A pluralistic model of the mind?

[thompnickson2]

Dear Friammers,

 

Derelict poor sod that I am, I was hoping for some commentary on the note below sent a few days back, particularly the last paragraph where I speculate inexpertly about the relation between a Turing system model of a computer and our serial (?) model of the mind? 

 

I am hoping that you will, as usual, inflate these flabby ideas with some of your wisdom.

 

Nick

 

Nick Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

[hidden email]

https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

 

 

From: [hidden email] <[hidden email]>
Sent: Tuesday, December 3, 2019 3:08 PM
To: 'The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group' <[hidden email]>
Cc: 'Dix McComas ([hidden email])' <[hidden email]>
Subject: RE: [FRIAM] Would send to Nick

 

Hi, Frank,

 

No I didn’t receive a cc of this, and am grateful for it.  Thanks Roger.  I now have a cc of it in Word on my hard disk, so we can talk about it endlessly. 

 

I think this review may be a wonderful example of what happens when a (Romantic) dualist tries to explain monism to dualists.  To wit:

 

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!”  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.

 

Nick

 

Nick Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

[hidden email]

https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

 

 

 

From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of Frank Wimberly
Sent: Tuesday, December 3, 2019 12:47 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Would send to Nick

 

I'm sure Nick got this via Friam.  It's a fascinating and intelligent book review.  The conclusion is well stated in the first paragraph.  No one knows how consciousness arises from the physical despite confident assertions to the contrary.

 

Frank

 

-----------------------------------
Frank Wimberly

My memoir:
https://www.amazon.com/author/frankwimberly

My scientific publications:
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Frank_Wimberly2

Phone [phone]

 

On Tue, Dec 3, 2019, 12:03 PM Roger Critchlow <[hidden email]> wrote:

https://www.bookforum.com/print/2604/the-unending-quest-to-explain-consciousness-23772

 

But my phone doesn't have his revised email address.

 

An entertaining review from a Prof in the town where I grew up, dear old Montclair, NJ.

 

-- rec --

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============================================================
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
archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

[gepr]

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/

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.

On 12/4/19 1:40 PM, [hidden email] wrote:
> Derelict poor sod that I am, I was hoping for some commentary on the note below sent a few days back, particularly the last paragraph where I speculate inexpertly about the relation between a Turing system model of a computer and our serial (?) model of the mind? 
>
>  
>
> I am hoping that you will, as usual, inflate these flabby ideas with some of your wisdom.

--
☣ uǝlƃ

============================================================
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
archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

[thompnickson2]

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/

 

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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Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
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[Eric Charles-2]

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

On Thu, Dec 5, 2019 at 1:20 AM <[hidden email]> 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/

 

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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Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com

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FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

============================================================
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
archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

============================================================
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
archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

[John Kennison]

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 <[hidden email]> on behalf of Eric Charles <[hidden email]>
Sent: Thursday, December 5, 2019 8:41 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
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

On Thu, Dec 5, 2019 at 1:20 AM <[hidden email]> 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/

 

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.

 

============================================================

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

archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/

FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

============================================================
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
archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

============================================================
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
archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

[Prof David West]

I dare not really speak for Nick, but I think the essence of his position is that there is no "out there" nor is there any "in here." There is only a flow of "experience" that is sometimes "evaluated" (interpreted?) to a false distinction of in or out — both equally illusory.

davew

On Fri, Dec 6, 2019, at 3:27 PM, John Kennison 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 <[hidden email]> on behalf of Eric Charles <[hidden email]>
Sent: Thursday, December 5, 2019 8:41 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
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

On Thu, Dec 5, 2019 at 1:20 AM <[hidden email]> 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/

 

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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[thompnickson2]

Hi, David,

 

Thanks for channeling me so accurately.  It is a talent to channel what one does not agree with so faithfully that the person channeled is satisfied.   Thank you for that. 

 

I would have only one ill-ease, about the last part of your version:

 

both equally illusory.

 

I think “illusory” is used here, in your way, not in the way I would use it, but to refer to the world that truly is but which we an never truly grasp.  I.e., dualistically.  For me, an illusion is just an experience that does not prove out.  I arrive at my coffee house three days in a row and there is a “day old” old-fashioned plain donut available for purchase at half price.  I experience that “donut at 4” is something I can count on.  That turns out not to be the case because, another customer starts coming in at 3.59 and commandeering all the donuts.  My experience was illusory.  Or, think flips of a coin.  You flip a coin 7 times heads and you come to the conclusion that the coin is biased.  However, you flip it a thousand times more and its behavior over the 1007 flips is consistent with randomness.  You come to the conclusion that the bias was probably an illusion. 

 

My understanding of illusory is probabilistic and provisional. 

 

Nick

 

 

Nick Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

[hidden email]https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

 

 

From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of Prof David West
Sent: Friday, December 6, 2019 10:16 AM
To: [hidden email]
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] [EXT] Re: A pluralistic model of the mind?

