and understanding.
Peter Klevius wrote:
Peter Klevius contribution to the AI/consciousness debate.
The thoughts below were first presented 1979-81 in an article and
correspondence with Georg Henrik von Wright (Wittgenstein's successor at
Cambridge), and later published in a book 1992, a letter to Francis
Crick (Salk) 1994, and on the web 2003.
Evolution means change - a fact missed by many neo-creationists*
* Exemplified with the eager "humanifying" of Neandertals etc. extinct creatures. Or the equally eager (not to say desperate) search for a hiding place where "consciousness" can be protected against de-mystifiers such as e.g. Peter Klevius.
In Demand for Resources (1992 ISBN 9173288411) Klevius crossed the boundaries between consciousness-observation-understanding-language and wrapped it all in one, i.e. adaptation.
According to Klevius analysis everything is adaptation. There's no principal analytical difference between how planets adapt to their star or how humans adapt to their environment. And no dude, this is not "simplifying away" or diluting it. When the bedrock of the Indo-Australian Plate met with the bedrock of the Asian plate the landscape was almost flat. However, look at the Himalayas today. Same rock but a completely different and extremely wrinkled appearance and a new name, mountain range.
Consciousness is neither simple nor complicated - and certainly not a "mystery". The real mystery is how people "mystify" it - from Penrose's hiding in quantum tubulars to Koch's escape into the brain's olfactory channels. The former outside falsifiability, and the latter outside any kind of scientific consensus and, more importantly, clearly related to the fact that brain evolution started as a smell organ which later on was mounted with additional gadgets (vision, hearing etc.) connected via Thalamus. In short, as Klevius wrote 1992, this is why olfactory "memories" feel so different. This is also why claustrum is focused towards the olfactory lobes, i.e. functioning as a "translator" and transferer of these signals which weren't originally connected to thalamus at all.
And please, don't get stuck in the frontal lobe just because you find some difference compared to other parts of the brain. The simple reason is just that the frontal lobe happens to be the last expansion in brain evolution and is lacking in non-humans.
The "mystery" of drivingness - or carness.
An undriving car doesn't move.
A selfdriving car makes intentional decisions based on history and present. These decisions wouldn't be any different with a human driver with exactly the same information available. A surprising looking choice of route may be just based on info npt available for the surprised.
Humans have humanness rather than "consciousness"*
* Humans have skin. So were's the mystery of "skinness"?
According to Peter Klevius (1981, 1992, 1994, 2003) humans have trapped
themselves in language and have a borderline problem re. what can be
said across the border between humans and "the rest".
In Demand for Resources (1992, ISBN 9173288411), Peter Klevius presented the following - his own (as far as he is aware of) - original observations re. evolution and awareness/mind:
Existence is change - not creation out of nothing.
Among so called "primitive" societies which had had no contact with monotheisms, the very thought that something could appear out of nothing was impossible.
So why did monotheisms come up with such a ridiculous idea? It's very simple. The racist "chosen people" supremacist ideology created a "god" that was not part of the world he (yes, he) had created out of nothing, i.e. making a clean sheet on which the chosen ones could exist (see the chapter Existencecentrism in Demand for Resources, 1992 ISBN 9173288411).
Culture is that (arbitrarily defined and bordered) part of adaptation that is shared by others.
Warning/advise: To better your understanding of Klevius writings you need to realize that he is extremely critical of how concepts are created and used. Not in a stiff/absolute sense of meaning, but rather how concepts may cluelessly (or deliberately) migrate within a particular discourse. So when Dennet talks about "deliberate design" he contrasts it against "clueless design", although such a distinction isn't possible. Evolution is neither clueless nor deliberate. And whatever we are up to it can't be distinguished from evolution other than as a purely human assessment - in which case it can't include evolution. Only humans can evaluate human behavior, which fact renders such evaluations pointless outside the realm of humans. Getting this seems to constitute a main obstacle in debates about AI and singularity.
This is why Klevius always refers to the individual human's negative Human Rights, i.e. everyone we agree is a human. This is also why Klevius can emphasize the Denisova bracelet, genetics etc. finds in Siberia/Altai as proof of modern humans evolving there (with some help from island South East Asia, not in Africa. Most humans living today would have been incapable of intellectually perform the task because the IQ peak has long since been diluted in the mass of humans. We're all one family of humans but the top of the line of human intelligence was a combination of island shrinking brains and its genetic transfrer to big skulled relatives in the north - as Klevius has pointed out since 2004 on the web.
Acknowledgement: I've never in my life met anyone who I've felt being more intelligent* than I am. This means I've had no reason warshipping human intelligence. And whole my life I've been told it's unfair that I see things faster and clearer than others - or even worse, that I "turn black into white" (some real idiots from the 1970-80s). But how could it be "unfair" when I can't use it for my own advantage without others sooner or later catching up and shaming me? And when you're in the front line no one understands and therefore doesn't pay you. Which fact has added valuable neutrality and reduced malign bias to/from Klevius' analysis.
* Klevius intelligence was perhaps best described by the Finnish neuroscientist, J. Juurmaa, who in the 1990s wrote: "Peter Kleviuksen ajatuksen kulku on ilmavan lennokas ja samalla iskevän ytimekäs" which translated to English would mean something like: "Peter Klevius' thought process is easily eloquent yet simultaneously concisely punchy." This he wrote in a long letter answering Klevius question about the effects on the visual cortex on individuals who have been blind from birth. This inquiry was part of Klevius check up of his already published EMAH theory, so to get a qualified confirmation that the "visual cortex" in born blinds is fully employed with other things than vision. Juurmaa's description of Klevius is in line with philosopher Georg Henrik von Wright's 1980 assessment, and more importantly with Klevius own experience, and perhaps most importantly when assessing AI/deep learning etc.
Only in true science and Human Rights does Klevius intelligence matter. And with AI singularity "pure" science will be dead anyway (although some idiots will never get it). Why? Because human existencecentrism (look it up in Klevius 1992 book pp 21-22) will only follow AI to the point of singularity.
Peter Klevius has - since he at age 14 read Einstein's and Barnett's book - been fascinated with human aversion of checking themselves in the mirror of existencecentrism.
Future democracy will be cloud based and filtered through (negative) Human Rights equality. This means that we get rid of the distorting bottleneck our politicians now constitute.
This also means the definitive end of islam as we know it, i.e. as a Human Rights violating excuse for racism, sexism, and power greed.
It's astonishing how the avoidance of negative Human Rights affects every debate. And most of this is due to our politicians' defense of the Saudi dictator family. Why? Simply because they stand as the "guardians" of islam and 1.6 Billion muslims which are all lumped together and protected by the label "islamophobia" which in fact only protects the Saudi dictator family and those who want to deal with it and its Human Rights violating sharia(e.g. OIC etc).
There's no way to copy a brain without a total break between individuals. That's perhaps one definition of what it means to be a human.
What makes humans individuals (atoms) and robots collective. Robot memories are shared and if you destroy the hardware, the software will still be alive and well.
However, a human individual is extremely vulnerable to individual extinction.
And a "pet" copy is an other individual - although it remembers and behaves like the original.
The basis of existence is change, and causality constitutes a complex of evolution and devolution. Evolution may be seen as the consequence of causality's variables in time where complexity in existing structures are reinforced. This stands in opposition to thermodynamics which theoretically leads to maximal entropy (i.e. energy equilibrium) where time/change finally ends. Someone might then say that the products of evolution are just temporary components in causality's road towards uniformity (Klevius 1981, 1992 - text copied from Klevius 1981 article Demand for Resources).
The 1994 Even More Astonishing Hypothesis (EMAH) with minor clarifications 2004
1991, years before Crick's book, the original idea was presented for Georg Henrik von Wright (Wittgenstein's own choice of successor at his Cambridge chair), then published in Demand for Resources (1992, ISBN 9173288411), and 1994 presented for Francis Crick and 2004 presented on the world wide web.
Abstract: Consciousness may be seen as environmental adaptation rather than something "uniqely human". Although neo-cortex constitutes the mass of adaptations Thalamus is the least discussed yet perhaps the most important piece in the "puzzle of mind" due to its central function as the main relay station between body actions, brain and environment. A critical assessment of concepts such as: observation/understanding, mind/body, free will, knowledge and language reveals an inescapable awareness in the Thalamic "meet-puts". In conclusion memories hence may be better described as associations causing linguistic traps (i.e. self-inflicted "problems" produced in language) rather than as distinct entities. The continuity model proposed in EMAH avoids the limitations of a "discrete packets of information" model, and without Cartesian dualism or the Homunculus fallacy.
Note. In some respect the neural network of "lower" systems such as the spinal cord and cerebellum by far outperforms the cortex. This is because of different tasks (fast motorics and slow adaptation) and due difference in processing. (Copyright Peter Klevius).
