BBC News - Ant colony 'personalities' shaped by environment

[John Kennison]

Hi Nick,

One of the problems in discussing consciousness is that it seems very hard to break it down into simpler concepts. There are what might be called "high-level" words such as "inner life", "awareness", "apprehension", which suggest consciousness but only to someone who already ha a sense of what consciousness is.  Whereas low level words, which refer to things that can be readily measured do not seem adequate to get at the real meaning of consciousness. So we are left with metaphors. When I use words such as "access" and "inner life" they suggest a container but they are not necessarily used to denote an actual container but to describe a situation which has some of the properties of a container.

However, there does seem to be a real container that describes the information I have access to.  I get raw information from my body. This is not to say that my consciousness is located in my body, but that what I know about the outside world starts with how my body senses the outside world. These senses are then processed or contemplated somehow and this results in what I think I know about the world. There is no way that "I can see exactly what you see" because what you see comes from your body and what I see comes from my body. If we literally mean "see" then what you see is what enters your eyes and what I see is what enters my eyes. You might tell me about what you see, but that is not the same as seeing what you see because what you have seen has been processed by you then reformulated in terms of speech, which is then processed by me.  Even if we witnessed the same event, we would have slightly different viewpoints, and our eyes are different, and, in any case, we would start interpreting the incoming rays of light as soon as they started to enter our respective eyes.

You also gave examples in which I might infer what you saw. This seems to presuppose I have a theory of what Nick is all about or some means of making inferences. (I don't have a well-articulated theory of Nick, but I do arrive at conclusions about what to make of you. I'm not certain how I do this, but I am certain that I do it all the time, quite effortlessly and almost automatically.) At any rate this drawing of inferences does not seem to be seeing exactly what you see, but a way (not necessarily very accurate) of getting a rough approximation of what you saw.

--John  

________________________________________
From: Friam [[hidden email]] on behalf of Nick Thompson [[hidden email]]
Sent: Friday, August 15, 2014 9:07 PM
To: 'The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group'
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] BBC News - Ant     colony  'personalities' shaped  by      environment

John,

        Ok.  I am in.  But we have to go slowly, because, as somebody
famously said, "In philosophy, if you are not moving slowly, you aren't
moving."   Not clear where to start.  I don't want to try to defend my
"insight" that our vernacular understanding of consciousness  arises not
because it is accurate but because it makes society possible. I will say  in
its defense only that the McNauton Rule which  forms the basis for our
notion of legal responsibility, states that I can only be considered
criminally responsible If I know the nature and quality of my own acts.
This phrase, "knowing nature and quality of one's acts" sounds a heckuva lot
like a definition of [self] consciousness to me.

        I thought we perhaps could start with unpacking "interior", since it
appears in both of your messages ("access").  What does it mean to say that
my thoughts  are "inside" me.  It ought to mean, if we play the language
game of "inside" by the rules, that there is some sort of container that my
thoughts are enclosed within.   The use of the word, "access", would seem to
suggest that I have ways of getting at the insides of the "box" to "see" my
thoughts that you do not have.  Perhaps the box is a 5-sided box, and it's
open side faces me, so I can see inside and you cannot?   If that is how the
metaphor works, then you should be able to come around  to my side of the
box and look in examine its contents with me.  Or, if my access is provided
by a key, you should be able to use that key to get inside my box.  In other
words, there should be some set of conditions under which you can see
exactly what I see.  Since this entailment of the box metaphor undermines
the essential privacy of mind, I assume that you would rule it out by, say,
asserting that only I have the key to my box, and I cannot loan it to you.


But now we encounter another problem.  I think you would agree that you do
have some access to the inside of my box, beyond the access that I might
provide you by telling you what is inside it.   Certainly, if I wrote you
now the words, "I really have no interest in issues in the philosophy of
mind," you would have every reason to assert that I had misrepresented the
contents of my box to you.  So, to make the metaphor work, we would have to
imagine that, perhaps it's sides are not entirely opaque, or not opaque all
the time.  Perhaps they are sometimes translucent?

How about a different metaphor altogether?  How about the metaphor of "point
of view"?  My consciousness is just that what is seen from the  point of
view on the world from where I stand.  It is mine only in the sense that it
is indexed to me, not in the sense that I own it or that it is in me.  For
example, there is a cup on my desk whose inscription is turned toward me so
that if you were sitting across my desk from me right now, you would not
"have access to it".   The inscription is, "ONLY MUGS PAY POLL TAX."   I am
conscious of it in the sense that my behavior points to it.  From your point
of view, my consciousness is just all that my behavior designates.   When
your behavior designates the relations between me and some of the objects in
your environment, you become conscious of what I am conscious.  When my
behavior designates those same relations,  I become self-conscious.  I think
"self-consciousness is what we are principally arguing about, here.

I hope this answer is somewhat satisfying.  Thanks for running me around the
track.  I am trying to write some on this subject this summer.  I really
need the exercise.

Best,

Nick




Nicholas S. Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology
Clark University
http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

-----Original Message-----
From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of John Kennison
Sent: Friday, August 15, 2014 12:52 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] BBC News - Ant colony 'personalities' shaped by
environment

Hi Nick,

I certainly don't think of what you said as "rude"  --in fact I asked you to
tell what errors you might see in what I said.
And in any case, I am very glad to agree that we are old friends and can, if
necessary, forgive what might appear as rudeness.

I am willing to accept your conclusion that the words "inner subjective
life" are not really very useful and do no contribute much to my idea of
what consciousness is. I don't think I claimed that they are either of these
things.

I am having difficulty seeing the connection between these words and a
quasi-legal understanding that I and only I get to speak for myself.
I guess I would say that my sense of what my consciousness is all about
will be different from yours because I have access to my thoughts and vague
feelings etc. that differs from the kind of access you have. It's okay with
me if you speak for myself (so to speak)  --and I imagine you will, perhaps
over the previous sentence.  I invite and will (I think) welcome your
analysis.

--John

________________________________________
From: Friam [[hidden email]] on behalf of Nick Thompson
[[hidden email]]
Sent: Friday, August 15, 2014 11:38 AM
To: 'The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group'
Cc: James Laird
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] BBC News - Ant colony      'personalities' shaped  by
environment

Hi, John,

Nothing like a sober, quiet, good question to knock an old warrior off his
high horse.

Ok.  Now that I am standing on the ground ...

First, let us stipulate, we are talking about self-consciousness, here, ...
something beyond sentience, right?  If so, then I think your question is a
wonderful example of a "mystery", like we talked about yesterday.  A mystery
is a state of pleasurable confusion generated by using words outside their
realm of usefulness.  So, I would predict that if we sat down and unpacked
"inner", "subjective", and "life" we would discover that these words have
really nothing to contribute beyond the assertion that "I, and only I, get
to speak for me."  In other words, under your use of "consciousness",  it is
really a quasi-legal understanding central to human interaction that, in the
absence of a legal certification of incompetence, our assertions about our
own needs, wants, thoughts, etc., are to be taken as definitive.   So, for
instance, what I just said -- that your view of consciousness is not quite
what you think it is -- would be (may be) seen as RUDE, in polite society,
because, on your own understanding of consciousness, you and only you get to
say what you think it is.  Because we have been friends for more than 40
years, I hoping you will let that rudeness pass.

On my account, an entity is conscious of something when it acts with respect
to it, and SELF-conscious, when it acts with reference to itself.  On that
account, a simple thermostat is clearly conscious, but not self-conscious.
A more complicated thermostat, which calibrates its own sensitivity (which
most modern thermostats do), would probably have to be admitted as
self-conscious.

Nick
Nicholas S. Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology Clark University
http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

-----Original Message-----
From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of John Kennison
Sent: Friday, August 15, 2014 11:00 AM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] BBC News - Ant colony 'personalities' shaped by
environment

Nick,

I guess my criterion for consciousness would be something like "has an inner
subjective life". It's not something that I can measure and it has the
problem of circularity  --if you ask me what I mean by an "inner subjective
life" I will soon be making a circular definition. I am willing to concede
that I don't have a suitable definition for a scientific study of
consciousness. Still the question of whether a thermostat has consciousness
seems meaningful to me. (I don't have an answer --other than "I doubt it". )
Perhaps, I am making some kind of error. If so, could you explain what my
mistake is.

--John
________________________________________
From: Friam [[hidden email]] on behalf of Nick Thompson
[[hidden email]]
Sent: Friday, August 15, 2014 10:20 AM
To: 'The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group'
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] BBC News - Ant colony 'personalities' shaped       by
environment

So, I looked up David Chalmers .  Yeh, I know:  I shouldn't have HAD  to
look up David Chalmers.   Here from Philosophy Index

A potential problem with this speculation, which Chalmers acknowledges, is
that it may imply the consciousness of things that we would not normally
consider to have consciousness at all. For instance, Chalmers wonders if
this means that a thermostat may have some experiential properties, even if
they are especially dull. He does not commit to the notion that they do, but
the possibility remains in the more speculative area of his thought.

