Hi Nick, and Eric,
I am grappling with Nick's ideas that mental states must be physical things and
even are "out there" rather than "in here". What about delusions? If I think I
see bear in the woods but I am mistaken, is this false perception "out there"
even when the bear is not?
--John
________________________________
From: Friam <friam-boun...@redfish.com> on behalf of Eric Charles
<eric.phillip.char...@gmail.com>
Sent: Thursday, December 5, 2019 8:41 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam@redfish.com>
Subject: [EXT] Re: [FRIAM] A pluralistic model of the mind?
Nick,
Your need to complicate things is fascinating. You are a monist. You are a
monist is the sense of not thinking that "mental" things and "physical" things
are made of different stuffs. At that point, you can throw a new word in the
mix (e.g., 'experience', 'neutral stuff'), or you can throw your hat in with
one or the other side of the original division, e.g., "I am a materialist" or
"I am an idealist". To that, you add the insight that that later discussion is
all a bit weird, because once you have decided to be a monist it weirdly
doesn't matter much what you call the stuff.That insight is in need of support,
because the old dichotomy is so built in to our language and culture that the
claim it doesn't matter which side you choose is very unintuitive. That is
solid, and you should develop it further.
Instead, you bring up some sort of discussion about serial vs. parallel
processing that has nothing to do with that topic at all, then you muddle the
issues up. Whether you think of "consciousness" as "serial" or "parallel" has
no bearing on the prior issue. Given that you are talking with a bunch of
computationally minded people, and that you brought up Turing Machines, the
first problem is that a serial system can simulate a parallel system, so while
parallel buys you time savings (sometimes a little, sometimes a lot), it
doesn't change what the system is capable of in any more fundamental way
(assuming you are still limited to writing zeros and ones). But you don't even
need that, because it just doesn't matter. Being a "monist" has nothing to do
with the serial vs. parallel issue at all. There is no reason a body can't be
doing many things at once. Or, you can change your level of analysis and
somehow set up your definition so that there is only one thing the body is
doing, but that one thing has parts. It is just a word game at that point. If I
have a 5-berry pie, is it 5 different types of pie at once, or is it its own 1
flavor of pie? We can talk about the pros and cons of labeling it different
ways, but it is the same thing whichever way we label it.... and... it has
nothing to do with monism vs. dualism....
Admonishment over.
So... Say more about the monism part... That is a solid issue and you are
getting somewhere with it...
It SEEMS so important a difference if one person claims that all we can never
know is ideas ("You don't know 'the chair', just your idea of the chair!") and
another person claims that knowing isn't ever a thing and that there is just
material ("There is no 'idea' of the chair, there is only your physical body in
relation to the physical world!"). It seems that they are making vastly
different claims, and that they should disagree about almost everything. How is
it that THAT doesn't matter?
Eric
-----------
Eric P. Charles, Ph.D.
Department of Justice - Personnel Psychologist
American University - Adjunct Instructor
<mailto:echar...@american.edu>
On Thu, Dec 5, 2019 at 1:20 AM
<thompnicks...@gmail.com<mailto:thompnicks...@gmail.com>> wrote:
Hi, everybody,
I have gotten all the communications off of nabble and concentrated them below.
If you read this message in plain text, a lot of useful formatting will go
away, so I encourage you to enable HTML. Or perhaps, I can fit it all up as a
Word file, tomorrow.
. I have not had time to dig into the contents much. I am pleased that
everybody took the issue straight on, and I look forward to grappling with your
comments.
A recapitulation of the thread:
First, some text from the review which Roger sent:
This is exactly as radical as it sounds. Bishop Berkeley and other idealists
argued that objects are dependent on mind; Manzotti argues the reverse of this:
Mind exists in objects. In The Spread Mind, Manzotti contends that we are
mistaken to believe that objects “do not depend on our presence. . . . Our
bodies enable processes that change the ontology of the world. Our bodies bring
into existence the physical objects with which our experience is identical. We
are our experience. We are not our bodies.” And later: “We are the world and
the world is us—everything is physical.” This includes dreams, hallucinations,
memories—all are the imagined physical objects themselves, not neural firings
or mental representations (we must at one time have perceived an object to
hallucinate or dream it, although it can be an unreal combination of other
objects, as in the case of flying pink elephants). Manzotti impishly dubs this
doctrine no-psychism. It’s idealism turned on its head, a reductio ad absurdum
of scientific materialism. (If you’re confused, well, I’m not sure I understand
it myself, and I read the book.)