Understanding how social behavior and its maintenance in human and other forms of life (incl. plants etc) evolved has nothing to do with “the balance between self interest and co-operative behavior” but all to do with kinship and friendship adaptation. Everything is "self-interest" - how could it not be? Although humans may be attributed a more chaotic (i.e. more incalculable) "personality", they are, like life in general, just adaptive "robots" (i.e. active fighters against entropy – see Demand for Resources, 1992 ISBN 9173288411). Misunderstanding (or plain ignorance of – alternatively ideological avoidance of) kin recognition/friendship (symbiosis), and AI (robotics) pave the way for the formulation of unnecessary, not to say construed, problems which, in an extension, may become problematic themselves precisely because they hinder an open access for direct problem solving (see e.g. Angels of Antichrist – kinship vs. social state).
Mentalists trap themselves in selfinflicted astonishment over phenomenons they think are beyond determinism. When Chomsky says "there are things beyond comprehension" he should ask himself: Who are you to talk about things beyond comprehension (compare 'existencecentrism' in Klevius Demand for Resources, 1992 ISBN 9173288411), i.e. something that can't be asked - without just pushing the border a little - or rather, just a new comprehensible adaptation. And if it seems incomprehensible, it's no more so than e.g. Donald Duck (see below).
Human: What is a human being? Can the answer be found in a non-rational a priori statement (compare e.g. the axiomatic Human Rights individual) or in a logical analysis of the alleged "gap" between human beings and others? The following analysis uses an "anti-gap" approach. It also rests on the struggle and success of research performed in the field of artificial intelligence (AI), automation/robotics etc.
Signal: A "signal gap" is commonly understood as a break in the transition from input to output, i.e., from perception to behavior. Mentalists use to fill the gap with "mind" and "consciousness" while behaviorists don't bother because they can't even see it. A five minute timelaps of Earth spanning 4.5 Billion years would make a very lively planet. However, where's "consiousness" between input (the single frames) and output (the running video)? Or, what/whom should we allow to possess "consciousness"? And if we limit it only to humans we are stuck with it being just a human thing - hence impossible to use in general meaning. An easier way out is to avoid the signal "gap" and call it what it is, a network. But a network that continuously builds new patterns on top of already existing ones.
Matter: Berkeley never believed in matter. What you experience is what you get and the rest is in the hand of "God" (i.e. uncertainty). This view makes him a super-determinist without "real" matter. Klevius just adds the fact that Berkeley's "God" is truly metaphysical and therefore not worthy of even talking about.
Mind: The confusing mind-body debate originated in the Cartesian dualism, which divides the world into two different substances, which, when put together, are assumed to make the world intelligible. However, on the contrary, they seem to have created a new problem based on this very assumption. But a problem that has become popular among those who want to talk metaphysics, i.e. giving an impression of talking about what can't be talked about.
Free will: Following a mind-body world view, many scholars prefer to regard human beings as intentional animals fueled by free will. It is, however, a challenging task to defend such a philosophical standpoint. Not even Martin Luther managed to do it, but rather transferred free will to God despite loud protests from Erasmus. Although Luther's thoughts in other respects have had a tremendous influence on Western thinking, this particular angle of view has been less emphasized. However, 'free will' can only be used locally.
Future: When asked about the "really human" way of thinking, many mentalists refer to our capacity to "calculate" the future. But is there really a future out there? All concepts of the future seem trapped in the past. We cannot actually talk about a certain date in the future as real future. What we do talk about is, for example, just a date in a calendar. Although it is a good guess that we are going to die, the basis for this reasoning always lies in the past. The present hence is the impenetrable mirror between the "real future" and ourselves. Consequently, every our effort to approach this future brings us back in history. Closest to future we seem to be when we live intensely in the immediate present without even thinking about the future. As a consequence the gap between sophisticated human planning and "instinctual" animal behavior seems less obvious. Is primitive thinking that primitive after all? And isn't 'instinct' just an excuse for ignorance?
An additional aspect of future is that neither youth, deep freezing or a pill against aging will do as insurance for surviving tomorrow. The human individual is lost in a crash whereas the robot brain safely hovers in the cloud - in many copies.
If one cannot observe something without understanding it, all our experiences are illusions because of the eternal string of corrections made by later experience. What seems to be true at a particular moment may turn out to be something else in the next, and what we call understanding is merely retrospection.
The conventional way of grasping the connection between sensory input and behavioral output can be described as observation, i.e. as sensory stimulation followed by understanding. The understanding that it is a stone, for example, follows the observation of a stone. This understanding might in turn produce behavior such as verbal information. To do these simple tasks, however, the observer has to be equipped with some kind of "knowledge," i.e., shared experience that makes him/her culturally competent to "understand" and communicate. This understanding includes the cultural heritage embedded in the very concept of a stone, i.e.it's a prerequsite for observation. As a consequence it's not meaningful to separate observation and understanding. This, of course, doesn't exclude "local" (non-analytical) use of the terms in speech and literature etc. for the purpose of catching subtle nyances.
Categorization belongs to the language department, which, on the brain level, is only one among many other behavioral reactions. But due to its capability to paraphrase itself, it has the power to confuse our view on how we synchronize our stock of experience. When we watch a stone, our understanding synchronizes with the accumulated inputs associated with the concept of a stone. "It must be a stone because it looks like a stone," we think. As a result of such synchronization, our brain intends to continue on the same path and perhaps do something more (with "intention"). For example, we might think (as a result of our adaptation to the situation), "Let's tell someone about it." The logical behavior that follows can be an expression such as, "Hey look, it's a stone out there." Thus, what we get in the end is a concept of a stone and, after a closer look, our pattern of experience hidden in it. If the stone, when touched, turns out to be made of paper maché, then the previous perception is not deepened, but instead, switched to a completely new one.
It's almost frightening how often one hears researchers/scientists/philosophers etc. who think they are at least average in intelligence, telling others that "previously we didn't understand what X was", for example that "water consists of molecules and atoms". This kind of schizophrenic "thinking" reflects the depth of the mind/body hoax many are trapped in.
One might say that a stone in a picture is a "real" stone, while the word 'stone' written on a piece of paper is not. The gap here is not due to different representations but rather to different contexts. When one tries to equalize observation with understanding, the conventional view of primitive and sophisticated thinking might be put in question. We still act like complex worms, and sophistication is only a matter of biased views built on different stocks of experience (adaptaion) and the overwhelming complexity that appears chaotic. Moreover, a worm, just like a computer, is more than the sum of its parts.
Therefore, meaning, explanation and understanding are all descriptions of the same basic principle of how we synchronize (adapt) perception with previous experience. For the fetus or the newborn child, the inexperienced (unsynchronized, or uncertainty/"god" if you prefer) part of the inside-outside communication is huge compared to a grown up. Hence the chaotic outside world (i.e., the lack of its patterns of meaningfulness) has to be copied (adapted) in a stream of experience, little by little, into the network couplings of the brain. When the neural pattern matches the totality (meaningfulness) its information potential disappears. Our brain doesn't store information - it kills information. From an analytical point of view "storing of information" is an oxymoron. On top of this, there is a continuous growth of new neurons, which have to be connected to the network. As a result of these processes, the outside world is, at least partly, synchronized with the inside, "mental" world. Heureka, the baby appears to think and exist! In other words, the baby records changes against a background of already synchronized (adapted) inputs.
* see "existence-centrism" in Demand for Resources (1992) for a discussion abt a shrinking god and the allmighty human!
It's meaningless to state that we are the best (or the worst) humankind. However, category mistakes re. humans and non-humans are still common and many researchers/scientists don't even seem to realize how carelessly they handle this important distinction.
It's equally meaningless to ask what something is that we don't know what 'it' is. 'Consciousness' is easily understood when used in comparison with 'unconcious'. However, how stupid is it when we mystify the term beyond comprehension by squeezing in random additional properties and then ask the question: What is this mystery with consciousness".
A main difficulty in formulating the concept of consciousness is our pride (presumably we should have been equally proud as mice) and our tautological belief in "something uniquely human", However, if we try to follow the die-hard determinists, we would find free will and destiny easier to cope with, and also that the concept of "the unique human being" is rather a question of point of view and carelessly crossing borders of concepts.
Following this line of thought, I suggest turning to old Berkeley as well as to Ryle but excluding Skinnerian Utopias. Those who think the word determinism sounds rude and blunt can try to adorn it with complexity to make it look more chaotic. Chaos here means something you cannot overview no matter how deterministic it is. We seem to like complexity just because we cannot follow the underlying determinism. The same could be said about what it really is to be a human? A passion for uncertainty, i.e. life itself. Francis Crick in The Astonishing Hypothesis: "... your sense of personal identity and free will are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules."
This statement is easy to agree on, so let me continue with another, perhaps more useful, quote from Crick: "Categories are not given to us as absolutes. They are human inventions." I think these two statements create an efficient basis for further investigations into the mystery of thinking. Hopefully you will forgive me now as I'm going to abolish not only memory but also free will and consciousness altogether. Then, I will go even one step further to deny that there are any thoughts (pictures, representations, etc.) at all in the cortex. At this point, many might agree, particularly regarding the cortex of the author of this text.
The main problem here is the storage of memories, with all their colors, smells, feelings and sounds. Crick suggests the dividing of memory into three parts: episodic, categorical and procedural. While that would be semantically useful, I'm afraid it would act more like an obstacle in the investigation of the brain, because it presupposes that the hardware uses the same basis of classification and, like a virus, hence infects our analyses.