This is one of those "TED" insights, to which the only rational response is,
"Duh!"  Why exactly is that a problem?  What exactly would it have meant to
say that "humans are conscious" if it were not possible to discover that (1)
things other than humans are conscious and/or that humans are not, in fact,
conscious.  Either we have a criterion for consciousness or we don't; once
we have a criterion, we either apply it rigorously or . we are dishonest.
It's really quite simple, actually.


N

Nicholas S. Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology Clark University
http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Eric Smith
Sent: Friday, August 15, 2014 9:45 AM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] BBC News - Ant colony 'personalities' shaped by
environment

Quick, somebody call David Chalmers!


On Aug 15, 2014, at 9:25 AM, Eric Charles wrote:


Weird that they want to call it "personality" instead of more simply saying
that ant colonies seem to adapt to their local environment. Of course, the
flashiness of the claim is the only reason it is being covered on the BBC,
so I guess it isn't that weird after all.


-----------
Eric P. Charles, Ph.D.
Lab Manager
Center for Teaching, Research, and Learning American University, Hurst Hall
Room 203A
4400 Massachusetts Avenue, N.W.
Washington, DC 20016
phone: [phone]   fax: [phone]
email: [hidden email]<mailto:[hidden email]>

On Fri, Aug 8, 2014 at 3:57 PM, Gillian Densmore
<[hidden email]<mailto:[hidden email]>> wrote:
A few swarm inteligence from the 90s described that.  Scott Kelly's "Fast
Cheap and Out of Controll"  touched on that. In his case they knew ants (and
often uncles) could pass around experience- and displayed something simillar
to hummans sense of experience they didn't have a explination. Then again
his forray into science was from the 90s.

On Fri, Aug 8, 2014 at 9:01 AM, Tom Johnson
<[hidden email]<mailto:[hidden email]>> wrote:

So who is going to integrate this into the sugar model?

http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-28658268

===================================
Tom Johnson - Inst. for Analytic Journalism Santa Fe, NM
[hidden email]<mailto:[hidden email]>.
505-473-9646<tel:[phone]>
===================================

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[Steve Smith]

Gentlemen,

I am also interested in both the nature of consciousness and the nature
of knowledge regarding what appear to be entirely subjective phenonomena
(arising from the fact of consciousness?).

The last time I attended a Cognitive Neuroscience conference (6 years
ago?) I was impressed with how far things had come with regard to
correlating brain imaging and *reported* subjective experiences.    I
realize that sometimes more data and even higher quality data doesn't
necessarily improve a model qualitatively, but I have been hoping that
there would be some conceptual breakthroughs from this work.

Unfortunately, as the popular media and the population in general (which
is chicken, which is egg?) have taken a stronger interest in science (or
has come to fetishize the artifacts of science?) there is a lot more
"noise" to sort through to find signal.   The number of articles or even
entire issues of magazines and the number of books on the topic has
risen dramatically in the past 10 years or so, but I rarely see what
looks like new insight into the nature of consciousness.

I'm hoping someone here with more direct experience or more patience
with the literature (BTW, the "hard literature" on the topic is
generally too opaque for me, so I'm lost in a middle-ground limbo
between the popular accounts and the actual work-product of scientists)
knows of new insights or new twists on the old models to share.

Does anyone have a short list of recent publications which reframe the
question in a new way?

- Steve

> Hi Nick,
>
> One of the problems in discussing consciousness is that it seems very hard to break it down into simpler concepts. There are what might be called "high-level" words such as "inner life", "awareness", "apprehension", which suggest consciousness but only to someone who already ha a sense of what consciousness is.  Whereas low level words, which refer to things that can be readily measured do not seem adequate to get at the real meaning of consciousness. So we are left with metaphors. When I use words such as "access" and "inner life" they suggest a container but they are not necessarily used to denote an actual container but to describe a situation which has some of the properties of a container.
>
> However, there does seem to be a real container that describes the information I have access to.  I get raw information from my body. This is not to say that my consciousness is located in my body, but that what I know about the outside world starts with how my body senses the outside world. These senses are then processed or contemplated somehow and this results in what I think I know about the world. There is no way that "I can see exactly what you see" because what you see comes from your body and what I see comes from my body. If we literally mean "see" then what you see is what enters your eyes and what I see is what enters my eyes. You might tell me about what you see, but that is not the same as seeing what you see because what you have seen has been processed by you then reformulated in terms of speech, which is then processed by me.  Even if we witnessed the same event, we would have slightly different viewpoints, and our eyes are different, and, in any case, we wou!
>   ld start interpreting the incoming rays of light as soon as they started to enter our respective eyes.
>
> You also gave examples in which I might infer what you saw. This seems to presuppose I have a theory of what Nick is all about or some means of making inferences. (I don't have a well-articulated theory of Nick, but I do arrive at conclusions about what to make of you. I'm not certain how I do this, but I am certain that I do it all the time, quite effortlessly and almost automatically.) At any rate this drawing of inferences does not seem to be seeing exactly what you see, but a way (not necessarily very accurate) of getting a rough approximation of what you saw.
>
> --John
>

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[Nick Thompson]

Steve,

Thanks for getting into this for real.  

I keep starting to feel I have irresponsibly bent this thread, but then I
remind myself that, to me anyway, the question of whether ant colonies have
personalities is the same kind of question  as the question of whether
computers are conscious.  How it gets answered depends on the kind of
question one takes it to be.  It could be a question of fact, in which case
the answer must begin with some sort of straight-forward definition of what
would constitute a personality or a consciousness: how we would recognize a
personality or a consciousness if we met it on a dark street in the middle
of the night.  Or it could be a question of metaphysics, in which case the
answer concerns the most central, and closely held presumptions of the
answerer's thought.   My sense is that you and John and Frank WANT the
question to be of the first type, but that it is, for you truly, a question
of the second type.  You START with the notion that at the core of every
human being is an inner, private space from which she or he speaks, and
without that presumption, all thought must stop.  Thus, my claim about
you-all is, that you are asking for a factual answer to a metaphysical
question, and that, of course, nobody can ever provide.  My claim about
myself is that I am just treating the question as the factual question that,
and answering it in the way that factual questions are answered.  "Is there
a unicorn in the room?"  "Oh, you mean, a horsey sort of thing with a
narwhale horn in the middle of its forehead?  No, I don't think so."  So,
the template for such a conversation would be a question, "Is X conscious or
does X have a personality?", followed by an agreement on some sort of a
procedure by which consciousness or personality is to be recognized,
followed by an attempt to relate the behavior of X to those criteria.

So, I have some questions for you.  First, do you accept my characterization
of the template for a factual discussion?  If so, can you explain to me what
on God's green earth  you think MRI images have to do with providing a
factual answer to the question of whether X is conscious or has a
personality?  That's an honest question.  I honestly cannot see the
relevance.  Well, I can see SOME relevance, but only if I adopt the
metaphysical stance I am identifying with your position.  In other words, I
think introduction of MRI "evidence" for consciousness (or personality) begs
the question of the nature of consciousness.  

You are safe from running into me in the street in Santa Fe until October.

N





Nicholas S. Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology
Clark University
http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

-----Original Message-----
From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Steve Smith
Sent: Saturday, August 16, 2014 11:04 AM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] BBC News - Ant colony 'personalities' shaped by
environment

Gentlemen,

I am also interested in both the nature of consciousness and the nature of
knowledge regarding what appear to be entirely subjective phenonomena
(arising from the fact of consciousness?).

The last time I attended a Cognitive Neuroscience conference (6 years
ago?) I was impressed with how far things had come with regard to
correlating brain imaging and *reported* subjective experiences.    I
realize that sometimes more data and even higher quality data doesn't
necessarily improve a model qualitatively, but I have been hoping that there
would be some conceptual breakthroughs from this work.

Unfortunately, as the popular media and the population in general (which is
chicken, which is egg?) have taken a stronger interest in science (or has
come to fetishize the artifacts of science?) there is a lot more
"noise" to sort through to find signal.   The number of articles or even
entire issues of magazines and the number of books on the topic has risen
dramatically in the past 10 years or so, but I rarely see what looks like
new insight into the nature of consciousness.

I'm hoping someone here with more direct experience or more patience with
the literature (BTW, the "hard literature" on the topic is generally too
opaque for me, so I'm lost in a middle-ground limbo between the popular
accounts and the actual work-product of scientists) knows of new insights or
new twists on the old models to share.

Does anyone have a short list of recent publications which reframe the
question in a new way?

