I think your answer to that question is the only one possible under your epistemology.
But then, given that I DO all the things that I do, “you” (in the non-adhominem sense) lose the ability to infer from some entity doing conscious-ish sorts of things that such entities are conscious, right? N Nicholas S. Thompson Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology Clark University <http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/> http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/ From: Friam [mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com] On Behalf Of Frank Wimberly Sent: Sunday, August 24, 2014 1:46 PM To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group Subject: Re: [FRIAM] BBC News - Ant colony 'personalities' shaped by environment If you say you are not conscious, I defer to your superior knowledge of the subject (you). Frank P.s. Nick and I have been through this argument before. Sent from my Verizon 4G LTE Phone (505) 670--9918 On Aug 24, 2014 11:43 AM, "Nick Thompson" <nickthomp...@earthlink.net <mailto:nickthomp...@earthlink.net> > wrote: So, now we move to the next step of the argument: On what basis do any of you confidently assert that I am conscious when I say I am not? Nick Nicholas S. Thompson Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology Clark University <http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/> http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/ From: Friam [mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com <mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com> ] On Behalf Of Frank Wimberly Sent: Sunday, August 24, 2014 1:06 PM To: 'The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group' Subject: Re: [FRIAM] BBC News - Ant colony 'personalities' shaped by environment But you are nonetheless correct. All this reminds me of the old joke: A skeptic asks God, “How do I know that I exist?” God replies, “And who is asking?” Frank Frank C. Wimberly 140 Calle Ojo Feliz Santa Fe, NM 87505 <mailto:wimber...@gmail.com> wimber...@gmail.com <mailto:wimbe...@cal.berkeley.edu> wimbe...@cal.berkeley.edu Phone: (505) 995-8715 <tel:%28505%29%20995-8715> Cell: (505) 670-9918 <tel:%28505%29%20670-9918> From: Friam [mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com] On Behalf Of Steve Smith Sent: Sunday, August 24, 2014 10:41 AM To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group Subject: Re: [FRIAM] BBC News - Ant colony 'personalities' shaped by environment Rebuttal by shame! If you have to ask you can't afford it. <grin> you saw right through me! -- rec -- On Sun, Aug 24, 2014 at 10:29 AM, Steve Smith <sasm...@swcp.com <mailto:sasm...@swcp.com> > wrote: Hey, wait a minute, guys! You have lost me. What is this "consciousness" of which you speak. I am not sure I have one and I need you to describe it to me in a way that I can recognize it. No you don't... and if you don't know that, then you are not a truly conscious being, but rather a clever simulacrum of one. N Nicholas S. Thompson Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology Clark University http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/ <http://home.earthlink.net/%7Enickthompson/naturaldesigns/> -----Original Message----- From: Friam [mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com <mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com> ] On Behalf Of John Kennison Sent: Sunday, August 24, 2014 11:50 AM To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group Subject: Re: [FRIAM] BBC News - Ant colony 'personalities' shaped by environment Eric, As I understand it, Dennett's position and Chalmers' are not only incompatible, their difference is more extreme than one simply being the denial of the other. Dennett says that a zombie is simply impossible. If we tried to create a computer that could think like a human, it would be conscious --perhaps even if it just did a good job of analyzing things the way humans did --even without loving pets, etc. (I say perhaps, because I'm not sure what Dennett actually means.) Chalmers says (I think) that even if we created a physically object that was identical to a human, it wouldn't necessarily be conscious --which I find too extreme. When I said I favored Chalmers, I meant that it seems plausible that consciousness might not simply emerge if a system behaves in a sufficiently sophisticated way. --the way the system is constructed could make a difference. But these are only top of my head guesses. --John ________________________________________ From: Friam [friam-boun...@redfish.com <mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com> ] on behalf of Eric Charles [eric.phillip.char...@gmail.com <mailto:eric.phillip.char...