Manzotti first drew Parks’s attention during a conference at IULM University in
Milan, where Parks is a professor, by bellowing “There are no images!” in
response to a neuroscientist’s discussion about how the brain transforms visual
stimuli into images. On Manzotti’s view, the brain does nothing of the kind.
There are no pictures, only objects. “He really couldn’t believe how stupid we
were all being, he said, buying into this dumb story of images in our heads.”
Parks was besotted.
He could as easily have said “There are no objects, only pictures!”
MY COMMENT ON THE REVIEW:
I think this review may be a wonderful example of what happens when a
(Romantic) dualist tries to explain monism to dualists.
What nobody in this discussion seems to understand is that one can have objects
OR images BUT NOT BOTH. The lunacy begins when people imagine that there are
things outside of experience. Or experience outside of things… really it
doesn’t matter: they are both equally crazy. The fact is, everything we know
comes in over one channel – I call it experience – and from that channel every
form of experience is derived. So, images and objects are not different sorts
of stuff, they are arrangements of the same stuff. And once you have agreed
that there is only one kind of stuff, it doesn’t make a damn bit of difference
what you call it, “images” or “objects”.
Take phantom limb, for instance. I feel like I have a leg but when I put my
weight on it I fall down. Now the dualist will artificially divide experience
into the feeling that I have a leg (i.e., I start to put my weight on it) and
the experience of falling down, and call one the ineffable experience the other
the brute reality. But this is an artificial division. Not falling down when
you put your weight on your leg is as much part of the experience of having a
leg as expecting that you wont fall down.
This is where I always imagine that glen and I must ultimately find agreement.
He has to concede that he is a monist in that everything we experience is,
well, experience. I have to concede that I am a pluralist, in that experience
can be be organized in a zillion different forms depending on how, and the
degree to which, it proves out Hypothesis testing is as much a part of
experience as hypothesis formation.
Now, there is a a hidden assumption in my monism which I would think you
computer folks would be all over me about. I am thinking of consciousness as
serial, rather than parallel. Where do I stand to assert that what ever else
can be said about experience, it comes down to a series of single,
instantaneous points from which all the varieties and forms of experience –
objects and fantasies, etc. – are constructed. This is where ProfDave has me,
because there is no more reason to believe on the basis of looking at the brain
that it has a single point of convergence, a choke point in its processing,
than to believe the same of the kidneys. Kidneys can make urine and clean the
blood at the same time. This is why I wish I understood the Turing Model
better, because I intuit that the computers we use are based on just this
seriel fallacy. Now, I suppose behavior provides something like a choke point.
We either walk to the supermarket or we drive. But we may do a dozen
different things on our way to the supermarket, whether or not we walk and
drive. We can listen to a pod cast, we can plan our summer vacation, we can
muse about which tuxedo we will wear for our Nobel Address. And if we don’t,
as I suspect Frank and Bruce will want us to, artificially separate these
musements from the circumstances that occasion them and the actions they
ultimately occasion, we will see that the myth of the choke point (the fallacy
of the turing machine model?) is contradicted by the fact that we can do and do
do many things at once all the time.
RESPONSES TO MY COMMENTS:
Glen’s First
But why is serialization different from any other monist tendency?
Serialization is a reduction to the uni-dimensional *sequence*, whereas
parallel implies pluralism, anything > 1 dimension. It would be inconsistent of
you to allow for parallelism and retain your monism. So, to me, you're better
off sticking with a sequential conception.
And don't forget, as we've discussed before, any output a parallel machine can
produce can be "simulated" by a sequential machine. So, again, monism is moot.
Yes, it may well be True in some metaphysical sense. But if it walks like a
pluralist and quacks like a pluralist ... well, then it's a pluralist.
Unification is only useful in so far as it *facilitates* multiplication, i.e.
demonstrates constructively how we get many things from few things. If you
can't show your work, then you don't understand the problem (or you haven't
read the instructions 8^).
Dave West’s Comment:
Nick, I read your Old New Realist paper, but to get a grip on it I must read
some Tolman and Holt - or at least it appears so. However, I have come to one
conclusion so far: that in your academic persona you are a committed experience
monist, but in your public/political persona you are an irredemptive dualist,
believing that humans have a soul/spirit/essence apart from mere experience. (I
know, how dare I cast such an aspersion?)
Other things. I will not attempt to explain the Turing Model, others have the
technical expertise to do so, but I will speak a bit about the Turing Metaphor.
