Hi, John, Welcome to the Weeds!
I like the history metaphor. What I think Peirce would say is everything you describe is experience NOW. Some of those experiences NOW get understood as experiences THEN. So, an "experience-then" is just a way of organizing some of the "experiences-now". There is no experience beyond experience. Put baldly, that sounds like nothing more than a trivial tautology. For me, it is a chastening reminder that any knowledge I assert beyond experience is either (1) nonsense or (2) a statement about some experiences. I know my Peirce-guru occasionally lurks, here, and I hope he will correct me. In particular, I wish he could remind me why I care about this enough even to devote a sub thread to it. Nick Nicholas S. Thompson Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology Clark University http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/ -----Original Message----- From: Friam [mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com] On Behalf Of John Kennison Sent: Tuesday, February 23, 2016 12:51 AM To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam@redfish.com> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Weeds of pragmatism: Subjectivity and intimacy I don't know it I am following all this correctly, but I would like to apply it to the question of doing History scientifically. At the start all we have are relics from the past --maybe we are uncertain which objects and/or documents really go back to a historical period under examination--but we have some way of testing for various relations between these relics. Se then look for a theory of the past which best accounts for the relics that we have. We may be able to measure how well different theories do this accounting. And the set opf measutres we arrive at is then history. But would some historian be dualists if they say there is a real truth about what happened in the past, it's just that we this real truth may not be recoverable. ________________________________________ From: Friam [friam-boun...@redfish.com] on behalf of Nick Thompson [nickthomp...@earthlink.net] Sent: Tuesday, February 23, 2016 1:34 AM To: 'The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group' Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Weeds of pragmatism: Subjectivity and intimacy Eric, I really like all of you said. What follows is a cavil, and will problem interest most readers as much as the bickering among monks about how often to wash their hair shirts. Please do not reply to this message unless you are interested in what follows. ________________________________ ONLY PERSONS UNINTERESTED IN THE WEEDIEST THICKETS OF PRAGMATISM SHOULD READ BELOW THIS LINE ________________________________ I think, Eric, you left the door open for dualism, when you describe the settlement of scientific opinion, and I need to close it behind you. You wrote: 3) In order to do science about something, we need only one thing to be true: It can be investigated empirically. That is, it is something, "out there" which we can turn our machinations towards, and which will yield stable results once we find the appropriate methods for its investigation. Here you imply that science is possible because there is Truth out there, concerning which human experience is fated to converge. The real world is somehow responsible for the convergence of opinion among scientists. Note the subtle difference in the way you presented it only a few paragraphs later: 7) And that's where we find ourselves. If a science of psychology is possible, then de facto the subject matter of psychology is some swath of empirically investigatable happenings, about which a community of investigators would eventually reach a consensus as the scientific process takes its course. Here, you focus exclusively on the convergence of opinion, eliminating altogether the notion of a truth outside human experience. Peirce would say – and perhaps James would not agree – that “that opinion upon which human scientists are fated to agree “ is exactly, and only, what is meant by the truth. So, there is a truth “out there”, beyond what you, or I, or any other individuals might come to believe, but not a truth beyond what all humans might come to believe. All we know now is that those opinions which are enduring and coherent with other enduring opinions have the best mathematical chance of being those opinions upon which we will ultimately converge. Lets say we are in a group of geographers wandering in a blizzard. We are completely disoriented and we have no consensus concerning what is the right direction home. Some propose going down hill, some up hill, some following the slope to the right or left. What is the function of “home” in our discussion. It is the place which, when we get there, we will terminate the discussion of where it is. To all intents and purposes, this distinction is monk’s work. The kind of question only true believers in pragmatism could trouble themselves with. For the rest of you, who need to get on with your work of building bridges and electing politicians, you need only say to yourselves (quietly, please, so Peirce will not hear you), “the REASON that scientists converge on some opinion is that there is something outside the world of human experience that beckons them toward it. Some Truth. But that is dualism, and Peirce never would have tolerated it. ________________________________ SEE. I TOLD YOU THIS WOULD BORE YOU! ________________________________ If you want to continue the previous conversation, but don’t want to go into the Weeds Of Pragmatism with me and Eric, I suggest you reply to an earlier message, not to this one. Nick Nicholas S. Thompson Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology Clark University http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/ From: Friam [mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com] On Behalf Of Eric Charles Sent: Monday, February 22, 2016 8:09 PM To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam@redfish.com> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Subjectivity and intimacy Russ said: "Eric's point that the world must be a certain way if we are to do science doesn't make sense to me. If Schrodinger, Heisenberg, etc. thought like that they would have denied the two-slit experiments, and quantum mechanics wouldn't exist. Science (as you all know) is fundamentally empirical. You can't demand that the world be a certain way so that it's easier to do science." Exactly! Let me try another tact. 1) We could imagine (with various levels of clarity) any number of worlds in which things worked differently from each other. 2) "Doing science" is largely a process of trying to figure out which of those worlds we live in, by searching for the best way to divide up empirical evidence, so that it is reliable and can be agreed up. (Peirce was particularly fascinated with the advances made in 18th century chemistry.) Scientists search for more and more stable ways to view the world, i.e., ways which stand up to more and more empirical scrutiny. (Early attempts at the periodic table, though imperfect, serve as an excellent example of this, leading to countless confirmatory experiments, including the correct prediction of the properties of yet-to-be-isolated elements.) 3) In order to do science about something, we need only one thing to be true: It can be investigated empirically. That is, it is something, "out there" which we can turn our machinations towards, and which will yield stable results once we find the appropriate methods for its investigation. 4) Many important big-name people have declared that a science of psychology is impossible, because the stuff under discussion in that context simply cannot be investigated empirically. Kant, is a prime example. Those big-names declared that another person's mind was not the type of thing that you could examine empirically, because the province of the soul did not yield itself to earthly poking and prodding. If those big-names are correct, and minds cannot be investigated, by their very nature, we would expect efforts in that direction to fail-to-produce the convergence-of-ideas characteristic of successful science. 5) We can imagine a world in which those big-names are correct. We can imagine a world in which many types of things can be investigated empirically, but not minds, and in which all attempts to produce a science of the mind would fail pathetically. 6) The above view has had a virtual strangle hold on Western thinking for centuries. However, in the late 1800's a few serious scholars started thinking that "science of psychology" might be given a go, to see how it went. They were widely dismissed, not allowed to hold their heads high in either scientific circles or philosophical ones. 7) And that's where we find ourselves. If a science of psychology is possible, then de facto the subject matter of psychology is some swath of empirically investigatable happenings, about which a community of investigators would eventually reach a consensus as the scientific process takes its course. We might not live in such a world, but we won't know without trying it. A science of ether winds never worked out. The attempted science of medieval humours was a bust. A science of studying bumps-on-people's-heads has been roundly rejected. All sorts of attempted sciences have not worked out over the years. But the science of the mind seems to be doing reasonably well. Either that progress is an illusion, and empirical-psychologists will soon go the way of the phrenologists, or that progress is evidence that the big-names who thought of "mind" as inherently uninvestigatable were wrong on a very fundamental level. If you are to study a romantic partner's mind in order to become intimate with her, then her mind must be something that can be studied. If I am to study your feeling of intimacy, then your feeling-of-intimacy must be something that can be studied. And so on, and so forth. Whatever methods and categories that leads us two, such is the stuff of the science of psychology, whether it matches any of our preconceptions, or not. Best, 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 fax: (202) 885-1190 email: echar...