- Steve
> Hi Nick,
>
> One of the problems in discussing consciousness is that it seems very hard
to break it down into simpler concepts. There are what might be called
"high-level" words such as "inner life", "awareness", "apprehension", which
suggest consciousness but only to someone who already ha a sense of what
consciousness is.  Whereas low level words, which refer to things that can
be readily measured do not seem adequate to get at the real meaning of
consciousness. So we are left with metaphors. When I use words such as
"access" and "inner life" they suggest a container but they are not
necessarily used to denote an actual container but to describe a situation
which has some of the properties of a container.
>
> However, there does seem to be a real container that describes the
information I have access to.  I get raw information from my body. This is
not to say that my consciousness is located in my body, but that what I know
about the outside world starts with how my body senses the outside world.
These senses are then processed or contemplated somehow and this results in
what I think I know about the world. There is no way that "I can see exactly
what you see" because what you see comes from your body and what I see comes
from my body. If we literally mean "see" then what you see is what enters
your eyes and what I see is what enters my eyes. You might tell me about
what you see, but that is not the same as seeing what you see because what
you have seen has been processed by you then reformulated in terms of
speech, which is then processed by me.  Even if we witnessed the same event,
we would have slightly different viewpoints, and our eyes are different,
and, in any case, we wou!
>   ld start interpreting the incoming rays of light as soon as they started
to enter our respective eyes.
>
> You also gave examples in which I might infer what you saw. This seems to
presuppose I have a theory of what Nick is all about or some means of making
inferences. (I don't have a well-articulated theory of Nick, but I do arrive
at conclusions about what to make of you. I'm not certain how I do this, but
I am certain that I do it all the time, quite effortlessly and almost
automatically.) At any rate this drawing of inferences does not seem to be
seeing exactly what you see, but a way (not necessarily very accurate) of
getting a rough approximation of what you saw.
>
> --John
>



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[David Eric Smith]

Hi Steve,

I am neither knowledgeable, nor do I have time to report even my own experiences, without making a mess of things.  But perhaps I can give some titles of things people have pointed out to me.

There seem to be several schools of approach (meaning, groups of people who criticize each other a lot).  I't hard even to know how to break them down into clusters, because there are several axes of variation.

There is a school who are mechanistic, and who think of themselves as mechanistic.  

At one end within that school, one has Dan Dennett.  Much of what he says seems to me like a lot of effort to beat the dead horse of mysticism, and I have no patience for that, because I find it tedious and uninteresting.  Beyond that, it is not clear to me how much he has contributed in real ideas.  One that seems okay, if I understand it from informal conversations that have involved him, is that it involves a kind of recursive self-reference of thought.  Meaning, that thought is a process for handling responses to events (or, in a very broad use of the noun, "things"), and part of what consciousness does is render the state of thought as a "thing" in its own right, having the same symbolic kind of representation as the mind gives to other "things", so that thought can then process a representation formed about its own state.  This seems like part of the common lore, expressed already in this thread, and not novel.  Dennett seems to want to associate this ability specifically with language, and seems almost to want to treat it as an _application_ of linguistic faculty.  I don't think that is a well-motivated position, but I am glad Dennett does it because it makes an important point.  Language, in having syntax, can manipulate words within the syntactic system, much as it uses words to manipulate ideas within semantic systems.  That is hard to understand in language, and making us aware of the fact that it is hard, even though it has been before our eyes for centuries, seems helpful in expressing part of what makes assigning clear meaning to statements about consciousness hard.

On another extreme from Dennett but still materialist, we have Giuglio Tononi and his "Phi" measure.  Basically, Tononi adopts information theory as a language, and within that language introduces a concrete notion of what it means for an information system to be irreducible, in a way that I think is analogous to the notion of irreducibility of representations of groups, in the theory of representations.  The details are different because information theory is a different structure from algebra, but the basic notion of something's not being splittable into factors is the same.  I am now a couple of years out of date wrt Tononi's publications, but I think it is fair to say that Tononi asserts that having a very large irreducible component of information is the _essence_ of consciousness, and that all the other things like self-reference (which I would argue are also essential, even if irreducibility is too) are merely other phenomena of mind but not the thing that distinguishes conscious states.  The Tononi development has the virtue of being an actual idea that is formalized and thus unambiguously exchangeable among people.  It may also have a kernel of something important.  Many people who work in consciousness seem to think it does.  For my taste, it is too non-embodied to likely be a very comprehensive part of the right answer.  I think both the embodied dimensions of the things that contribute to conscious states, and some kind of recursion, are primitives that are essential.  Tononi has a large book about this, and I think several shorter papers that are on the arXiv.

Somewhere in here is Christof Koch, who is also considered one of the important contributors, but I don't know what his ideas are.  I include him because if you are asking who the thought leaders at the moment seem to be, my understanding is that he is one of them.  

There is also Max Tegmark, who has a recent paper "Consciousness as a state of matter", available from the arxiv.  This (which I have read) seems to me to be a smart mathematician's discussion of a generally nice point, which adds nothing of substance to where we are stuck.  Tegmark is making an argument with which I agree, that most-everything we see in nature that is robust is a "state of matter", understood as modern physics uses the term.  Hence, the distinctive and characteristic nature of consciousness too.  But the only thing about consciousness in what Tegmark builds is what he gets from Tononi.  The rest of it is more about the theory of measurement in quantum mechanics, than it is anything that distinguishes consciousness from other patterns of order to which we have given names and phenomenologies.

Now, if I understand it at a distant second hand, Chalmers has a criticism of all of these kinds of positions, notwithstanding their technical differences, which is that he would claim they fail to recognize what he calls "the hard problem".  I do not know exactly how Chalmers uses language, and I cannot speak for him, but to try to use my own language to express what I think he says, I would say he asserts that these mere characterizations of mechanism are not "accounting for" what we mean when we report "the experience of" this or that.  Here, the word "qualia" is often introduced, to refer to the antecedent of such reports.  

I think Dennett thinks of (and perhaps calls) Chalmers the worst sort of Cartesian dualist, whereas Chalmers would say that Dennett is claiming that consciousness "doesn't really exist", or something morally equivalent.  I believe both of them think of the axis on which they hold opposite ends as different and bigger than any of the axes that separate the technical people from one another.   Chalmers seems (for good or ill) to attract people who do want to be dualists or mystics (or mysterians), so without putting in a lot of time with original material, it is hard to get a clear picture of him through the people who claim to render him.

Ih the middle of all this, helping us sort it all out, is John Searl, who has a short little book "The problem of consciousness".  Searl is at his best when using pellucid common language to explain why everyone else is being silly.  He is much less impressive when asked to introduce an actual new idea that moves the discussion forward.  However, in saying that, I do not mean to diminish the value (or the enjoyment) of his criticisms.  He has some language in there about various kinds of dualists, which I find mystifying, because it all exists within such self-referential
circles of language that I wouldn't know how to link it to anything in the rest of the world.  But, if you want to know about dualists, this is a good place to find them categorized.  

I find reporting on a lot of this like I think I would feel if sent to the middle east to report on exactly why it is necessary for some factions to fight other factions.  There seems to be a long way between being humans, and so exercising the individual and social behaviors that constitute bringing ourself to share or coordinate various internal states that we refer to with names for awareness or states of mind or whatever, and finding a language that, in symbolic form, makes a faithful representation of what it is that distinctively allows us to be what we are and do what we do.  Each of these guys seems to bring attention to the absence of such language in one or another way.  What I can't understand is why they think there is anything more than "a hard problem" of inventing a valid language to faithfully reflect the structure of a natural phenomenon, and their main difference is in how much each thinks he has captured and the others have not.  But I think they would argue there is more to their positions than that.  

Of course, I have no expert knowledge, and haven't put that much time even into reading their literatures as an outsider and tourist.  So it is to be expected that a lot of it will pass over me.

Several of these guys have either TED talks, or lectures that stream on the web, which are shorter than reading their papers, but even more unsatisfying.

Oops.  Too much text.  

