A pluralistic model of the mind?

[thompnickson2]

Dave,

 

Thanks for this; and thanks, Frank, for forwarding it, else I should never have seen it. 

 

Well, that’s what I get for labeling my Monism.  Once labeled, monisms become dualisms.  Let me just say that the experiencer of an experience is simply another experience. 

 

Isn’t admitting to the ineffable throwing in the towel?

 

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: Monday, December 9, 2019 6:20 AM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] [EXT] Re: A pluralistic model of the mind?

 

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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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 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

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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
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[Eric Charles-2]

Ineffable? 

F it!

I will try for a more thorough reply later,  but the short version is that no inherently ineffable things exist,  because "exist" and "real" are awkward ways we talk about the object of those concepts that will sustain the scrutiny of investigation. For that process to happen,  we have to be able to talk about the thing being investigated,  i.e. it must be in-principle effable. If we lack the necessary vocabulary at the moment,  that's a different problem. 

On Mon, Dec 9, 2019, 12:03 PM <[hidden email]> wrote:

Dave,

 

Thanks for this; and thanks, Frank, for forwarding it, else I should never have seen it. 

 

Well, that’s what I get for labeling my Monism.  Once labeled, monisms become dualisms.  Let me just say that the experiencer of an experience is simply another experience. 

 

Isn’t admitting to the ineffable throwing in the towel?

 

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: Monday, December 9, 2019 6:20 AM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] [EXT] Re: A pluralistic model of the mind?

 

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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[Prof David West]

Ineffable!

There are many things that "cannot be expressed in words."

There are many experiences "that cannot be expressed in words."

Perhaps the "words" simply do not exist - or exist at the moment — the vocabulary problem you mention.

Perhaps the constructs of the language — copulas / the verb "to be" in English, for example — prevent accurate assertions, or mandate unresolvable paradox.

Perhaps no language with appropriate expressive power is extant. (Unless Nick, in his researchers, has rediscovered the "language of the birds" that Huggin and Munnin used to converse with Odin.)

Perhaps a 'process of investigative scrutiny' other than the one we commonly use to talk about common things is required; i.e. we simply have yet to invent the appropriate "science."

Why do limitations in epistemology mandate exclusions from ontology?

davew

On Mon, Dec 9, 2019, at 7:40 PM, Eric Charles wrote:

Ineffable? 

F it!

I will try for a more thorough reply later,  but the short version is that no inherently ineffable things exist,  because "exist" and "real" are awkward ways we talk about the object of those concepts that will sustain the scrutiny of investigation. For that process to happen,  we have to be able to talk about the thing being investigated,  i.e. it must be in-principle effable. If we lack the necessary vocabulary at the moment,  that's a different problem. 

On Mon, Dec 9, 2019, 12:03 PM <[hidden email]> wrote:

Dave,

 

Thanks for this; and thanks, Frank, for forwarding it, else I should never have seen it. 

 

Well, that’s what I get for labeling my Monism.  Once labeled, monisms become dualisms.  Let me just say that the experiencer of an experience is simply another experience. 

 

Isn’t admitting to the ineffable throwing in the towel?

 

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: Monday, December 9, 2019 6:20 AM

To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>

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

 

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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[Grant Holland]

Of course, Heisenberg and Bohr made this point regarding the quantum world. Languages are constructed, or emerge, to operate within certain bounds.

Grant

On Dec 10, 2019, at 12:44 AM, Prof David West <[hidden email]> wrote:

Ineffable!

There are many things that "cannot be expressed in words."

There are many experiences "that cannot be expressed in words."

Perhaps the "words" simply do not exist - or exist at the moment — the vocabulary problem you mention.

Perhaps the constructs of the language — copulas / the verb "to be" in English, for example — prevent accurate assertions, or mandate unresolvable paradox.

Perhaps no language with appropriate expressive power is extant. (Unless Nick, in his researchers, has rediscovered the "language of the birds" that Huggin and Munnin used to converse with Odin.)

Perhaps a 'process of investigative scrutiny' other than the one we commonly use to talk about common things is required; i.e. we simply have yet to invent the appropriate "science."

Why do limitations in epistemology mandate exclusions from ontology?

davew

On Mon, Dec 9, 2019, at 7:40 PM, Eric Charles wrote:

Ineffable? 

F it!

I will try for a more thorough reply later,  but the short version is that no inherently ineffable things exist,  because "exist" and "real" are awkward ways we talk about the object of those concepts that will sustain the scrutiny of investigation. For that process to happen,  we have to be able to talk about the thing being investigated,  i.e. it must be in-principle effable. If we lack the necessary vocabulary at the moment,  that's a different problem. 

On Mon, Dec 9, 2019, 12:03 PM <[hidden email]> wrote:

Dave, 

 

Thanks for this; and thanks, Frank, for forwarding it, else I should never have seen it.  

 

Well, that’s what I get for labeling my Monism.  Once labeled, monisms become dualisms.  Let me just say that the experiencer of an experience is simply another experience.  

 

Isn’t admitting to the ineffable throwing in the towel? 

 

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: Monday, December 9, 2019 6:20 AM

To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>

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

 

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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[thompnickson2]

Hi, Dave,

 

How is it in that Lank Amsterdamp?  Lights coming on.  People starting to head home.  Bright crisp mid-morning here.  Sky azure right down to the refreshed white folds of the sangres.  Mind you, it has not been always so.  On Saturday, a drive up to the College, took you into the clouds. 

 

Ok, so you know that I am daffy about etymology.

 

ineffable (adj.)

late 14c., "beyond expression, too great for words, inexpressible," from Old French ineffable (14c.) or directly from Latin ineffabilis "unutterable," from in- "not, opposite of" (see in- (1)) + effabilis "speakable," from effari "utter," from assimilated form of ex "out" (see ex-) + fari "to say, speak," from PIE root *bha- (2) "to speak, tell, say." Meaning "that may not be spoken" is from 1590s. Plural noun ineffables was, for a time, a jocular euphemism for "trousers" (1823; see inexpressible). Related: Ineffably.

So, you are herding me along in my thinking.  Yes, I think of you rather like a thought-shepherd-dog, rushing off to nip at the heals of any errant conception  This latest nip has to do with my not quite grasping that to “eff” something is to “render it in words.” 

 

Let’s say that my grand daughter came to me in tears to say that her dog had been run over in the street.  Words fail me, so I hug her.  So, my feelings for her at that moment were ineffable.  Yet I managed to render them!  And, now, with words, I have managed to render them to you. 

 

I wonder if ineffability is a feeling, like anxiety.  Like anxiety, it may, or may not, have very much to do with the thing it is ostensibly “about”.  It is like displacement preening in bickering ducks.  Ineffing is something we do when we don’t know which way to eff. 

 

By the way.  My parents (as you can guess) were in publishing and editing and were very wordy people.  My mother died quite young (or so it seems from the perspective of 82).  She struggled with words all her life, tried to do too much with them.  It was years before my father could put an epigraph on her grave.  It lay there for years, just the brass plate, with her name and dates.  Relatives commented when they visited the family plot.   Then, the year we went to bury my aunt, there it was, finally, etched in the brass, my father’s comment on our 37 years together as a family:  “Words Fail!” 

 

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: Tuesday, December 10, 2019 12:45 AM
To: [hidden email]
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] [EXT] Re: A pluralistic model of the mind?

 

Ineffable!

 

There are many things that "cannot be expressed in words."

 

There are many experiences "that cannot be expressed in words."

 

Perhaps the "words" simply do not exist - or exist at the moment — the vocabulary problem you mention.

 

Perhaps the constructs of the language — copulas / the verb "to be" in English, for example — prevent accurate assertions, or mandate unresolvable paradox.

 

Perhaps no language with appropriate expressive power is extant. (Unless Nick, in his researchers, has rediscovered the "language of the birds" that Huggin and Munnin used to converse with Odin.)

 

Perhaps a 'process of investigative scrutiny' other than the one we commonly use to talk about common things is required; i.e. we simply have yet to invent the appropriate "science."

 

Why do limitations in epistemology mandate exclusions from ontology?

 

davew

 

 

 

On Mon, Dec 9, 2019, at 7:40 PM, Eric Charles wrote:

Ineffable? 

 

F it!

 

I will try for a more thorough reply later,  but the short version is that no inherently ineffable things exist,  because "exist" and "real" are awkward ways we talk about the object of those concepts that will sustain the scrutiny of investigation. For that process to happen,  we have to be able to talk about the thing being investigated,  i.e. it must be in-principle effable. If we lack the necessary vocabulary at the moment,  that's a different problem. 

 

On Mon, Dec 9, 2019, 12:03 PM <[hidden email]> wrote:

Dave,

 

Thanks for this; and thanks, Frank, for forwarding it, else I should never have seen it. 

 

Well, that’s what I get for labeling my Monism.  Once labeled, monisms become dualisms.  Let me just say that the experiencer of an experience is simply another experience. 

 

Isn’t admitting to the ineffable throwing in the towel?

 

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: Monday, December 9, 2019 6:20 AM

To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>

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

 

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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[Prof David West]

Dr. Nick,

For the last month, I have had to ride my bike — in the dark, both morning and night — almost 10 miles each way from a temporary home in Ankeveen to Weesp where I could catch a train to Amsterdam. On all but 4 mornings/evenings it rained, sometimes quite hard. And the wind was, seemingly, always gusting in the wrong direction. Miserable, but it builds character; so they say. (Cardio is definitely improved.) Temp almost universally between 28 and 38 Fahrenheit.

Both your anecdotes support, my assertion that lots of things and lots of experiences are ineffable. This does not mean they are not "expressible" nor "communicable, merely that they cannot be expressed with words nor communicated using words.

Words fail! Indeed!

Entire languages fail. Entire epistemological philosophies fail.

You "rendered" the ineffable to your grand-daughter, but you did NOT render them to me with words. You you words to circumscribe and speak about an experience of a kind that you believe I might have first hand, equally ineffable, experience of and that your indirect words would move me to make a connection. At best, your words, your language, worked like a game of Charades or Pictionary as a means of limning the space wherein I might find my own experience of like kind.

A "mystic" engages an experience that is ineffable, and then utters thousands, book volumes worth, of words attempting to limn a space wherein you too might engage the same experience — or, if an optimist, might awaken in you a recognition of what you have already experienced. More Charades and Pictionary — spewing forth words ABOUT the experience; never expressing, in words or language, the experience itself.

At least some ineffable experiences can be expressed directly using a language of voltages and wave forms, (Neurotheology), but not words or mathematical symbols or such-based languages.

The question remains: why does a failure of epistemology mandate voids in ontology?

I love your etymological daffiness, I share it.

The definitions cited reflect an arrogance of the "enlightened" in the notion "too great for words." A lot of mystics make this, what I believe to be, error, attempting to grant an ontological status of REAL that does not follow from the simple fact that it cannot be expressed in words.

And another sidenote — something might be "ineffable" simply because you are not allowed to use a word, ala Carlin's seven dirty words, or the "N-Word" or the "C-Word."

davew

On Tue, Dec 10, 2019, at 6:30 PM, [hidden email] wrote:

Hi, Dave,

 

How is it in that Lank Amsterdamp?  Lights coming on.  People starting to head home.  Bright crisp mid-morning here.  Sky azure right down to the refreshed white folds of the sangres.  Mind you, it has not been always so.  On Saturday, a drive up to the College, took you into the clouds. 