@american.edu<mailto:echar...@american.edu> On Mon, Feb 22, 2016 at 7:13 PM, Russ Abbott <russ.abb...@gmail.com<mailto:russ.abb...@gmail.com>> wrote: I'm flattered. Thank you. I can see myself in the Devil's Advocate role -- except for the last part. I'll grant that you can think whatever you want. [NST==>”close” is a metaphor; I am suggesting a co-location in space metaphor to substitute for the privacy-inside metaphor which I take to be yours. I am suggesting, roughly, that the more experiences we share, the more we are of one mind. <==nst] That won't work for my sense of intimacy. One can be intimate (in my sense) on the telephone and via written words. Sharing (i.e., participating in the same) experiences is not required for intimacy in my sense. What is required (in my sense) is sharing (i.e., talking about one's subjective experiences of one's) experiences. [NST==>You will find this sentence totally unintelligible until you entertain the notion that the self is an inferred entity, inferred using the same sort of equipment that we use to infer the motives, aspirations, feelings, and thoughts of others. What differs between you and me is the amount of time we spend around me. To the extent that I spend more time than you do around me, I am probably a better source of info about what I am up to, thinking about, etc., ceteris paribus. Thus, I may greater familiarity with me than you do, I don’t have any special access to me. <==nst] What does it mean to infer something if one has no subjective experience? I think of inferring something as having to do with thinking about it. More generally what does it mean to think about something in your framework? I'll agree that thinking involves stuff happening in the brain. So it's behavior in that sense. But it's not behavior in the sense you seem to be talking about. So what does it mean in your sense to think about something? I realize I'm on shaky ground here because computers "think" about things without having what I would call subjective experience. [NST==>If you insist that a mind is a thing that is enclosed in a head (or a steel cabinet, etc.), then I can only say that if a robot does mind things, than a robot “has” a mind. But I rebel against the metaphor. <==nst] I don't insist that a mind is anything. I don't know how to talk about subjective experience scientifically. I see no reason to deny it, but I agree we have made little scientific progress in talking about it. By the way, Eric's point that the world must be a certain way if we are to do science doesn't make sense to me. If Schrodinger, Heisenberg, etc. thought like that they would have denied the two-slit experiments, and quantum mechanics wouldn't exist. Science (as you all know) is fundamentally empirical. You can't demand that the world be a certain way so that it's easier to do science. [NST==>I have to run, now, but please see Intentionality is the Mark of the Vital<https://www.researchgate.net/publication/281409844_Intentionality_is_the_mark_of_the_vital> . Ethology is thick with intentionality. Language is not an necessary condition for intentionalty. All is required is the sign relation (cf Peirce). <==nst] I looked at (but didn't read in any detail) the Intentionality paper. The upshot seems to be that non-humans have intentionality. I don't argue with that. My question for you is still how you reconcile intentionality with not having subjective experience. What is intentionality without subjectivity? (Again, I'm moving onto shaky ground since we have "goal-directed" software even though the software and the computer that runs it has no subjective experience.) I guess in both cases in which computers seem to "think" or "plan" we are using those terms as analogs to what we see ourselves doing and not really to attribute those processes to computers or software. On Mon, Feb 22, 2016 at 3:23 PM Nick Thompson <nickthomp...@earthlink.net<mailto:nickthomp...@earthlink.net>> wrote: See Larding below: Nicholas S. Thompson Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology Clark University http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/ From: Friam [mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com<mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com>] On Behalf Of Russ Abbott Sent: Monday, February 22, 2016 3:08 PM To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam@redfish.com<mailto:friam@redfish.com>> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Subjectivity and intimacy Sorry that I'm not responding to Glen, Jochen, or John, but I've got to defend Nick's devil's advocate. Nick, you do keep changing the subject. In response to your two suggested definitions of intimacy I asked the following. -------------- Version 1: Intimacy is just being so close that you see the same world from where you stand. I don't know how to understand that. Do you mean close wrt Euclidean distance? How does that relate to, for example, pain? No matter how close you are to someone, you can't see, for example, their toothache. [NST==>”close” is a metaphor; I am suggesting a co-location