All best,

Eric





On Aug 16, 2014, at 11:04 AM, Steve Smith wrote:

> Gentlemen,
>
> I am also interested in both the nature of consciousness and the nature of knowledge regarding what appear to be entirely subjective phenonomena (arising from the fact of consciousness?).
>
> The last time I attended a Cognitive Neuroscience conference (6 years ago?) I was impressed with how far things had come with regard to correlating brain imaging and *reported* subjective experiences.    I realize that sometimes more data and even higher quality data doesn't necessarily improve a model qualitatively, but I have been hoping that there would be some conceptual breakthroughs from this work.
>
> Unfortunately, as the popular media and the population in general (which is chicken, which is egg?) have taken a stronger interest in science (or has come to fetishize the artifacts of science?) there is a lot more "noise" to sort through to find signal.   The number of articles or even entire issues of magazines and the number of books on the topic has risen dramatically in the past 10 years or so, but I rarely see what looks like new insight into the nature of consciousness.
>
> I'm hoping someone here with more direct experience or more patience with the literature (BTW, the "hard literature" on the topic is generally too opaque for me, so I'm lost in a middle-ground limbo between the popular accounts and the actual work-product of scientists) knows of new insights or new twists on the old models to share.
>
> Does anyone have a short list of recent publications which reframe the question in a new way?
>
> - Steve
>> Hi Nick,
>>
>> One of the problems in discussing consciousness is that it seems very hard to break it down into simpler concepts. There are what might be called "high-level" words such as "inner life", "awareness", "apprehension", which suggest consciousness but only to someone who already ha a sense of what consciousness is.  Whereas low level words, which refer to things that can be readily measured do not seem adequate to get at the real meaning of consciousness. So we are left with metaphors. When I use words such as "access" and "inner life" they suggest a container but they are not necessarily used to denote an actual container but to describe a situation which has some of the properties of a container.
>>
>> However, there does seem to be a real container that describes the information I have access to.  I get raw information from my body. This is not to say that my consciousness is located in my body, but that what I know about the outside world starts with how my body senses the outside world. These senses are then processed or contemplated somehow and this results in what I think I know about the world. There is no way that "I can see exactly what you see" because what you see comes from your body and what I see comes from my body. If we literally mean "see" then what you see is what enters your eyes and what I see is what enters my eyes. You might tell me about what you see, but that is not the same as seeing what you see because what you have seen has been processed by you then reformulated in terms of speech, which is then processed by me.  Even if we witnessed the same event, we would have slightly different viewpoints, and our eyes are different, and, in any case, we wou!
>>  ld start interpreting the incoming rays of light as soon as they started to enter our respective eyes.
>>
>> You also gave examples in which I might infer what you saw. This seems to presuppose I have a theory of what Nick is all about or some means of making inferences. (I don't have a well-articulated theory of Nick, but I do arrive at conclusions about what to make of you. I'm not certain how I do this, but I am certain that I do it all the time, quite effortlessly and almost automatically.) At any rate this drawing of inferences does not seem to be seeing exactly what you see, but a way (not necessarily very accurate) of getting a rough approximation of what you saw.
>>
>> --John
>>
>
>
>
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[Steve Smith]

Standard Disclaimer for most: TL;DR

Steve, 

Thanks for getting into this for real. 

Well the language *was* a bit too easy pickings there for a moment.   And I think *that* is also relevant to the conversation, even if I *was* being teasing and flippant.   The dialog in place *was* as much about language as about consciousness.  You were talking about abstractions like "cup" and "card" which are at some level simply idiomatic.  To members of a modestly (let's say non-westernized) different culture,  both "cup" and "card" would not mean the same thing and when you met in person and showed one another those artifacts, there might be as much surprise as recognition.    I know this may be tangential to the intended point, but I still think it cannot be ignored?

 

I keep starting to feel I have irresponsibly bent this thread, but then I
remind myself that, to me anyway, the question of whether ant colonies have
personalities is the same kind of question  as the question of whether
computers are conscious.

I'm not a stickler about thread-bending myself, it is certainly a motivated tangent to the original.  And don't be shy about changing the subject-line if you feel like you are being bendy.

Just to bend/fork/twist it in another direction... I can't help but imagine that Ant Hill Art is a useful technique for trying to measure the "personality" of an ant colony (the same way the Israelis are trying to measure the "personality" of the Palestinians right now?).    Other than being destructive testing to the max, can we say that such artifacts (the aluminum casts of the ant-hill) correlate with anything we might want to call "personality" of the ant-colony collectively?   I might suggest "mood" would be a more appropriate metaphor, but still implying something familiar to consciousness.   Is it not apt to refer to an ant colony as "angry" or "calm" or (when analyzing the nest structure) "curious" or "withdrawn" or "aggressive"?  

  How it gets answered depends on the kind of
question one takes it to be.  It could be a question of fact, in which case
the answer must begin with some sort of straight-forward definition of what
would constitute a personality or a consciousness: how we would recognize a
personality or a consciousness if we met it on a dark street in the middle
of the night.

Turing Test. Right?

  Or it could be a question of metaphysics, in which case the
answer concerns the most central, and closely held presumptions of the
answerer's thought.   My sense is that you and John and Frank WANT the
question to be of the first type, but that it is, for you truly, a question
of the second type.  

I believe that the question *has* a significant component of the second type and that the first type is the only thing that has a chance to be measured directly.  At worst, the first type of question suffers from perceptual and semantic differences, while the second suffers from being at some point strictly grounded in shared axioms.  

You START with the notion that at the core of every
human being is an inner, private space from which she or he speaks, and
without that presumption, all thought must stop.

I can't quite parse this completely.  I *do* think this is how we operate, or at least this is how I subjectively feel that *I* operate and for the sake of sanity or at least social embeddedness, I assume others operate in a sufficiently similar manner.   I'm not sure what "thought" is if it isn't mediated by (if not entirely originating from) the neurological (highly coupled with and informed by the vascular, the lymphatic, etc.) system of the body.  I'm not beyond granting some ground to those who want to suggest that our individual, confined to our own body, neurological systems are somehow coupled with those of others in overt (visual, aural, pheremonal, etc.) ways, or even through shared mythologies (Ancient Greeks shared the same Pantheon, the Romans, to the extent that they

  Thus, my claim about
you-all is, that you are asking for a factual answer to a metaphysical
question, and that, of course, nobody can ever provide.

I agree.  But I also think that whilst mulling over facts in the light of metaphysical perspectives, the facts can take on some (provisional) meaning that they did not have without that, and in complement, hanging facts all over one's theories can help one to refine and understand their theories more better/differently?

  My claim about
myself is that I am just treating the question as the factual question that,
and answering it in the way that factual questions are answered.  "Is there
a unicorn in the room?"  "Oh, you mean, a horsey sort of thing with a
narwhale horn in the middle of its forehead?  No, I don't think so."  So,
the template for such a conversation would be a question, "Is X conscious or
does X have a personality?", followed by an agreement on some sort of a
procedure by which consciousness or personality is to be recognized,
followed by an attempt to relate the behavior of X to those criteria.

Ok... trying to unpack this a bit...  if I understand you correctly, I would rephrase the above to say:  I intrinsically think of this as a metaphysical question (or perhaps more aptly an epistemological one?) .  I also believe that FACTUAL things (facts about the world vs relations between ideas) are the only ones which can be tested directly.   Sometimes the *expression* of ideas and their relations can be tested (this is what psychologists and anthropologists do?), which amounts to determining (experimentally and statistically) "what people believe or perceive" but not "what they experience", if the distinction is not too subtle?

So, I have some questions for you.  First, do you accept my characterization
of the template for a factual discussion?  If so, can you explain to me what
on God's green earth  you think MRI images have to do with providing a
factual answer to the question of whether X is conscious or has a
personality?  That's an honest question.  I honestly cannot see the
relevance.

It represents the only way *I* know of right now to measure or observe anything about brain states of  directly.  In this case of humans or possibly all animals.  I don't think we can put an ant colony in an MRI and get anything meaningful from it.  I suppose we might be able to put a single ant in one, though I'm not sure.   Putting a computer or a vending machine in one would be silly of course.

Well, I can see SOME relevance, but only if I adopt the
metaphysical stance I am identifying with your position.  In other words, I
think introduction of MRI "evidence" for consciousness (or personality) begs
the question of the nature of consciousness.

This is why I asked if there were any new insights that came from such activities.  It isn't clear to me that such measurements help directly (or it is somewhat clear that they are not).  The current model, as I understand it of what MRI's (or similar) measure and what can be correlated with other observables and subjective inner states ( e.g. show me flash-cards of colored shapes and maybe you can map what parts of my brain respond to which colors and shapes, and maybe you can correlate that with others' physiological responses to the same stimuli, but does that actually say anything about my subjective experience of color and/or shape?).  I realize I'm talking more about "perception" than "consciousness" but I think the two are inextricable ("Embodied Mind" arguement). 

I happen to experience modest amounts of synaesthesia, and I have never met anyone else whose synaesthesia presents identically to my own.   I recognize the *pattern* of their descriptions of the way things get tangled, but the specifics are always unique to me (and them?).  The fact that many people can agree that "blue and green are cool colors" and "red and orange are hot colors" is a lovely generalization.  I have learned to nod (up and down) to such claims, yet my experience is somewhat more complicated and unconventional.  I can speak the vernacular language of color (if someone asks me to choose a warmer or cooler color, I know what they mean and can usually satisfy them) but the metaphors aren't as fully apt for me.   Blackbody radiation and therefore most of physics maps red to "cool" and blue to "hot" for direct physical reasons, yet the average individual maps blue to water and green to vegetation  which are usually cool and red and orange to flame which is usually hot.   If we go to asian cultures however, for example, we discover that Red is associated with life and positive energy (oxygenated blood?) whilst Green is associated with warnings and death and decay (mold and overgrowing vegetation?).  Green stop signs and lights and red traffic lights meaning *GO!*.   Such things are at least learned, if not entirely culturally defined?