 

Ok, so you know that I am daffy about etymology.

 

ineffable (adj.)

late 14c., "beyond expression, too great for words, inexpressible," from Old French ineffable (14c.) or directly from Latin ineffabilis "unutterable," from in- "not, opposite of" (see in- (1)) + effabilis "speakable," from effari "utter," from assimilated form of ex "out" (see ex-) + fari "to say, speak," from PIE root *bha- (2) "to speak, tell, say." Meaning "that may not be spoken" is from 1590s. Plural noun ineffables was, for a time, a jocular euphemism for "trousers" (1823; see inexpressible). Related: Ineffably.

So, you are herding me along in my thinking.  Yes, I think of you rather like a thought-shepherd-dog, rushing off to nip at the heals of any errant conception  This latest nip has to do with my not quite grasping that to “eff” something is to “render it in words.” 

 

Let’s say that my grand daughter came to me in tears to say that her dog had been run over in the street.  Words fail me, so I hug her.  So, my feelings for her at that moment were ineffable.  Yet I managed to render them!  And, now, with words, I have managed to render them to you. 

 

I wonder if ineffability is a feeling, like anxiety.  Like anxiety, it may, or may not, have very much to do with the thing it is ostensibly “about”.  It is like displacement preening in bickering ducks.  Ineffing is something we do when we don’t know which way to eff. 

 

By the way.  My parents (as you can guess) were in publishing and editing and were very wordy people.  My mother died quite young (or so it seems from the perspective of 82).  She struggled with words all her life, tried to do too much with them.  It was years before my father could put an epigraph on her grave.  It lay there for years, just the brass plate, with her name and dates.  Relatives commented when they visited the family plot.   Then, the year we went to bury my aunt, there it was, finally, etched in the brass, my father’s comment on our 37 years together as a family:  “Words Fail!” 

 

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: Tuesday, December 10, 2019 12:45 AM

To: [hidden email]

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

 

Ineffable!

 

There are many things that "cannot be expressed in words."

 

There are many experiences "that cannot be expressed in words."

 

Perhaps the "words" simply do not exist - or exist at the moment — the vocabulary problem you mention.

 

Perhaps the constructs of the language — copulas / the verb "to be" in English, for example — prevent accurate assertions, or mandate unresolvable paradox.

 

Perhaps no language with appropriate expressive power is extant. (Unless Nick, in his researchers, has rediscovered the "language of the birds" that Huggin and Munnin used to converse with Odin.)

 

Perhaps a 'process of investigative scrutiny' other than the one we commonly use to talk about common things is required; i.e. we simply have yet to invent the appropriate "science."

 

Why do limitations in epistemology mandate exclusions from ontology?

 

davew

 

 

 

On Mon, Dec 9, 2019, at 7:40 PM, Eric Charles wrote:

Ineffable? 

 

F it!

 

I will try for a more thorough reply later,  but the short version is that no inherently ineffable things exist,  because "exist" and "real" are awkward ways we talk about the object of those concepts that will sustain the scrutiny of investigation. For that process to happen,  we have to be able to talk about the thing being investigated,  i.e. it must be in-principle effable. If we lack the necessary vocabulary at the moment,  that's a different problem. 

 

On Mon, Dec 9, 2019, 12:03 PM <[hidden email]> wrote:

Dave,

 

Thanks for this; and thanks, Frank, for forwarding it, else I should never have seen it. 

 

Well, that’s what I get for labeling my Monism.  Once labeled, monisms become dualisms.  Let me just say that the experiencer of an experience is simply another experience. 

 

Isn’t admitting to the ineffable throwing in the towel?

 

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: Monday, December 9, 2019 6:20 AM

To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>

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

 

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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[gepr]

I intend to respond to both Nick's and EricC's comments about "faith in convergence" at some point. But I've been caught up in other things. So, in the meantime, ...

"Irony and Outrage," part 2: Why Colbert got serious — and why Donald Trump isn't funny
https://www.salon.com/2019/12/08/irony-and-outrage-part-2-why-colbert-got-serious-and-why-donald-trump-isnt-funny/

There are 2 interesting tangents touching this thread:

1) Re: ineffability -- "But also that the mere logic of the humorous juxtaposition eludes him — the notion that you do not issue the argument, you create a juxtaposition that invites the audience to issue an argument."

I'll argue that the content of a (good) joke is *ineffable*. The whole purpose of the joke teller is to communicate something without actually *saying* it. If you explain a joke, it breaks the joke.

And 2) Re: limits to epistemology limiting ontology -- "That, to me, is illustrative of that broader point I try to make about how when a threat is salient to you, it becomes hard to enter the state of play, ..."

I *would* argue that pluralists will be more able to enter the "state of play" Goldthwaite describes (and I've described on this list a number of times as variations of "suspension of disbelief", "empathetic listening", and being willing to play games others set up) than monists. I think monists should TEND to be more committed to their way of thinking than pluralists ... more willing to believe their own or others' brain farts. At least in my case, being a pluralist means, in part, that I refuse to *commit* to ontological assertions of any kind. I'll play with various types of monism just as readily as I'll play with 3-tupleisms ... or 17-tupleisms. I think that's what makes me a simulant of passing competence. You just need to tell me *what* -ism you want to simulate.

As such, it seems that maybe Dave's got the cart before the horse. It's the failure of ontology that's mandating voids in epistemology. We should work toward robust *ways of knowing* and loosen up a bit on whatever it is we think we know. I say "would argue" of course because, being totally ignorant of philosophy, I'm probably just confused about everything.

On 12/10/19 12:43 PM, Prof David West wrote:

> Both your anecdotes support, my assertion that lots of things and lots of experiences are ineffable. This does not mean they are not "expressible" nor "communicable, merely that they cannot be expressed with words nor communicated using words.
>
> Words fail! Indeed!
>
> Entire languages fail. Entire epistemological philosophies fail.
>
> You "rendered" the ineffable to your grand-daughter, but you did NOT render them to me with words. You you words to circumscribe and speak about an experience of a kind that you believe I might have first hand, equally ineffable, experience of and that your indirect words would move me to make a connection. At best, your words, your language, worked like a game of Charades or Pictionary as a means of limning the space wherein I might find my own experience of like kind.
>
> A "mystic" engages an experience that is ineffable, and then utters thousands, book volumes worth, of words attempting to limn a space wherein you too might engage the same experience — or, if an optimist, might awaken in you a recognition of what you have already experienced. More Charades and Pictionary — spewing forth words ABOUT the experience; never expressing, in words or language, the experience itself.
>
> At least some ineffable experiences can be expressed directly using a language of voltages and wave forms, (Neurotheology), but not words or mathematical symbols or such-based languages.
>
> The question remains: why does a failure of epistemology mandate voids in ontology?
>
> I love your etymological daffiness, I share it.
>
> The definitions cited reflect an arrogance of the "enlightened" in the notion "too great for words." A lot of mystics make this, what I believe to be, error, attempting to grant an ontological status of REAL that does not follow from the simple fact that it cannot be expressed in words.
>
> And another sidenote — something might be "ineffable" simply because you are not allowed to use a word, ala Carlin's seven dirty words, or the "N-Word" or the "C-Word."

--
☣ uǝlƃ

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[Eric Charles-2]

Ok.... I'm going to try to do a better take on the "ineffable" issue. I want to start by admitting that there is some sense in which ANYTHING I want to describe is never fully described by the words I use, in some reasonable use of the word "fully." If I see a turtle, and I tell you that I saw a turtle, I haven't provided you with a full description of exactly what the experience was like. So, I'm willing to admit that... but I'm not convinced there is anything deeper than that about Nick's inability to express his "feelings" to his granddaughter... and with that out of the way I will return to what I think is the broader issue.

Real / existing things have effects. That is what it is to be real / to exist. If someone wants to talk about something that exists but have no effects, they are wandering down an rabbit hole with no bottom, and might as well be talking about noiseless sounds or blue-less blue. 

The pragmatic maxim tells us: " Consider what effects... we conceive the object of our conception to have. Then, our conception of these effects is the whole of our conception of the object." So anything we conceive of is, in some sense, a cluster of effects, and so everything "real" is in principle conceivable. And to the extent anything can be expressed adequately - whether by words or any other means of expression - concepts can be expressed, and so anything real can be expressed.

However, i'm not sure the effability is really the important part. The bigger question was about epistemology and ontology. But the pragmatic maxim covers that as well. Things that have effects are in principle we may presume there are many, many effects that we don't yet have the means to detect, but anything that has effects could, under some circumstances, be detectable. So the limits of what is are the same as the limits of what can in principle be known. Postulation of things that are existing but which can't, under any circumstances, be known is internally contradictory. 

Was that a better reply? It felt more thorough at least...

On Tue, Dec 10, 2019 at 7:36 PM uǝlƃ ☣ <[hidden email]> wrote:

I intend to respond to both Nick's and EricC's comments about "faith in convergence" at some point. But I've been caught up in other things. So, in the meantime, ...

"Irony and Outrage," part 2: Why Colbert got serious — and why Donald Trump isn't funny
https://www.salon.com/2019/12/08/irony-and-outrage-part-2-why-colbert-got-serious-and-why-donald-trump-isnt-funny/

There are 2 interesting tangents touching this thread:

1) Re: ineffability -- "But also that the mere logic of the humorous juxtaposition eludes him — the notion that you do not issue the argument, you create a juxtaposition that invites the audience to issue an argument."

I'll argue that the content of a (good) joke is *ineffable*. The whole purpose of the joke teller is to communicate something without actually *saying* it. If you explain a joke, it breaks the joke.

And 2) Re: limits to epistemology limiting ontology -- "That, to me, is illustrative of that broader point I try to make about how when a threat is salient to you, it becomes hard to enter the state of play, ..."

I *would* argue that pluralists will be more able to enter the "state of play" Goldthwaite describes (and I've described on this list a number of times as variations of "suspension of disbelief", "empathetic listening", and being willing to play games others set up) than monists. I think monists should TEND to be more committed to their way of thinking than pluralists ... more willing to believe their own or others' brain farts. At least in my case, being a pluralist means, in part, that I refuse to *commit* to ontological assertions of any kind. I'll play with various types of monism just as readily as I'll play with 3-tupleisms ... or 17-tupleisms. I think that's what makes me a simulant of passing competence. You just need to tell me *what* -ism you want to simulate.

As such, it seems that maybe Dave's got the cart before the horse. It's the failure of ontology that's mandating voids in epistemology. We should work toward robust *ways of knowing* and loosen up a bit on whatever it is we think we know. I say "would argue" of course because, being totally ignorant of philosophy, I'm probably just confused about everything.

