Computers Are Incapable Of Creatively Writing Music

[Steve Klinko]

What do you mean "without any way to measure"?
Are we talking measurable physics or immeasurable spirits? If we are talking physics there will be a way to measure eventually, either directly from the physics of brain pattern measurements, or indirectly where brain pattern measurements diverge from the physics.
All mainstream science was once speculative. It's called hypothesis.

If there is no brain pattern at all the brain is dead and unable to consciously process any information.
Eternal anesthesia......total oblivion......nothing......nothing at all. Even if homeostasis can be maintained, the "person" exist only as an object.

We do not need to speculate IF consciousness exists and IF it is an emergent result of brain function. Their existence and origin are axiomatic "hard facts". We have just begun to map the patterns, give it time and in the mean time consider all possible aspects of what we do know and what might yield the most promising direction of inquiry.

I am talking about Measuring the Conscious Experience of a subject. If Consciousness is Measurable Physics then what is that Physics? What is Consciousness made out of? If Consciousness is completely in the Neurons then what is a Mechanism in the Neurons that is giving rise to that Consciousness? We need to Measure that Mechanism of Consciousness in the Neurons. If Consciousness is an Emergent Property then that Property must be something Measurable if it is Physics based. How do you Measure that Property? If Consciousness is actually some new Phenomenon of Physics then we sure don't know how to Measure that yet.

I assumed we all knew that Memory operations are implemented in the Physical Brain. So when the Connection is reestablished there is no Memory of the disconnection for the Conscious Mind to use. Until Science can actually Measure Consciousness the only Scientific thing to say about Anesthesia is that no body knows what the Experience of the subject could be. The Conscious Mind can Experience all kinds of things during Anesthesia, from Intense Pain, to Terror, etc., but luckily the Brain is not recording this. You will almost never remember after you wake up. Best not to think about this reality of Anesthesia.

 

[Steve Klinko]

Do you have a anatomical diagram of this Physical Mind?

Can you post said anatomical diagram of this Physical Mind please?

I guess you do not yet understand that the Physical Mind is the Brain.

 

[Michael 345]

I guess you do not yet understand that the Physical Mind is the Brain.

So you don't go along with

The identity theory of mind holds that states and processes of the mind are identical to states and processes of the brain. Strictly speaking, it need not hold that the mind is identical to the brain. Idiomatically we do use ‘She has a good mind’ and ‘She has a good brain’ interchangeably but we would hardly say ‘Her mind weighs fifty ounces’. Here I take identifying mind and brain as being a matter of identifying processes and perhaps states of the mind and brain. ?

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/mind-identity/

 

[Write4U]

Anecdotal reports are never very accurate and not very Scientific.

Anecdotal reports of what? I report "nothing". No lights, no ghosts, no voices, no pain, no pleasure. I can report NOTHING. I was no longer conscious of anything. What can be inaccurate or measurable about that?
The science lies in the anesthesia rendering the brain unconscious.

I am talking about Measuring the Conscious Experience of a subject. If Consciousness is Measurable Physics then what is that Physics? What is Consciousness made out of? If Consciousness is completely in the Neurons then what is a Mechanism in the Neurons that is giving rise to that Consciousness? We need to Measure that Mechanism of Consciousness in the Neurons. If Consciousness is an Emergent Property then that Property must be something Measurable if it is Physics based. How do you Measure that Property? If Consciousness is actually some new Phenomenon of Physics then we sure don't know how to Measure that yet.

No one claims the answer to emergent consciousness. You are fighting non existent windmills

I assumed we all knew that Memory operations are implemented in the Physical Brain.

Only when you are conscious and have experiences to memorize. Memory requires a memorable experience.

So when the Connection is reestablished there is no Memory of the disconnection for the Conscious Mind to use.

Right, no consciousness, no memory, nothing!

Until Science can actually Measure Consciousness the only Scientific thing to say about Anesthesia is that no body knows what the Experience of the subject could be. The Conscious Mind can Experience all kinds of things during Anesthesia, from Intense Pain, to Terror, etc., but luckily the Brain is not recording this.