 

I dare not really speak for Nick, but I think the essence of his position is that there is no "out there" nor is there any "in here." There is only a flow of "experience" that is sometimes "evaluated" (interpreted?) to a false distinction of in or out — both equally illusory.

 

davew

 

 

On Fri, Dec 6, 2019, at 3:27 PM, John Kennison 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 <[hidden email]> on behalf of Eric Charles <[hidden email]>
Sent: Thursday, December 5, 2019 8:41 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
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 <[hidden email]> 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/

 

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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[gepr]

But doesn't it mean that, since no experience will ever *fully prove out*, that a fully proved out experience is something we will "never truly grasp"? Doesn't the provisionality imply that *all* experience is illusory? And, then, if there is such a thing as a "fully proved out experience", then you're back to 2 things not fully proved out vs. fully proved out?

Of course, my point goes back to scale ... again ... there's a little proved out, a medium amount of proved out, and a lot proved out. But I don't want to put words in your mouth. 8^)

On 12/6/19 11:49 AM, [hidden email] wrote:
> */both equally illusory./*
>
> I think “illusory” is used here, in your way, not in the way I would use it, but to refer to the world that truly is but which we an never truly grasp.  I.e., dualistically.  For me, an illusion is just an experience that does not prove out.  I arrive at my coffee house three days in a row and there is a “day old” old-fashioned plain donut available for purchase at half price.  I experience that “donut at 4” is something I can count on.  That turns out not to be the case because, another customer starts coming in at 3.59 and commandeering all the donuts.  My experience was illusory.  Or, think flips of a coin.  You flip a coin 7 times heads and you come to the conclusion that the coin is biased.  However, you flip it a thousand times more and its behavior over the 1007 flips is consistent with randomness.  You come to the conclusion that the bias was probably an illusion. 
>
> My understanding of illusory is probabilistic and provisional. 

--
☣ uǝlƃ

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[thompnickson2]

Elegant, Glen, and you caused me truly to wonder:  Is the population mean, mu,  of statistics fame, of a different substance than the individual measurements, the bar x's that are stabs at it?  But I think the answer is no.  It is just one among the others, a citizen king amongst those bar-x's, the one on which the others will converge in a normally distributed world.  I guess that makes me a frequentist, right?  

And it's not strictly true that Mu is beyond my reach.  I may have already reached it with the sample I now hold in my hand.  I just will never be sure that I have reached it.  

Could you, Dave, and I perhaps all agree that all ==>certainty<== is illusory?  

I don't think that's going to assuage you.  

I am going to have to think more.

Ugh!  I hate when that happens.

Nick



Nick Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology
Clark University
[hidden email]
https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/
 


-----Original Message-----
From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of u?l? ?
Sent: Friday, December 6, 2019 5:08 PM
To: FriAM <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] [EXT] Re: A pluralistic model of the mind?

But doesn't it mean that, since no experience will ever *fully prove out*, that a fully proved out experience is something we will "never truly grasp"? Doesn't the provisionality imply that *all* experience is illusory? And, then, if there is such a thing as a "fully proved out experience", then you're back to 2 things not fully proved out vs. fully proved out?

Of course, my point goes back to scale ... again ... there's a little proved out, a medium amount of proved out, and a lot proved out. But I don't want to put words in your mouth. 8^)

On 12/6/19 11:49 AM, [hidden email] wrote:
> */both equally illusory./*
>
> I think “illusory” is used here, in your way, not in the way I would
> use it, but to refer to the world that truly is but which we an never truly grasp.  I.e., dualistically.  For me, an illusion is just an experience that does not prove out.  I arrive at my coffee house three days in a row and there is a “day old” old-fashioned plain donut available for purchase at half price.  I experience that “donut at 4” is something I can count on.  That turns out not to be the case because, another customer starts coming in at 3.59 and commandeering all the donuts.  My experience was illusory.  Or, think flips of a coin.  You flip a coin 7 times heads and you come to the conclusion that the coin is biased.  However, you flip it a thousand times more and its behavior over the 1007 flips is consistent with randomness.  You come to the conclusion that the bias was probably an illusion.
>
> My understanding of illusory is probabilistic and provisional.

--
☣ uǝlƃ

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[Eric Charles-2]

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? 

On Fri, Dec 6, 2019 at 9:28 AM John Kennison <[hidden email]> 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 <[hidden email]> on behalf of Eric Charles <[hidden email]>
Sent: Thursday, December 5, 2019 8:41 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
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

[hidden email]

On Thu, Dec 5, 2019 at 1:20 AM <[hidden email]> 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/

 

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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archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/

FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

============================================================
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
archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

============================================================
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
archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

[thompnickson2]

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

[hidden email]

https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

 

 

From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of Eric Charles
Sent: Saturday, December 7, 2019 7:00 AM
To: John Kennison <[hidden email]>
Cc: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
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 <[hidden email]> 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 <[hidden email]> on behalf of Eric Charles <[hidden email]>
Sent: Thursday, December 5, 2019 8:41 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
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 <[hidden email]> 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/

 

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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[gepr]

Excellent! So, your *scalar* is confidence in your estimates of any given distribution. I try to describe it in [†] below. But that's a tangent.

