Stephen,
Thank you for prompting me to respond to Dan’s scaling questionaire. I tried to when I first received it, but quit because I could not recognize my own thinking in most of the alternatives. But you have asked me to be a good sport, so here I am. If you offer me, as in Q1 a choice between materialism and dualism I am stumped. I am an avowed monist who believes that all monisms are more or less equivalent – materialism, idealism, or neutral), and I believe that dualism is one of the great mind-fucks of all time, But I don’t think the brain has a damned thing to do with the definition of consciousness and that it is disrespectful to brain research to consider it in that way. So give me a 0.7 on Q1. So, on Q2, my response is stronger than the question allows. Consciousness is not shaped by relations to the environment, it IS one of them. So put me down for a 1.2 on that one. I think Q3 is just berserk. I think the attribution, "X is conscious [of Y]" is a third-person attribution. I can see that X is responding to some portion of our shared experience. So, when attribute to myself, I am making a first-person attribution while adopting the perspective of a third-person. If we start with the belief that first-person attributions must be, in principle, different from ordinary third-person ones, then we are left with a “mystery" But, I don’t think that; I think my concept of self is just my attempt to model me from the outside So, put me down for a zero on this one. On Q4, I think my response is probably “meh” or “nu”. On the one hand I agree that we need evidence at the level of a relation to identify it, still we locate it at the individual. This is called metonomy and is frerquent in speach. For instance, we locate motivation in individuals at a momennt,but we know motivations from broad patterns in time and space. I am usually against that sort of thing, because it misdirects the attribution from the evidence for it. However, unlike”communication” which requires at least two conscious beings, consciousness can be at a sentient being and directed toward a non-sentient one. I can be conscious of a rock. So, put me down as 0.5, I guess. As to the last question, I think there is a grammatical sleight of hand built into “What is it like to be a …..?” Put the question in its natural grammatical form and the answer becomes obvious “what is being Stephen Guerin like?” " It’s like running on a treadmill with jammed on-off switch." Notice that presented in its undistorted form, the answer will be a reference to some experience that I would have. The grammatical impersonal creates the mystery by throwing one off the track. So, put me down as a zero. So, Stephen, I cannot bring myself to fill in the entries myself, but feel free to fill them in for me and report the results to whomever you see fit. I share your admiration Professor Gupta and will be eager to see what he makes of it. You said you would look in on THUAM tomorrow around .... what a minute .... when? I may be mixing up my time zones. Nick On Thu, Jul 4, 2024 at 7:26 PM Jochen Fromm <j...@cas-group.net> wrote: > I don't get Philip Goff: first we send our children 20 years to school, > from Kindergarten to college and university, to teach them all kinds of > languages, and then we wonder how they can be conscious. It will be the > same for AI: first we spend millions and millions to train them all > available knowledge, and then we wonder how they can develop understanding > of language and consciousness... > > https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-mystery-of-consciousness-is-deeper-than-we-thought/ > > -J. > > -. --- - / ...- .- .-.. .. -.. / -- --- .-. ... . / -.-. --- -.. . > FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv > Fridays 9a-12p Friday St. Johns Cafe / Thursdays 9a-12p Zoom > https://bit.ly/virtualfriam > to (un)subscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com > FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ > archives: 5/2017 thru present > https://redfish.com/pipermail/friam_redfish.com/ > 1/2003 thru 6/2021 http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/ > -- Nicholas S. Thompson Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology Clark University
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