I guess what I am hypothesizing is that while neuroscientists are mucking around measuring the brain's activity and trying to correlate it with behaviour (including reportage of subjective experiences), that they might trip over new ways of thinking about consciousness.  I am asking if there are new models of consciousness (metaphysical issue) which might have been inspired or tripped over whilst running lots of people's brains through machines, looking for "the lost keys under the streetlight".   I don't expect them to find the keys under the streetlight, but maybe while looking there (because the light is better) they will think of other/better places to look (or more aptly, to realize that there are no keys, or that they are not needed?).

You are safe from running into me in the street in Santa Fe until October. 

Well that is a relief!  Although I don't think I have *ever* run into you on the streets of Santa Fe excepting when we were deliberately trying to find eachother (and even then it was a crapshoot).   Of course, I spend *very* little time on the streets of Santa Fe.  And not because I fear running into you. 

I will reaffirm my desire to join the St. John's crowd on Friday AMs but so far I seem to fail at it nearly every week of every year.  But knowing you will be there adds to my interest in doing so.


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[Nick Thompson]

Eric,

Great to hear from you.

I am wondering about what you make of my distinction between a metaphysical
and a factual question and my concern for the perils of trying to answer a
question of one type with an answer of the other.  Is it a well founded
distinction?  If so, one would expect that Dennett of all people, would
start by making it, but so far as I know he doesn't.  So, given my
[grudging] respect for Dennett, I am worried.   Remember that I, too, am not
a philosopher.   N

Nicholas S. Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology
Clark University
http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

-----Original Message-----
From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Eric Smith
Sent: Saturday, August 16, 2014 12:32 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] BBC News - Ant colony 'personalities' shaped by
environment

Hi Steve,

I am neither knowledgeable, nor do I have time to report even my own
experiences, without making a mess of things.  But perhaps I can give some
titles of things people have pointed out to me.

There seem to be several schools of approach (meaning, groups of people who
criticize each other a lot).  I't hard even to know how to break them down
into clusters, because there are several axes of variation.

There is a school who are mechanistic, and who think of themselves as
mechanistic.  

At one end within that school, one has Dan Dennett.  Much of what he says
seems to me like a lot of effort to beat the dead horse of mysticism, and I
have no patience for that, because I find it tedious and uninteresting.
Beyond that, it is not clear to me how much he has contributed in real
ideas.  One that seems okay, if I understand it from informal conversations
that have involved him, is that it involves a kind of recursive
self-reference of thought.  Meaning, that thought is a process for handling
responses to events (or, in a very broad use of the noun, "things"), and
part of what consciousness does is render the state of thought as a "thing"
in its own right, having the same symbolic kind of representation as the
mind gives to other "things", so that thought can then process a
representation formed about its own state.  This seems like part of the
common lore, expressed already in this thread, and not novel.  Dennett seems
to want to associate this ability specifically with language, and seems
almost to want to treat it as an _application_ of linguistic faculty.  I
don't think that is a well-motivated position, but I am glad Dennett does it
because it makes an important point.  Language, in having syntax, can
manipulate words within the syntactic system, much as it uses words to
manipulate ideas within semantic systems.  That is hard to understand in
language, and making us aware of the fact that it is hard, even though it
has been before our eyes for centuries, seems helpful in expressing part of
what makes assigning clear meaning to statements about consciousness hard.

On another extreme from Dennett but still materialist, we have Giuglio
Tononi and his "Phi" measure.  Basically, Tononi adopts information theory
as a language, and within that language introduces a concrete notion of what
it means for an information system to be irreducible, in a way that I think
is analogous to the notion of irreducibility of representations of groups,
in the theory of representations.  The details are different because
information theory is a different structure from algebra, but the basic
notion of something's not being splittable into factors is the same.  I am
now a couple of years out of date wrt Tononi's publications, but I think it
is fair to say that Tononi asserts that having a very large irreducible
component of information is the _essence_ of consciousness, and that all the
other things like self-reference (which I would argue are also essential,
even if irreducibility is too) are merely other phenomena of mind but not
the thing that distinguishes conscious states.  The Tononi development has
the virtue of being an actual idea that is formalized and thus unambiguously
exchangeable among people.  It may also have a kernel of something
important.  Many people who work in consciousness seem to think it does.
For my taste, it is too non-embodied to likely be a very comprehensive part
of the right answer.  I think both the embodied dimensions of the things
that contribute to conscious states, and some kind of recursion, are
primitives that are essential.  Tononi has a large book about this, and I
think several shorter papers that are on the arXiv.

Somewhere in here is Christof Koch, who is also considered one of the
important contributors, but I don't know what his ideas are.  I include him
because if you are asking who the thought leaders at the moment seem to be,
my understanding is that he is one of them.  

There is also Max Tegmark, who has a recent paper "Consciousness as a state
of matter", available from the arxiv.  This (which I have read) seems to me
to be a smart mathematician's discussion of a generally nice point, which
adds nothing of substance to where we are stuck.  Tegmark is making an
argument with which I agree, that most-everything we see in nature that is
robust is a "state of matter", understood as modern physics uses the term.
Hence, the distinctive and characteristic nature of consciousness too.  But
the only thing about consciousness in what Tegmark builds is what he gets
from Tononi.  The rest of it is more about the theory of measurement in
quantum mechanics, than it is anything that distinguishes consciousness from
other patterns of order to which we have given names and phenomenologies.

Now, if I understand it at a distant second hand, Chalmers has a criticism
of all of these kinds of positions, notwithstanding their technical
differences, which is that he would claim they fail to recognize what he
calls "the hard problem".  I do not know exactly how Chalmers uses language,
and I cannot speak for him, but to try to use my own language to express
what I think he says, I would say he asserts that these mere
characterizations of mechanism are not "accounting for" what we mean when we
report "the experience of" this or that.  Here, the word "qualia" is often
introduced, to refer to the antecedent of such reports.  

I think Dennett thinks of (and perhaps calls) Chalmers the worst sort of
Cartesian dualist, whereas Chalmers would say that Dennett is claiming that
consciousness "doesn't really exist", or something morally equivalent.  I
believe both of them think of the axis on which they hold opposite ends as
different and bigger than any of the axes that separate the technical people
from one another.   Chalmers seems (for good or ill) to attract people who
do want to be dualists or mystics (or mysterians), so without putting in a
lot of time with original material, it is hard to get a clear picture of him
through the people who claim to render him.

Ih the middle of all this, helping us sort it all out, is John Searl, who
has a short little book "The problem of consciousness".  Searl is at his
best when using pellucid common language to explain why everyone else is
being silly.  He is much less impressive when asked to introduce an actual
new idea that moves the discussion forward.  However, in saying that, I do
not mean to diminish the value (or the enjoyment) of his criticisms.  He has
some language in there about various kinds of dualists, which I find
mystifying, because it all exists within such self-referential circles of
language that I wouldn't know how to link it to anything in the rest of the
world.  But, if you want to know about dualists, this is a good place to
find them categorized.  

I find reporting on a lot of this like I think I would feel if sent to the
middle east to report on exactly why it is necessary for some factions to
fight other factions.  There seems to be a long way between being humans,
and so exercising the individual and social behaviors that constitute
bringing ourself to share or coordinate various internal states that we
refer to with names for awareness or states of mind or whatever, and finding
a language that, in symbolic form, makes a faithful representation of what
it is that distinctively allows us to be what we are and do what we do.
Each of these guys seems to bring attention to the absence of such language
in one or another way.  What I can't understand is why they think there is
anything more than "a hard problem" of inventing a valid language to
faithfully reflect the structure of a natural phenomenon, and their main
difference is in how much each thinks he has captured and the others have
not.  But I think they would argue there is more to their positions than
that.  

Of course, I have no expert knowledge, and haven't put that much time even
into reading their literatures as an outsider and tourist.  So it is to be
expected that a lot of it will pass over me.

Several of these guys have either TED talks, or lectures that stream on the
web, which are shorter than reading their papers, but even more
unsatisfying.

Oops.  Too much text.  