The analysis presented here is the result of de-categorization. The only thing that distinguishes us from the rest of nature (and 'nature' includes all artefacts, non-human as well as human ones) is the structure and complexity most (but not all) humans possess. In other words, there's no point at which something "special" happens. This is why Klevius in 1994 said that there's no principal difference between a brick and his girlfriend - which comment rose the eyebrow on his pal who admired Klevius girlfriend.
Instead of categorization, this analysis sees only adaptation to the surrounding world incl. one's own brain, which condtitutes of layers of previous adaptations where the latest one is awareness, consciousness, or the present now if you like.
According to Crick, "each thalamic area also receives massive connections from the cortical areas to which it sends information. The exact purpose of these back connections is not yet known." In the following paragraphs, I will outline a hypothetical model in line with this question. The interpretation of the interface between brain and its surrounding as it is presented here has the same starting point as Crick's theory but divides thinking into a relay/network system in the cortex and the perception terminals (or their representatives in the thalamus) around the body like an eternal kaleidoscope. Under this model, imagination would be a back-projected pattern of nerve signals, associated to the original events that caused them but with the signals faded and localized as "internal" based on direction of nerve signals. This view suggests that there are not only inputs and outputs but also whst one might name "meet-puts," i.e., when an input signal goes through and evolves into other signals in the cortex, these new signals meet other input signals in the thalamus.
There is no limit to the possible number of pattern/association in such a system, and there is no need for memory storage but rather, adaptive network couplings. These "couplings," or signal pathways, are constantly running in loops (not all simultaneously but some at any given moment, i.e. e.g. what we call awareness) from the nerve endings in our bodies through the network in the cortex and back again to the thalamus. Of course the back-projected signals have to be discriminated from incoming signals, thereby avoiding confusion regarding fantasy and reality. But this process, though still unknown, could be quite simple and perhaps detected simply based on the direction where it comes from. As a consequence of the loops, the back-projected pattern differs from the incoming signals, or the stimuli. Therefore, every signal from the body/perceptions, hormonal signals and so on, either finds its familiar old route or pattern of association in the network (established/adapted experiences) or creates new connections (new experiences) that can be of varying durability depending on how they settle with older associations. For example, if someone is blind from the moment of birth, s/he will have normal neuronal activity in the cortex area of vision. On the other hand, in case of an acquired blindness, the level of activity in the same area will become significantly lower over time. This is logical according to the EMAH model because, in the former case, the neurons have never become involved in association patterns of vision but were engaged in other tasks. In the latter case, the neurons have partly remained in previous vision patterns, which are no longer in use, while the rest has moved onto other new tasks.
It is important to note that human thinking, contrary to what today's computers do, involves the perceptions that originate from the chemical processes in the body's hormonal system, what we carelessly name "emotions." This, I think, is the main source behind the term "human behavior." The difference between man and machine is a source of concern but, as I see it, there is no point in making a "human machine". But perhaps someone might be interested in building a "human-like machine".
The surface of our body isn't the border of consciousness. A better candidate is the neuronal system/Thalamus.
According to the EMAH model, nerves define our body. Thus, our hormonal signals inside our body can be viewed as belonging to the environment surrounding the nerveous system. As the meaning of life is to uphold complexity by guarding the borders, it's ultimately a fight against entropy. In this struggle, life is supported by a certain genetic structure and metabolism, which synchronizes its dealings (adaptation) with the surrounding environment. Balancing and neutralizing these dealings is a job done by nerves. Also consider Klevius gut bacterias with brain.
A major and crucial feature of this "body-guarding" mechanism is knowing difference in the direction between incoming signals and outgoing, processed signals. On top of this, both areas change continuously and thus have to be matched against each other to uphold or even improve the complexity. According to this model, people suffering from schizophrenia, just like healthy people, have no problem in discriminating between inputs and outputs. In fact, we can safely assume that the way they sometimes experience hallucinations is just like the way we experience nightmares. Both hallucinations and nightmares seem so frightening because they are perceived as incoming signals and confused as real perceptions. The problem for the schizophrenic lies in a defect in processing due to abnormal functions in and among the receptors on the neurons, which makes the association pattern unstable and "creative" in a way that is completely different compared with controlled fantasies. In the case of nightmares, the confusion is related to low and fluctuating energy levels during sleep. However, a frightful hallucination is always real because it is based on perceptions. What makes it an illusion is when it is viewed historically from a new point of view or experienced in a new "now," i.e., weighed and recorded as illusory from a standpoint that differs from the original one. In conclusion, one may argue that what really differentiates a frightful ghost from a harmless fantasy is that we know the latter being created inside our body, whereas we feel unsure about the former.
EMAH does not support the idea that information is conveyed over distance, both in the peripheral and central nervous system, by the time of occurrence of action potential?
"All we are hypothesizing is that the activity in V1 does not directly enter awareness. What does enter awareness, we believe, is some form of the neural activity in certain higher visual areas, since they do project directly to prefrontal areas. This seems well established for cortical areas in the fifth tier of the visual hierarchy, such as MT and V4." (Crick & Koch, 1995a,b). Hardware in a computer is, together with software (should be “a program” because this word signals programming more directly), specified at the outset. A high level of flexibility is made possible through the hardware's ability to unceasingly customize to incoming signals. This is partly what differs human beings from a machine. The rest of the differentiating factors include our perceptions of body chemistry such as hormones, etc. Programming a computer equipped with flexible hardware, i.e., to make them function like neurons, will, according to the EMAH-model, make the machine resemble the development of a fetus or infant. The development of this machine depends on the type of input terminals.
All input signals in the human, including emotional ones, involve a feedback process that matches the incoming signals from the environment with a changing copy of it in the form of representations (or rather adaptations) in the brain's network couplings. Life starts with a basic set of neurons, the connections of which grow as experiences come flooding in. This complex body of neuronal connections can be divided into permanent couplings, the sum of experiences that is your "personality," and temporary couplings, short-term more shallow "memories"/imprints for the time being.
A certain relay connection, if activated, results in a back-projected signal toward every receptor originally involved and thus creates, in collaboration with millions of other signals, a "collage" that we often call awareness. This is a constant flow and is in fact what we refer to as the mysterious consciousness. At this stage, it is important to note that every thought, fantasy or association is a mix of different kinds of signals. You cannot, for example, think about a color alone because it is always "in" or "on" something else (on a surface or embedded in some kind of substance) and connected by relay couplings to other perceptions or hormonal systems. "Meaning" is thus derived from a complex mix of the loops between perceptions and back-projected perceptions. This can be compared to a video camera system with a receiving screen and a back-projecting screen. The light meter is the "personality" and the aperture control the motor system. However, this system lacks the complex network system found in the cortex and thus has no possibility to "remember"/adapt. The recorded signal is of course not equivalent to the brain's network couplings because it is fixed. To save "bytes," our brains actually "forgets" what has been synchronized (adapted) rather than "remember" it. Such changes in the brain - not memories - are what build up our awareness. This process is in fact a common technique in transmitting compressed data. It's also similar to how we first actively learn to walk, and then stop thinking about it.
At any given moment, incoming signals, or perceptions, have to be understood through fitting and dissolving in a network of associations. If there are new, incomprehensible signals, they become linked (coupled) to the existing net and localized in the present pattern of associations. Whether their couplings finally vanish or stay depends on how they fit into the previous pattern and/or what happens next.
As a consequence of this coupling process - a process that could be described rather as a flow - memories in a conventional, semantic meaning do not exist, because everything happens now. Consciousness or awareness is something one cannot influence, but rather, something that involves an ongoing flow of information to and from nerve endings through the brain (a relay station incl. Thalamus). For every given moment (now) there is consequently only one possible way of acting, i.e. no absolute "free will". One cannot escape awareness or decisions because whatever one thinks, it is based on the past and will rule the future. Memories are thus similar to fantasies of the future, based on and created by experiences. Regarding short-term memory, I agree with Crick's view and hypothesis. But I certainly would not call it memory, only weaker or vanishing superficial couplings between neurons. Remember that with this model, the imagination of something or someone seen a long time ago always has to be projected back on the ports were it came through and thus enabling the appropriate association pattern. Although signals in each individual nerve are all equal, the back-projected pattern makes sense only as a combination of signals. The relay couplings in the cortex is the "code," and the receptor system is the "screen." Because this system does not allow any "escape" from the ever changing "now" which determines the dealings with the surrounding environment. Living creatures develope their software by living.
Dreams are, according to this model, remnants of short-term memories from the previous day(s), connected and mixed with relevant patterns of associations but excluding a major part of finer association structures. This is why dreams differ from conscious thinking. The lack of finer association structures is due to low or irregular activity levels in the brain during sleep. The results are "confused thoughts", which are quite similar to those of demented people, whose finer neural structures are damaged because of tissue death due to a lack of appropriate blood flow. Thus dreams are relevantly structured but in no way a secret message in the way psychoanalysts see them, whereas patients with dementia tend to go back to their childhood due to the irrevocable nature of the physical retardation process. Investigating dreams and their meaning by interpreting them is essentially the same as labeling them as psychological (in a psychoanalytical sense). A better and less biased result would emerge if the researcher actually lived with the subject the day before the dream occurred. Rather than analyzing pale and almost vanished childhood experiences from a view trapped in theoretical prejudices that describe an uncertain future, the researcher should perhaps put more efforts in the logic of the presence.