in space metaphor to substitute for the privacy-inside metaphor which I take to be yours. I am suggesting, roughly, that the more experiences we share, the more we are of one mind. <==nst] Version 2: When the self you see projected in another ‘s behavior toward you is the same as the self you see projected in your own behavior. [NST==>You will find this sentence totally unintelligible until you entertain the notion that the self is an inferred entity, inferred using the same sort of equipment that we use to infer the motives, aspirations, feelings, and thoughts of others. What differs between you and me is the amount of time we spend around me. To the extent that I spend more time than you do around me, I am probably a better source of info about what I am up to, thinking about, etc., ceteris paribus. Thus, I may greater familiarity with me than you do, I don’t have any special access to me. <==nst] If I remember what happened when we last did this Russ, you made me clearer and a clearer (and Eric, who wrote the Devil’s Advocate questions, in some ways modeled himself after you), but in the end, you just concluded that I was nuts, and we let it go at that. I don't know how to understand that either. What do you mean by "self?" What does it mean to project it toward someone? What does it mean to say that it's the same self as the one you project? Over what period of time must they be the same? If we're talking about behavior would it matter if the projecting entity were a robot? (Perhaps you answered those questions in the papers I haven't read. Sorry if that's the case.) [NST==>If you insist that a mind is a thing that is enclosed in a head (or a steel cabinet, etc.), than I can only say that if a robot does mind things, than a robot “has” a mind. But I rebel against the metaphor. <==nst] -------------- You responded with a long (and clear and definitive) extract from your paper. But I don't see how it answers my questions. Wrt the first question, if we're talking about behavior, distance doesn't see relevant. Wrt the second question, the extract doesn't (seem to) talk about what you mean by a self or what it means for the projected behaviors of two of them to be "the same" -- or even what projected behavior means. Is it the case that you also don't "believe in" intentionality? After all how can there be intentionality without a subjective intent? And if that's the case, what does "projected" mean? Is it the same as oriented in 3D space? [NST==>I have to run, now, but please see Intentionality is the Mark of the Vital<https://www.researchgate.net/publication/281409844_Intentionality_is_the_mark_of_the_vital> . Ethology is thick with intentionality. Language is not an necessary condition for intentionalty. All is required is the sign relation (cf Peirce). <==nst] On Mon, Feb 22, 2016 at 1:38 PM glen <geprope...@gmail.com<mailto:geprope...@gmail.com>> wrote: I may as well chime in, too, since none of what's been said so far is meaningful to me. My concept of intimacy runs along M-W's 2nd entry: 2 : to communicate delicately and indirectly This is almost nothing to do with subjectivity and almost nothing to do with non-private knowledge (things others know). It has to do with "delicate" attention to detail and, perhaps, manipulation. A robot could easily be intimate with a human, and demonstrate such intimacy by catering to many of the tiny things the human prefers/enjoys, even if each and every tiny preference is publicly known. Similarly, 2 robots could be intimate by way of a _special_ inter-robot interface. But the specialness of the interface isn't its privacy or uniqueness. It's in its handling of whatever specific details are appropriate to those robots. Even if inter-subjectivity is merely the intertwining of experiences, it's still largely unrelated to intimacy. Two complete strangers can become intimate almost instantaneously, because/if their interfaces are pre-adapted for a specific coupling. There it wouldn't be inter-subjectivity, but a kind of similarity of type. And that might be mostly or entirely genetic rather than ontogenic. And I have to again be some sort of Morlockian champion for the irrelevance of thought. 2 strangers can be intimate and hold _radically_ different understandings of the world(s) presented to them ... at least if we believe the tales told to us in countless novels. 8^) On 02/22/2016 12:40 AM, Jochen Fromm wrote: > Nice to see FRIAM is still alive! > I like this definition as well: "Intimacy is just being so close that you see > the same world from where you stand". In a family for example we are being so > close that we roughly see and experience the same world. > > I still believe that the solution to the hard problem lies in Hollywood: > cinemas are built like theaters. If we see a film about a person, it is like > sitting in his or her cartesian theater. We see what the person sees. In a > sense, we feel what the feels as well, especially the pain of loosing someone. -- ⇔ glen ============================================================ 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
