Dear FRIAMMERS,
If you have any interest in the consciousness-monism-dualism-pluralism-materialism-idealism discussion, PLEASE take some time to read Eric’s three paragraphs, reposted below. He lays it out about as well as it can be laid out. I may have nothing to add! Think how he has economized your inbox. Nick Nick Thompson Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology Clark University <mailto:thompnicks...@gmail.com> thompnicks...@gmail.com <https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/> https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/ From: Friam <friam-boun...@redfish.com> On Behalf Of Eric Charles Sent: Saturday, December 7, 2019 7:00 AM To: John Kennison <jkenni...@clarku.edu> Cc: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam@redfish.com> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] [EXT] Re: A pluralistic model of the mind? John, This is a wonderful question, and though it has already gone one way in the thread, I want to point out that there is another way it can go. "Are you really asserting," you ask, a bit rephrased, "that the bear I think is in the woods is somehow out there even when there is no bear?" We COULD understand your question as a philosophical/ontological/metaphysical one. Along these lines, Glen channels Nick fairly well, and points out that the judgement of the in-woods-bear is illusory is a post-hoc judgement, which one can only arrive based on later experience. The judgement of "real" vs. "illusion" is after the fact, and the fact is that the initial experience is "bear in woods" without any such baggage. Nick brings in that this is a bit of a statistical issue, with expectations being based on past experience, and he points out that the "problem of induction" reminds us that the next time could always be different. Glen rightly chimes in with the observation that it is nigh impossible for us to see anything "fully prove out". That point is wonderful, because it brings us to Peirce's definition of "Truth". Recall that Peirce is the first combination History/Philosophy/Anthropology of Science guy. Sure, there is a lot written about science before Peirce, but Peirce has read the actual records of the scientists, and is a highly reputed scientist, and is interested in what Scientists are actually doing, not what they say they are doing, or what it might make abstract sense for them to be doing. Thus, when on good behavior, Peirce is explicitly articulating The Scientist's working definition of Truth: Truth is that upon which we would ultimately agree, when the dust of all the investigations settle. Truth is exactly that which will be fully proved out, should it take millennia for the proving. And until the dust settles, all assertions of Truth are provisional. Or, to phrase it differently, when a scientists asserts the truth of a conclusion within their field, they are exactly asserting that the conclusion will fully prove out in future investigation, and nothing more. If the conclusion doesn't prove out, then they were wrong. Any scientists trying to assert they are doing something else, something philosophically/ontologically/metaphysically deeper than that is, on Peirce's account, misrepresenting their actual activity and/or they have squarely stepped outside the role of Scientist. We COULD understand your question as something bordering philosophy and psychology (at least as they were understood in the early 1900s). Returning to the start... That bear in the woods is initially experienced as out-there, and remains experienced as out-there, unless some later experience leads you to the conclusion that it is not out-there. Given John's initial question, we can surmise that the further investigation will lead you to not only conclude that there is no bear out there, but that there never was (the latter being a second conclusion, presumably distinct from the first). But when - via further investigation - we determine the bear was never-in-the-woods, what do we conclude? Is it possible to conclude "I was wrong that the bear was out there" without jumping immediately to "the bear was in-here the whole time"? Nick asserts that we can conclude our initial belief inaccurate without jumping immediately to the existence of "mental bears" in the mind/soul-theater/brain. He asserts that is possible, both because "in-here" creates a host of philosophical problems, and because we must not let the 20-steps-down-the-road conclusion color our view of the initial experience. The initial experience is unalterably of "a bear in the woods". That experience happened, past-tense, and it some sort of screwy post-hoc shenanigans to try use that conclusion to reinterpret the initial experience into something it wasn't. At this point, while we are clearly drawing upon what we laid out as Peircian in the first paragraph, we are actually in the middle of a William-James-esque rant about "The Psychologist's Fallacy" - which is when the conclusion of an analysis is mistaken for the starting point of the analysis. We also COULD understand your question as a more straightforward psychological one. Returning to the start... What is it that you are referring to, when you say that you think there is a bear in the woods? If you are being honest, I assert, it means that your behavior is a function of the out-there bear: You would resist wandering into that part of the woods; if you did find yourself in that part of the woods, you would be extra-vigilant; you would warn others about the bear; etc. The actual location of the thing your behavior is directed towards is in-the-woods. Should it be determined, at a later time, that there is no bear in the woods, that changes nothing. Your behavior was not, in any way, directed at an in-the-head bear. The bear of your thoughts, whether those thoughts prove accurate or inaccurate, was 100% out-there-in-the-woods. That you "thought there was a bear in the woods" is nothing more than a description, confirmed to both yourself and to any observant third party, that your behavior was a function of an out-there bear. We might have all sorts of questions about how one's behavior comes to be directed at an entity that is later concluded to not exist, but that is a totally different issue. There are a myriad of potential explanations for how that might occur, on various time scales and various levels of analysis (neurological explanations, evolutionary explanations, life-span developmental explanations, operant-conditioning explanations, broad physiological explanations, etc., etc.). So long as we keep our descriptions and explanations clear, we will never make the mistake of substituting a particular, narrow, type of explanation (e.g., neurological) for the thing to be explained (e.g., that my behavior was directed towards an in-the-woods bear). The bear you are thinking of is in the woods, and even if we later find out that there is not a bear in the woods, the bear of your thoughts, the bear your behavior was directed at, the bear your behavior was a reliable function of, is in the woods. At this point, we are in E. B. Holt's domain - and Holt sees himself as providing the logical end point of William James's work - and James's work is heavily influenced by Peirce. So... John.... which of those questions were you asking? Or do none of those match up? ----------- Eric P. Charles, Ph.D. Department of Justice - Personnel Psychologist American University - Adjunct Instructor On Fri, Dec 6, 2019 at 9:28 AM John Kennison <jkenni...@clarku.edu <mailto:jkenni...@clarku.edu> > wrote: 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 <mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com> > on behalf of Eric Charles <eric.phillip.char...@gmail.com <mailto:eric.phillip.char...@gmail.com> > Sent: Thursday, December 5, 2019 8:41 PM To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam@redfish.com <mailto: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 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: <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> http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/ 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. 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