Wittgenstein: "Sie ist kein Etwas, aber auch nicht ein Nichts!" (Phil. Untersuch. 304). Also see P. Klevius' analysis of a stone (in Demand for Resources - on the right to be poor, 1992).
Although Wittgenstein describes language as a tool it seems more appropriate to classify it as human behavior. Unlike tools language is a set (family) of a certain kind of bodily reactions (internal and/or towards its environment). We have to reject, not only the grammar which tries to force itself on us", but also, and perhaps even more so, representations we, without any particular reason, assign to language.
Language is basically vocal but apart from that, little has been said about its real boundaries. One could actually argue that the best definition is perhaps the view that language is human territory. The question whether animals have a language is then consequently meaningless. On the other hand, Wittgenstein denied the existence of a "private language" because applying it could never prove the validity of its products. We are trapped in words and connotations of language although these categories themselves, like language in general, are completely arbitrary "language games," as Wittgenstein would have put it. (no offense, Mr Chomsky and others, but this is the tough reality for those trying to make sense of it in the efforts of constructing intelligent, talking computers). Furthermore, these categories change over time and within different contexts with overlapping borders.
Changing language games provide endless possibilities for creating new "language products", such as e.g. psycho-dynamic psychology. I believe this is exactly what Wittgenstein had in mind when he found Freud interesting as a player of such games but with nothing to say about the scientific roots of the mental phenomenon.
Let's imaging Donald Duck and a picture of a stone. Like many psychological terms, Donald Duck is very real in his symbolized form but nonetheless without any direct connection to the reality of the stone. In this sense, even the word stone has no connection to reality for those who don't speak English. Words and languages are shared experience.
It is said that a crucial feature of language is its ability to express past and future time. This might be true but in no way makes language solely human. When bees arrive to their hive they are able, in symbolic form, to express what they have seen in the past so that other bees will "understand" what to do in the future. Naming this an instinct just because bees have such an uncomplicated brain does not justify a different classification to that of human thinking.
If, as I proposed in Demand for Resources (1992), we stop dividing our interaction with the surrounding world in terms of observation and understanding (because there is no way of separating them), we will find it easier to compare different human societies. Language is a categorizing extension of perception/experience patterns and discriminates us as human only in the sense that we have different experiences.
Language has developed from a tool for communication to an additional tool of deception within itself. In Demand for Resources (1992 ISBN 9173288411) I used the example of a stone that turned out to be papier mache, as well as the word existence which has transformed from emerge to exist, i.e. loosing its root and hence opening up for the question how we can exist.
However, words and language are just like everything else that hits our receptors. There is no principle difference in thinking through the use of words or through sounds, smells (albeit not through thalamus), pictures or other "categories". Ultimately, language is, like other types of communication with the surrounding world, just a form of adaptation to one's environment (in a broad sense of course), i.e. resistance against entropy.
Wikipedia: Language is a system that consists of the development, acquisition, maintenance and use of complex systems of communication, particularly the human ability to do so.
Human language has the properties of productivity and displacement, and relies entirely on social convention and learning. Its complex structure affords a much wider range of expressions than any known system of animal communication. Writing is a medium of human communication that represents language and emotion with signs and symbols.
This short "definition" reveals the meaninglessness of the definition.
It's important to note the difference between everyday use of language, and language used about itself.
What's the difference between an image of a distant galaxy taken via a space telescope, or smell molecules left on a path?
And long before humans realized how nature performs photosynthesis, they already thought of themselves as the masters of Universe.
And unlike what Chomsky and others say, Klevius doesn't think in language other than when preparing to answer someone through language. Is this why Klevius is a lousier talker than most early teenagers who don't have a clue about what Klevius is talking about?
Words constitute rigid traps when compared to free, smoothly running thinking/analysis - unless you're gambling with words, as Freud did while waiting for reality to catch up with his speculations we call psychoanalysis (see Klevius Psychosocial Freud timeline.
However, words are also so unprecise that they are useless for construction work etc. where we need math and geometry instead. Words describe what it is and math how it is.
Everyday language needs its greatest asset, volatility, which simultaneously constitutes its main security risk re. faking/misleading communication.
To define it more narrowly, language is also the room where psychoanalysis is supposed to live and work. A stone does not belong to language, but the word "stone" does. What is the difference? How does the word differ from the symbolic expression of a "real" stone in front of you? Or if we put it the other way round: What precisely makes it a stone? Nothing, except for the symbolic value derived from the word "stone." The term "observation" thus implicates an underlying "private language. When Turing mixed up his collapsing bridges with math, he was corrected by Wittgenstein, just as Freud was corrected when he tried to build psychological courses of events on a fantasy of natural science. Wittgenstein's "no" to Turing at the famous lecture at Cambridge hit home the difference between games and reality.
Archetypes and grammar as evolutionary tracks imprinted in our genes is a favorite theme among certain scholars. But what about other skills? Can there also be some hidden imprints that make driving or playing computer games possible? And what about ice hockey, football, chess, talk shows, chats and so on? The list can go on forever. Again, there is no distinguishing border between evolutionary "imprints" (i.e. adaptation) and other stimulus/response features in ordinary life.
The more synchronized (informed) something or someone is with its surrounding reality, the less dynamics/interest this something or someone invests in its relationship with that particular reality. Interest causes investment and social entropy excludes investment economy because economy is always at war against entropy. The key to economic success is luck and thus includes lack of knowledge. No matter how well a business idea is outlined and performed, the success or lack of success is ultimately unforeseeable.In Demand for Resources I discussed the possibility of some serious prejudice hidden in Karl Poppers' top achievement of civilization, namely the "World 3" and his and Eccles' assumption of an increasing level of sophistication from the primitive to the modern stage of development. It is of course easy to be impressed by the sophistication of the artificial, technical environment constructed by man, including language and literature, etc. But there is nonetheless a striking lack of evidence in support of a higher degree of complexity in the civilized human thinking than that of e.g. Australian Aboriginals, say 25,000 years ago. Needless to say, many hunting-gathering societies have been affluent in the way that they have food, shelter and enough time to enrich World 3, but in reality they have failed to do so.
Even on the level of physical anthropology, human evolution gives no good, single answer to our originality. What is "uniquely human" has rested on a "gap," which is now closed, according to Richard Leakey and Roger Lewin, among others. This gap is presumably the same as the one between sensory input and behavioral output mentioned above.From an anthropological point of view, it can be said that a computer lacks genetic kinship, which, however, is a rule without exception in the animate world, although we in the West seem to have underestimated its real power.
A deconstruction of our underlying concepts of the brain can easily end up in serious troubles due to the problem with language manipulation. Wittgenstein would probably have suggested us to leave it as it is. If language is a way of manipulating a certain area - language - then the confusion will become even greater if we try to manipulate the manipulation! But why not try to find out how suitable "the inner environment" is for deconstruction? After all, this environment presupposes some kind of biology at least in the border line between the outside and the inside world. Are not behavioral reactions as well as intra-bodily causes, e g hormones etc. highly dependent on presumed biological "starting points"? How does skin color or sex hormones affect our thinking? Where do causes and reactions start and isn't even the question a kind of explanation and understanding?
Determinists usually do not recognize the point of free will although they admit the possible existence of freedom. Why? Obviously this needs some Wittgensteinian cleaning of language. Unfortunately I'm not prepared for the task, so let's pick up only the best looking parts, i.e. that words as freedom, will, mind, etc., are semantic inventions and that they have no connections to anything else if not proved by convincing and understandable evidence. Does this sound familiar and maybe even boring? Here comes the gap again. Stimuli and response seen purely as a reflex/adaptation is not always correct, says G. H. von Wright, because sometimes there may be a particular reason causing an action. According to von Wright, an acoustic sensation, for example, is mental and semantic and thus out of reach for the scientific understanding of the body-mind interaction. Is this a view of a diplomatic gentleman eating the cake and wanting to keep it too? To me, it is a deterministic indeterminist's view.
G. H. von Wright concludes that what we experience in our brain is the meaning of its behavioral effects. In making such a conclusion that it is rather a question of two different ways of narrowing one's view on living beings von Wright seems to narrow himself to Spinoza's view. Is meaning meaningful or is it perhaps only the interpreter's random projection of him/herself? Is it, in other words, based only on existence of the word meaning?
Aristotle divided the world primarily into matter and definable reality (psyche). As many other Greek philosophers, Aristotle was an individualist and would have fitted quite well in the Western discourse of today. Berkeley, who was a full-blood determinist, however recognized the sameness in mind and matter and handed both over to "god". Consequently Philonous' perceived sensations in the mind were not directly aligned with Hylas view of immediate perceptions. We thus end up with Berkeley as a spiritual die-hard determinist challenging materialistic humanism.