@gmail.com> ] Sent: Sunday, August 24, 2014 10:04 AM To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group Subject: Re: [FRIAM] BBC News - Ant colony 'personalities' shaped by environment John, So, in a "snapshot" I think "A conscious system and a non conscious one could be physically identical", however, I think it would be disingenuous to say that we could not tell them apart through interaction over time. This issue is not whether or not it is easy, but merely whether it is possible. I guess the question boils down to how you respond to challenges about philosophical zombies. These discussions normally begin with someone asserting "You can imagine things that behave exactly like you and I in all ways, but not conscious." The presenter then goes on to lay out a series of riddles these creatures lead to. However, I am not sure I buy the premise. I would assert that you CANNOT imagine such creatures. Can you really imagine a creature that acts exactly like you without consciousness? Perhaps you can imagine a creature that appears to act lovingly towards your dog (if you have a dog) without feeling the love that you feel. But can you imagine a creature that appears to act lovingly towards your dog with being aware of your dog?!? It seems like the type of claim we allow people to get away with at the start of a philosophical discussion, because it is a pretty normal seeming premise, and we all like to play such games... but if we really stopped to consider the premise, we would not let it pass. (Obviously, this need not be read as a question to you, it is a challenge to Chalmers and others who hold those views.) Eric ----------- Eric P. Charles, Ph.D. Lab Manager Center for Teaching, Research, and Learning American University, Hurst Hall Room 203A 4400 Massachusetts Avenue, N.W. Washington, DC 20016 phone: (202) 885-3867 <tel:%28202%29%20885-3867> fax: (202) 885-1190 <tel:%28202%29%20885-1190> email: echar...@american.edu <mailto:echar...@american.edu> <mailto:echar...@american.edu <mailto:echar...@american.edu> > On Fri, Aug 22, 2014 at 1:16 PM, John Kennison <jkenni...@clarku.edu <mailto:jkenni...@clarku.edu> <mailto:jkenni...@clarku.edu <mailto:jkenni...@clarku.edu> >> wrote: Thanks Nick, I found a few statements I would revise in what I wrote. Perhaps, I should have said that my argument seems valid rather correct. I was careless in describing Chalmers' view (He said something like: A conscious system and a non conscious one could be physically identical). And I was being presumptuous in describing Dennett as giving a great tour of the issues --I don't know that much about the issues. --John ________________________________________ From: Friam [friam-boun...@redfish.com <mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com> <mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com <mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com> >] on behalf of Nick Thompson [nickthomp...@earthlink.net <mailto:nickthomp...@earthlink.net> <mailto:nickthomp...@earthlink.net <mailto:nickthomp...@earthlink.net> >] Sent: Friday, August 22, 2014 12:37 PM To: 'The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group' Subject: Re: [FRIAM] BBC News - Ant colony 'personalities' shaped by environment John, Thanks for this. But now I have to read Dennett again. I am afraid my copy is in a box in Santa Fe, so may have to come over and borrow yours for a few days. But I am in somebody else's vacation cabin in NH for the moment, so it will be a while. The following is from my shaky memory. Please don't flame me, anybody; just put your arm around my shoulders and lead me from error. There appears to be a divide amongst philosophers of science concerning how much to be a rationalist. Thomas Kuhn is the classic IRRATIONALIST An awful lot of the philosophy of science that we were all taught in graduate school is irrationalist in this sense. Even Popper, who stressed the logic of deduction in his philosophy ("falsification") was irrationalist in his account of where good scientific ideas come from ("bold conjectures"). The hallmark of an irrationalist is a tendency to put logic words in ironic quotes, such as "proof" or "inference" or "truth" , or to use persuasion words ("intuition pumps") that avoid invoking logical relations. So, Dennett's failure to organize the book in the manner you suggest is part and parcel of his irrationalism, as is, by the way, your observation that an argument can be effective without being clear. I want to pull back a bit my distinction between metaphysical and factual. I guess I REALLY think the distinction is relative to a particular argument. In any argument, there are the facts we argue from and the facts we argue about. There is a sense in which metaphysics consists in the facts we ALWAYS argue from. I hope I haven't shot my own high horse out from under me, here. Nick Nicholas S. Thompson Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology Clark University http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/ <http://home.earthlink.net/%7Enickthompson/naturaldesigns/> -----Original Message----- From: Friam [mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com <mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com> <mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com <mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com> >] On Behalf Of John Kennison Sent: Friday, August 22, 2014 8:35 AM To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group Subject: Re: [FRIAM] BBC News - Ant colony 'personalities' shaped by environment Nick: I find your distinction between metaphysical questions and factual questions helpful because it clarifies the vague feeling I expressed about making "some sort of error" when I said that consciousness is "having an inner subjective life". I no longer feel it is an error but I should categorize it as a metaphysical position rather than a scientific fact. (I prefer the term ``scientific fact`` to your term ``fact``.) It still seems like a good argument ("I know consciousness exists because I experience it") even though this cannot be a scientific argument. Eric, Steve, et al: Thanks for your very