No, your unconscious mind doesn't experience anything, hence you have no memory. Your body experiences trauma, but YOU do not. No one does. That's why they use it for major invasive surgery.

You will almost never remember after you wake up. Best not to think about this reality of Anesthesia

There is nothing to remember. If you remember anything from the surgery you were not unconscious and the anesthesiologist screwed up.
Nothing gets erased. All your prior memories remain intact and your homeostasis continues . These are the subconscious parts of the brain. These parts of the brain are never conscious and are not affected by anesthesia.

When the conscious part of the brain is under the proper amounts of anesthesia it is rendered unconscious and does not experience and/or record anything at all. YOU are away.

What you are suggesting is that it is impossible to measure the absence of conscious brain activity . Well duhhhhhh, that's the proof of being unconscious.

 

[Steve Klinko]

So you don't go along with

The identity theory of mind holds that states and processes of the mind are identical to states and processes of the brain. Strictly speaking, it need not hold that the mind is identical to the brain. Idiomatically we do use ‘She has a good mind’ and ‘She has a good brain’ interchangeably but we would hardly say ‘Her mind weighs fifty ounces’. Here I take identifying mind and brain as being a matter of identifying processes and perhaps states of the mind and brain. ?

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/mind-identity/

No. All that you can Logically say is that States and Processes of the Mind are Correlated with Processes of the Brain. The Experience of Redness in your Visual Field is Correlated with certain Neural Activity. Nobody knows how the Redness is produced. When you say Identical, are you saying that in some sense the Redness IS Neural Activity? Then I say that is not a Logical conclusion to make. It is nothing more than a Speculation. Zero chain of Logic exists that can take you from Neural Activity to the Experience of Redness.

 

[Steve Klinko]

Anecdotal reports of what? I report "nothing". No lights, no ghosts, no voices, no pain, no pleasure. I can report NOTHING. I was no longer conscious of anything. What can be inaccurate or measurable about that?
The science lies in the anesthesia rendering the brain unconscious.
No one claims the answer to emergent consciousness. You are fighting non existent windmills
Only when you are conscious and have experiences to memorize. Memory requires a memorable experience. Right, no consciousness, no memory, nothing! No, your unconscious mind doesn't experience anything, hence you have no memory. Your body experiences trauma, but YOU do not. No one does. That's why they use it for major invasive surgery. There is nothing to remember. If you remember anything from the surgery you were not unconscious and the anesthesiologist screwed up.
Nothing gets erased. All your prior memories remain intact and your homeostasis continues . These are the subconscious parts of the brain. These parts of the brain are never conscious and are not affected by anesthesia.

When the conscious part of the brain is under the proper amounts of anesthesia it is rendered unconscious and does not experience and/or record anything at all. YOU are away.

What you are suggesting is that it is impossible to measure the absence of conscious brain activity . Well duhhhhhh, that's the proof of being unconscious.

What I am suggesting is that maybe if we were to actually Measure Consciousness we might find that a lot is happening in the Mind while under Anesthesia even though the subject will not remember it on awakening. We do much more Dreaming at night than we can remember. At least that is what Sleep Science tells us so far. But again, I don't think we can really know what our Conscious Minds are doing all night while we are asleep until we find some way to Measure Consciousness and Conscious Experience.

 

[Write4U]

What I am suggesting is that maybe if we were to actually Measure Consciousness we might find that a lot is happening in the Mind while under Anesthesia even though the subject will not remember it on awakening.

A lot of things are happening in the subconscious parts of the brain, because their chemistry is not affected by the anesthesia. Not all brain neurons and neuronal patterns are the same. The Exteroceptive and Interoceptive parts of the brain fill different functions. The first is the conscious Observational perceptive/translative functions, the second is subconscious Homeostatic control/translative functions.

We do much more Dreaming at night than we can remember. At least that is what Sleep Science tells us so far. But again, I don't think we can really know what our Conscious Minds are doing all night while we are asleep until we find some way to Measure Consciousness and Conscious Experience.

Yes, our conscious mind is not anesthetized during dreaming, it is merely dormant and sometimes can experience the "uncontrolled hallucinations", like nightmares, which are not real.