In conclusion one might propose a rethinking of the conventional hierarchy of the brain. What we use to call "higher levels", perhaps because they are more pronounced in humans, are in fact only huge "neural mirrors" for the real genius, thalamus (and its capability of two-way communication with the cortex and extensions in the cerebellum, spine, nerv ends etc), i.e. what is part of the "primitive" system. In other words, one may propose a view describing the "gap" between humans and animals as a quantitative difference in the amount/power of cerebral "mirroring" and communication with thalamus, rather than as a distinct qualitative feature. Nothing, except our "emotions", seems to hinder us from making a "human machine". And because these very "emotions" are lived experience (there is, for example, no way to scientifically establish what could be considered "emotions" in a fetus) nothing, except the meaninglessness in the project itself, could hinder us from allowing a machine to "live" a "human life".
In Demand for Resources (1992, ISBN 9173288411), Peter Klevius presented the following - his own (as far as he is aware of) - original observations re. evolution and awareness/mind:
Existence is change - not creation out of nothing.
Among so called "primitive" societies which had had no contact with monotheisms, the very thought that something could appear out of nothing was impossible.
So why did monotheisms come up with such a ridiculous idea? It's very simple. The racist "chosen people" supremacist ideology created a "god" that was not part of the world he (yes, he) had created out of nothing, i.e. making a clean sheet on which the chosen ones could exist (see the chapter Existencecentrism in Demand for Resources, 1992 ISBN 9173288411).
Culture is that (arbitrarily defined and bordered) part of adaptation that is shared by others.
Warning/advise: To better your understanding of Klevius writings you need to realize that he is extremely critical of how concepts are created and used. Not in a stiff/absolute sense of meaning, but rather how concepts may cluelessly (or deliberately) migrate within a particular discourse. So when Dennet talks about "deliberate design" he contrasts it against "clueless design", although such a distinction isn't possible. Evolution is neither clueless nor deliberate. And whatever we are up to it can't be distinguished from evolution other than as a purely human assessment - in which case it can't include evolution. Only humans can evaluate human behavior, which fact renders such evaluations pointless outside the realm of humans. Getting this seems to constitute a main obstacle in debates about AI and singularity.
This is why Klevius always refers to the individual human's negative Human Rights, i.e. everyone we agree is a human. This is also why Klevius can emphasize the Denisova bracelet, genetics etc. finds in Siberia/Altai as proof of modern humans evolving there (with some help from island South East Asia, not in Africa. Most humans living today would have been incapable of intellectually perform the task because the IQ peak has long since been diluted in the mass of humans. We're all one family of humans but the top of the line of human intelligence was a combination of island shrinking brains and its genetic transfrer to big skulled relatives in the north - as Klevius has pointed out since 2004 on the web.
Peter Klevius EMAH update on "consciousness" 2018:
Acknowledgement: I've never in my life met anyone who I've felt being more intelligent* than I am. This means I've had no reason warshipping human intelligence. And whole my life I've been told it's unfair that I see things faster and clearer than others - or even worse, that I "turn black into white" (some real idiots from the 1970-80s). But how could it be "unfair" when I can't use it for my own advantage without others sooner or later catching up and shaming me? And when you're in the front line no one understands and therefore doesn't pay you. Which fact has added valuable neutrality and reduced malign bias to/from Klevius' analysis.
* Klevius intelligence was perhaps best described by the Finnish neuroscientist, J. Juurmaa, who in the 1990s wrote: "Peter Kleviuksen ajatuksen kulku on ilmavan lennokas ja samalla iskevän ytimekäs" which translated to English would mean something like: "Peter Klevius' thought process is easily eloquent yet simultaneously concisely punchy." This he wrote in a long letter answering Klevius question about the effects on the visual cortex on individuals who have been blind from birth. This inquiry was part of Klevius check up of his already published EMAH theory, so to get a qualified confirmation that the "visual cortex" in born blinds is fully employed with other things than vision. Juurmaa's description of Klevius is in line with philosopher Georg Henrik von Wright's 1980 assessment, and more importantly with Klevius own experience, and perhaps most importantly when assessing AI/deep learning etc.
Only in true science and Human Rights does Klevius intelligence matter. And with AI singularity "pure" science will be dead anyway (although some idiots will never get it). Why? Because human existencecentrism (look it up in Klevius 1992 book pp 21-22) will only follow AI to the point of singularity.
Peter Klevius has - since he at age 14 read Einstein's and Barnett's book - been fascinated with human aversion of checking themselves in the mirror of existencecentrism.
Future democracy will be cloud based and filtered through (negative) Human Rights equality. This means that we get rid of the distorting bottleneck our politicians now constitute.
This also means the definitive end of islam as we know it, i.e. as a Human Rights violating excuse for racism, sexism, and power greed.
It's astonishing how the avoidance of negative Human Rights affects every debate. And most of this is due to our politicians' defense of the Saudi dictator family. Why? Simply because they stand as the "guardians" of islam and 1.6 Billion muslims which are all lumped together and protected by the label "islamophobia" which in fact only protects the Saudi dictator family and those who want to deal with it and its Human Rights violating sharia(e.g. OIC etc).
There's no way to copy a brain without a total break between individuals. That's perhaps one definition of what it means to be a human.
What makes humans individuals (atoms) and robots collective. Robot memories are shared and if you destroy the hardware, the software will still be alive and well.
However, a human individual is extremely vulnerable to individual extinction.
And a "pet" copy is an other individual - although it remembers and behaves like the original.
Peter Klevius in Demand for Resources (1992:23, ISBN 9173288411):
The basis of existence is change, and causality constitutes a complex of evolution and devolution. Evolution may be seen as the consequence of causality's variables in time where complexity in existing structures are reinforced. This stands in opposition to thermodynamics which theoretically leads to maximal entropy (i.e. energy equilibrium) where time/change finally ends. Someone might then say that the products of evolution are just temporary components in causality's road towards uniformity (Klevius 1981, 1992 - text copied from Klevius 1981 article Demand for Resources).
The 1994 Even More Astonishing Hypothesis (EMAH) with minor clarifications 2004
by Peter Klevius
1991, years before Crick's book, the original idea was presented for Georg Henrik von Wright (Wittgenstein's own choice of successor at his Cambridge chair), then published in Demand for Resources (1992, ISBN 9173288411), and 1994 presented for Francis Crick and 2004 presented on the world wide web.
Abstract: Consciousness may be seen as environmental adaptation rather than something "uniqely human". Although neo-cortex constitutes the mass of adaptations Thalamus is the least discussed yet perhaps the most important piece in the "puzzle of mind" due to its central function as the main relay station between body actions, brain and environment. A critical assessment of concepts such as: observation/understanding, mind/body, free will, knowledge and language reveals an inescapable awareness in the Thalamic "meet-puts". In conclusion memories hence may be better described as associations causing linguistic traps (i.e. self-inflicted "problems" produced in language) rather than as distinct entities. The continuity model proposed in EMAH avoids the limitations of a "discrete packets of information" model, and without Cartesian dualism or the Homunculus fallacy.
Note. In some respect the neural network of "lower" systems such as the spinal cord and cerebellum by far outperforms the cortex. This is because of different tasks (fast motorics and slow adaptation) and due difference in processing. (Copyright Peter Klevius).
Introduction
Understanding how social behavior and its maintenance in human and other forms of life (incl. plants etc) evolved has nothing to do with “the balance between self interest and co-operative behavior” but all to do with kinship and friendship adaptation. Everything is "self-interest" - how could it not be? Although humans may be attributed a more chaotic (i.e. more incalculable) "personality", they are, like life in general, just adaptive "robots" (i.e. active fighters against entropy – see Demand for Resources, 1992 ISBN 9173288411). Misunderstanding (or plain ignorance of – alternatively ideological avoidance of) kin recognition/friendship (symbiosis), and AI (robotics) pave the way for the formulation of unnecessary, not to say construed, problems which, in an extension, may become problematic themselves precisely because they hinder an open access for direct problem solving (see e.g. Angels of Antichrist – kinship vs. social state).
Mentalists trap themselves in selfinflicted astonishment over phenomenons they think are beyond determinism. When Chomsky says "there are things beyond comprehension" he should ask himself: Who are you to talk about things beyond comprehension (compare 'existencecentrism' in Klevius Demand for Resources, 1992 ISBN 9173288411), i.e. something that can't be asked - without just pushing the border a little - or rather, just a new comprehensible adaptation. And if it seems incomprehensible, it's no more so than e.g. Donald Duck (see below).
The Future of a "Gap" (copyright P. Klevius 1992-2004)
Human: What is a human being? Can the answer be found in a non-rational a priori statement (compare e.g. the axiomatic Human Rights individual) or in a logical analysis of the alleged "gap" between human beings and others? The following analysis uses an "anti-gap" approach. It also rests on the struggle and success of research performed in the field of artificial intelligence (AI), automation/robotics etc.
