thanks Steve for these comments. Since your message is in html, I will allow myself colors in my response.
please see below. Nick Nicholas S. Thompson Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology, Clark University (nthomp...@clarku.edu) http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/ ----- Original Message ----- From: Steve Smith To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group Sent: 6/15/2009 4:16:21 PM Subject: Re: [FRIAM] The ghost in the machine (was 'quick question') Nick - And that, sir, is why I am the Special Swine Flu Correspondent to the Santa Fe Reporter! Swine Flu Intelligence Report Now that Doug has established that Swine Flu has Intelligence (is it Collective?) I am left wondering if it (Swine Flu) has a First-Person Experience? I am so taken with your (Nick's) suggestion that 1st-Person Experience of Consciousness is really an epiphenomenon of 3rd-Person Observation that I am now trying to relate it to my recent readings of the Trialogs of Terrence McKenna, Ralph Abraham, and Rupert Sheldrake. I think I have to disavow "epiphenomenon". What I want to say is that is is a construction. We build the first person out of the third person. I have always had a hard time swallowing both Sheldrake and McKenna for somewhat different reasons, but for better or worse, I find that your 1st/3rd-person duality makes their schlock (or is it?) more palatable. I hate to admit my ignorance, but who are they? And why is a man of your great discretion and wisdom reading schlock? And is schlock really a word? I thought my mother had made it up. This is not a criticism of your observations/suggestions, but rather a report from my own reaction to it. One of the biggest problems *I* have with the "the universe is all one big slap-happy consciousness and the you that thinks it is you is just one little tiny facet of it" is the ever-present *I* that *I* experience! But somehow this is harder to hold onto after your description of how 1st Person Experience might very well be an illusion of 3rd person observation. It seems as if this 3rd/1st Duality supports collective consciousness in some way or another? I have never (wanted to?) viewed Collective (un)Consciousness as a literal understanding. Look, if we are going to go basic, as Cartesians seem to want to do, then let's be phenomenologists. What is naively presented to us is a world and some of that world moves when we move and some of it stays still when we move. From that basic fact one can construct a world/me distinction. And then, by watching others, we can build a theory of me. I am one of those things over there! Wow! This takes me to another (quite eloquent) statement you made earlier. "It's metaphors all the way down!" As an acolyte of the reverend George Lakoff in the Church of Metaphor, I will have to go see what he and Rafael Nunez have to imply about that in their "Where Mathematics Comes From: How the Embodied Mind Brings Mathematics into Being". I read that book last summer and really liked it. What I loved was the idea that the number system was constructed over the centuries through a series of metaphorical extensions. I need to read it again. It's a great allusion to "Turtles all the way down!" but my own theories of layered metaphor complexes (or complex layered metaphors, depending on when you ask) depends on metaphor grounding out in experiences (ala Nunez & Lakoff and embodied mind). I am willing to accept (perhaps) that there is some sort of bootstrapping process where metaphors are first built upon primary experience and then elaborated by inserting other metaphorical maps between the original metaphorical source and the experiential target, and repeatedly abstracted until the original experiences are lost to the fogs of time or the influence of other's. No, I think I really mean ALL the way down. Natural selection wires in much of our metaphor making. Anytime we see "this" as a sort of "that", we are engaged in metaphor. Think how the retina, lateral geniculate, and visual cortex treat fields as divided into contours. (Is there still a lateral geniculate; perhaps it got retired in the 80's) Anytime we see today as a version of yesterday, we are doing metaphor. So perhaps, on this rather free-wheeling notion of metaphor, you can relinguish your need to bootstrap. Damn fine material for avoiding deadlines. Thank gentlemen, one and all! John Kennison and I and a few others read Dennett's Consciousness Explained a few years back and in those days I conceived of an essay entitled "I am an extensionless dot." I have never written it. This is what I mean when I say, there is no introspection: there is only spection and all of it is extro. - Steve Nick
============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