On 12/10/19 12:43 PM, Prof David West wrote:
> Both your anecdotes support, my assertion that lots of things and lots of experiences are ineffable. This does not mean they are not "expressible" nor "communicable, merely that they cannot be expressed with words nor communicated using words.
>
> Words fail! Indeed!
>
> Entire languages fail. Entire epistemological philosophies fail.
>
> You "rendered" the ineffable to your grand-daughter, but you did NOT render them to me with words. You you words to circumscribe and speak about an experience of a kind that you believe I might have first hand, equally ineffable, experience of and that your indirect words would move me to make a connection. At best, your words, your language, worked like a game of Charades or Pictionary as a means of limning the space wherein I might find my own experience of like kind.
>
> A "mystic" engages an experience that is ineffable, and then utters thousands, book volumes worth, of words attempting to limn a space wherein you too might engage the same experience — or, if an optimist, might awaken in you a recognition of what you have already experienced. More Charades and Pictionary — spewing forth words ABOUT the experience; never expressing, in words or language, the experience itself.
>
> At least some ineffable experiences can be expressed directly using a language of voltages and wave forms, (Neurotheology), but not words or mathematical symbols or such-based languages.
>
> The question remains: why does a failure of epistemology mandate voids in ontology?
>
> I love your etymological daffiness, I share it.
>
> The definitions cited reflect an arrogance of the "enlightened" in the notion "too great for words." A lot of mystics make this, what I believe to be, error, attempting to grant an ontological status of REAL that does not follow from the simple fact that it cannot be expressed in words.
>
> And another sidenote — something might be "ineffable" simply because you are not allowed to use a word, ala Carlin's seven dirty words, or the "N-Word" or the "C-Word."

--
☣ uǝlƃ

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[Prof David West]

Last summer I spoke with God. The effects were profound and obvious to all. Many of the effects, measured with MRI and encephalographic devices, were quantifiable. I spoke of my experience, as best as I could, recognizing that whatever words I used told but part of the story. Other's experience of me changed as well - they uniformly and consistently experience me, not as the fun loving drunken whoring party guy, but only as the pious jackass that was the inevitable and most profound effect of my experience.

God is therefore real and extant?

But wait ...

I did not really speak with God. That word and all the other words, and the framing of the effects, piety replacing ribaldry, came after the fact, a post hoc rationalization/interpretation/articulation of "something." And, of course, the form of all those words and effects is but an artifact of the culture (and maybe the Jungian collective unconscious) within which I was raised.

There was "An Experience;" but even that label, those two words, is false-to-fact. What "Was" had no bounds, in time or space and, in fact continues (and predated) the implied bounded context inherent in the meaning of 'an experience'. There is an implied relation between the "Experience" and an ego, an "I:" 1) the "Experience" was apart from "I," 2) "I" was part of the "Experience," 3) "I" perceived/sensed the "Experience."  None of these implied relations are accurate or complete, or even differentiable from each other.

There was a Real, Existing, Thing. "It" was effectual; in that patterns of brain waves and detectable activity in different parts of the brain before and after "It" are measurable and comparable. Behavior and experience — from the "inside" — was altered dramatically, in the sense of the "color," the filtering lens, the 'fit" of interpretations of individual experiences is dramatically altered. Experience — of others on the "outside" —  is altered as well, although often not expressible beyond, "there's something different about you, can't put my finger on it, but ... "

Not only was the "Thing" effectual, it is, within statistical limits, possible to predict the nature and degree of the effects that ensue from "Thing-Occurrence." Moreover, it is possible to establish an "experimental context" whereby others can "experience" the "Thing" and thereby confirm the prediction of effects.

"Thing-Occurrence" ---> partially predictable, measurable (sometimes quantifiable) effects ---> "Thing is Real/Existing?

Despite being, in every way ineffable —  in that no words capture its totality and any words used, in any naturally occurring human language, are false-to-fact.

????

dave west

On Wed, Dec 11, 2019, at 6:10 AM, Eric Charles wrote:

Ok.... I'm going to try to do a better take on the "ineffable" issue. I want to start by admitting that there is some sense in which ANYTHING I want to describe is never fully described by the words I use, in some reasonable use of the word "fully." If I see a turtle, and I tell you that I saw a turtle, I haven't provided you with a full description of exactly what the experience was like. So, I'm willing to admit that... but I'm not convinced there is anything deeper than that about Nick's inability to express his "feelings" to his granddaughter... and with that out of the way I will return to what I think is the broader issue.

Real / existing things have effects. That is what it is to be real / to exist. If someone wants to talk about something that exists but have no effects, they are wandering down an rabbit hole with no bottom, and might as well be talking about noiseless sounds or blue-less blue. 

The pragmatic maxim tells us: " Consider what effects... we conceive the object of our conception to have. Then, our conception of these effects is the whole of our conception of the object." So anything we conceive of is, in some sense, a cluster of effects, and so everything "real" is in principle conceivable. And to the extent anything can be expressed adequately - whether by words or any other means of expression - concepts can be expressed, and so anything real can be expressed.

However, i'm not sure the effability is really the important part. The bigger question was about epistemology and ontology. But the pragmatic maxim covers that as well. Things that have effects are in principle we may presume there are many, many effects that we don't yet have the means to detect, but anything that has effects could, under some circumstances, be detectable. So the limits of what is are the same as the limits of what can in principle be known. Postulation of things that are existing but which can't, under any circumstances, be known is internally contradictory. 

Was that a better reply? It felt more thorough at least...

On Tue, Dec 10, 2019 at 7:36 PM uǝlƃ ☣ <[hidden email]> wrote:

I intend to respond to both Nick's and EricC's comments about "faith in convergence" at some point. But I've been caught up in other things. So, in the meantime, ...

"Irony and Outrage," part 2: Why Colbert got serious — and why Donald Trump isn't funny

https://www.salon.com/2019/12/08/irony-and-outrage-part-2-why-colbert-got-serious-and-why-donald-trump-isnt-funny/

There are 2 interesting tangents touching this thread:

1) Re: ineffability -- "But also that the mere logic of the humorous juxtaposition eludes him — the notion that you do not issue the argument, you create a juxtaposition that invites the audience to issue an argument."

I'll argue that the content of a (good) joke is *ineffable*. The whole purpose of the joke teller is to communicate something without actually *saying* it. If you explain a joke, it breaks the joke.

And 2) Re: limits to epistemology limiting ontology -- "That, to me, is illustrative of that broader point I try to make about how when a threat is salient to you, it becomes hard to enter the state of play, ..."

I *would* argue that pluralists will be more able to enter the "state of play" Goldthwaite describes (and I've described on this list a number of times as variations of "suspension of disbelief", "empathetic listening", and being willing to play games others set up) than monists. I think monists should TEND to be more committed to their way of thinking than pluralists ... more willing to believe their own or others' brain farts. At least in my case, being a pluralist means, in part, that I refuse to *commit* to ontological assertions of any kind. I'll play with various types of monism just as readily as I'll play with 3-tupleisms ... or 17-tupleisms. I think that's what makes me a simulant of passing competence. You just need to tell me *what* -ism you want to simulate.

As such, it seems that maybe Dave's got the cart before the horse. It's the failure of ontology that's mandating voids in epistemology. We should work toward robust *ways of knowing* and loosen up a bit on whatever it is we think we know. I say "would argue" of course because, being totally ignorant of philosophy, I'm probably just confused about everything.

On 12/10/19 12:43 PM, Prof David West wrote:

> Both your anecdotes support, my assertion that lots of things and lots of experiences are ineffable. This does not mean they are not "expressible" nor "communicable, merely that they cannot be expressed with words nor communicated using words.

>

> Words fail! Indeed!

>

> Entire languages fail. Entire epistemological philosophies fail.

>

> You "rendered" the ineffable to your grand-daughter, but you did NOT render them to me with words. You you words to circumscribe and speak about an experience of a kind that you believe I might have first hand, equally ineffable, experience of and that your indirect words would move me to make a connection. At best, your words, your language, worked like a game of Charades or Pictionary as a means of limning the space wherein I might find my own experience of like kind.

>

> A "mystic" engages an experience that is ineffable, and then utters thousands, book volumes worth, of words attempting to limn a space wherein you too might engage the same experience — or, if an optimist, might awaken in you a recognition of what you have already experienced. More Charades and Pictionary — spewing forth words ABOUT the experience; never expressing, in words or language, the experience itself.

>

> At least some ineffable experiences can be expressed directly using a language of voltages and wave forms, (Neurotheology), but not words or mathematical symbols or such-based languages.

>

> The question remains: why does a failure of epistemology mandate voids in ontology?

>

> I love your etymological daffiness, I share it.

>

> The definitions cited reflect an arrogance of the "enlightened" in the notion "too great for words." A lot of mystics make this, what I believe to be, error, attempting to grant an ontological status of REAL that does not follow from the simple fact that it cannot be expressed in words.

>

> And another sidenote — something might be "ineffable" simply because you are not allowed to use a word, ala Carlin's seven dirty words, or the "N-Word" or the "C-Word."

--

☣ uǝlƃ

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[Frank Wimberly-2]

LIKE.  I like Dave's comments but I reply to make sure that Nick sees them.

On Wed, Dec 11, 2019, 2:59 AM Prof David West <[hidden email]> wrote:

Last summer I spoke with God. The effects were profound and obvious to all. Many of the effects, measured with MRI and encephalographic devices, were quantifiable. I spoke of my experience, as best as I could, recognizing that whatever words I used told but part of the story. Other's experience of me changed as well - they uniformly and consistently experience me, not as the fun loving drunken whoring party guy, but only as the pious jackass that was the inevitable and most profound effect of my experience.

God is therefore real and extant?

But wait ...

I did not really speak with God. That word and all the other words, and the framing of the effects, piety replacing ribaldry, came after the fact, a post hoc rationalization/interpretation/articulation of "something." And, of course, the form of all those words and effects is but an artifact of the culture (and maybe the Jungian collective unconscious) within which I was raised.

There was "An Experience;" but even that label, those two words, is false-to-fact. What "Was" had no bounds, in time or space and, in fact continues (and predated) the implied bounded context inherent in the meaning of 'an experience'. There is an implied relation between the "Experience" and an ego, an "I:" 1) the "Experience" was apart from "I," 2) "I" was part of the "Experience," 3) "I" perceived/sensed the "Experience."  None of these implied relations are accurate or complete, or even differentiable from each other.

There was a Real, Existing, Thing. "It" was effectual; in that patterns of brain waves and detectable activity in different parts of the brain before and after "It" are measurable and comparable. Behavior and experience — from the "inside" — was altered dramatically, in the sense of the "color," the filtering lens, the 'fit" of interpretations of individual experiences is dramatically altered. Experience — of others on the "outside" —  is altered as well, although often not expressible beyond, "there's something different about you, can't put my finger on it, but ... "

Not only was the "Thing" effectual, it is, within statistical limits, possible to predict the nature and degree of the effects that ensue from "Thing-Occurrence." Moreover, it is possible to establish an "experimental context" whereby others can "experience" the "Thing" and thereby confirm the prediction of effects.

"Thing-Occurrence" ---> partially predictable, measurable (sometimes quantifiable) effects ---> "Thing is Real/Existing?

Despite being, in every way ineffable —  in that no words capture its totality and any words used, in any naturally occurring human language, are false-to-fact.

????

dave west

On Wed, Dec 11, 2019, at 6:10 AM, Eric Charles wrote:

Ok.... I'm going to try to do a better take on the "ineffable" issue. I want to start by admitting that there is some sense in which ANYTHING I want to describe is never fully described by the words I use, in some reasonable use of the word "fully." If I see a turtle, and I tell you that I saw a turtle, I haven't provided you with a full description of exactly what the experience was like. So, I'm willing to admit that... but I'm not convinced there is anything deeper than that about Nick's inability to express his "feelings" to his granddaughter... and with that out of the way I will return to what I think is the broader issue.