What I can't yet reconstruct, credibly, in my own words, is the faith in *convergence*. What if sequential calculations of an average do NOT converge?

Does this mean there are 2 stuffs, some that converge and some that don't? ... some distributions are stationary and some are not? Or would you assert that reality (and/or truth, given Peirce's distinction) is always and everywhere stationary and all (competent/accurate/precise) estimates will always converge?




[†] You can be a little confident (0.01%) or a lot confident (99.9%). I don't much care if you close the set and allow 0 and 1, confidence ∈ [0,1]. I think I have ways to close the set. But it doesn't matter. If we keep it open and agree that 100% confidence is illusory, then your scalar is confidence ∈ (0,1). Now that we have a scale of some kind, we can *construct* a typology of experiences. E.g. we can categorize things like deja vu or a bear in the woods as accumulations of confidence with different organizations. E.g. a composite experience with ((e1⨂e2⨂e3)⨂e4)⨂e5, where each of ei experiences has some confidence associated with it. Obviously, ⨂ is not multiplication or addition, but some other composer function. The whole composite experience would then have some aggregate confidence.

On December 6, 2019 8:22:29 PM PST, [hidden email] wrote:

>Elegant, Glen, and you caused me truly to wonder:  Is the population
>mean, mu,  of statistics fame, of a different substance than the
>individual measurements, the bar x's that are stabs at it?  But I think
>the answer is no.  It is just one among the others, a citizen king
>amongst those bar-x's, the one on which the others will converge in a
>normally distributed world.  I guess that makes me a frequentist,
>right?  
>
>And it's not strictly true that Mu is beyond my reach.  I may have
>already reached it with the sample I now hold in my hand.  I just will
>never be sure that I have reached it.  
>
>Could you, Dave, and I perhaps all agree that all ==>certainty<== is
>illusory?  
>
>I don't think that's going to assuage you.  
>
>I am going to have to think more.
>
>Ugh!  I hate when that happens.

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[thompnickson2]

Dear Friammers,

 

Alas, I was wrong.  I DID have something to say.  Sorry about that.

 

Since eric has laid out three versions of monism so clearly, I thought perhaps it was time to lay out the version of dualism we are opposing, or, more precisely, the dead horse we are flogging.  The dualism that I abhor is the mind-body dualism.  It begins with the notion that there are two kinds of stuff, “mind stuff” and “body stuff”, or “mind stuff” and “material stuff” and then plunges into a great obscurantist orgy concerning how these two different kinds of stuff could possibly be related.  “Oh Wow!  Isn’t wonderful that the World actually gets into the Mind!”  The wonder is, of course, that we ever separated the world from the mind in the first place. 

 

The dualist thinks that stuff comes in two streams, like Santa Fe Refuse Collection, the life stream and the and objects stream.  The mystery for the dualist is how we manage to mix them up.  For the monist the mystery is how we manage to separate them.  As anybody who lives in Santa Fe knows, the achievement is not mixing them up but managing somehow to separate them into the two bins such that the two different trucks will pick them up.  Thus we are monists with respect to refuse.  For the dualist, they are as oil and water; for the monist, they are as liquid and frozen water.  (Peirce actually says somewhere that matter is crystalized mind.) 

 

The first task of the baby, presented to its parents, lolling in the nurse’s arms, is how do I control experience.  What stays with me always, that I will call “me”.  What comes and goes, because that I will call “other”?  What forms does “other” take?  What can I learn about “me” from the forms taken by “other”.  Etc.  “Inside” and “outside”, “mind” and  “body” are not given in experience, but are the first of a gazillion distinctions that we make in order to manage the flow of experience. 

 

By the way, I am a monist with respect to life.  To me, death is not a an alternative to life.  It’s a nothing.  When I croak, the rest of you will shift from living while being pestered by Nick to living while not being pestered by Nick.  Both of those are forms of living. Nick himself becomes, simply, a zero. The point of view, “Nick”, simply ceases,  like the path to the compost heap at the end of the garden.   Death is NOT the alternative to life.  Death is non-life.   The idea of a life-dualism, a life, and a life after death, with a miraculous transformation from one to the other and back, is a preposterous and obscene notion put forward by those who would manipulate the living with the promises of joys or threats of horrors beyond the grave. 

 

---

[NST===>] CAUTION

---

---

Only those few people (a null set, perhaps) interested in Peirce will be interested what follows.  The rest of you can safely shut this message down.  I have been pressing on you for several months that Peirce is a monist.  But a strong case can be made – and Eric has elsewhere made it – that Peirce is a triadist, or triplist, or 3-ist, or whatever you would have to be if you believed that there are, irreduceably, three kinds of stuff.  That case flows from Peirce’s metaphysics in which he says –ad nauseam—that before we can begin to talk we have to posit three, which he calls, Firsts, Seconds, and Thirds.  Once we have Firsts, Seconds, and Thirds, we have all the equipment to we need.  What are they?  Well, for starters, we can think of them as “Whack!”, “Ouch!”, and “Something hit me!”.   Now it follows, from triplism, that none of these things can be described in words because to do so we need to make a three out of each of them.  But it also follows from triplism that in order to go on talking about them we have to try.   Firsts, “Whacks!”, are happenings. Seconds, “Ouches!”, are reactions to happenings.  Thirds “Something-hit-me”’s, are relations among Firsts and Seconds.  All cognitions consist in such three-somes.  (This is what Peirce means when he says that all thought is in signs.)