All best,

Eric





On Aug 16, 2014, at 11:04 AM, Steve Smith wrote:

> Gentlemen,
>
> I am also interested in both the nature of consciousness and the nature of
knowledge regarding what appear to be entirely subjective phenonomena
(arising from the fact of consciousness?).
>
> The last time I attended a Cognitive Neuroscience conference (6 years
ago?) I was impressed with how far things had come with regard to
correlating brain imaging and *reported* subjective experiences.    I
realize that sometimes more data and even higher quality data doesn't
necessarily improve a model qualitatively, but I have been hoping that there
would be some conceptual breakthroughs from this work.
>
> Unfortunately, as the popular media and the population in general (which
is chicken, which is egg?) have taken a stronger interest in science (or has
come to fetishize the artifacts of science?) there is a lot more "noise" to
sort through to find signal.   The number of articles or even entire issues
of magazines and the number of books on the topic has risen dramatically in
the past 10 years or so, but I rarely see what looks like new insight into
the nature of consciousness.
>
> I'm hoping someone here with more direct experience or more patience with
the literature (BTW, the "hard literature" on the topic is generally too
opaque for me, so I'm lost in a middle-ground limbo between the popular
accounts and the actual work-product of scientists) knows of new insights or
new twists on the old models to share.
>
> Does anyone have a short list of recent publications which reframe the
question in a new way?
>
> - Steve
>> Hi Nick,
>>
>> One of the problems in discussing consciousness is that it seems very
hard to break it down into simpler concepts. There are what might be called
"high-level" words such as "inner life", "awareness", "apprehension", which
suggest consciousness but only to someone who already ha a sense of what
consciousness is.  Whereas low level words, which refer to things that can
be readily measured do not seem adequate to get at the real meaning of
consciousness. So we are left with metaphors. When I use words such as
"access" and "inner life" they suggest a container but they are not
necessarily used to denote an actual container but to describe a situation
which has some of the properties of a container.
>>
>> However, there does seem to be a real container that describes the
information I have access to.  I get raw information from my body. This is
not to say that my consciousness is located in my body, but that what I know
about the outside world starts with how my body senses the outside world.
These senses are then processed or contemplated somehow and this results in
what I think I know about the world. There is no way that "I can see exactly
what you see" because what you see comes from your body and what I see comes
from my body. If we literally mean "see" then what you see is what enters
your eyes and what I see is what enters my eyes. You might tell me about
what you see, but that is not the same as seeing what you see because what
you have seen has been processed by you then reformulated in terms of
speech, which is then processed by me.  Even if we witnessed the same event,
we would have slightly different viewpoints, and our eyes are different,
and, in any case, we wou!
>>  ld start interpreting the incoming rays of light as soon as they started
to enter our respective eyes.
>>
>> You also gave examples in which I might infer what you saw. This seems to
presuppose I have a theory of what Nick is all about or some means of making
inferences. (I don't have a well-articulated theory of Nick, but I do arrive
at conclusions about what to make of you. I'm not certain how I do this, but
I am certain that I do it all the time, quite effortlessly and almost
automatically.) At any rate this drawing of inferences does not seem to be
seeing exactly what you see, but a way (not necessarily very accurate) of
getting a rough approximation of what you saw.

>>
>> --John
>>
>
>
>
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[Steve Smith]

Eric -
> Of course, I have no expert knowledge, and haven't put that much time even into reading their literatures as an outsider and tourist.  So it is to be expected that a lot of it will pass over me.
>
> Several of these guys have either TED talks, or lectures that stream on the web, which are shorter than reading their papers, but even more unsatisfying.
>
> Oops.  Too much text.

Awesome...  thank you for throwing down that great (in depth) summary...
no matter how appropriate your many caveats might be on your own humble
engagement and understanding in such matters might be... it represents a
*huge* headstart for any of us interested in more than just arguing a
few points around the latest popular article on the topic.

As for too much text... it is definitely a lot and quite dense but
precisely what I hope for in this venue when I ask for such things.  
Half of your references are entirely new to me, and your commentary on
the more familiar excruciatingly helpful in my framing of their work in
a larger context.

Thank you!

  - Steve


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[David Eric Smith]

Nick, hi,

Likewise.

I may be more of a frustration than a help to you in this discussion, because I don't see much here that is precise enough to make questions of fact, and generally, when people claim they have metaphysical questions, I am unable to recognize any well-posed question at all.  Probably an autism-related disorder...

But more seriously, here I think the popular exercise is to hope we can argue our way to clarity, using a lexicon and rules of syntax from a language that is largely inherited from social engagement, and that to me seems to have no reason to succeed.  As a mind-in-society, which without science is the best I can hope to be, when I talk to you, the purpose of my language is to be part of a state-of-mind etc.-coordinating processes that you and I participate/are embedded in.  The purpose of my language is not to be a faithful representation of anything in the actual world.  It is to function in some systematic way as part of a signaling system between two entities that have an enormous amount of state/process complexity shared via inherited common developmental processes.

Sometimes it will be a faithful representation, because that is a good way for it to work, as in our language of objects which works well if it roughly mimics our sight-perception and touch-perception of objects.  Then the cross-modal associations are easy to maintain.  But for coordinating mental or affective states, I see no reason language should reflect any particular structure as opposed to any other.  When you say "it is strange that I can tell I am awake and not dreaming", and I nod and say "I know what you mean", I actually don't know anything about what either of us means.  Really all that sentence tells us as science is that you and I are both humans, with a lot of shared structure and then a culture that trains us in using part of a language to coordinate awareness and imagination of certain states.

So here, if I had any intention of doing work in this area (which is impossible, because I am too many thousands of years behind to ever gain the fact-knowledge to contribute), I imagine I would start at an ultra-phenomenologist end.  This is not because I think phenomenology ever arrives at new understanding, but because a certain ruthlessness in this regard starts to make us aware of how much of our terminology is part of the observation, but is not a model of its structure.  Then I would try hard to learn to describe structures in the internal process and in the social process, to learn how much it depends on the acquisition of language structures (a la Vygotsky), and I would look at lots of pathological states to try to get windows on where the subsystem boundaries are that usually don't show through (so, dissociative states, delusional states, sense of boundaries during early infant development, etc.)  If you look at a lot of the little restrictions Tononi puts into his definition of Phi, it is clear that he wants the seeming-unitariness of the consciousness-that-is-"I" to be fundamental, so that there can't be multiple nested levels in a conscious system, each of them experiencing itself as an "I".  I would ask "is that fundamental?"  Kim Peak can read the two facing pages of a book at the same time, one with each eye.  What does that teach us, since Kim builds a variant functional system out of mostly the same building blocks as everybody else, but with a few switches set differently.

I guess, in that long-winded answer, I would say I would be groping for ideas of what to put into a formal representation that was supposed to be "faithful" to the phenomenon in structure, yet exposed to manipulation in its nature as a formal system.  Hopefully, as long as I had no new ideas, I would sit like a Quaker at a meeting when no-one has anything that needs to be said or done: sit quietly, and at the end go back to work.  It seems that we are still at very early stages in looking for new ideas, and this is attested by the extreme reversion to traditional language.  Nonetheless, there might be nice pieces and parts to draw on that capture some of it.  Reflection in formal language theory is a good one.  If one studies languages in which all the syntactic rules of the language can somehow also be made data manipulable within the language, this conveys a certain delighted joy, as if the system is somehow _so_ much more satisfying than a a dull automaton.  I think that response is somehow an affinity to its seeming closer to being like us.  

But sadly, I have no ideas of my own, so this doesn't help.

All best,

Eric


On Aug 16, 2014, at 1:24 PM, Nick Thompson wrote:

> Eric,
>
> Great to hear from you.
>
> I am wondering about what you make of my distinction between a metaphysical
> and a factual question and my concern for the perils of trying to answer a
> question of one type with an answer of the other.  Is it a well founded
> distinction?  If so, one would expect that Dennett of all people, would
> start by making it, but so far as I know he doesn't.  So, given my
> [grudging] respect for Dennett, I am worried.   Remember that I, too, am not
> a philosopher.   N
>
> Nicholas S. Thompson
> Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology
> Clark University
> http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Eric Smith
> Sent: Saturday, August 16, 2014 12:32 PM
> To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] BBC News - Ant colony 'personalities' shaped by
> environment
>
> Hi Steve,
>
> I am neither knowledgeable, nor do I have time to report even my own
> experiences, without making a mess of things.  But perhaps I can give some
> titles of things people have pointed out to me.
>
> There seem to be several schools of approach (meaning, groups of people who
> criticize each other a lot).  I't hard even to know how to break them down
> into clusters, because there are several axes of variation.
>
> There is a school who are mechanistic, and who think of themselves as
> mechanistic.  
>
> At one end within that school, one has Dan Dennett.  Much of what he says
> seems to me like a lot of effort to beat the dead horse of mysticism, and I
> have no patience for that, because I find it tedious and uninteresting.
> Beyond that, it is not clear to me how much he has contributed in real
> ideas.  One that seems okay, if I understand it from informal conversations
> that have involved him, is that it involves a kind of recursive
> self-reference of thought.  Meaning, that thought is a process for handling
> responses to events (or, in a very broad use of the noun, "things"), and
> part of what consciousness does is render the state of thought as a "thing"
> in its own right, having the same symbolic kind of representation as the
> mind gives to other "things", so that thought can then process a
> representation formed about its own state.  This seems like part of the
> common lore, expressed already in this thread, and not novel.  Dennett seems
> to want to associate this ability specifically with language, and seems
> almost to want to treat it as an _application_ of linguistic faculty.  I
> don't think that is a well-motivated position, but I am glad Dennett does it
> because it makes an important point.  Language, in having syntax, can
> manipulate words within the syntactic system, much as it uses words to
> manipulate ideas within semantic systems.  That is hard to understand in
> language, and making us aware of the fact that it is hard, even though it
> has been before our eyes for centuries, seems helpful in expressing part of
> what makes assigning clear meaning to statements about consciousness hard.
>
> On another extreme from Dennett but still materialist, we have Giuglio
> Tononi and his "Phi" measure.  Basically, Tononi adopts information theory
> as a language, and within that language introduces a concrete notion of what
> it means for an information system to be irreducible, in a way that I think
> is analogous to the notion of irreducibility of representations of groups,
> in the theory of representations.  The details are different because
> information theory is a different structure from algebra, but the basic
> notion of something's not being splittable into factors is the same.  I am
> now a couple of years out of date wrt Tononi's publications, but I think it
> is fair to say that Tononi asserts that having a very large irreducible
> component of information is the _essence_ of consciousness, and that all the
> other things like self-reference (which I would argue are also essential,
> even if irreducibility is too) are merely other phenomena of mind but not
> the thing that distinguishes conscious states.  The Tononi development has
> the virtue of being an actual idea that is formalized and thus unambiguously
> exchangeable among people.  It may also have a kernel of something
> important.  Many people who work in consciousness seem to think it does.
> For my taste, it is too non-embodied to likely be a very comprehensive part
> of the right answer.  I think both the embodied dimensions of the things
> that contribute to conscious states, and some kind of recursion, are
> primitives that are essential.  Tononi has a large book about this, and I
> think several shorter papers that are on the arXiv.
>
> Somewhere in here is Christof Koch, who is also considered one of the
> important contributors, but I don't know what his ideas are.  I include him
> because if you are asking who the thought leaders at the moment seem to be,
> my understanding is that he is one of them.  
>
> There is also Max Tegmark, who has a recent paper "Consciousness as a state
> of matter", available from the arxiv.  This (which I have read) seems to me
> to be a smart mathematician's discussion of a generally nice point, which
> adds nothing of substance to where we are stuck.  Tegmark is making an
> argument with which I agree, that most-everything we see in nature that is
> robust is a "state of matter", understood as modern physics uses the term.
> Hence, the distinctive and characteristic nature of consciousness too.  But
> the only thing about consciousness in what Tegmark builds is what he gets
> from Tononi.  The rest of it is more about the theory of measurement in
> quantum mechanics, than it is anything that distinguishes consciousness from
> other patterns of order to which we have given names and phenomenologies.
>
> Now, if I understand it at a distant second hand, Chalmers has a criticism
> of all of these kinds of positions, notwithstanding their technical
> differences, which is that he would claim they fail to recognize what he
> calls "the hard problem".  I do not know exactly how Chalmers uses language,
> and I cannot speak for him, but to try to use my own language to express
> what I think he says, I would say he asserts that these mere
> characterizations of mechanism are not "accounting for" what we mean when we
> report "the experience of" this or that.  Here, the word "qualia" is often
> introduced, to refer to the antecedent of such reports.  
>
> I think Dennett thinks of (and perhaps calls) Chalmers the worst sort of
> Cartesian dualist, whereas Chalmers would say that Dennett is claiming that
> consciousness "doesn't really exist", or something morally equivalent.  I
> believe both of them think of the axis on which they hold opposite ends as
> different and bigger than any of the axes that separate the technical people
> from one another.   Chalmers seems (for good or ill) to attract people who
> do want to be dualists or mystics (or mysterians), so without putting in a
> lot of time with original material, it is hard to get a clear picture of him
> through the people who claim to render him.
>
> Ih the middle of all this, helping us sort it all out, is John Searl, who
> has a short little book "The problem of consciousness".  Searl is at his
> best when using pellucid common language to explain why everyone else is
> being silly.  He is much less impressive when asked to introduce an actual
> new idea that moves the discussion forward.  However, in saying that, I do
> not mean to diminish the value (or the enjoyment) of his criticisms.  He has
> some language in there about various kinds of dualists, which I find
> mystifying, because it all exists within such self-referential circles of
> language that I wouldn't know how to link it to anything in the rest of the
> world.  But, if you want to know about dualists, this is a good place to
> find them categorized.  
>
> I find reporting on a lot of this like I think I would feel if sent to the
> middle east to report on exactly why it is necessary for some factions to
> fight other factions.  There seems to be a long way between being humans,
> and so exercising the individual and social behaviors that constitute
> bringing ourself to share or coordinate various internal states that we
> refer to with names for awareness or states of mind or whatever, and finding
> a language that, in symbolic form, makes a faithful representation of what
> it is that distinctively allows us to be what we are and do what we do.
> Each of these guys seems to bring attention to the absence of such language
> in one or another way.  What I can't understand is why they think there is
> anything more than "a hard problem" of inventing a valid language to
> faithfully reflect the structure of a natural phenomenon, and their main
> difference is in how much each thinks he has captured and the others have
> not.  But I think they would argue there is more to their positions than
> that.  
>
> Of course, I have no expert knowledge, and haven't put that much time even
> into reading their literatures as an outsider and tourist.  So it is to be
> expected that a lot of it will pass over me.
>
> Several of these guys have either TED talks, or lectures that stream on the
> web, which are shorter than reading their papers, but even more
> unsatisfying.
>
> Oops.  Too much text.  
>
> All best,
>
> Eric
>
>
>
>
>
> On Aug 16, 2014, at 11:04 AM, Steve Smith wrote:
>
>> Gentlemen,
>>
>> I am also interested in both the nature of consciousness and the nature of
> knowledge regarding what appear to be entirely subjective phenonomena
> (arising from the fact of consciousness?).
>>
>> The last time I attended a Cognitive Neuroscience conference (6 years
> ago?) I was impressed with how far things had come with regard to
> correlating brain imaging and *reported* subjective experiences.    I
> realize that sometimes more data and even higher quality data doesn't
> necessarily improve a model qualitatively, but I have been hoping that there
> would be some conceptual breakthroughs from this work.
>>
>> Unfortunately, as the popular media and the population in general (which
> is chicken, which is egg?) have taken a stronger interest in science (or has
> come to fetishize the artifacts of science?) there is a lot more "noise" to
> sort through to find signal.   The number of articles or even entire issues
> of magazines and the number of books on the topic has risen dramatically in
> the past 10 years or so, but I rarely see what looks like new insight into
> the nature of consciousness.
>>
>> I'm hoping someone here with more direct experience or more patience with
> the literature (BTW, the "hard literature" on the topic is generally too
> opaque for me, so I'm lost in a middle-ground limbo between the popular
> accounts and the actual work-product of scientists) knows of new insights or
> new twists on the old models to share.
>>
>> Does anyone have a short list of recent publications which reframe the
> question in a new way?
>>
>> - Steve
>>> Hi Nick,
>>>
>>> One of the problems in discussing consciousness is that it seems very
> hard to break it down into simpler concepts. There are what might be called
> "high-level" words such as "inner life", "awareness", "apprehension", which
> suggest consciousness but only to someone who already ha a sense of what
> consciousness is.  Whereas low level words, which refer to things that can
> be readily measured do not seem adequate to get at the real meaning of
> consciousness. So we are left with metaphors. When I use words such as
> "access" and "inner life" they suggest a container but they are not
> necessarily used to denote an actual container but to describe a situation
> which has some of the properties of a container.
>>>
>>> However, there does seem to be a real container that describes the
> information I have access to.  I get raw information from my body. This is
> not to say that my consciousness is located in my body, but that what I know
> about the outside world starts with how my body senses the outside world.
> These senses are then processed or contemplated somehow and this results in
> what I think I know about the world. There is no way that "I can see exactly
> what you see" because what you see comes from your body and what I see comes
> from my body. If we literally mean "see" then what you see is what enters
> your eyes and what I see is what enters my eyes. You might tell me about
> what you see, but that is not the same as seeing what you see because what
> you have seen has been processed by you then reformulated in terms of
> speech, which is then processed by me.  Even if we witnessed the same event,
> we would have slightly different viewpoints, and our eyes are different,
> and, in any case, we wou!
>>> ld start interpreting the incoming rays of light as soon as they started
> to enter our respective eyes.
>>>
>>> You also gave examples in which I might infer what you saw. This seems to
> presuppose I have a theory of what Nick is all about or some means of making
> inferences. (I don't have a well-articulated theory of Nick, but I do arrive
> at conclusions about what to make of you. I'm not certain how I do this, but
> I am certain that I do it all the time, quite effortlessly and almost
> automatically.) At any rate this drawing of inferences does not seem to be
> seeing exactly what you see, but a way (not necessarily very accurate) of
> getting a rough approximation of what you saw.
>>>
>>> --John
>>>
>>
>>
>>
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[John Kennison]

Nick:
I find your distinction between metaphysical questions and factual questions helpful because it clarifies the vague feeling I expressed about making "some sort of error" when I said that consciousness is "having an inner subjective life". I no longer feel it is an error but I should categorize it as a metaphysical position rather than a scientific fact. (I prefer the term ``scientific fact`` to your term ``fact``.) It still seems like a good argument ("I know consciousness exists because I experience it") even though this cannot be a scientific argument.