Real / existing things have effects. That is what it is to be real / to exist. If someone wants to talk about something that exists but have no effects, they are wandering down an rabbit hole with no bottom, and might as well be talking about noiseless sounds or blue-less blue. 

The pragmatic maxim tells us: " Consider what effects... we conceive the object of our conception to have. Then, our conception of these effects is the whole of our conception of the object." So anything we conceive of is, in some sense, a cluster of effects, and so everything "real" is in principle conceivable. And to the extent anything can be expressed adequately - whether by words or any other means of expression - concepts can be expressed, and so anything real can be expressed.

However, i'm not sure the effability is really the important part. The bigger question was about epistemology and ontology. But the pragmatic maxim covers that as well. Things that have effects are in principle we may presume there are many, many effects that we don't yet have the means to detect, but anything that has effects could, under some circumstances, be detectable. So the limits of what is are the same as the limits of what can in principle be known. Postulation of things that are existing but which can't, under any circumstances, be known is internally contradictory. 

Was that a better reply? It felt more thorough at least...

-----------

Eric P. Charles, Ph.D.

Department of Justice - Personnel Psychologist

American University - Adjunct Instructor

[hidden email]

On Tue, Dec 10, 2019 at 7:36 PM uǝlƃ ☣ <[hidden email]> wrote:

I intend to respond to both Nick's and EricC's comments about "faith in convergence" at some point. But I've been caught up in other things. So, in the meantime, ...

"Irony and Outrage," part 2: Why Colbert got serious — and why Donald Trump isn't funny

https://www.salon.com/2019/12/08/irony-and-outrage-part-2-why-colbert-got-serious-and-why-donald-trump-isnt-funny/

There are 2 interesting tangents touching this thread:

1) Re: ineffability -- "But also that the mere logic of the humorous juxtaposition eludes him — the notion that you do not issue the argument, you create a juxtaposition that invites the audience to issue an argument."

I'll argue that the content of a (good) joke is *ineffable*. The whole purpose of the joke teller is to communicate something without actually *saying* it. If you explain a joke, it breaks the joke.

And 2) Re: limits to epistemology limiting ontology -- "That, to me, is illustrative of that broader point I try to make about how when a threat is salient to you, it becomes hard to enter the state of play, ..."

I *would* argue that pluralists will be more able to enter the "state of play" Goldthwaite describes (and I've described on this list a number of times as variations of "suspension of disbelief", "empathetic listening", and being willing to play games others set up) than monists. I think monists should TEND to be more committed to their way of thinking than pluralists ... more willing to believe their own or others' brain farts. At least in my case, being a pluralist means, in part, that I refuse to *commit* to ontological assertions of any kind. I'll play with various types of monism just as readily as I'll play with 3-tupleisms ... or 17-tupleisms. I think that's what makes me a simulant of passing competence. You just need to tell me *what* -ism you want to simulate.

As such, it seems that maybe Dave's got the cart before the horse. It's the failure of ontology that's mandating voids in epistemology. We should work toward robust *ways of knowing* and loosen up a bit on whatever it is we think we know. I say "would argue" of course because, being totally ignorant of philosophy, I'm probably just confused about everything.

On 12/10/19 12:43 PM, Prof David West wrote:

> Both your anecdotes support, my assertion that lots of things and lots of experiences are ineffable. This does not mean they are not "expressible" nor "communicable, merely that they cannot be expressed with words nor communicated using words.

>

> Words fail! Indeed!

>

> Entire languages fail. Entire epistemological philosophies fail.

>

> You "rendered" the ineffable to your grand-daughter, but you did NOT render them to me with words. You you words to circumscribe and speak about an experience of a kind that you believe I might have first hand, equally ineffable, experience of and that your indirect words would move me to make a connection. At best, your words, your language, worked like a game of Charades or Pictionary as a means of limning the space wherein I might find my own experience of like kind.

>

> A "mystic" engages an experience that is ineffable, and then utters thousands, book volumes worth, of words attempting to limn a space wherein you too might engage the same experience — or, if an optimist, might awaken in you a recognition of what you have already experienced. More Charades and Pictionary — spewing forth words ABOUT the experience; never expressing, in words or language, the experience itself.

>

> At least some ineffable experiences can be expressed directly using a language of voltages and wave forms, (Neurotheology), but not words or mathematical symbols or such-based languages.

>

> The question remains: why does a failure of epistemology mandate voids in ontology?

>

> I love your etymological daffiness, I share it.

>

> The definitions cited reflect an arrogance of the "enlightened" in the notion "too great for words." A lot of mystics make this, what I believe to be, error, attempting to grant an ontological status of REAL that does not follow from the simple fact that it cannot be expressed in words.

>

> And another sidenote — something might be "ineffable" simply because you are not allowed to use a word, ala Carlin's seven dirty words, or the "N-Word" or the "C-Word."

--

☣ uǝlƃ

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Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
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[gepr]

It seems like you're asking a question with the ???? at the end. But it's unclear to me what the question is.  If the question is:

Can a thing-occurance exist/be-real even if any attempt to describe it in any language will be a false description?

Phrased that way, it's unclear how anyone could say "No". I enjoy quoting Gödel's interpretation of what von Neumann said [†] to demonstrate one way that could happen:

von Neumann: But in the complicated parts of formal logic it is always one order of magnitude harder to tell what an object can do than to produce the object.

Gödel: However, what von Neumann perhaps had in mind appears more clearly from the universal Turing machine. There it might be said that the complete description of its behavior is infinite because, in view of the non-existence of a decision procedure predicting its behavior, the complete description could be given only by an enumeration of all instances. Of course this presupposes that only decidable descriptions are considered to be complete descriptions, but this is in line with the finitistic way of thinking. The universal Turing machine, where the ratio of the two complexities is infinity, might then be considered to be a limiting case of other finite mechanisms. This immediately leads to von Neumann's conjecture.

By this reasoning, it's relatively easy to see why *any* description will fall short of the thing described, at least in this levels-of-types conception.



[†] Or what Burks says Gödel said anyway -- Theory of Self-Reproducing Automata

On 12/11/19 1:58 AM, Prof David West wrote:

>
> Last summer I spoke with God. The effects were profound and obvious to all. Many of the effects, measured with MRI and encephalographic devices, were quantifiable. I spoke of my experience, as best as I could, recognizing that whatever words I used told but part of the story. Other's experience of me changed as well - they uniformly and consistently experience me, not as the fun loving drunken whoring party guy, but only as the pious jackass that was the inevitable and most profound effect of my experience.
>
> God is therefore real and extant?
>
> But wait ...
>
> I did not really speak with God. That word and all the other words, and the framing of the effects, piety replacing ribaldry, came after the fact, a post hoc rationalization/interpretation/articulation of "something." And, of course, the form of all those words and effects is but an artifact of the culture (and maybe the Jungian collective unconscious) within which I was raised.
>
> There was "An Experience;" but even that label, those two words, is false-to-fact. What "Was" had no bounds, in time or space and, in fact continues (and predated) the implied bounded context inherent in the meaning of 'an experience'. There is an implied relation between the "Experience" and an ego, an "I:" 1) the "Experience" was apart from "I," 2) "I" was part of the "Experience," 3) "I" perceived/sensed the "Experience."  None of these implied relations are accurate or complete, or even differentiable from each other.
>
> There was a Real, Existing, Thing. "It" was effectual; in that patterns of brain waves and detectable activity in different parts of the brain before and after "It" are measurable and comparable. Behavior and experience — from the "inside" — was altered dramatically, in the sense of the "color," the filtering lens, the 'fit" of interpretations of individual experiences is dramatically altered. Experience — of others on the "outside" —  is altered as well, although often not expressible beyond, "there's something different about you, can't put my finger on it, but ... "
>
> Not only was the "Thing" effectual, it is, within statistical limits, possible to predict the nature and degree of the effects that ensue from "Thing-Occurrence." Moreover, it is possible to establish an "experimental context" whereby others can "experience" the "Thing" and thereby confirm the prediction of effects.
>
> "Thing-Occurrence" ---> partially predictable, measurable (sometimes quantifiable) effects ---> "Thing is Real/Existing?
>
> Despite being, in every way ineffable —  in that no words capture its totality and any words used, in any naturally occurring human language, are false-to-fact.
>
> ????
>
> dave west
>
>
> On Wed, Dec 11, 2019, at 6:10 AM, Eric Charles wrote:
>> Ok.... I'm going to try to do a better take on the "ineffable" issue. I want to start by admitting that there is some sense in which ANYTHING I want to describe is never fully described by the words I use, in some reasonable use of the word "fully." If I see a turtle, and I tell you that I saw a turtle, I haven't provided you with a full description of exactly what the experience was like. So, I'm willing to admit that... but I'm not convinced there is anything deeper than that about Nick's inability to express his "feelings" to his granddaughter... and with that out of the way I will return to what I think is the broader issue.
>>
>> Real / existing things have effects. That is what it is to be real / to exist. If someone wants to talk about something that exists but have no effects, they are wandering down an rabbit hole with no bottom, and might as well be talking about noiseless sounds or blue-less blue. 
>>
>> The pragmatic maxim tells us: " Consider what effects... we conceive the object of our conception to have. Then, our conception of these effects is the whole of our conception of the object." So anything we conceive of is, in some sense, a cluster of effects, and so everything "real" is _in principle_ conceivable. And to the extent anything can be expressed adequately - whether by words or any other means of expression - concepts can be expressed, and so anything real can be expressed.
>>
>> However, i'm not sure the effability is really the important part. The bigger question was about epistemology and ontology. But the pragmatic maxim covers that as well. Things that have effects are _in principle_ we may presume there are many, many effects that we don't yet have the means to detect, but anything that has effects could, under some circumstances, be detectable. So the limits of what _is_ are the same as the limits of what can in principle be known. Postulation of things that are existing but which can't, under any circumstances, be known is internally contradictory. 
>>
>> Was that a better reply? It felt more thorough at least...

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[Frank Wimberly-2]

I'm surprised no one has quoted Wittgenstein:

Wovon Mann nicht sprechen kann daruber muss Mann schweigen.

On Wed, Dec 11, 2019, 11:34 AM uǝlƃ ☣ <[hidden email]> wrote:

It seems like you're asking a question with the ???? at the end. But it's unclear to me what the question is.  If the question is:

Can a thing-occurance exist/be-real even if any attempt to describe it in any language will be a false description?

Phrased that way, it's unclear how anyone could say "No". I enjoy quoting Gödel's interpretation of what von Neumann said [†] to demonstrate one way that could happen:

von Neumann: But in the complicated parts of formal logic it is always one order of magnitude harder to tell what an object can do than to produce the object.

Gödel: However, what von Neumann perhaps had in mind appears more clearly from the universal Turing machine. There it might be said that the complete description of its behavior is infinite because, in view of the non-existence of a decision procedure predicting its behavior, the complete description could be given only by an enumeration of all instances. Of course this presupposes that only decidable descriptions are considered to be complete descriptions, but this is in line with the finitistic way of thinking. The universal Turing machine, where the ratio of the two complexities is infinity, might then be considered to be a limiting case of other finite mechanisms. This immediately leads to von Neumann's conjecture.