 

Whether one is an experience monist or a triplist does not seem an urgent question to me, a matter of what Peirce would call, “an arrangement of words.  It suits me to think of Firsts, Seconds, and Thirds as events in the flow of experience.  I agree with Peirce that all thoughts involve all three, but, I suppose, imagine that there experiences that do not yet form thoughts.  So triplism, is fine by me.  Just so long as we avoid dualism in general and the mind-body dualism, in particular. 

 

I need to close with the usual disclaimers that my Peirce mentor, Bybee, assures me that I know nothing of Peirce.

 

Also, with the usual expression of gratitude to all of you for my being allowed to imagine that are reading what I write here.  That illusion, scrupulously fostered by a few of you, has kept me alive and (reasonably) alert into my 80’s

 

All the best,

 

Nick Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

[hidden email]

https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

 

 

From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of Eric Charles
Sent: Saturday, December 7, 2019 7:00 AM
To: John Kennison <[hidden email]>
Cc: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
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 <[hidden email]> 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 <[hidden email]> on behalf of Eric Charles <[hidden email]>
Sent: Thursday, December 5, 2019 8:41 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
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 <[hidden email]> 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/

 

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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[thompnickson2]

Glen,

Most streams of experience don't converge.  Random streams predict nothing.  They are of no use to the organism.  Only streams that converge, "are".  I.e, only they exist.  Random streams, aren't.  Most co-occurrences in stream are random, they reveal no existents.  Since you can never know for sure whether you are in a random or a non random stream, you can never know whether the parts of the stream you are responding to exist or not.  But you can sure make educated (i.e., probabilistic)  guesses, and that's what organisms' learning mechanisms do.  So, I don’t have a ==>faith<== in convergence.  I, like all learning creatures, have a lack of interest in non-convergence.  Non being interested in convergence in experience would be like going to a poker game in which some cards are marked and not being interested in the relation between the cards and the marks.  

Nick

Nick Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology
Clark University
[hidden email]
https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/
 


-----Original Message-----
From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of glen?C
Sent: Saturday, December 7, 2019 9:40 AM
To: [hidden email]
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] [EXT] Re: A pluralistic model of the mind?

Excellent! So, your *scalar* is confidence in your estimates of any given distribution. I try to describe it in [†] below. But that's a tangent.

What I can't yet reconstruct, credibly, in my own words, is the faith in *convergence*. What if sequential calculations of an average do NOT converge?

Does this mean there are 2 stuffs, some that converge and some that don't? ... some distributions are stationary and some are not? Or would you assert that reality (and/or truth, given Peirce's distinction) is always and everywhere stationary and all (competent/accurate/precise) estimates will always converge?




[†] You can be a little confident (0.01%) or a lot confident (99.9%). I don't much care if you close the set and allow 0 and 1, confidence ∈ [0,1]. I think I have ways to close the set. But it doesn't matter. If we keep it open and agree that 100% confidence is illusory, then your scalar is confidence ∈ (0,1). Now that we have a scale of some kind, we can *construct* a typology of experiences. E.g. we can categorize things like deja vu or a bear in the woods as accumulations of confidence with different organizations. E.g. a composite experience with ((e1⨂e2⨂e3)⨂e4)⨂e5, where each of ei experiences has some confidence associated with it. Obviously, ⨂ is not multiplication or addition, but some other composer function. The whole composite experience would then have some aggregate confidence.

On December 6, 2019 8:22:29 PM PST, [hidden email] wrote:

>Elegant, Glen, and you caused me truly to wonder:  Is the population
>mean, mu,  of statistics fame, of a different substance than the
>individual measurements, the bar x's that are stabs at it?  But I think
>the answer is no.  It is just one among the others, a citizen king
>amongst those bar-x's, the one on which the others will converge in a
>normally distributed world.  I guess that makes me a frequentist,
>right?
>
>And it's not strictly true that Mu is beyond my reach.  I may have
>already reached it with the sample I now hold in my hand.  I just will
>never be sure that I have reached it.
>
>Could you, Dave, and I perhaps all agree that all ==>certainty<== is
>illusory?
>
>I don't think that's going to assuage you.  
>
>I am going to have to think more.
>
>Ugh!  I hate when that happens.

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[Eric Charles-2]

"Does this mean there are 2 stuffs, some that converge and some that don't? ... some distributions are stationary and some are not?"