interesting comments. I would like to add some further comments about Dennett. I both enjoyed and was frustrated by his book "Consciousness Explained". I recommend it highly but with the following caveats: (1) I wish the book were organized differently. I think it should have started with "The Challenge" (section 5 of chapter 2, p.39-42). I paraphrase this challenge as: First, Dennett says he wants to explain Consciousness in scientific terms, without invoking anything beyond contemporary science. I take this to mean that he wants to show that we can analyze and explain human behavior entirely in scientific, materialistic terms without appealing to any 'mysterious' forces. (Therefore, to focus on the behavior rather than the motives, of conscious people, Dennett starts by telling speculative stories about the phenomenology of consciousness.) Secondly, he doesn't want to be like behaviorists who "pretend they don't have the experiences we know darn well they share they share with us. If I [Dennett] wish to deny the existence of some controversial feature of consciousness, the burden falls on me to that it is somehow illusory." (p.40 of the book). Thirdly he wants to do an honest job of explaining the empirical evidence. This challenge intrigued me. The first and second goals seem almost contradictory. I wondered how he could possibly pull it off. (2) As far as I remember, Dennett never summarizes how he met this challenge. (I read this book over 15 years ago and I might have forgotten the summary. At any rate, as I go over the book now, I can't find the kind of summary I would like to see.) So here is my summary of how Dennett did: (a) After having read the book, I feel there is no theoretical barrier to explaining all of the behavior of apparently conscious beings in purely materialistic terms. (b) My memory is that Dennett explains the feeling of being conscious in terms of the strong AI hypothesis, which says that any system that carries out a sufficiently complex task will automatically be conscious. I am not certain if I believe this, but it or something like it seems necessary if we take the first two goals seriously. Dennett apparently believes that the emergence of consciousness depends only on the behavior exhibited. By contrast, Chalmers argues that a conscious systems and a non-conscious system could exhibit the same type of behavior. I don't see any reason to favor either position, but I prefer Chalmers. (3) On Dennett's style: This is what I find both frustrating and intriguing. He seems to discuss various ideas without fully arranging them into an argument, as I would tend to do. Dennett relies on this tendency of the reader to complete the argument. So Dennett spends less time on argumentation and more on telling stories. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. As mentioned above, I came away with a strong feeling about the first part of the challenge. I also had a strong feeling that our consciousness often fools us into thinking it is in control when it isn't. I liked Dennett's presentation of the Pandemonium model of language (based on work of Selfridge, Dawkins and others) and I feel it explains a lot of things that would otherwise be murky. On the other hand, I was dissatisfied with the chapter on "Qualia Disqualified". I even found myself agreeing with his students (and others) that he hasn't really explained consciousness --but I think he gave us a great tour of the issues. (If I had written the book, and arranged it more logically, the thread of the arguments might have been clearer, but it would have been a much less effective book.) --John ________________________________________ From: Friam [friam-boun...@redfish.com <mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com> <mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com <mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com> >] on behalf of Eric Smith [desm...@santafe.edu <mailto:desm...@santafe.edu> <mailto:desm...@santafe.edu <mailto:desm...@santafe.edu> >] Sent: Saturday, August 16, 2014 12:31 PM To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group Subject: Re: [FRIAM] BBC News - Ant colony 'personalities' shaped by environment Hi Steve, I am neither knowledgeable, nor do I have time to report even my own experiences, without making a mess of things. But perhaps I can give some titles of things people have pointed out to me. There seem to be several schools of approach (meaning, groups of people who criticize each other a lot). I't hard even to know how to break them down into clusters, because there are several axes of variation. There is a school who are mechanistic, and who think of themselves as mechanistic. At one end within that school, one has Dan Dennett. Much of what he says seems to me like a lot of effort to beat the dead horse of mysticism, and I have no patience for that, because I find it tedious and uninteresting. Beyond that, it is not clear to me how much he has contributed in real ideas. One that seems okay, if I understand it from informal conversations that have involved him, is that it involves a kind of recursive self-reference of thought. Meaning, that thought is a process for handling responses to events (or, in a very broad use of the noun, "things"), and part of what consciousness does is render the state of thought as a "thing" in its own right, having the same symbolic kind of representation as the mind gives to other "things", so that