By this reasoning, it's relatively easy to see why *any* description will fall short of the thing described, at least in this levels-of-types conception.



[†] Or what Burks says Gödel said anyway -- Theory of Self-Reproducing Automata

On 12/11/19 1:58 AM, Prof David West wrote:
>
> Last summer I spoke with God. The effects were profound and obvious to all. Many of the effects, measured with MRI and encephalographic devices, were quantifiable. I spoke of my experience, as best as I could, recognizing that whatever words I used told but part of the story. Other's experience of me changed as well - they uniformly and consistently experience me, not as the fun loving drunken whoring party guy, but only as the pious jackass that was the inevitable and most profound effect of my experience.
>
> God is therefore real and extant?
>
> But wait ...
>
> I did not really speak with God. That word and all the other words, and the framing of the effects, piety replacing ribaldry, came after the fact, a post hoc rationalization/interpretation/articulation of "something." And, of course, the form of all those words and effects is but an artifact of the culture (and maybe the Jungian collective unconscious) within which I was raised.
>
> There was "An Experience;" but even that label, those two words, is false-to-fact. What "Was" had no bounds, in time or space and, in fact continues (and predated) the implied bounded context inherent in the meaning of 'an experience'. There is an implied relation between the "Experience" and an ego, an "I:" 1) the "Experience" was apart from "I," 2) "I" was part of the "Experience," 3) "I" perceived/sensed the "Experience."  None of these implied relations are accurate or complete, or even differentiable from each other.
>
> There was a Real, Existing, Thing. "It" was effectual; in that patterns of brain waves and detectable activity in different parts of the brain before and after "It" are measurable and comparable. Behavior and experience — from the "inside" — was altered dramatically, in the sense of the "color," the filtering lens, the 'fit" of interpretations of individual experiences is dramatically altered. Experience — of others on the "outside" —  is altered as well, although often not expressible beyond, "there's something different about you, can't put my finger on it, but ... "
>
> Not only was the "Thing" effectual, it is, within statistical limits, possible to predict the nature and degree of the effects that ensue from "Thing-Occurrence." Moreover, it is possible to establish an "experimental context" whereby others can "experience" the "Thing" and thereby confirm the prediction of effects.
>
> "Thing-Occurrence" ---> partially predictable, measurable (sometimes quantifiable) effects ---> "Thing is Real/Existing?
>
> Despite being, in every way ineffable —  in that no words capture its totality and any words used, in any naturally occurring human language, are false-to-fact.
>
> ????
>
> dave west
>
>
> On Wed, Dec 11, 2019, at 6:10 AM, Eric Charles wrote:
>> Ok.... I'm going to try to do a better take on the "ineffable" issue. I want to start by admitting that there is some sense in which ANYTHING I want to describe is never fully described by the words I use, in some reasonable use of the word "fully." If I see a turtle, and I tell you that I saw a turtle, I haven't provided you with a full description of exactly what the experience was like. So, I'm willing to admit that... but I'm not convinced there is anything deeper than that about Nick's inability to express his "feelings" to his granddaughter... and with that out of the way I will return to what I think is the broader issue.
>>
>> Real / existing things have effects. That is what it is to be real / to exist. If someone wants to talk about something that exists but have no effects, they are wandering down an rabbit hole with no bottom, and might as well be talking about noiseless sounds or blue-less blue. 
>>
>> The pragmatic maxim tells us: " Consider what effects... we conceive the object of our conception to have. Then, our conception of these effects is the whole of our conception of the object." So anything we conceive of is, in some sense, a cluster of effects, and so everything "real" is _in principle_ conceivable. And to the extent anything can be expressed adequately - whether by words or any other means of expression - concepts can be expressed, and so anything real can be expressed.
>>
>> However, i'm not sure the effability is really the important part. The bigger question was about epistemology and ontology. But the pragmatic maxim covers that as well. Things that have effects are _in principle_ we may presume there are many, many effects that we don't yet have the means to detect, but anything that has effects could, under some circumstances, be detectable. So the limits of what _is_ are the same as the limits of what can in principle be known. Postulation of things that are existing but which can't, under any circumstances, be known is internally contradictory. 
>>
>> Was that a better reply? It felt more thorough at least...

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[gepr]

I'm not. Wittgenstein was very cool. But he wasn't a *builder*. (... as far as I know. I'd be happy to be wrong.) The thing that (in my ignorant opinion) distinguishes people like Wittgenstein from people like Gödel, von Neumann, Feynman, etc. ... even Penrose with the tilings and such, is that they *build* things. Until the hoity-toity results from the unification theorem come percolating down to morons like me, I'll continue treating constructive proofs as better and more real/existing than classical proofs.

On 12/11/19 10:44 AM, Frank Wimberly wrote:
> I'm surprised no one has quoted Wittgenstein:
>
> Wovon Mann nicht sprechen kann daruber muss Mann schweigen.

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[thompnickson2]

Hi, Dave, and thanks, Frank.  See Larding Below:

 

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: Wednesday, December 11, 2019 2:58 AM
To: [hidden email]
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] [EXT] Re: A pluralistic model of the mind?

 

 

Last summer I spoke with God. The effects were profound and obvious to all. Many of the effects, measured with MRI and encephalographic devices, were quantifiable. I spoke of my experience, as best as I could, recognizing that whatever words I used told but part of the story. Other's experience of me changed as well - they uniformly and consistently experience me, not as the fun loving drunken whoring party guy, but only as the pious jackass that was the inevitable and most profound effect of my experience.

[NST===>] My Larder is only half working on this computer. 

 

God is therefore real and extant?

[NST===>] Does God “prove out”? In order to answer that question, we would have to have a conception of God that could possibly “prove out”.  I say that God is the Wizard in Wizard of Oz.  An old guy who hides in a closet and manipulates our experience with giant levers.  That conception is probably “prove-out-able” but probably doesn’t prove out.  Or, ringed around with sufficient special meanings, it could become circular, and therefore not “prove-out-able”.  So,

 

But wait ...

 

I did not really speak with God. That word and all the other words, and the framing of the effects, piety replacing ribaldry, came after the fact, a post hoc rationalization/interpretation/articulation of "something." And, of course, the form of all those words and effects is but

[NST===>]  Why “but”, Dave?  It’s an artifact of culture.  It’s an experience that proves out only with in the framework of a culture.  As long as you stay within the culture, it proves out pretty good.  When you moved away from home, it didn’t prove out. 

 an artifact of the culture (and maybe the Jungian collective unconscious) within which I was raised.

 

There was "An Experience;" but even that label, those two words, is false-to-fact.

[NST===>]  Stipulated

What "Was" had no bounds, in time or space and, in fact continues (and predated) the implied bounded context inherent in the meaning of 'an experience'. There is an implied relation between the "Experience" and an ego, an "I:" 1) the "Experience" was apart from "I," 2) "I" was part of the "Experience," 3) "I" perceived/sensed the "Experience."  None of these implied relations are accurate or complete, or even differentiable from each other.

 

There was a Real, Existing, Thing. "It" was effectual; in that patterns of brain waves and detectable activity in different parts of the brain before and after "It" are measurable and comparable.

[NST===>] Not sure what all this brain talk is doing.  What experiences does brain talk represent.  Were you looking at an MRI while all of this was happening?

Behavior and experience — from the "inside" — was altered dramatically, in the sense of the "color," the filtering lens, the 'fit" of interpretations of individual experiences is dramatically altered. Experience — of others on the "outside" —  is altered as well, although often not expressible beyond, "there's something different about you, can't put my finger on it, but ... "

[NST===>] The outsidedness and the insidedness of experiences are themselves experiences which prove out in markedly different ways. 

 

Not only was the "Thing" effectual, it is, within statistical limits, possible to predict the nature and degree of the effects that ensue from "Thing-Occurrence." Moreover, it is possible to establish an "experimental context" whereby others can "experience" the "Thing" and thereby confirm the prediction of effects.

 

"Thing-Occurrence" ---> partially predictable, measurable (sometimes quantifiable) effects ---> "Thing is Real/Existing?

 

Despite being, in every way ineffable —  in that no words capture its totality and any words used, in any naturally occurring human language, are false-to-fact.

[NST===>] Hang on, Dave. We are starting to talk as if ANYTHING is effable.  Let’s agree on an example of proper, unambiguous effing that we can use as a model, a case where you, and I, and all members of FRIAM can agree, “Nick and Dave really effed that sucker!”  In the meantime, please have a look at the attached text, pp 4-8. 

 

Here, for the lazy amongst you, is a “gist”

 

Working through thought-experiments like the one above leads us to conclude that all descriptions, particularly satisfying ones, are inevitably explanatory and that all explanations are descriptive. And yet, you cannot explain something until you have something to explain – so all explanations must be based on prior descriptions. The only reasonable conclusion, if you take both of these claims at face value, is that all explanations are based on prior explanations! The distinction between description and explanation concerns their position in an argument, not their objectivity or subjectivity in some enduring sense.  Whether a statement is explanatory or descriptive depends upon the understandings that exist between the speaker and his or her audience at the time the statement is made. Descriptions are explanations that the speaker and the audience take to be true for the purpose of seeking further explanations.[1] 

 

 

????

 

dave west

 

 

On Wed, Dec 11, 2019, at 6:10 AM, Eric Charles wrote:

Ok.... I'm going to try to do a better take on the "ineffable" issue. I want to start by admitting that there is some sense in which ANYTHING I want to describe is never fully described by the words I use, in some reasonable use of the word "fully." If I see a turtle, and I tell you that I saw a turtle, I haven't provided you with a full description of exactly what the experience was like. So, I'm willing to admit that... but I'm not convinced there is anything deeper than that about Nick's inability to express his "feelings" to his granddaughter... and with that out of the way I will return to what I think is the broader issue.

 

Real / existing things have effects. That is what it is to be real / to exist. If someone wants to talk about something that exists but have no effects, they are wandering down an rabbit hole with no bottom, and might as well be talking about noiseless sounds or blue-less blue. 

 

The pragmatic maxim tells us: " Consider what effects... we conceive the object of our conception to have. Then, our conception of these effects is the whole of our conception of the object." So anything we conceive of is, in some sense, a cluster of effects, and so everything "real" is in principle conceivable. And to the extent anything can be expressed adequately - whether by words or any other means of expression - concepts can be expressed, and so anything real can be expressed.

 

However, i'm not sure the effability is really the important part. The bigger question was about epistemology and ontology. But the pragmatic maxim covers that as well. Things that have effects are in principle we may presume there are many, many effects that we don't yet have the means to detect, but anything that has effects could, under some circumstances, be detectable. So the limits of what is are the same as the limits of what can in principle be known. Postulation of things that are existing but which can't, under any circumstances, be known is internally contradictory. 

 

Was that a better reply? It felt more thorough at least...

 

 

 

 

 

 

-----------

Eric P. Charles, Ph.D.

Department of Justice - Personnel Psychologist

American University - Adjunct Instructor

 

 

 

 

On Tue, Dec 10, 2019 at 7:36 PM uǝlƃ ☣ <[hidden email]> wrote:

I intend to respond to both Nick's and EricC's comments about "faith in convergence" at some point. But I've been caught up in other things. So, in the meantime, ...