If we are actually done with the first question (which I don't think we are), this is a perfect next question! I would say that there are not two kinds of stuff, because of the baggage that seems to add to the discussion. Yes, there is stuff we are right about and stuff we are wrong about, but that observation is more something about us than something about the stuff. We are talking about concepts, and sometimes those concepts try to cleave the world in ways where the world pushes back. It was not long ago that the Western World classified animals based on where they lived, which is why Beaver and Hippo are fair game during Lent (the animals of the sea having been created in one fell swoop). That way of cleaving didn't hold up under further scrutiny. 

Also, YES, Nick does have faith here. Nick has faith that at least some of the distributions are stable in the long run. 

Though we talk about it as stability in the end-times, he doesn't really needs faith that anything converges in the infinitely long run... because amongst a bunch of physicists that can become a messy conversation... but he has faith that some things converge over a reasonably long period of time. For example, long enough to confirm that bears and woods are things that exist, that sometimes woods have bears in them, and that the one Joe thinks is there is there (or is not there). 

Does iron rust via an oxidation process? We are all pretty confident that will not be upturned by the next scientific break through. The concept of "oxygen" itself represents a concept that has been remarkably stable, and does not seem in danger of being overturned, at least since it replaced the competing concept of " dephlogisticated air." Etc. Someone interjects, "Does that hold at absurdly high temperatures inside exploding stars, and will Oxygen even exist when the universe experiences heat death or re-big-bangs?" I don't know, but that's really a different conversation, and that's not really what I mean when I say "infinite long run", I mean when the scientific investigation have proven out what can be proven out: Will the concept stay stable under scrutiny, or will we need to replace it with a new concept so we can better match the data; that's what I want to know. The history of science is a history of searching for just such stabilities, and some have lasted thousands of years, while others come and go rapidly. 

Most of the concepts we have are not stable in anything like that sense, and one of the problems we are having as a society is an inability to broadly discriminate between concepts that are likely to be stable and concepts that clearly are not going to be. "Water is made of hydrogen and oxygen in a roughly 2:1 ratio" is not like "Do not wear white after Labor Day" nor like "Immigrants are job stealers". One is "real" in a sense that the other two are not. There are some places in which there are some consequences for wearing white after Labor Day, but there is nothing universal about that belief, and we can all agree that isn't likely to be a rule anywhere in another 10,000 years. We can agree that because, while anyone alive then will likely have a concept nigh identical to our current concept of "white", it is highly unlikely that "Labor Day" will still exist as it does now, and even if both exist, fashion is fickle. As for the immigrants, the statement is too broad and the categories too course. Likely SOME immigrants steal jobs under SOME conditions. If you want to get to something more long-term stable, you need to try to divide up immigrants into types, jobs into types, and wrangle in the conditions dramatically. At that point, either you would find converge, and science can continue, or you would not be able to find convergence, and the whole thing conceptual cluster would disintegrate into nothingness. Or, at least, that is what would happen if you approached the claim scientifically. 

And, it is likely that as things progress, even many of the claims we could never imagine being overturned will, in fact, be overturned. The science of "Airs" was going gangbusters before atomic theory upended it. Newtonian physics and Euclidean Geometry were shown to be a special cases, and might yet be upended more than that. Most concepts that most people have are garbage. Yours and mine and Nicks are no exceptions. And yet, the quest to find stability continues, backed only by the faith that there is some stability to be found. 

On Sat, Dec 7, 2019 at 3:25 PM <[hidden email]> wrote:

Glen,

Most streams of experience don't converge.  Random streams predict nothing.  They are of no use to the organism.  Only streams that converge, "are".  I.e, only they exist.  Random streams, aren't.  Most co-occurrences in stream are random, they reveal no existents.  Since you can never know for sure whether you are in a random or a non random stream, you can never know whether the parts of the stream you are responding to exist or not.  But you can sure make educated (i.e., probabilistic)  guesses, and that's what organisms' learning mechanisms do.  So, I don’t have a ==>faith<== in convergence.  I, like all learning creatures, have a lack of interest in non-convergence.  Non being interested in convergence in experience would be like going to a poker game in which some cards are marked and not being interested in the relation between the cards and the marks. 

Nick

Nick Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology
Clark University
[hidden email]
https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/



-----Original Message-----
From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of glen?C
Sent: Saturday, December 7, 2019 9:40 AM
To: [hidden email]
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] [EXT] Re: A pluralistic model of the mind?

Excellent! So, your *scalar* is confidence in your estimates of any given distribution. I try to describe it in [†] below. But that's a tangent.

What I can't yet reconstruct, credibly, in my own words, is the faith in *convergence*. What if sequential calculations of an average do NOT converge?

Does this mean there are 2 stuffs, some that converge and some that don't? ... some distributions are stationary and some are not? Or would you assert that reality (and/or truth, given Peirce's distinction) is always and everywhere stationary and all (competent/accurate/precise) estimates will always converge?