thought can then process a representation formed about its own state. This seems like part of the common lore, expressed already in this thread, and not novel. Dennett seems to want to associate this ability specifical ly with language, and seems almost to want to treat it as an _application_ of linguistic faculty. I don't think that is a well-motivated position, but I am glad Dennett does it because it makes an important point. Language, in having syntax, can manipulate words within the syntactic system, much as it uses words to manipulate ideas within semantic systems. That is hard to understand in language, and making us aware of the fact that it is hard, even though it has been before our eyes for centuries, seems helpful in expressing part of what makes assigning clear meaning to statements about consciousness hard. On another extreme from Dennett but still materialist, we have Giuglio Tononi and his "Phi" measure. Basically, Tononi adopts information theory as a language, and within that language introduces a concrete notion of what it means for an information system to be irreducible, in a way that I think is analogous to the notion of irreducibility of representations of groups, in the theory of representations. The details are different because information theory is a different structure from algebra, but the basic notion of something's not being splittable into factors is the same. I am now a couple of years out of date wrt Tononi's publications, but I think it is fair to say that Tononi asserts that having a very large irreducible component of information is the _essence_ of consciousness, and that all the other things like self-reference (which I would argue are also essential, even if irreducibility is too) are merely other phenomena of mind but not the thing that distinguishe s conscious states. The Tononi development has the virtue of being an actual idea that is formalized and thus unambiguously exchangeable among people. It may also have a kernel of something important. Many people who work in consciousness seem to think it does. For my taste, it is too non-embodied to likely be a very comprehensive part of the right answer. I think both the embodied dimensions of the things that contribute to conscious states, and some kind of recursion, are primitives that are essential. Tononi has a large book about this, and I think several shorter papers that are on the arXiv. Somewhere in here is Christof Koch, who is also considered one of the important contributors, but I don't know what his ideas are. I include him because if you are asking who the thought leaders at the moment seem to be, my understanding is that he is one of them. There is also Max Tegmark, who has a recent paper "Consciousness as a state of matter", available from the arxiv. This (which I have read) seems to me to be a smart mathematician's discussion of a generally nice point, which adds nothing of substance to where we are stuck. Tegmark is making an argument with which I agree, that most-everything we see in nature that is robust is a "state of matter", understood as modern physics uses the term. Hence, the distinctive and characteristic nature of consciousness too. But the only thing about consciousness in what Tegmark builds is what he gets from Tononi. The rest of it is more about the theory of measurement in quantum mechanics, than it is anything that distinguishes consciousness from other patterns of order to which we have given names and phenomenologies. Now, if I understand it at a distant second hand, Chalmers has a criticism of all of these kinds of positions, notwithstanding their technical differences, which is that he would claim they fail to recognize what he calls "the hard problem". I do not know exactly how Chalmers uses language, and I cannot speak for him, but to try to use my own language to express what I think he says, I would say he asserts that these mere characterizations of mechanism are not "accounting for" what we mean when we report "the experience of" this or that. Here, the word "qualia" is often introduced, to refer to the antecedent of such reports. I think Dennett thinks of (and perhaps calls) Chalmers the worst sort of Cartesian dualist, whereas Chalmers would say that Dennett is claiming that consciousness "doesn't really exist", or something morally equivalent. I believe both of them think of the axis on which they hold opposite ends as different and bigger than any of the axes that separate the technical people from one another. Chalmers seems (for good or ill) to attract people who do want to be dualists or mystics (or mysterians), so without putting in a lot of time with original material, it is hard to get a clear picture of him through the people who claim to render him. Ih the middle of all this, helping us sort it all out, is John Searl, who has a short little book "The problem of consciousness". Searl is at his best when using pellucid common language to explain why everyone else is being silly. He is much less impressive when asked to introduce an actual new idea that moves the discussion forward. However, in saying that, I do not mean to diminish the value (or the enjoyment) of his criticisms. He has some language in there about various kinds of dualists, which I find mystifying, because it all exists within such self-referential circles of language that I wouldn't know how to link it to anything in the rest of the world. But, if you want to know about