 

"Irony and Outrage," part 2: Why Colbert got serious — and why Donald Trump isn't funny

https://www.salon.com/2019/12/08/irony-and-outrage-part-2-why-colbert-got-serious-and-why-donald-trump-isnt-funny/

 

There are 2 interesting tangents touching this thread:

 

1) Re: ineffability -- "But also that the mere logic of the humorous juxtaposition eludes him — the notion that you do not issue the argument, you create a juxtaposition that invites the audience to issue an argument."

 

I'll argue that the content of a (good) joke is *ineffable*. The whole purpose of the joke teller is to communicate something without actually *saying* it. If you explain a joke, it breaks the joke.

 

And 2) Re: limits to epistemology limiting ontology -- "That, to me, is illustrative of that broader point I try to make about how when a threat is salient to you, it becomes hard to enter the state of play, ..."

 

I *would* argue that pluralists will be more able to enter the "state of play" Goldthwaite describes (and I've described on this list a number of times as variations of "suspension of disbelief", "empathetic listening", and being willing to play games others set up) than monists. I think monists should TEND to be more committed to their way of thinking than pluralists ... more willing to believe their own or others' brain farts. At least in my case, being a pluralist means, in part, that I refuse to *commit* to ontological assertions of any kind. I'll play with various types of monism just as readily as I'll play with 3-tupleisms ... or 17-tupleisms. I think that's what makes me a simulant of passing competence. You just need to tell me *what* -ism you want to simulate.

 

As such, it seems that maybe Dave's got the cart before the horse. It's the failure of ontology that's mandating voids in epistemology. We should work toward robust *ways of knowing* and loosen up a bit on whatever it is we think we know. I say "would argue" of course because, being totally ignorant of philosophy, I'm probably just confused about everything.

 

On 12/10/19 12:43 PM, Prof David West wrote:

> Both your anecdotes support, my assertion that lots of things and lots of experiences are ineffable. This does not mean they are not "expressible" nor "communicable, merely that they cannot be expressed with words nor communicated using words.

>

> Words fail! Indeed!

>

> Entire languages fail. Entire epistemological philosophies fail.

>

> You "rendered" the ineffable to your grand-daughter, but you did NOT render them to me with words. You you words to circumscribe and speak about an experience of a kind that you believe I might have first hand, equally ineffable, experience of and that your indirect words would move me to make a connection. At best, your words, your language, worked like a game of Charades or Pictionary as a means of limning the space wherein I might find my own experience of like kind.

>

> A "mystic" engages an experience that is ineffable, and then utters thousands, book volumes worth, of words attempting to limn a space wherein you too might engage the same experience — or, if an optimist, might awaken in you a recognition of what you have already experienced. More Charades and Pictionary — spewing forth words ABOUT the experience; never expressing, in words or language, the experience itself.

>

> At least some ineffable experiences can be expressed directly using a language of voltages and wave forms, (Neurotheology), but not words or mathematical symbols or such-based languages.

>

> The question remains: why does a failure of epistemology mandate voids in ontology?

>

> I love your etymological daffiness, I share it.

>

> The definitions cited reflect an arrogance of the "enlightened" in the notion "too great for words." A lot of mystics make this, what I believe to be, error, attempting to grant an ontological status of REAL that does not follow from the simple fact that it cannot be expressed in words.

>

> And another sidenote — something might be "ineffable" simply because you are not allowed to use a word, ala Carlin's seven dirty words, or the "N-Word" or the "C-Word."

 

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---

[1] Conversely, explanations are descriptions that the speaker and audience hold to be unverified under the present circumstances.

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[gepr]

The thing being left out of this still seems, to me, to be constructive vs ... what? ... analytical explanation. Your larger document beats around that bush quite a bit, I think. But I don't think it ever names/tackles the point explicitly.

When you say things like "explanations are based on prior explanations" and "depends on the understandings that exist between speaker and audience", you're leaving out THE fundamental ontology atop which it's all built ... the building of the experimental apparatus. Feynman's pithy aphorism applies: What I cannot create, I do not understand.

Explanations facilitate replication. They tell you *how* to do the trick yourself. Descriptions can be explanatory, of course. But they can also be non-explanatory. And some explanations are more facilitating than others. (E.g. I can write out some obtuse math and print it on paper or I can hand you a floppy disk with some Matlab code on it.)

But the foundation is that we all have the same basic hardware. And *that's* what explanations are built upon. Change the hardware and your explanation becomes mere description. ... E.g. take a big hit of LSD and many explanations become mere descriptions. The evolutionary biological content of your paper (as well as Figure 1.2[†]) seems like it's just crying out for something like "construction". Reading it feels like watching someone struggle for a word that's on the "tip of their tongue".


[†] In particular, if I replace "is the model for" with *generates*, I get some sort of Necker cube flipping feeling.

On 12/11/19 11:23 AM, [hidden email] wrote:
> [... the thought experiment being explaining an eraser falling behind a book ...]
> Working through thought-experiments like the one above leads us to conclude that all descriptions, particularly satisfying ones, are inevitably explanatory and that all explanations are descriptive. And yet, you cannot explain something until you have something to explain – so all explanations must be based on prior descriptions. The only reasonable conclusion, if you take both of these claims at face value, is that all explanations are based on prior explanations! The distinction between description and explanation concerns their position in an argument, not their objectivity or subjectivity in some enduring sense.  Whether a statement is explanatory or descriptive depends upon the understandings that exist between the speaker and his or her audience at the time the statement is made. /Descriptions are explanations that the speaker and the audience take to be true for the purpose of seeking further explanations/.[1] <#_ftn1> 


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[Frank Wimberly-2]

Well, he elucidated the limitations of language including the concept that words produced by one human to describe an experience cannot cause another to have that same experience.  Not too hoity-toity.

On Wed, Dec 11, 2019, 11:51 AM uǝlƃ ☣ <[hidden email]> wrote:

I'm not. Wittgenstein was very cool. But he wasn't a *builder*. (... as far as I know. I'd be happy to be wrong.) The thing that (in my ignorant opinion) distinguishes people like Wittgenstein from people like Gödel, von Neumann, Feynman, etc. ... even Penrose with the tilings and such, is that they *build* things. Until the hoity-toity results from the unification theorem come percolating down to morons like me, I'll continue treating constructive proofs as better and more real/existing than classical proofs.

On 12/11/19 10:44 AM, Frank Wimberly wrote:
> I'm surprised no one has quoted Wittgenstein:
>
> Wovon Mann nicht sprechen kann daruber muss Mann schweigen.

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[Eric Charles-2]

I think the effableness is a red herring. "Last night I ate spaghetti" doesn't fully and completely explain exactly what happened last night... but we all agree that I used words to describe a thing that is not "ineffable". So far, no argument has been offered to demonstrate that Dave's conversation with God is any more or less effable than my having eaten spaghetti. Absent an argument to that effect, we are begging the question by taking it as given that the two differ. I think the more interesting issue that Dave's example brings up is our original issue regarding monism, in its relation to the question "what is real?" 

We all agree that that Dave could have been having a conversation with something real or something not real, right? We can call the other option "imaginary" or "illusory" or whatever else we want to call it, but we recognize that people sometimes have conversations with those types of conversational partners, so it is a live possibility.

I said in prior emails, we are in-particular talking about "monism" in contrast to mind-matter dualism (and all variants of that particular dualism), meaning that we reject that mental things and matter things are made of two different stuffs. 

So Dave is talking to God. Whether he is talking to something that is "mental" or something "physical" is a post-hoc judgement. That is, we discover that based on future experience, not based on the initial experience, which is neutral with regards to that distinction. What later experiences will allow us to determine if the conversational partner is real? That is hard to specify when we are discussing a deity with ambiguous properties, but the method must be in principle very similar to how we would confirm or reject the reality of any other conversational partner. How do you determine when a child has an imaginary friend versus a real friend? You look for other consequences of the conversational partner. Ultimately we look for convergent agreement by anyone who honestly inquires into the existence of the conversational partner (i.e., the long term convergence / pattern-stability, referenced earlier in the conversation). The only thing we can't allow - because it is internally incoherent - is for there to exist a "real" thing with "no consequences" that we could investigate. So the "Deist" God, the instigator with no current effects, is off the table a priori, because that is a description of a thing that doesn't exist --- and also because Dave couldn't have had a conversation with that. We could only be discussing a conception of God that can be interacted with to certain ends, which means that some tractable means of converging opinions one way or the other is possible. 

As such: Dave's conversation with God is not in-kind difference from John's seeing a bear in the woods: Both are equally effable/ineffable. Both have the same question about the reality of the thing experienced. Both can be subjected to the same types of analyses (I offered Peircian, Jamesian, or Holtian options regarding the bear). 

On Wed, Dec 11, 2019 at 3:17 PM uǝlƃ ☣ <[hidden email]> wrote:

The thing being left out of this still seems, to me, to be constructive vs ... what? ... analytical explanation. Your larger document beats around that bush quite a bit, I think. But I don't think it ever names/tackles the point explicitly.

When you say things like "explanations are based on prior explanations" and "depends on the understandings that exist between speaker and audience", you're leaving out THE fundamental ontology atop which it's all built ... the building of the experimental apparatus. Feynman's pithy aphorism applies: What I cannot create, I do not understand.

Explanations facilitate replication. They tell you *how* to do the trick yourself. Descriptions can be explanatory, of course. But they can also be non-explanatory. And some explanations are more facilitating than others. (E.g. I can write out some obtuse math and print it on paper or I can hand you a floppy disk with some Matlab code on it.)

But the foundation is that we all have the same basic hardware. And *that's* what explanations are built upon. Change the hardware and your explanation becomes mere description. ... E.g. take a big hit of LSD and many explanations become mere descriptions. The evolutionary biological content of your paper (as well as Figure 1.2[†]) seems like it's just crying out for something like "construction". Reading it feels like watching someone struggle for a word that's on the "tip of their tongue".


[†] In particular, if I replace "is the model for" with *generates*, I get some sort of Necker cube flipping feeling.

On 12/11/19 11:23 AM, [hidden email] wrote:
> [... the thought experiment being explaining an eraser falling behind a book ...]
> Working through thought-experiments like the one above leads us to conclude that all descriptions, particularly satisfying ones, are inevitably explanatory and that all explanations are descriptive. And yet, you cannot explain something until you have something to explain – so all explanations must be based on prior descriptions. The only reasonable conclusion, if you take both of these claims at face value, is that all explanations are based on prior explanations! The distinction between description and explanation concerns their position in an argument, not their objectivity or subjectivity in some enduring sense.  Whether a statement is explanatory or descriptive depends upon the understandings that exist between the speaker and his or her audience at the time the statement is made. /Descriptions are explanations that the speaker and the audience take to be true for the purpose of seeking further explanations/.[1] <#_ftn1> 


--
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[thompnickson2]

Glen,

 

Thanks for taking the time to read what I sent.  That is a great kindness.

 

See [semi] larding below:  I am afraid that this will go a lot easier if readers allow me some html. 

 

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: Wednesday, December 11, 2019 1:17 PM
To: FriAM <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] [EXT] Re: A pluralistic model of the mind?

 

The thing being left out of this still seems, to me, to be constructive vs ... what? ... analytical explanation.