[†] You can be a little confident (0.01%) or a lot confident (99.9%). I don't much care if you close the set and allow 0 and 1, confidence ∈ [0,1]. I think I have ways to close the set. But it doesn't matter. If we keep it open and agree that 100% confidence is illusory, then your scalar is confidence ∈ (0,1). Now that we have a scale of some kind, we can *construct* a typology of experiences. E.g. we can categorize things like deja vu or a bear in the woods as accumulations of confidence with different organizations. E.g. a composite experience with ((e1⨂e2⨂e3)⨂e4)⨂e5, where each of ei experiences has some confidence associated with it. Obviously, ⨂ is not multiplication or addition, but some other composer function. The whole composite experience would then have some aggregate confidence.

On December 6, 2019 8:22:29 PM PST, [hidden email] wrote:
>Elegant, Glen, and you caused me truly to wonder:  Is the population
>mean, mu,  of statistics fame, of a different substance than the
>individual measurements, the bar x's that are stabs at it?  But I think
>the answer is no.  It is just one among the others, a citizen king
>amongst those bar-x's, the one on which the others will converge in a
>normally distributed world.  I guess that makes me a frequentist,
>right?
>
>And it's not strictly true that Mu is beyond my reach.  I may have
>already reached it with the sample I now hold in my hand.  I just will
>never be sure that I have reached it.
>
>Could you, Dave, and I perhaps all agree that all ==>certainty<== is
>illusory?
>
>I don't think that's going to assuage you. 
>
>I am going to have to think more.
>
>Ugh!  I hate when that happens.


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[John Kennison]

Eric,

Many thanks for your three versions of my question. I haven't decided whether any of them represent what my original question was but I appreciate all three. I guess I want to say that my original experience of "seeing" a bear in the woods is the same regardless of whether later experiences, by me or others, lead to the judgement that there was, or was not, an actual bear in the woods. Later judgements might affect how I regard my experience (or perhaps I should say influence  subsequent experience relating to my original experience.)

--John 

---

From: Eric Charles <[hidden email]>
Sent: Saturday, December 7, 2019 9:00 AM
To: John Kennison <[hidden email]>
Cc: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [EXT] Re: [FRIAM] 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? 

On Fri, Dec 6, 2019 at 9:28 AM John Kennison <[hidden email]> 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 <[hidden email]> on behalf of Eric Charles <[hidden email]>
Sent: Thursday, December 5, 2019 8:41 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
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

[hidden email]

On Thu, Dec 5, 2019 at 1:20 AM <[hidden email]> 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/

 

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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[HighlandWindsLLC Miller]

Sent from my iPhone

> On Dec 7, 2019, at 1:25 PM, <[hidden email]> <[hidden email]> wrote:
>
> Glen,
>
> Most streams of experience don't converge.  Random streams predict nothing.  They are of no use to the organism.  Only streams that converge, "are".  I.e, only they exist.  Random streams, aren't.  Most co-occurrences in stream are random, they reveal no existents.  Since you can never know for sure whether you are in a random or a non random stream, you can never know whether the parts of the stream you are responding to exist or not.  But you can sure make educated (i.e., probabilistic)  guesses, and that's what organisms' learning mechanisms do.  So, I don’t have a ==>faith<== in convergence.  I, like all learning creatures, have a lack of interest in non-convergence.  Non being interested in convergence in experience would be like going to a poker game in which some cards are marked and not being interested in the relation between the cards and the marks.  
>
> Nick
>
> Nick Thompson
> Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology
> Clark University
> [hidden email]
> https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/
>
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of glen?C
> Sent: Saturday, December 7, 2019 9:40 AM
> To: [hidden email]
> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] [EXT] Re: A pluralistic model of the mind?
>
> Excellent! So, your *scalar* is confidence in your estimates of any given distribution. I try to describe it in [†] below. But that's a tangent.
>
> What I can't yet reconstruct, credibly, in my own words, is the faith in *convergence*. What if sequential calculations of an average do NOT converge?
>
> Does this mean there are 2 stuffs, some that converge and some that don't? ... some distributions are stationary and some are not? Or would you assert that reality (and/or truth, given Peirce's distinction) is always and everywhere stationary and all (competent/accurate/precise) estimates will always converge?
>
>
>
>
> [†] You can be a little confident (0.01%) or a lot confident (99.9%). I don't much care if you close the set and allow 0 and 1, confidence ∈ [0,1]. I think I have ways to close the set. But it doesn't matter. If we keep it open and agree that 100% confidence is illusory, then your scalar is confidence ∈ (0,1). Now that we have a scale of some kind, we can *construct* a typology of experiences. E.g. we can categorize things like deja vu or a bear in the woods as accumulations of confidence with different organizations. E.g. a composite experience with ((e1⨂e2⨂e3)⨂e4)⨂e5, where each of ei experiences has some confidence associated with it. Obviously, ⨂ is not multiplication or addition, but some other composer function. The whole composite experience would then have some aggregate confidence.
>
>> On December 6, 2019 8:22:29 PM PST, [hidden email] wrote:
>> Elegant, Glen, and you caused me truly to wonder:  Is the population
>> mean, mu,  of statistics fame, of a different substance than the
>> individual measurements, the bar x's that are stabs at it?  But I think
>> the answer is no.  It is just one among the others, a citizen king
>> amongst those bar-x's, the one on which the others will converge in a
>> normally distributed world.  I guess that makes me a frequentist,
>> right?
>>
>> And it's not strictly true that Mu is beyond my reach.  I may have
>> already reached it with the sample I now hold in my hand.  I just will
>> never be sure that I have reached it.
>>
>> Could you, Dave, and I perhaps all agree that all ==>certainty<== is
>> illusory?
>>
>> I don't think that's going to assuage you.  
>>
>> I am going to have to think more.
>>
>> Ugh!  I hate when that happens.
>
>
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>
>
>