dualists, this is a good place to find them categorized. I find reporting on a lot of this like I think I would feel if sent to the middle east to report on exactly why it is necessary for some factions to fight other factions. There seems to be a long way between being humans, and so exercising the individual and social behaviors that constitute bringing ourself to share or coordinate various internal states that we refer to with names for awareness or states of mind or whatever, and finding a language that, in symbolic form, makes a faithful representation of what it is that distinctively allows us to be what we are and do what we do. Each of these guys seems to bring attention to the absence of such language in one or another way. What I can't understand is why they think there is anything more than "a hard problem" of inventing a valid language to faithfully reflect the structure of a natural phenomenon, and their main difference is in how much each thinks he has captured and the others have not. But I think they would argu e there is more to their positions than that. Of course, I have no expert knowledge, and haven't put that much time even into reading their literatures as an outsider and tourist. So it is to be expected that a lot of it will pass over me. Several of these guys have either TED talks, or lectures that stream on the web, which are shorter than reading their papers, but even more unsatisfying. Oops. Too much text. All best, Eric On Aug 16, 2014, at 11:04 AM, Steve Smith wrote: Gentlemen, I am also interested in both the nature of consciousness and the nature of knowledge regarding what appear to be entirely subjective phenonomena (arising from the fact of consciousness?). The last time I attended a Cognitive Neuroscience conference (6 years ago?) I was impressed with how far things had come with regard to correlating brain imaging and *reported* subjective experiences. I realize that sometimes more data and even higher quality data doesn't necessarily improve a model qualitatively, but I have been hoping that there would be some conceptual breakthroughs from this work. Unfortunately, as the popular media and the population in general (which is chicken, which is egg?) have taken a stronger interest in science (or has come to fetishize the artifacts of science?) there is a lot more "noise" to sort through to find signal. The number of articles or even entire issues of magazines and the number of books on the topic has risen dramatically in the past 10 years or so, but I rarely see what looks like new insight into the nature of consciousness. I'm hoping someone here with more direct experience or more patience with the literature (BTW, the "hard literature" on the topic is generally too opaque for me, so I'm lost in a middle-ground limbo between the popular accounts and the actual work-product of scientists) knows of new insights or new twists on the old models to share. Does anyone have a short list of recent publications which reframe the question in a new way? - Steve Hi Nick, One of the problems in discussing consciousness is that it seems very hard to break it down into simpler concepts. There are what might be called "high-level" words such as "inner life", "awareness", "apprehension", which suggest consciousness but only to someone who already ha a sense of what consciousness is. Whereas low level words, which refer to things that can be readily measured do not seem adequate to get at the real meaning of consciousness. So we are left with metaphors. When I use words such as "access" and "inner life" they suggest a container but they are not necessarily used to denote an actual container but to describe a situation which has some of the properties of a container. However, there does seem to be a real container that describes the information I have access to. I get raw information from my body. This is not to say that my consciousness is located in my body, but that what I know about the outside world starts with how my body senses the outside world. These senses are then processed or contemplated somehow and this results in what I think I know about the world. There is no way that "I can see exactly what you see" because what you see comes from your body and what I see comes from my body. If we literally mean "see" then what you see is what enters your eyes and what I see is what enters my eyes. You might tell me about what you see, but that is not the same as seeing what you see because what you have seen has been processed by you then reformulated in terms of speech, which is then processed by me. Even if we witnessed the same event, we would have slightly different viewpoints, and our eyes are different, and, in any case, we w ou! ld start interpreting the incoming rays of light as soon as they started to enter our respective eyes. You also gave examples in which I might infer what you saw. This seems to presuppose I have a theory of what Nick is all about or some means of making inferences. (I don't have a well-articulated theory of Nick, but I do arrive at conclusions about what to make of you. I'm not certain how I do this, but I am certain that I do it all the time, quite effortlessly and almost automatically.) At any rate this drawing of inferences does not seem to be seeing exactly what you see, but a way (not necessarily very accurate) of getting a rough approximation of what you saw. --John ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