I think you may be misinterpreting the "mind" as separated from the brain once it is created and that is partly true, it is an emergent non-physical quality. But what I believe is what you are missing is that the continuation of the mind remains totally dependent on the brain's activity and is renewed at quantum level by activity in the physical neural patterns of the brain. When the conscious brain stops the mind evaporates into nothingness.

When the conscious part of the brain loses functionality, the mind suffers from that process, because the mind is wholly dependent on a fully functional brain. As Anil Seth observes , that is a fragile mechanism that can easily go wrong as evidenced by the abundance of aberrant mental conditions.
There maybe more broken minds than broken computers in the world. Alzheimers is caused by a loss of brain function due to microtubule catastrophe. (Hameroff).

Alzheimer's is a progressive disease, where dementia symptoms gradually worsen over a number of years. In its early stages, memory loss is mild, but with late-stage Alzheimer's, individuals lose the ability to carry on a conversation and respond to their environment.

https://www.alz.org › what-is-alzheimers

IOW, the person's mind gradually fades away as the damage in the brain progresses.

A direct parallel can be drawn between getting stuck in an Alzheimer brain "lock-up", due to microtubule catastrophe, and a computer "lock-up" due to transistor failure.

Transistors [quote]In the 1950's the Bipolar junction transistor (or BJT) was invented at AT&T Bell Laboratories in 1948 by John Bardeen, Walter Brattain, and William Shockley (all of whom shared the Nobel prize for physics in 1956 for the transistor's invention). This type of transistor still is widely used today. Today's most-used transistor is the Metal Oxide Semiconductor Field Effect Transistor (MOSFET), present by the millions in integrated circuits. This transistor was invented by Dawon Khang and Martin Atalla in 1960, another Bell Labs research team.[/quote]

Transistors perform operations earlier provided by vacuum tubes, but are smaller, cheaper, require less power, and obtain faster switching times. The first transistor was made from materials that included a paper clip and a razor blade.

Well, whaddaya know!

Although transistors can be manufactured as stand-alone devices, more often they are encapsulated inside small, semiconductor chips
(often called integrated circuits, or simply IC's).

When technology advanced to the point where millions of transistors could be packed onto an IC the size of a fingernail, the density of transistors on the chip came to be called VLSI (Very Large Scale Integration). The density of transistors in silicon chips has been predicted effectively by Moore's law, illustrated by the density of switching elements in these computer processors:more

https://en.citizendium.org/wiki/Electronic_switch#

Compare this to some 100 billion neurons in the brain alone, each containing some hundred microtubule processors (do the math). IMO this approach of starting with hard facts will be more productive than starting with a hard question which we do not even know how to formulate.

 

[billvon]

When I read the title of this thread, I think about someone in Tibet saying "Westerners are incapable of creatively writing music! Have you heard their music? It's all the same. They just take some formula and apply it and come up with a series of notes, then sing them and it all sounds exactly the same to me."

And he would be just as right as the OP here.

 

[Write4U]

When I read the title of this thread, I think about someone in Tibet saying "Westerners are incapable of creatively writing music! Have you heard their music? It's all the same. They just take some formula and apply it and come up with a series of notes, then sing them and it all sounds exactly the same to me."

And he would be just as right as the OP here.

I don't know what music you are listening to but it sounds that you have extremely narrow musical horizons.

As ex-musician I beg to disagree with you. I don't know your taste in music but Western Jazz is a shining jewel in the mozaic of the musical world.
The Dalai Lama seemed to thoroughly enjoy Andreas Vollenweider
The Pat Metheny group has some of the most inventive and spellbinding compositions.

If anyone wants to see Vollenweider perform for the Dalai Lama or live performance of the PatMetheny group in Japan. I have posted two YouTube links in the; What's on your I-pod in Art & Culture.

 

[billvon]

I don't know what music you are listening to but it sounds that you have extremely narrow musical horizons.

??? I don't live in Tibet.

As ex-musician I beg to disagree with you. I don't know your taste in music but Western Jazz is a shining jewel in the mozaic of the musical world.