Metaphorically, a Turing machine is a device with three elements: a read/write
head, a set of instructions "in memory," and an infinite tape divided into
cells with each cell containing a 1 or 0.
A cell of the tape is available to the read/write head and, depending on the
instructions in memory, will read or write (or both in sequence) and advance or
retire the tape for 1 to n positions.
The Turing machine "computes" the tape and, simultaneously, the tape
"instructs" (programs) the computer (read/write head plus tape advance-retire
mechanism).
The "instructions in memory" are just sequences of the same "stuff" — ones and
zeros — as the "stuff" on the tape.
Subsequent to some "bootstrap" set of instructions (you have no interest in
"end cases" so I will not pursue), the "instructions in memory" can originate
on the tape, i.e. the tape contains both "program" and "data." As the
"instructions on tape" "move" to "instructions in memory," the "instructions in
memory" can become arbitrarily complicated.
So far, nothing that contradicts your "experience monism."
A favorite science fiction meme: once enough ones and zeros have moved from the
tape into "memory" the Turing Machine "wakes up" becomes conscious. Instant
dualism, but without much reason as mere "location" changes nothing about the
"stuff" which is still ones and zeros. (one "stuff," two values)
Because the tape is infinite in length, it matters not that it is "serial"
because any parallel computational experience can be replicated serially just
takes longer.
Still nothing to interfere with your experience monism. The interesting
questions might be:
1- Is each individual human being a separate (but equal) instantiation of a
Turing Machine consuming a separate (but equal) infinite tape. If yes, then
the door seems to be opened for "private" experience/consciousness.
2- each human is a separate Turing Machine, but all consume the "same" infinite
tape. "Same" meaning mostly identical, but with some allowance for perspective
(slight variation in which portions of the tape are consumed when??). I believe
that this would be your preferred interpretation as it might allow some kind of
dialog among Turing machines as each one "wrote" to the infinite tape that all
were consuming and, perhaps, somehow, thereby lead to some kind of "consensus
computation."
3- there is but One Turing Machine, co-extensive with the Universe and One
infinite tape, also co-extensive with the Universe and therefore the Universe
is constantly "computing" itself. (Writing to the tape equals popping quantum
quiffs, i.e. collapsing wave functions by observing.)
I am pretty certain that option three is the only one possible for one
committed to both ontological and epistemological monism. Ouroboros Rules!!
Glen’s Second:
Well, I did reply, as did Dave. If you're ever wondering whether someone
replied, you might check the archive at:
http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/<https://nam10.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=http%3A%2F%2Ffriam.471366.n2.nabble.com%2F&data=02%7C01%7Cjkennison%40clarku.edu%7Cd797357f28854a68954e08d779ed8593%7Cb5b2263d68aa453eb972aa1421410f80%7C1%7C0%7C637111933386669699&sdata=I3i4o%2FUwNgskuqC9FZm%2FJ7ih8ktHpk7XmBUVU2wsO8M%3D&reserved=0>
Dave's was rather interesting w.r.t. Turing machines. Mine was more flippant.
But to continue mine, your discussion of serial attention or behavior hearkens
back to our prior discussions of quantum computing. Parallelism vs. serial(ism?
... sequentialism?) can be monified/unified by considering a 2 dimentional
space of "space" vs time. In the ideal, even things at, say, space = 1 billion
can operate that the same *time* as things at space = 1. Similarly, space at
time = 1 billion can be at the same position as time = 1. But reality doesn't
work that way. And quantum computing demonstrates this kinda-sorta painfully.
But traditional distributed computing demonstrates it, too. Parallel
computations across large spaces run into inter-process communication
bottlenecks. I.e. sure, we can have 10 computers compute the same thing with
different inputs and fuse the outputs. But we can't do the same thing with 1k
computers without having "bus" or "backbone" bandwidth problems.
This sort of thing seems pragmatically clear when you talk about your issues
handling "serial consciousness". And, at risk of conflating 2 unrelated weird
things (quantum with consciousness) for no good reason, there's a *coherence*
to the parallel processing that goes on in quantum computing that kinda-sorta
feels like your reduction to a serial attention/behavior in parsing
consciousness. A loss of that coherence results in separate things, whereas a
retention of the coherence maintains your "monism". But, in the end, it's all
about the orthogonality between space and time and the *scales* of space and
time wherein such orthogonality breaks down.
I hope that's clear. I'm a bit occupied with debugging an uncooperative
simulation at the moment.
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