 

Your larger document beats around that bush quite a bit, I think. But I don't think it ever names/tackles the point explicitly.

[NST===>] I am not sure I quite understand that distinction.  Can you say more? 

 

When you say things like "explanations are based on prior explanations" and "depends on the understandings that exist between speaker and audience", you're leaving out THE fundamental ontology atop which it's all built ... the building of the experimental apparatus.

[NST===>] Do I escape – or perhaps simply evade –this objection by the pragmatist mantra, “we begin in the middle.”  I think the pragmatic maxim pretty much covers this objection…meaning is in the practicial consequences of our conceptions, so if we are to mean anything by anything, we have to start with some practices, no? 

 Feynman's pithy aphorism applies: What I cannot create, I do not understand.

 

Explanations facilitate replication. They tell you *how* to do the trick yourself. Descriptions can be explanatory, of course. But they can also be non-explan atory.

[NST===>] I think I want to insist that there is no description that does not bring some sort of metaphor upon some sort of facts taken to be prior, and hence, no description that is not an explanation.  So, the arrogance of such an assertion being what it is, you have only to provide a single example to send me to the showers. 

And some explanations are more facilitating than others. (E.g. I can write out some obtuse math and print it on paper or I can hand you a floppy disk with some Matlab code on it.)

 

But the foundation is that we all have the same basic hardware. And *that's* what explanations are built upon. Change the hardware and your explanation becomes mere description. ... E.g. take a big hit of LSD and many explanations become mere descriptions. The evolutionary biological content of your paper (as well as Figure 1.2[†]) seems like it's just crying out for something like "construction". Reading it feels like watching someone struggle for a word that's on the "tip of their tongue".

[NST===>] I am probably being dumb, here, but can you use the word “construction” in the manner in which you would have me use it.   I will copy in the diagram below so that anybody who wants can figure out wtf we are talking about.  Readers should know that I define a “model” as a scientific metaphor, and argue that all scientific descriptions/explanations imply or employ models. 

 

 

[†] In particular, if I replace "is the model for" with *generates*[NST===>] d

[NST===>] I like the word generate.  In the mathematical sense.  A function generates y’s from x’s.  Models, or metaphors, do the same thing.  You give me “your love” and I give you back “a red red rose.”  From the one, the metaphor has generated the other.

, I get some sort of Necker cube flipping feeling.

 

 

Levels of Explanation

So far we have argued for two points about explanations: First that they take descriptions for granted, and second that they use models to organize known and hypothetical information about the phenomena they explain. We have also argued that there is no essential difference between the contents of a description and the contents of an explanation, and so we could just as easily have asserted that explanations take other explanations for granted. Together, these two ideas suggest that explanations may be stacked on top of each other, or nested into interconnected sets. Such a structure is called a theory. The simplest theories consist of a nested set of explanations, each member of the set being taken as a description for the purposes of another explanation, and each taking other explanations as descriptions to be explained. This structure is shown in Figure 1.2 below.

 

          

Figure 1.2. A theory represented as a hierarchy of explanations in which each explanation makes use of a model to explain the explanations below it.

 

 

On 12/11/19 11:23 AM, [hidden email] wrote:

> [... the thought experiment being explaining an eraser falling behind

> a book ...] Working through thought-experiments like the one above

> leads us to conclude that all descriptions, particularly satisfying

> ones, are inevitably explanatory and that all explanations are

> descriptive. And yet, you cannot explain something until you have

> something to explain – so all explanations must be based on prior

> descriptions. The only reasonable conclusion, if you take both of

> these claims at face value, is that all explanations are based on

> prior explanations! The distinction between description and

> explanation concerns their position in an argument, not their

> objectivity or subjectivity in some enduring sense.  Whether a

> statement is explanatory or descriptive depends upon the

> understandings that exist between the speaker and his or her audience

> at the time the statement is made. /Descriptions are explanations that

> the speaker and the audience take to be true for the purpose of

> seeking further explanations/.[1] <#_ftn1>

 

 

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☣ uǝlƃ

 

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[Steve Smith]

FriAMsketeers and Correspondents en Ineffablia -

I am traveling in Sweden right now where every other young man I meet is named "Torbjorn"  which roughly translates to "Thunder-Bear" or more specifically "god-of-thunder/bear".   In every case, I actually do feel as if I have spoken with a God and a Bear... it is in the ineffable quality that separates our cultures and our generations (they are mostly of the X/Z), and the things that are hard to say the same way in both Swedish or English or as we mostly use "Svenglish". 

My geneology says I am from Germany/Poland/Scotland but my DNA says I am 95% Scandanavian and 5% North African...  not a hint of Neanderthal, and I do not believe anyone has sequenced the Sasquatch/Yeti, so how would we know about that?   I did see a cousin to the Loch Nesse monster yesterday, but it was a sculpture made of scrap Iron, or that was how I interpreted it, it might have been Ouroborous herself.   Perhaps the fondness for adding wild mushrooms to the borscht here has something to do with all of these visions?

Merle has arranged the meetings here regarding the acute implications of the Anthropocene... nominally the Climate and Complexity Science. Stephen and Stu were the "headliners" from the Santa Fe contingent . I call it The END of the Anthropocene (if/when/as we drive off a cliff of our own making) or "A Grand Unified Theory of Endogenous Existential Threats" (tongue planted obliquely in cheek).   We did do our part to rush the upheaval of sequestered Dino-carbon into the atmosphere to the tune of 3-4 tonne each, so go figure?   I also stopped in at Parliament to channel Greta last Friday...   I turned the "AT" in my "Make America Great Again" cap upside down so it now reads "Make America GreTA Again" which seems ever more grounded and hopeful than what we have been up to these past few years... 

I also have been meeting with Steen Rasmussen in Copenhagen (an early ALife colleague some of you may know) and one of the founders of Mapillery in Maimo.   Both live as if they want to prevent an Abrupt End of the Anthropocene, as many here seem to do.   Public transportation is very good and with the apparently warmed climate, what should be dead of winter feels more like a cold Springtime.   Bicycles in the cold rain everywhere.   Next I move forward to Amsterdam where I will visit our own Jenny Quillien and the current correspondent Dave West where we will either speak to God, a Bear, or perhaps just Eat Spaghetti...  in the reflection of the shadow of the presence of the spirit of Christopher Alexander.  Throughout the entire visit I expect there will be an ineffability he would call "the quality without a name".   We will probably not speak of it, and rather speak "of Cabbages and Kings" or Humpty Trumpty and all his horses and women who will patently not put anything together again.

Jet lag leads to sleep deprivation which in fact seems to enhance my awareness the ineffable.  And FriAMPhilosophy only adds to that.

Carry On!

- Steve

On 12/12/19 5:15 AM, Eric Charles wrote:

I think the effableness is a red herring. "Last night I ate spaghetti" doesn't fully and completely explain exactly what happened last night... but we all agree that I used words to describe a thing that is not "ineffable". So far, no argument has been offered to demonstrate that Dave's conversation with God is any more or less effable than my having eaten spaghetti. Absent an argument to that effect, we are begging the question by taking it as given that the two differ. I think the more interesting issue that Dave's example brings up is our original issue regarding monism, in its relation to the question "what is real?" 

We all agree that that Dave could have been having a conversation with something real or something not real, right? We can call the other option "imaginary" or "illusory" or whatever else we want to call it, but we recognize that people sometimes have conversations with those types of conversational partners, so it is a live possibility.

I said in prior emails, we are in-particular talking about "monism" in contrast to mind-matter dualism (and all variants of that particular dualism), meaning that we reject that mental things and matter things are made of two different stuffs. 

So Dave is talking to God. Whether he is talking to something that is "mental" or something "physical" is a post-hoc judgement. That is, we discover that based on future experience, not based on the initial experience, which is neutral with regards to that distinction. What later experiences will allow us to determine if the conversational partner is real? That is hard to specify when we are discussing a deity with ambiguous properties, but the method must be in principle very similar to how we would confirm or reject the reality of any other conversational partner. How do you determine when a child has an imaginary friend versus a real friend? You look for other consequences of the conversational partner. Ultimately we look for convergent agreement by anyone who honestly inquires into the existence of the conversational partner (i.e., the long term convergence / pattern-stability, referenced earlier in the conversation). The only thing we can't allow - because it is internally incoherent - is for there to exist a "real" thing with "no consequences" that we could investigate. So the "Deist" God, the instigator with no current effects, is off the table a priori, because that is a description of a thing that doesn't exist --- and also because Dave couldn't have had a conversation with that. We could only be discussing a conception of God that can be interacted with to certain ends, which means that some tractable means of converging opinions one way or the other is possible. 

As such: Dave's conversation with God is not in-kind difference from John's seeing a bear in the woods: Both are equally effable/ineffable. Both have the same question about the reality of the thing experienced. Both can be subjected to the same types of analyses (I offered Peircian, Jamesian, or Holtian options regarding the bear). 

On Wed, Dec 11, 2019 at 3:17 PM uǝlƃ ☣ <[hidden email]> wrote:

The thing being left out of this still seems, to me, to be constructive vs ... what? ... analytical explanation. Your larger document beats around that bush quite a bit, I think. But I don't think it ever names/tackles the point explicitly.

When you say things like "explanations are based on prior explanations" and "depends on the understandings that exist between speaker and audience", you're leaving out THE fundamental ontology atop which it's all built ... the building of the experimental apparatus. Feynman's pithy aphorism applies: What I cannot create, I do not understand.

Explanations facilitate replication. They tell you *how* to do the trick yourself. Descriptions can be explanatory, of course. But they can also be non-explanatory. And some explanations are more facilitating than others. (E.g. I can write out some obtuse math and print it on paper or I can hand you a floppy disk with some Matlab code on it.)

But the foundation is that we all have the same basic hardware. And *that's* what explanations are built upon. Change the hardware and your explanation becomes mere description. ... E.g. take a big hit of LSD and many explanations become mere descriptions. The evolutionary biological content of your paper (as well as Figure 1.2[†]) seems like it's just crying out for something like "construction". Reading it feels like watching someone struggle for a word that's on the "tip of their tongue".


[†] In particular, if I replace "is the model for" with *generates*, I get some sort of Necker cube flipping feeling.

On 12/11/19 11:23 AM, [hidden email] wrote:
> [... the thought experiment being explaining an eraser falling behind a book ...]
> Working through thought-experiments like the one above leads us to conclude that all descriptions, particularly satisfying ones, are inevitably explanatory and that all explanations are descriptive. And yet, you cannot explain something until you have something to explain – so all explanations must be based on prior descriptions. The only reasonable conclusion, if you take both of these claims at face value, is that all explanations are based on prior explanations! The distinction between description and explanation concerns their position in an argument, not their objectivity or subjectivity in some enduring sense.  Whether a statement is explanatory or descriptive depends upon the understandings that exist between the speaker and his or her audience at the time the statement is made. /Descriptions are explanations that the speaker and the audience take to be true for the purpose of seeking further explanations/.[1] <#_ftn1> 


--
☣ uǝlƃ

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[Prof David West]

Hello Nick,

Re previous post about speaking to god and ineffable experience:

I was not attempting to assert anything, merely ask questions. Specifically, questions regarding Eric's assertion denying ineffability and "defining" the Real as that which has effects.