Signal: A "signal gap" is commonly understood as a break in the transition from input to output, i.e., from perception to behavior. Mentalists use to fill the gap with "mind" and "consciousness" while behaviorists don't bother because they can't even see it. A five minute timelaps of Earth spanning 4.5 Billion years would make a very lively planet. However, where's "consiousness" between input (the single frames) and output (the running video)? Or, what/whom should we allow to possess "consciousness"? And if we limit it only to humans we are stuck with it being just a human thing - hence impossible to use in general meaning. An easier way out is to avoid the signal "gap" and call it what it is, a network. But a network that continuously builds new patterns on top of already existing ones.
Matter: Berkeley never believed in matter. What you experience is what you get and the rest is in the hand of "God" (i.e. uncertainty). This view makes him a super-determinist without "real" matter. Klevius just adds the fact that Berkeley's "God" is truly metaphysical and therefore not worthy of even talking about.
Mind: The confusing mind-body debate originated in the Cartesian dualism, which divides the world into two different substances, which, when put together, are assumed to make the world intelligible. However, on the contrary, they seem to have created a new problem based on this very assumption. But a problem that has become popular among those who want to talk metaphysics, i.e. giving an impression of talking about what can't be talked about.
Free will: Following a mind-body world view, many scholars prefer to regard human beings as intentional animals fueled by free will. It is, however, a challenging task to defend such a philosophical standpoint. Not even Martin Luther managed to do it, but rather transferred free will to God despite loud protests from Erasmus. Although Luther's thoughts in other respects have had a tremendous influence on Western thinking, this particular angle of view has been less emphasized. However, 'free will' can only be used locally.
Future: When asked about the "really human" way of thinking, many mentalists refer to our capacity to "calculate" the future. But is there really a future out there? All concepts of the future seem trapped in the past. We cannot actually talk about a certain date in the future as real future. What we do talk about is, for example, just a date in a calendar. Although it is a good guess that we are going to die, the basis for this reasoning always lies in the past. The present hence is the impenetrable mirror between the "real future" and ourselves. Consequently, every our effort to approach this future brings us back in history. Closest to future we seem to be when we live intensely in the immediate present without even thinking about the future. As a consequence the gap between sophisticated human planning and "instinctual" animal behavior seems less obvious. Is primitive thinking that primitive after all? And isn't 'instinct' just an excuse for ignorance?
An additional aspect of future is that neither youth, deep freezing or a pill against aging will do as insurance for surviving tomorrow. The human individual is lost in a crash whereas the robot brain safely hovers in the cloud - in many copies.
Observation and Understanding (copyright P. Klevius 1992-2004)
If one cannot observe something without understanding it, all our experiences are illusions because of the eternal string of corrections made by later experience. What seems to be true at a particular moment may turn out to be something else in the next, and what we call understanding is merely retrospection.
The conventional way of grasping the connection between sensory input and behavioral output can be described as observation, i.e. as sensory stimulation followed by understanding. The understanding that it is a stone, for example, follows the observation of a stone. This understanding might in turn produce behavior such as verbal information. To do these simple tasks, however, the observer has to be equipped with some kind of "knowledge," i.e., shared experience that makes him/her culturally competent to "understand" and communicate. This understanding includes the cultural heritage embedded in the very concept of a stone, i.e.it's a prerequsite for observation. As a consequence it's not meaningful to separate observation and understanding. This, of course, doesn't exclude "local" (non-analytical) use of the terms in speech and literature etc. for the purpose of catching subtle nyances.
Categorization belongs to the language department, which, on the brain level, is only one among many other behavioral reactions. But due to its capability to paraphrase itself, it has the power to confuse our view on how we synchronize our stock of experience. When we watch a stone, our understanding synchronizes with the accumulated inputs associated with the concept of a stone. "It must be a stone because it looks like a stone," we think. As a result of such synchronization, our brain intends to continue on the same path and perhaps do something more (with "intention"). For example, we might think (as a result of our adaptation to the situation), "Let's tell someone about it." The logical behavior that follows can be an expression such as, "Hey look, it's a stone out there." Thus, what we get in the end is a concept of a stone and, after a closer look, our pattern of experience hidden in it. If the stone, when touched, turns out to be made of paper maché, then the previous perception is not deepened, but instead, switched to a completely new one.
It's almost frightening how often one hears researchers/scientists/philosophers etc. who think they are at least average in intelligence, telling others that "previously we didn't understand what X was", for example that "water consists of molecules and atoms". This kind of schizophrenic "thinking" reflects the depth of the mind/body hoax many are trapped in.
One might say that a stone in a picture is a "real" stone, while the word 'stone' written on a piece of paper is not. The gap here is not due to different representations but rather to different contexts. When one tries to equalize observation with understanding, the conventional view of primitive and sophisticated thinking might be put in question. We still act like complex worms, and sophistication is only a matter of biased views built on different stocks of experience (adaptaion) and the overwhelming complexity that appears chaotic. Moreover, a worm, just like a computer, is more than the sum of its parts.
Therefore, meaning, explanation and understanding are all descriptions of the same basic principle of how we synchronize (adapt) perception with previous experience. For the fetus or the newborn child, the inexperienced (unsynchronized, or uncertainty/"god" if you prefer) part of the inside-outside communication is huge compared to a grown up. Hence the chaotic outside world (i.e., the lack of its patterns of meaningfulness) has to be copied (adapted) in a stream of experience, little by little, into the network couplings of the brain. When the neural pattern matches the totality (meaningfulness) its information potential disappears. Our brain doesn't store information - it kills information. From an analytical point of view "storing of information" is an oxymoron. On top of this, there is a continuous growth of new neurons, which have to be connected to the network. As a result of these processes, the outside world is, at least partly, synchronized with the inside, "mental" world. Heureka, the baby appears to think and exist! In other words, the baby records changes against a background of already synchronized (adapted) inputs.
* see "existence-centrism" in Demand for Resources (1992) for a discussion abt a shrinking god and the allmighty human!
The Category of the Uniquely Human Category Mistake (copyright P. Klevius 1992-2004)
It's meaningless to state that we are the best (or the worst) humankind. However, category mistakes re. humans and non-humans are still common and many researchers/scientists don't even seem to realize how carelessly they handle this important distinction.
It's equally meaningless to ask what something is that we don't know what 'it' is. 'Consciousness' is easily understood when used in comparison with 'unconcious'. However, how stupid is it when we mystify the term beyond comprehension by squeezing in random additional properties and then ask the question: What is this mystery with consciousness".
A main difficulty in formulating the concept of consciousness is our pride (presumably we should have been equally proud as mice) and our tautological belief in "something uniquely human", However, if we try to follow the die-hard determinists, we would find free will and destiny easier to cope with, and also that the concept of "the unique human being" is rather a question of point of view and carelessly crossing borders of concepts.
Following this line of thought, I suggest turning to old Berkeley as well as to Ryle but excluding Skinnerian Utopias. Those who think the word determinism sounds rude and blunt can try to adorn it with complexity to make it look more chaotic. Chaos here means something you cannot overview no matter how deterministic it is. We seem to like complexity just because we cannot follow the underlying determinism. The same could be said about what it really is to be a human? A passion for uncertainty, i.e. life itself. Francis Crick in The Astonishing Hypothesis: "... your sense of personal identity and free will are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules."
This statement is easy to agree on, so let me continue with another, perhaps more useful, quote from Crick: "Categories are not given to us as absolutes. They are human inventions." I think these two statements create an efficient basis for further investigations into the mystery of thinking. Hopefully you will forgive me now as I'm going to abolish not only memory but also free will and consciousness altogether. Then, I will go even one step further to deny that there are any thoughts (pictures, representations, etc.) at all in the cortex. At this point, many might agree, particularly regarding the cortex of the author of this text.
The main problem here is the storage of memories, with all their colors, smells, feelings and sounds. Crick suggests the dividing of memory into three parts: episodic, categorical and procedural. While that would be semantically useful, I'm afraid it would act more like an obstacle in the investigation of the brain, because it presupposes that the hardware uses the same basis of classification and, like a virus, hence infects our analyses.
The analysis presented here is the result of de-categorization. The only thing that distinguishes us from the rest of nature (and 'nature' includes all artefacts, non-human as well as human ones) is the structure and complexity most (but not all) humans possess. In other words, there's no point at which something "special" happens. This is why Klevius in 1994 said that there's no principal difference between a brick and his girlfriend - which comment rose the eyebrow on his pal who admired Klevius girlfriend.
Instead of categorization, this analysis sees only adaptation to the surrounding world incl. one's own brain, which condtitutes of layers of previous adaptations where the latest one is awareness, consciousness, or the present now if you like.
Nerves, Loops and "Meet-puts" (copyright P. Klevius 1992-2004)
According to Crick, "each thalamic area also receives massive connections from the cortical areas to which it sends information. The exact purpose of these back connections is not yet known." In the following paragraphs, I will outline a hypothetical model in line with this question. The interpretation of the interface between brain and its surrounding as it is presented here has the same starting point as Crick's theory but divides thinking into a relay/network system in the cortex and the perception terminals (or their representatives in the thalamus) around the body like an eternal kaleidoscope. Under this model, imagination would be a back-projected pattern of nerve signals, associated to the original events that caused them but with the signals faded and localized as "internal" based on direction of nerve signals. This view suggests that there are not only inputs and outputs but also whst one might name "meet-puts," i.e., when an input signal goes through and evolves into other signals in the cortex, these new signals meet other input signals in the thalamus.