Again, I don't live in Tibet. But if someone DOES live in Tibet and has that opinion - his opinion is just as valid as Steve K's.

 

[Write4U]

??? I don't live in Tibet.

No, but you are speculating what Tibetans might say about Western music.

Again, I don't live in Tibet. But if someone DOES live in Tibet and has that opinion - his opinion is just as valid as Steve K's.

Of course, but the question still remains IF they are saying that Western music is "all the same", which prompted my comment, because I know that Eastern countries like Japan are enchanted with Jazz, a typical Western music.

As to computers being able to compose good music, I am confident that GPT3 may well be able to create melodious and balanced pieces of music, given some instruction in harmony and rhythmic parameters . They may not be masterpieces, but most musical compositions are not masterpieces.

 

[Michael 345]

Nobody knows how the Redness is produced.

Memory short answer
Seen red
Told red
Know red
See red again
Memory know red
Conscious it is red

 

[Steve Klinko]

A lot of things are happening in the subconscious parts of the brain, because their chemistry is not affected by the anesthesia. Not all brain neurons and neuronal patterns are the same. The Exteroceptive and Interoceptive parts of the brain fill different functions. The first is the conscious Observational perceptive/translative functions, the second is subconscious Homeostatic control/translative functions. Yes, our conscious mind is not anesthetized during dreaming, it is merely dormant and sometimes can experience the "uncontrolled hallucinations", like nightmares, which are not real.

I think you may be misinterpreting the "mind" as separated from the brain once it is created and that is partly true, it is an emergent non-physical quality. But what I believe is what you are missing is that the continuation of the mind remains totally dependent on the brain's activity and is renewed at quantum level by activity in the physical neural patterns of the brain. When the conscious brain stops the mind evaporates into nothingness.

Talking about Quantum Level Activity having anything to do with Consciousness is pure Speculation. Speculations. But that's all anyone can do with Consciousness at this point.

 

[Steve Klinko]

When I read the title of this thread, I think about someone in Tibet saying "Westerners are incapable of creatively writing music! Have you heard their music? It's all the same. They just take some formula and apply it and come up with a series of notes, then sing them and it all sounds exactly the same to me."

And he would be just as right as the OP here.

But I'm sure that Computers will not be able to Creatively write Tibetan Music either. Beauty is in the Eye of the Beholder. Computers will never understand the Conscious Experience of Music from any culture.

 

[Steve Klinko]

Memory short answer
Seen red
Told red
Know red
See red again
Memory know red
Conscious it is red

How does the Experience of Redness appear in your Conscious Mind from that list? How did you See Redness the first time? You just Experienced it. You don't need to know it's name, in any language, to Experience the Redness of it. Don't understand what you are trying to say here.

 

[billvon]

But I'm sure that Computers will not be able to Creatively write Tibetan Music either. Beauty is in the Eye of the Beholder.

Exactly. Thus if people hear computer generated music and think it's creative - it's creative.

 

[billvon]

Of course, but the question still remains IF they are saying that Western music is "all the same", which prompted my comment, because I know that Eastern countries like Japan are enchanted with Jazz, a typical Western music.

Some are, some aren't. Just like here.

 

[Steve Klinko]

Exactly. Thus if people hear computer generated music and think it's creative - it's creative.

Simulations of existing styles of Music might sound good but it is not Creative. You have to realize what the Algorithms are doing. They are basically generating Random Notes that fit a particular recipe or style. If the Computer is Simulating Beethoven then people will probably like it because it sounds like Beethoven not because it is Creative.

 

[billvon]

Simulations of existing styles of Music might sound good but it is not Creative.

The Beatles copying earlier styles of music might sound good but it is not Creative either.

 

[Steve Klinko]

The Beatles copying earlier styles of music might sound good but it is not Creative either.

But the Beatles put their own Unique Beatles Sound into the earlier styles. How would you program in a "Unique Sound" into the Program. And if the Programmers did put a Unique Sound into their Programs, who is it that Created the Unique Sound? Of course it was the Programmers and not the Computer itself.