So I proposed two scenarios involving a "Thing" that had measurable, sometimes predictable, effects and asked if thir "effect ability" gave them ontological status of "Real" despite the fact that they were ineffable or, in the case of God, 'effed' inaccurately.

The question might be generalized to one of the relationship between what we can know (epistemology) and what is real (ontology). A subtext to this question is a concern: as we elaborate our epistemology, and make it rigorous, do we arbitrarily, in my view, void segments of ontology? Is this a bad thing?

Now to one of your lard-ettes:

"Hang on, Dave. We are starting to talk as if ANYTHING is effable."

I don't know about you, but I would never make such an assertion, nor propose any example of something being "effed." I agree with Korzibski's dictum, "The Map is not the Territory!" And I am perfectly happy, all my "Experience" is compatible with, and my adopted philosophy of Hermeneutics is consistent with that dictum. 

I have no desire to reduce ambiguity. I thrive on constant change. I have no need to replace metaphor with lexical terms. For me there is no "Truth" — even if defined as a provisional agreement, ala Peirce. The "approximately effable" linguistic constructions we utilize to attribute "meaning" to our experiences are all equally false-to-fact, but pragmatically useful to the extent they keep us fed and amused.

Comments on other elements of larding await the reading of the paper you sent.

davew

On Wed, Dec 11, 2019, at 8:23 PM, [hidden email] wrote:

Hi, Dave, and thanks, Frank.  See Larding Below:

 

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: Wednesday, December 11, 2019 2:58 AM

To: [hidden email]

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

 

 

Last summer I spoke with God. The effects were profound and obvious to all. Many of the effects, measured with MRI and encephalographic devices, were quantifiable. I spoke of my experience, as best as I could, recognizing that whatever words I used told but part of the story. Other's experience of me changed as well - they uniformly and consistently experience me, not as the fun loving drunken whoring party guy, but only as the pious jackass that was the inevitable and most profound effect of my experience.

[NST===>] My Larder is only half working on this computer. 

 

God is therefore real and extant?

[NST===>] Does God “prove out”? In order to answer that question, we would have to have a conception of God that could possibly “prove out”.  I say that God is the Wizard in Wizard of Oz.  An old guy who hides in a closet and manipulates our experience with giant levers.  That conception is probably “prove-out-able” but probably doesn’t prove out.  Or, ringed around with sufficient special meanings, it could become circular, and therefore not “prove-out-able”.  So,

 

But wait ...

 

I did not really speak with God. That word and all the other words, and the framing of the effects, piety replacing ribaldry, came after the fact, a post hoc rationalization/interpretation/articulation of "something." And, of course, the form of all those words and effects is but

[NST===>]  Why “but”, Dave?  It’s an artifact of culture.  It’s an experience that proves out only with in the framework of a culture.  As long as you stay within the culture, it proves out pretty good.  When you moved away from home, it didn’t prove out. 

 an artifact of the culture (and maybe the Jungian collective unconscious) within which I was raised.

 

There was "An Experience;" but even that label, those two words, is false-to-fact.

[NST===>]  Stipulated

What "Was" had no bounds, in time or space and, in fact continues (and predated) the implied bounded context inherent in the meaning of 'an experience'. There is an implied relation between the "Experience" and an ego, an "I:" 1) the "Experience" was apart from "I," 2) "I" was part of the "Experience," 3) "I" perceived/sensed the "Experience."  None of these implied relations are accurate or complete, or even differentiable from each other.

 

There was a Real, Existing, Thing. "It" was effectual; in that patterns of brain waves and detectable activity in different parts of the brain before and after "It" are measurable and comparable.

[NST===>] Not sure what all this brain talk is doing.  What experiences does brain talk represent.  Were you looking at an MRI while all of this was happening?

Behavior and experience — from the "inside" — was altered dramatically, in the sense of the "color," the filtering lens, the 'fit" of interpretations of individual experiences is dramatically altered. Experience — of others on the "outside" —  is altered as well, although often not expressible beyond, "there's something different about you, can't put my finger on it, but ... "

[NST===>] The outsidedness and the insidedness of experiences are themselves experiences which prove out in markedly different ways. 

 

Not only was the "Thing" effectual, it is, within statistical limits, possible to predict the nature and degree of the effects that ensue from "Thing-Occurrence." Moreover, it is possible to establish an "experimental context" whereby others can "experience" the "Thing" and thereby confirm the prediction of effects.

 

"Thing-Occurrence" ---> partially predictable, measurable (sometimes quantifiable) effects ---> "Thing is Real/Existing?

 

Despite being, in every way ineffable —  in that no words capture its totality and any words used, in any naturally occurring human language, are false-to-fact.

[NST===>] Hang on, Dave. We are starting to talk as if ANYTHING is effable.  Let’s agree on an example of proper, unambiguous effing that we can use as a model, a case where you, and I, and all members of FRIAM can agree, “Nick and Dave really effed that sucker!”  In the meantime, please have a look at the attached text, pp 4-8. 

 

Here, for the lazy amongst you, is a “gist”

 

Working through thought-experiments like the one above leads us to conclude that all descriptions, particularly satisfying ones, are inevitably explanatory and that all explanations are descriptive. And yet, you cannot explain something until you have something to explain – so all explanations must be based on prior descriptions. The only reasonable conclusion, if you take both of these claims at face value, is that all explanations are based on prior explanations! The distinction between description and explanation concerns their position in an argument, not their objectivity or subjectivity in some enduring sense.  Whether a statement is explanatory or descriptive depends upon the understandings that exist between the speaker and his or her audience at the time the statement is made. Descriptions are explanations that the speaker and the audience take to be true for the purpose of seeking further explanations.[1] 

 

 

????

 

dave west

 

 

On Wed, Dec 11, 2019, at 6:10 AM, Eric Charles wrote:

Ok.... I'm going to try to do a better take on the "ineffable" issue. I want to start by admitting that there is some sense in which ANYTHING I want to describe is never fully described by the words I use, in some reasonable use of the word "fully." If I see a turtle, and I tell you that I saw a turtle, I haven't provided you with a full description of exactly what the experience was like. So, I'm willing to admit that... but I'm not convinced there is anything deeper than that about Nick's inability to express his "feelings" to his granddaughter... and with that out of the way I will return to what I think is the broader issue.

 

Real / existing things have effects. That is what it is to be real / to exist. If someone wants to talk about something that exists but have no effects, they are wandering down an rabbit hole with no bottom, and might as well be talking about noiseless sounds or blue-less blue. 

 

The pragmatic maxim tells us: " Consider what effects... we conceive the object of our conception to have. Then, our conception of these effects is the whole of our conception of the object." So anything we conceive of is, in some sense, a cluster of effects, and so everything "real" is in principle conceivable. And to the extent anything can be expressed adequately - whether by words or any other means of expression - concepts can be expressed, and so anything real can be expressed.

 

However, i'm not sure the effability is really the important part. The bigger question was about epistemology and ontology. But the pragmatic maxim covers that as well. Things that have effects are in principle we may presume there are many, many effects that we don't yet have the means to detect, but anything that has effects could, under some circumstances, be detectable. So the limits of what is are the same as the limits of what can in principle be known. Postulation of things that are existing but which can't, under any circumstances, be known is internally contradictory. 

 

Was that a better reply? It felt more thorough at least...

 

 

 

 

 

 

-----------

Eric P. Charles, Ph.D.

Department of Justice - Personnel Psychologist

American University - Adjunct Instructor

 

 

 

 

On Tue, Dec 10, 2019 at 7:36 PM uǝlƃ ☣ <[hidden email]> wrote:

I intend to respond to both Nick's and EricC's comments about "faith in convergence" at some point. But I've been caught up in other things. So, in the meantime, ...

 

"Irony and Outrage," part 2: Why Colbert got serious — and why Donald Trump isn't funny

https://www.salon.com/2019/12/08/irony-and-outrage-part-2-why-colbert-got-serious-and-why-donald-trump-isnt-funny/

 

There are 2 interesting tangents touching this thread:

 

1) Re: ineffability -- "But also that the mere logic of the humorous juxtaposition eludes him — the notion that you do not issue the argument, you create a juxtaposition that invites the audience to issue an argument."

 

I'll argue that the content of a (good) joke is *ineffable*. The whole purpose of the joke teller is to communicate something without actually *saying* it. If you explain a joke, it breaks the joke.

 

And 2) Re: limits to epistemology limiting ontology -- "That, to me, is illustrative of that broader point I try to make about how when a threat is salient to you, it becomes hard to enter the state of play, ..."

 

I *would* argue that pluralists will be more able to enter the "state of play" Goldthwaite describes (and I've described on this list a number of times as variations of "suspension of disbelief", "empathetic listening", and being willing to play games others set up) than monists. I think monists should TEND to be more committed to their way of thinking than pluralists ... more willing to believe their own or others' brain farts. At least in my case, being a pluralist means, in part, that I refuse to *commit* to ontological assertions of any kind. I'll play with various types of monism just as readily as I'll play with 3-tupleisms ... or 17-tupleisms. I think that's what makes me a simulant of passing competence. You just need to tell me *what* -ism you want to simulate.

 

As such, it seems that maybe Dave's got the cart before the horse. It's the failure of ontology that's mandating voids in epistemology. We should work toward robust *ways of knowing* and loosen up a bit on whatever it is we think we know. I say "would argue" of course because, being totally ignorant of philosophy, I'm probably just confused about everything.

 

On 12/10/19 12:43 PM, Prof David West wrote:

> Both your anecdotes support, my assertion that lots of things and lots of experiences are ineffable. This does not mean they are not "expressible" nor "communicable, merely that they cannot be expressed with words nor communicated using words.

>

> Words fail! Indeed!

>

> Entire languages fail. Entire epistemological philosophies fail.

>

> You "rendered" the ineffable to your grand-daughter, but you did NOT render them to me with words. You you words to circumscribe and speak about an experience of a kind that you believe I might have first hand, equally ineffable, experience of and that your indirect words would move me to make a connection. At best, your words, your language, worked like a game of Charades or Pictionary as a means of limning the space wherein I might find my own experience of like kind.

>

> A "mystic" engages an experience that is ineffable, and then utters thousands, book volumes worth, of words attempting to limn a space wherein you too might engage the same experience — or, if an optimist, might awaken in you a recognition of what you have already experienced. More Charades and Pictionary — spewing forth words ABOUT the experience; never expressing, in words or language, the experience itself.

>

> At least some ineffable experiences can be expressed directly using a language of voltages and wave forms, (Neurotheology), but not words or mathematical symbols or such-based languages.

>

> The question remains: why does a failure of epistemology mandate voids in ontology?

>

> I love your etymological daffiness, I share it.

>

> The definitions cited reflect an arrogance of the "enlightened" in the notion "too great for words." A lot of mystics make this, what I believe to be, error, attempting to grant an ontological status of REAL that does not follow from the simple fact that it cannot be expressed in words.

>

> And another sidenote — something might be "ineffable" simply because you are not allowed to use a word, ala Carlin's seven dirty words, or the "N-Word" or the "C-Word."

 

--

☣ uǝlƃ

 

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[1] Conversely, explanations are descriptions that the speaker and audience hold to be unverified under the present circumstances.

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Attachments:

• Introduction-nst-17-06-18 (002).docx
  

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FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
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archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove