Jochen Fromm " What would be needed to reconstruct a mind?" I had to respond, I suspect a kind of Koan content to the question. Reconstruct or Construct?? Since the latter does not seem to have occurred historically I am not sure the former is possible at this time.
Then I bumped into one of Hume's references. "The mind is a theatre.." Basically a picture show of unrelated images played out and given a meaning from some arbitrary emotional reservoir. If the mind is basically irrational and built upon a set of compulsions for emotional gratification then perhaps it is not unlike a flock. Each picture wishes to be the center of attention providing links to emotional rewards. Lucien Goldmann, being very clever and linguistically obtuse seems to suspect that the class consciousness of Heidegger, Lukacs and Marx is not actually real and some how still depends on the acts and thoughts of individuals(he does not actually come out and deny group consciousness but he certainly goes a long way toward dismantling the concept) . If a class consciousness while apparently real to us is an emergent phenomena defying easy explanation( or even proof of existing) perhaps our minds are also an assembly of individual emotional entities the whole of which is equally elusive of definition. I am Only thinking out loud. I have been struggling to understand 20th century European philosophers and the complex language, is a problem for me . But My intuition suggests that they were struggling to define a Mind from a perspective that kept shifting. Flocks are not sentient so they are simple by comparison to Minds but they may be usefully analogous. The thread of the moderns is that two distinct realities seem to exist for the mind, the one fabricated from the senses and the other outside and beyond immediate perception. So is a mind a machine flipping through random images attempting to construct a self gratifying Narrative to explain away each and every obvious contradiction introduced by flawed perception? Perhaps literature gives us a window into the way we construct individual realities, if each mind finds difficult contradictions then perhaps literature provides temporary solutions in favour of simple magical explanations. Is it possible to build a mind on such simplistic foundations and then perhaps we can reconstruct a mind that is less dependent on self gratification. Funny that in some way the addiction to emotional rewards is every bit as crippling as a drug addiction which simply intensifies the effects of the original. It is interesting that philosophers from prior to the French revolution have been focused on Group and Individual properties and attempting to rationalize these unknowns. We have often attributed to the Group a mind as if it were an individual, Hobbe's Leviathan is perhaps the first clear presentation of the idea. We seem to suspect that examination of groups will produce insight into individual minds. As for the question regarding the number of memes, I will back off not being certain that even Dawkins knew for certain what he had exposed. If class consciousness does not exist except in some action then perhaps emergent behaviour requires some more discussion and clarification. Especially when dealing with living sentients. Miraculously I made it through years of education without any exposure to philosophy or humanities and only in old age do I have the patience to persevere. I must admit I once arrogantly mocked such pursuits. I now regret my past in large part. So shall we begin by Building a Theatre (akin to Hume's) and supplying it with images(Props) and then allow the director and stage manager to appear then a script writer to make sure each performance is consistent(A number of agents coupled to form a single entity akin to Hobbe's Leviathan)? . It looks like a number of Auto Agents forced to cooperate, however we can not distinguish if it is mindlike until it produces something. That seems to be a problem, what would it have to produce before we accept that some Mind even exists.? That evidence we need would seem in some way a little like Praxis, an effect upon the world akin to Lucien Goldmann and Georg Lukacs' use of the ideas. Further more the programming of the Agent constituents would now seem to qualify in some way as equivalent to Dawkin's memes. The meme does not appear to be an established concept within the recent philosophical theses. That is not the only oddity I have noticed, the other is a slow acceptance of feedback loops creating complexity. Marx seems to venture into such ideas only marginally but considering the time in which he wrote he must have been seriously handicapped in the available language tools. ( I am not a Marxist, just curious) However with careful reading I think there has always been passages alluding to complexity before the idea was given full acknowledgment. Complexity lurks deep in philosophy. There were references to Lukacs in Goldmann's work that sound as if he knew exactly how to arrange various Agents to achieve social transformations. There is a curious mention of Groups requiring an external member loosely associated for the purpose of a global perspective while the majority are focused on tasks at hand. The loosely associated agent can steer the group and deliver it new knowledge(Memes) which the group can rapidly assimilate and manifest as concrete reality through action. There is some acknowledgement about the instability and lifespan perhaps someone has more insight into these issues. I am not a philosopher and venture to say that nothing I say could be trusted in the least. But if others in this group poke around a bit perhaps we can build some understanding( I hope deeply). I appreciate your tolerance of my musings, I would prefer sitting beneath a Linden tree and drinking German beer. Bertrand Russell never quite knew how to regard the Heidegger line of thinking and mentions them almost dismissivly and quickly moves on to beating upon Existentialists, but that was a different era. I suspect that if Complexity Theory had been around earlier the entire line of Western Philosophy would have changed. -----Original Message----- From: friam-boun...@redfish.com [mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com] On Behalf Of Jochen Fromm Sent: February-04-11 3:25 PM To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Daphnia's jeans How many memes does a mind have? What would be needed to reconstruct a mind? -J. ============================================================ 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 ============================================================ 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