There is no limit to the possible number of pattern/association in such a system, and there is no need for memory storage but rather, adaptive network couplings. These "couplings," or signal pathways, are constantly running in loops (not all simultaneously but some at any given moment, i.e. e.g. what we call awareness) from the nerve endings in our bodies through the network in the cortex and back again to the thalamus. Of course the back-projected signals have to be discriminated from incoming signals, thereby avoiding confusion regarding fantasy and reality. But this process, though still unknown, could be quite simple and perhaps detected simply based on the direction where it comes from. As a consequence of the loops, the back-projected pattern differs from the incoming signals, or the stimuli. Therefore, every signal from the body/perceptions, hormonal signals and so on, either finds its familiar old route or pattern of association in the network (established/adapted experiences) or creates new connections (new experiences) that can be of varying durability depending on how they settle with older associations. For example, if someone is blind from the moment of birth, s/he will have normal neuronal activity in the cortex area of vision. On the other hand, in case of an acquired blindness, the level of activity in the same area will become significantly lower over time. This is logical according to the EMAH model because, in the former case, the neurons have never become involved in association patterns of vision but were engaged in other tasks. In the latter case, the neurons have partly remained in previous vision patterns, which are no longer in use, while the rest has moved onto other new tasks.
It is important to note that human thinking, contrary to what today's computers do, involves the perceptions that originate from the chemical processes in the body's hormonal system, what we carelessly name "emotions." This, I think, is the main source behind the term "human behavior." The difference between man and machine is a source of concern but, as I see it, there is no point in making a "human machine". But perhaps someone might be interested in building a "human-like machine".
Body vs. Environment - a History of Illusions (copyright P. Klevius 1992-2004)
The surface of our body isn't the border of consciousness. A better candidate is the neuronal system/Thalamus.
According to the EMAH model, nerves define our body. Thus, our hormonal signals inside our body can be viewed as belonging to the environment surrounding the nerveous system. As the meaning of life is to uphold complexity by guarding the borders, it's ultimately a fight against entropy. In this struggle, life is supported by a certain genetic structure and metabolism, which synchronizes its dealings (adaptation) with the surrounding environment. Balancing and neutralizing these dealings is a job done by nerves. Also consider Klevius gut bacterias with brain.
A major and crucial feature of this "body-guarding" mechanism is knowing difference in the direction between incoming signals and outgoing, processed signals. On top of this, both areas change continuously and thus have to be matched against each other to uphold or even improve the complexity. According to this model, people suffering from schizophrenia, just like healthy people, have no problem in discriminating between inputs and outputs. In fact, we can safely assume that the way they sometimes experience hallucinations is just like the way we experience nightmares. Both hallucinations and nightmares seem so frightening because they are perceived as incoming signals and confused as real perceptions. The problem for the schizophrenic lies in a defect in processing due to abnormal functions in and among the receptors on the neurons, which makes the association pattern unstable and "creative" in a way that is completely different compared with controlled fantasies. In the case of nightmares, the confusion is related to low and fluctuating energy levels during sleep. However, a frightful hallucination is always real because it is based on perceptions. What makes it an illusion is when it is viewed historically from a new point of view or experienced in a new "now," i.e., weighed and recorded as illusory from a standpoint that differs from the original one. In conclusion, one may argue that what really differentiates a frightful ghost from a harmless fantasy is that we know the latter being created inside our body, whereas we feel unsure about the former.
EMAH Computing as Matched Changes (copyright P. Klevius 1992-2004)
EMAH does not support the idea that information is conveyed over distance, both in the peripheral and central nervous system, by the time of occurrence of action potential?
"All we are hypothesizing is that the activity in V1 does not directly enter awareness. What does enter awareness, we believe, is some form of the neural activity in certain higher visual areas, since they do project directly to prefrontal areas. This seems well established for cortical areas in the fifth tier of the visual hierarchy, such as MT and V4." (Crick & Koch, 1995a,b). Hardware in a computer is, together with software (should be “a program” because this word signals programming more directly), specified at the outset. A high level of flexibility is made possible through the hardware's ability to unceasingly customize to incoming signals. This is partly what differs human beings from a machine. The rest of the differentiating factors include our perceptions of body chemistry such as hormones, etc. Programming a computer equipped with flexible hardware, i.e., to make them function like neurons, will, according to the EMAH-model, make the machine resemble the development of a fetus or infant. The development of this machine depends on the type of input terminals.
All input signals in the human, including emotional ones, involve a feedback process that matches the incoming signals from the environment with a changing copy of it in the form of representations (or rather adaptations) in the brain's network couplings. Life starts with a basic set of neurons, the connections of which grow as experiences come flooding in. This complex body of neuronal connections can be divided into permanent couplings, the sum of experiences that is your "personality," and temporary couplings, short-term more shallow "memories"/imprints for the time being.
A certain relay connection, if activated, results in a back-projected signal toward every receptor originally involved and thus creates, in collaboration with millions of other signals, a "collage" that we often call awareness. This is a constant flow and is in fact what we refer to as the mysterious consciousness. At this stage, it is important to note that every thought, fantasy or association is a mix of different kinds of signals. You cannot, for example, think about a color alone because it is always "in" or "on" something else (on a surface or embedded in some kind of substance) and connected by relay couplings to other perceptions or hormonal systems. "Meaning" is thus derived from a complex mix of the loops between perceptions and back-projected perceptions. This can be compared to a video camera system with a receiving screen and a back-projecting screen. The light meter is the "personality" and the aperture control the motor system. However, this system lacks the complex network system found in the cortex and thus has no possibility to "remember"/adapt. The recorded signal is of course not equivalent to the brain's network couplings because it is fixed. To save "bytes," our brains actually "forgets" what has been synchronized (adapted) rather than "remember" it. Such changes in the brain - not memories - are what build up our awareness. This process is in fact a common technique in transmitting compressed data. It's also similar to how we first actively learn to walk, and then stop thinking about it.
Short-Term Memories and Dreams (copyright P. Klevius 1992-2004)
At any given moment, incoming signals, or perceptions, have to be understood through fitting and dissolving in a network of associations. If there are new, incomprehensible signals, they become linked (coupled) to the existing net and localized in the present pattern of associations. Whether their couplings finally vanish or stay depends on how they fit into the previous pattern and/or what happens next.
As a consequence of this coupling process - a process that could be described rather as a flow - memories in a conventional, semantic meaning do not exist, because everything happens now. Consciousness or awareness is something one cannot influence, but rather, something that involves an ongoing flow of information to and from nerve endings through the brain (a relay station incl. Thalamus). For every given moment (now) there is consequently only one possible way of acting, i.e. no absolute "free will". One cannot escape awareness or decisions because whatever one thinks, it is based on the past and will rule the future. Memories are thus similar to fantasies of the future, based on and created by experiences. Regarding short-term memory, I agree with Crick's view and hypothesis. But I certainly would not call it memory, only weaker or vanishing superficial couplings between neurons. Remember that with this model, the imagination of something or someone seen a long time ago always has to be projected back on the ports were it came through and thus enabling the appropriate association pattern. Although signals in each individual nerve are all equal, the back-projected pattern makes sense only as a combination of signals. The relay couplings in the cortex is the "code," and the receptor system is the "screen." Because this system does not allow any "escape" from the ever changing "now" which determines the dealings with the surrounding environment. Living creatures develope their software by living.
Dreams are, according to this model, remnants of short-term memories from the previous day(s), connected and mixed with relevant patterns of associations but excluding a major part of finer association structures. This is why dreams differ from conscious thinking. The lack of finer association structures is due to low or irregular activity levels in the brain during sleep. The results are "confused thoughts", which are quite similar to those of demented people, whose finer neural structures are damaged because of tissue death due to a lack of appropriate blood flow. Thus dreams are relevantly structured but in no way a secret message in the way psychoanalysts see them, whereas patients with dementia tend to go back to their childhood due to the irrevocable nature of the physical retardation process. Investigating dreams and their meaning by interpreting them is essentially the same as labeling them as psychological (in a psychoanalytical sense). A better and less biased result would emerge if the researcher actually lived with the subject the day before the dream occurred. Rather than analyzing pale and almost vanished childhood experiences from a view trapped in theoretical prejudices that describe an uncertain future, the researcher should perhaps put more efforts in the logic of the presence.
Donald Duck and a Stone in the Holy Land of Language (copyright P. Klevius 1992-2004)
Wittgenstein: "Sie ist kein Etwas, aber auch nicht ein Nichts!" (Phil. Untersuch. 304). Also see P. Klevius' analysis of a stone (in Demand for Resources - on the right to be poor, 1992).
Although Wittgenstein describes language as a tool it seems more appropriate to classify it as human behavior. Unlike tools language is a set (family) of a certain kind of bodily reactions (internal and/or towards its environment). We have to reject, not only the grammar which tries to force itself on us", but also, and perhaps even more so, representations we, without any particular reason, assign to language.
Language is basically vocal but apart from that, little has been said about its real boundaries. One could actually argue that the best definition is perhaps the view that language is human territory. The question whether animals have a language is then consequently meaningless. On the other hand, Wittgenstein denied the existence of a "private language" because applying it could never prove the validity of its products. We are trapped in words and connotations of language although these categories themselves, like language in general, are completely arbitrary "language games," as Wittgenstein would have put it. (no offense, Mr Chomsky and others, but this is the tough reality for those trying to make sense of it in the efforts of constructing intelligent, talking computers). Furthermore, these categories change over time and within different contexts with overlapping borders.
Changing language games provide endless possibilities for creating new "language products", such as e.g. psycho-dynamic psychology. I believe this is exactly what Wittgenstein had in mind when he found Freud interesting as a player of such games but with nothing to say about the scientific roots of the mental phenomenon.
Let's imaging Donald Duck and a picture of a stone. Like many psychological terms, Donald Duck is very real in his symbolized form but nonetheless without any direct connection to the reality of the stone. In this sense, even the word stone has no connection to reality for those who don't speak English. Words and languages are shared experience.
It is said that a crucial feature of language is its ability to express past and future time. This might be true but in no way makes language solely human. When bees arrive to their hive they are able, in symbolic form, to express what they have seen in the past so that other bees will "understand" what to do in the future. Naming this an instinct just because bees have such an uncomplicated brain does not justify a different classification to that of human thinking.
If, as I proposed in Demand for Resources (1992), we stop dividing our interaction with the surrounding world in terms of observation and understanding (because there is no way of separating them), we will find it easier to compare different human societies. Language is a categorizing extension of perception/experience patterns and discriminates us as human only in the sense that we have different experiences.
Language has developed from a tool for communication to an additional tool of deception within itself. In Demand for Resources (1992 ISBN 9173288411) I used the example of a stone that turned out to be papier mache, as well as the word existence which has transformed from emerge to exist, i.e. loosing its root and hence opening up for the question how we can exist.
However, words and language are just like everything else that hits our receptors. There is no principle difference in thinking through the use of words or through sounds, smells (albeit not through thalamus), pictures or other "categories". Ultimately, language is, like other types of communication with the surrounding world, just a form of adaptation to one's environment (in a broad sense of course), i.e. resistance against entropy.
Wikipedia: Language is a system that consists of the development, acquisition, maintenance and use of complex systems of communication, particularly the human ability to do so.
Human language has the properties of productivity and displacement, and relies entirely on social convention and learning. Its complex structure affords a much wider range of expressions than any known system of animal communication. Writing is a medium of human communication that represents language and emotion with signs and symbols.
This short "definition" reveals the meaninglessness of the definition.
It's important to note the difference between everyday use of language, and language used about itself.
What's the difference between an image of a distant galaxy taken via a space telescope, or smell molecules left on a path?
And long before humans realized how nature performs photosynthesis, they already thought of themselves as the masters of Universe.
And unlike what Chomsky and others say, Klevius doesn't think in language other than when preparing to answer someone through language. Is this why Klevius is a lousier talker than most early teenagers who don't have a clue about what Klevius is talking about?
Words constitute rigid traps when compared to free, smoothly running thinking/analysis - unless you're gambling with words, as Freud did while waiting for reality to catch up with his speculations we call psychoanalysis (see Klevius Psychosocial Freud timeline.
However, words are also so unprecise that they are useless for construction work etc. where we need math and geometry instead. Words describe what it is and math how it is.
Everyday language needs its greatest asset, volatility, which simultaneously constitutes its main security risk re. faking/misleading communication.
To define it more narrowly, language is also the room where psychoanalysis is supposed to live and work. A stone does not belong to language, but the word "stone" does. What is the difference? How does the word differ from the symbolic expression of a "real" stone in front of you? Or if we put it the other way round: What precisely makes it a stone? Nothing, except for the symbolic value derived from the word "stone." The term "observation" thus implicates an underlying "private language. When Turing mixed up his collapsing bridges with math, he was corrected by Wittgenstein, just as Freud was corrected when he tried to build psychological courses of events on a fantasy of natural science. Wittgenstein's "no" to Turing at the famous lecture at Cambridge hit home the difference between games and reality.
Archetypes and grammar as evolutionary tracks imprinted in our genes is a favorite theme among certain scholars. But what about other skills? Can there also be some hidden imprints that make driving or playing computer games possible? And what about ice hockey, football, chess, talk shows, chats and so on? The list can go on forever. Again, there is no distinguishing border between evolutionary "imprints" (i.e. adaptation) and other stimulus/response features in ordinary life.
"Primitive" vs. "Sophisticated" Thinking (copyright P. Klevius 1992-2004)
The more synchronized (informed) something or someone is with its surrounding reality, the less dynamics/interest this something or someone invests in its relationship with that particular reality. Interest causes investment and social entropy excludes investment economy because economy is always at war against entropy. The key to economic success is luck and thus includes lack of knowledge. No matter how well a business idea is outlined and performed, the success or lack of success is ultimately unforeseeable.In Demand for Resources I discussed the possibility of some serious prejudice hidden in Karl Poppers' top achievement of civilization, namely the "World 3" and his and Eccles' assumption of an increasing level of sophistication from the primitive to the modern stage of development. It is of course easy to be impressed by the sophistication of the artificial, technical environment constructed by man, including language and literature, etc. But there is nonetheless a striking lack of evidence in support of a higher degree of complexity in the civilized human thinking than that of e.g. Australian Aboriginals, say 25,000 years ago. Needless to say, many hunting-gathering societies have been affluent in the way that they have food, shelter and enough time to enrich World 3, but in reality they have failed to do so.
Even on the level of physical anthropology, human evolution gives no good, single answer to our originality. What is "uniquely human" has rested on a "gap," which is now closed, according to Richard Leakey and Roger Lewin, among others. This gap is presumably the same as the one between sensory input and behavioral output mentioned above.From an anthropological point of view, it can be said that a computer lacks genetic kinship, which, however, is a rule without exception in the animate world, although we in the West seem to have underestimated its real power.
De-constructing the Mind (copyright P. Klevius 1992-2004)
A deconstruction of our underlying concepts of the brain can easily end up in serious troubles due to the problem with language manipulation. Wittgenstein would probably have suggested us to leave it as it is. If language is a way of manipulating a certain area - language - then the confusion will become even greater if we try to manipulate the manipulation! But why not try to find out how suitable "the inner environment" is for deconstruction? After all, this environment presupposes some kind of biology at least in the border line between the outside and the inside world. Are not behavioral reactions as well as intra-bodily causes, e g hormones etc. highly dependent on presumed biological "starting points"? How does skin color or sex hormones affect our thinking? Where do causes and reactions start and isn't even the question a kind of explanation and understanding?
Determinists usually do not recognize the point of free will although they admit the possible existence of freedom. Why? Obviously this needs some Wittgensteinian cleaning of language. Unfortunately I'm not prepared for the task, so let's pick up only the best looking parts, i.e. that words as freedom, will, mind, etc., are semantic inventions and that they have no connections to anything else if not proved by convincing and understandable evidence. Does this sound familiar and maybe even boring? Here comes the gap again. Stimuli and response seen purely as a reflex/adaptation is not always correct, says G. H. von Wright, because sometimes there may be a particular reason causing an action. According to von Wright, an acoustic sensation, for example, is mental and semantic and thus out of reach for the scientific understanding of the body-mind interaction. Is this a view of a diplomatic gentleman eating the cake and wanting to keep it too? To me, it is a deterministic indeterminist's view.
G. H. von Wright concludes that what we experience in our brain is the meaning of its behavioral effects. In making such a conclusion that it is rather a question of two different ways of narrowing one's view on living beings von Wright seems to narrow himself to Spinoza's view. Is meaning meaningful or is it perhaps only the interpreter's random projection of him/herself? Is it, in other words, based only on existence of the word meaning?
Aristotle divided the world primarily into matter and definable reality (psyche). As many other Greek philosophers, Aristotle was an individualist and would have fitted quite well in the Western discourse of today. Berkeley, who was a full-blood determinist, however recognized the sameness in mind and matter and handed both over to "god". Consequently Philonous' perceived sensations in the mind were not directly aligned with Hylas view of immediate perceptions. We thus end up with Berkeley as a spiritual die-hard determinist challenging materialistic humanism.
Conclusion
In conclusion one might propose a rethinking of the conventional hierarchy of the brain. What we use to call "higher levels", perhaps because they are more pronounced in humans, are in fact only huge "neural mirrors" for the real genius, thalamus (and its capability of two-way communication with the cortex and extensions in the cerebellum, spine, nerv ends etc), i.e. what is part of the "primitive" system. In other words, one may propose a view describing the "gap" between humans and animals as a quantitative difference in the amount/power of cerebral "mirroring" and communication with thalamus, rather than as a distinct qualitative feature. Nothing, except our "emotions", seems to hinder us from making a "human machine". And because these very "emotions" are lived experience (there is, for example, no way to scientifically establish what could be considered "emotions" in a fetus) nothing, except the meaninglessness in the project itself, could hinder us from allowing a machine to "live" a "human life".
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