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[Prof David West]

Nick,

No need to be ill at ease — I do not mean illusory in, or with, any sense/degree/intimation of dualism.

Ultimately, either: I am more of a monist than thou. Or, you are equally a mystic as I.

You cannot speak of Experience without explicitly or implicitly asserting an Experiencer --->> dualism. If there is an Experience "of which you cannot speak," or of which "whatever is spoken is incorrect or incomplete;" then you are as much a mystic as Lao Tzu and the Tao.

Because your sensibilities will not allow you to admit your mysticism, I offer an alternative: you are an epistemological monist but not an ontological monist. On the latter point; I have already accused you of believing in an ontological "Thing" other than experience: a human soul or essence or spirit.

My monism is both ontological (except for the myth that infinitely long ago, and infinitely in the future, there were two things "intelligence" and "matter") and epistemological (accepting that my epistemology is ineffable).

davew

On Fri, Dec 6, 2019, at 8:49 PM, [hidden email] wrote:

Hi, David,

 

Thanks for channeling me so accurately.  It is a talent to channel what one does not agree with so faithfully that the person channeled is satisfied.   Thank you for that. 

 

I would have only one ill-ease, about the last part of your version:

 

both equally illusory.

 

I think “illusory” is used here, in your way, not in the way I would use it, but to refer to the world that truly is but which we an never truly grasp.  I.e., dualistically.  For me, an illusion is just an experience that does not prove out.  I arrive at my coffee house three days in a row and there is a “day old” old-fashioned plain donut available for purchase at half price.  I experience that “donut at 4” is something I can count on.  That turns out not to be the case because, another customer starts coming in at 3.59 and commandeering all the donuts.  My experience was illusory.  Or, think flips of a coin.  You flip a coin 7 times heads and you come to the conclusion that the coin is biased.  However, you flip it a thousand times more and its behavior over the 1007 flips is consistent with randomness.  You come to the conclusion that the bias was probably an illusion. 

 

My understanding of illusory is probabilistic and provisional. 

 

Nick

 

 

Nick Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

[hidden email]https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

 

 

From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of Prof David West

Sent: Friday, December 6, 2019 10:16 AM

To: [hidden email]

Subject: Re: [FRIAM] [EXT] Re: A pluralistic model of the mind?

 

I dare not really speak for Nick, but I think the essence of his position is that there is no "out there" nor is there any "in here." There is only a flow of "experience" that is sometimes "evaluated" (interpreted?) to a false distinction of in or out — both equally illusory.

 

davew

 

 

On Fri, Dec 6, 2019, at 3:27 PM, John Kennison 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 <[hidden email]> on behalf of Eric Charles <[hidden email]>
Sent: Thursday, December 5, 2019 8:41 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
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 <[hidden email]> 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/

 

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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[Frank Wimberly-2]

I think we've gotten somewhere.

Frank

On Mon, Dec 9, 2019, 4:08 AM Prof David West <[hidden email]> wrote:

Nick,

No need to be ill at ease — I do not mean illusory in, or with, any sense/degree/intimation of dualism.

Ultimately, either: I am more of a monist than thou. Or, you are equally a mystic as I.

You cannot speak of Experience without explicitly or implicitly asserting an Experiencer --->> dualism. If there is an Experience "of which you cannot speak," or of which "whatever is spoken is incorrect or incomplete;" then you are as much a mystic as Lao Tzu and the Tao.

Because your sensibilities will not allow you to admit your mysticism, I offer an alternative: you are an epistemological monist but not an ontological monist. On the latter point; I have already accused you of believing in an ontological "Thing" other than experience: a human soul or essence or spirit.

My monism is both ontological (except for the myth that infinitely long ago, and infinitely in the future, there were two things "intelligence" and "matter") and epistemological (accepting that my epistemology is ineffable).

davew

On Fri, Dec 6, 2019, at 8:49 PM, [hidden email] wrote:

Hi, David,

 

Thanks for channeling me so accurately.  It is a talent to channel what one does not agree with so faithfully that the person channeled is satisfied.   Thank you for that. 

 

I would have only one ill-ease, about the last part of your version:

 

both equally illusory.

 

I think “illusory” is used here, in your way, not in the way I would use it, but to refer to the world that truly is but which we an never truly grasp.  I.e., dualistically.  For me, an illusion is just an experience that does not prove out.  I arrive at my coffee house three days in a row and there is a “day old” old-fashioned plain donut available for purchase at half price.  I experience that “donut at 4” is something I can count on.  That turns out not to be the case because, another customer starts coming in at 3.59 and commandeering all the donuts.  My experience was illusory.  Or, think flips of a coin.  You flip a coin 7 times heads and you come to the conclusion that the coin is biased.  However, you flip it a thousand times more and its behavior over the 1007 flips is consistent with randomness.  You come to the conclusion that the bias was probably an illusion. 

 

My understanding of illusory is probabilistic and provisional. 

 

Nick

 

 

Nick Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

[hidden email]https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

 

 

From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of Prof David West

Sent: Friday, December 6, 2019 10:16 AM

To: [hidden email]

Subject: Re: [FRIAM] [EXT] Re: A pluralistic model of the mind?

 

I dare not really speak for Nick, but I think the essence of his position is that there is no "out there" nor is there any "in here." There is only a flow of "experience" that is sometimes "evaluated" (interpreted?) to a false distinction of in or out — both equally illusory.

 

davew

 

 

On Fri, Dec 6, 2019, at 3:27 PM, John Kennison 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 <[hidden email]> on behalf of Eric Charles <[hidden email]>
Sent: Thursday, December 5, 2019 8:41 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
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 <[hidden email]> 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/

 

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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[Curt McNamara]

This discussion reminded me of two books:

The Mechanical Mind by Crane

https://books.google.com/books?id=fIzWix4CPxkC&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false

In it the author makes clear that all thinking is tied to (some kind) of experience. Which is different from AI (at this time).

The Order of Time by Rovelli

https://books.google.com/books?id=YvM3DwAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false

Rovelli makes it clear there is no single time -- it is different for you and me, different on the mountain top, and there is "less of it" near large masses. Time is discrete, and has a lower allowable limit.

                Curt

On Mon, Dec 9, 2019 at 7:20 AM Frank Wimberly <[hidden email]> wrote:

I think we've gotten somewhere.

Frank

-----------------------------------
Frank Wimberly

My memoir:
https://www.amazon.com/author/frankwimberly

My scientific publications:
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Frank_Wimberly2

Phone [phone]

On Mon, Dec 9, 2019, 4:08 AM Prof David West <[hidden email]> wrote:

Nick,

No need to be ill at ease — I do not mean illusory in, or with, any sense/degree/intimation of dualism.

Ultimately, either: I am more of a monist than thou. Or, you are equally a mystic as I.

You cannot speak of Experience without explicitly or implicitly asserting an Experiencer --->> dualism. If there is an Experience "of which you cannot speak," or of which "whatever is spoken is incorrect or incomplete;" then you are as much a mystic as Lao Tzu and the Tao.

Because your sensibilities will not allow you to admit your mysticism, I offer an alternative: you are an epistemological monist but not an ontological monist. On the latter point; I have already accused you of believing in an ontological "Thing" other than experience: a human soul or essence or spirit.

My monism is both ontological (except for the myth that infinitely long ago, and infinitely in the future, there were two things "intelligence" and "matter") and epistemological (accepting that my epistemology is ineffable).

davew

On Fri, Dec 6, 2019, at 8:49 PM, [hidden email] wrote:

Hi, David,

 

Thanks for channeling me so accurately.  It is a talent to channel what one does not agree with so faithfully that the person channeled is satisfied.   Thank you for that. 

 

I would have only one ill-ease, about the last part of your version:

 

both equally illusory.

 

I think “illusory” is used here, in your way, not in the way I would use it, but to refer to the world that truly is but which we an never truly grasp.  I.e., dualistically.  For me, an illusion is just an experience that does not prove out.  I arrive at my coffee house three days in a row and there is a “day old” old-fashioned plain donut available for purchase at half price.  I experience that “donut at 4” is something I can count on.  That turns out not to be the case because, another customer starts coming in at 3.59 and commandeering all the donuts.  My experience was illusory.  Or, think flips of a coin.  You flip a coin 7 times heads and you come to the conclusion that the coin is biased.  However, you flip it a thousand times more and its behavior over the 1007 flips is consistent with randomness.  You come to the conclusion that the bias was probably an illusion. 

 

My understanding of illusory is probabilistic and provisional. 

 

Nick

 

 

Nick Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

[hidden email]https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

 

 

From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of Prof David West

Sent: Friday, December 6, 2019 10:16 AM

To: [hidden email]

Subject: Re: [FRIAM] [EXT] Re: A pluralistic model of the mind?

 

I dare not really speak for Nick, but I think the essence of his position is that there is no "out there" nor is there any "in here." There is only a flow of "experience" that is sometimes "evaluated" (interpreted?) to a false distinction of in or out — both equally illusory.

 

davew

 

 

On Fri, Dec 6, 2019, at 3:27 PM, John Kennison 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 <[hidden email]> on behalf of Eric Charles <[hidden email]>
Sent: Thursday, December 5, 2019 8:41 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
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 <[hidden email]> 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/

 

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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