Eric, Steve, et al:
Thanks for your very interesting comments. I would like to add some further comments about Dennett. I both enjoyed and was frustrated by his book "Consciousness Explained". I recommend it highly but with the following caveats:

(1) I wish the book were organized differently. I think it should have started with    
"The Challenge" (section 5 of chapter 2, p.39-42). I paraphrase this challenge as:
             First, Dennett says he wants to explain Consciousness in scientific terms, without invoking anything beyond contemporary science. I take this to mean that he wants to show that we can analyze and explain human behavior entirely in scientific, materialistic terms without appealing to any 'mysterious' forces.  (Therefore, to focus on the behavior rather than the motives, of conscious people, Dennett starts by telling speculative stories about the phenomenology of consciousness.)  
            Secondly, he doesn't want to be like behaviorists who "pretend they don't have the experiences we know darn well they share they share with us. If I [Dennett] wish to deny the existence of some controversial feature of consciousness, the burden falls on me to that it is somehow illusory." (p.40 of the book).
             Thirdly he wants to do an honest job of explaining the empirical evidence.
This challenge intrigued me. The first and second goals seem almost contradictory. I wondered how he could possibly pull it off.
   
(2) As far as I remember, Dennett never summarizes how he met this challenge.  (I read this book over 15 years ago and I might have forgotten the summary.  At any rate, as I go over the book now, I can't find the kind of summary I would like to see.)
So here is my summary of how Dennett did:
(a) After having read the book, I feel there is no theoretical barrier to explaining all of the behavior of apparently conscious beings in purely materialistic terms.    
(b) My memory is that Dennett explains the feeling of being conscious in terms of the strong AI hypothesis, which says that any system that carries out a sufficiently complex task will automatically be conscious. I am not certain if I believe this, but it or something like it seems necessary if we take the first two goals seriously.  Dennett apparently believes that the emergence of consciousness depends only on the behavior exhibited. By contrast, Chalmers argues that a conscious systems and a non-conscious system could exhibit the same type of behavior. I don't see any reason to favor either position, but I prefer Chalmers.

(3) On Dennett's style: This is what I find both frustrating and intriguing. He seems to discuss various ideas without fully arranging them into an argument, as I would tend to do.  Dennett relies on this tendency of the reader to complete the argument. So Dennett spends less time on argumentation and more on telling stories. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. As mentioned above, I came away with a strong feeling about the first part of the challenge. I also had a strong feeling that our consciousness often fools us into thinking it is in control when it isn't. I liked Dennett's presentation of the Pandemonium model of language (based on work of Selfridge, Dawkins and others) and I feel it explains a lot of things that would otherwise be murky. On the other hand, I was dissatisfied with the chapter on "Qualia Disqualified". I even found myself agreeing with his students (and others) that he hasn't really explained consciousness --but I think he gave us a great tour of the issues.  (If I had written the book, and arranged it more logically, the thread of the arguments might have been clearer, but it would have been a much less effective book.)

--John
________________________________________
From: Friam [[hidden email]] on behalf of Eric Smith [[hidden email]]
Sent: Saturday, August 16, 2014 12:31 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] BBC News   -       Ant     colony  'personalities' shaped  by      environment

Hi Steve,

I am neither knowledgeable, nor do I have time to report even my own experiences, without making a mess of things.  But perhaps I can give some titles of things people have pointed out to me.

There seem to be several schools of approach (meaning, groups of people who criticize each other a lot).  I't hard even to know how to break them down into clusters, because there are several axes of variation.

There is a school who are mechanistic, and who think of themselves as mechanistic.

At one end within that school, one has Dan Dennett.  Much of what he says seems to me like a lot of effort to beat the dead horse of mysticism, and I have no patience for that, because I find it tedious and uninteresting.  Beyond that, it is not clear to me how much he has contributed in real ideas.  One that seems okay, if I understand it from informal conversations that have involved him, is that it involves a kind of recursive self-reference of thought.  Meaning, that thought is a process for handling responses to events (or, in a very broad use of the noun, "things"), and part of what consciousness does is render the state of thought as a "thing" in its own right, having the same symbolic kind of representation as the mind gives to other "things", so that thought can then process a representation formed about its own state.  This seems like part of the common lore, expressed already in this thread, and not novel.  Dennett seems to want to associate this ability specifical
 ly with language, and seems almost to want to treat it as an _application_ of linguistic faculty.  I don't think that is a well-motivated position, but I am glad Dennett does it because it makes an important point.  Language, in having syntax, can manipulate words within the syntactic system, much as it uses words to manipulate ideas within semantic systems.  That is hard to understand in language, and making us aware of the fact that it is hard, even though it has been before our eyes for centuries, seems helpful in expressing part of what makes assigning clear meaning to statements about consciousness hard.

On another extreme from Dennett but still materialist, we have Giuglio Tononi and his "Phi" measure.  Basically, Tononi adopts information theory as a language, and within that language introduces a concrete notion of what it means for an information system to be irreducible, in a way that I think is analogous to the notion of irreducibility of representations of groups, in the theory of representations.  The details are different because information theory is a different structure from algebra, but the basic notion of something's not being splittable into factors is the same.  I am now a couple of years out of date wrt Tononi's publications, but I think it is fair to say that Tononi asserts that having a very large irreducible component of information is the _essence_ of consciousness, and that all the other things like self-reference (which I would argue are also essential, even if irreducibility is too) are merely other phenomena of mind but not the thing that distinguishe
 s conscious states.  The Tononi development has the virtue of being an actual idea that is formalized and thus unambiguously exchangeable among people.  It may also have a kernel of something important.  Many people who work in consciousness seem to think it does.  For my taste, it is too non-embodied to likely be a very comprehensive part of the right answer.  I think both the embodied dimensions of the things that contribute to conscious states, and some kind of recursion, are primitives that are essential.  Tononi has a large book about this, and I think several shorter papers that are on the arXiv.

Somewhere in here is Christof Koch, who is also considered one of the important contributors, but I don't know what his ideas are.  I include him because if you are asking who the thought leaders at the moment seem to be, my understanding is that he is one of them.

There is also Max Tegmark, who has a recent paper "Consciousness as a state of matter", available from the arxiv.  This (which I have read) seems to me to be a smart mathematician's discussion of a generally nice point, which adds nothing of substance to where we are stuck.  Tegmark is making an argument with which I agree, that most-everything we see in nature that is robust is a "state of matter", understood as modern physics uses the term.  Hence, the distinctive and characteristic nature of consciousness too.  But the only thing about consciousness in what Tegmark builds is what he gets from Tononi.  The rest of it is more about the theory of measurement in quantum mechanics, than it is anything that distinguishes consciousness from other patterns of order to which we have given names and phenomenologies.

Now, if I understand it at a distant second hand, Chalmers has a criticism of all of these kinds of positions, notwithstanding their technical differences, which is that he would claim they fail to recognize what he calls "the hard problem".  I do not know exactly how Chalmers uses language, and I cannot speak for him, but to try to use my own language to express what I think he says, I would say he asserts that these mere characterizations of mechanism are not "accounting for" what we mean when we report "the experience of" this or that.  Here, the word "qualia" is often introduced, to refer to the antecedent of such reports.

I think Dennett thinks of (and perhaps calls) Chalmers the worst sort of Cartesian dualist, whereas Chalmers would say that Dennett is claiming that consciousness "doesn't really exist", or something morally equivalent.  I believe both of them think of the axis on which they hold opposite ends as different and bigger than any of the axes that separate the technical people from one another.   Chalmers seems (for good or ill) to attract people who do want to be dualists or mystics (or mysterians), so without putting in a lot of time with original material, it is hard to get a clear picture of him through the people who claim to render him.

Ih the middle of all this, helping us sort it all out, is John Searl, who has a short little book "The problem of consciousness".  Searl is at his best when using pellucid common language to explain why everyone else is being silly.  He is much less impressive when asked to introduce an actual new idea that moves the discussion forward.  However, in saying that, I do not mean to diminish the value (or the enjoyment) of his criticisms.  He has some language in there about various kinds of dualists, which I find mystifying, because it all exists within such self-referential
circles of language that I wouldn't know how to link it to anything in the rest of the world.  But, if you want to know about dualists, this is a good place to find them categorized.

I find reporting on a lot of this like I think I would feel if sent to the middle east to report on exactly why it is necessary for some factions to fight other factions.  There seems to be a long way between being humans, and so exercising the individual and social behaviors that constitute bringing ourself to share or coordinate various internal states that we refer to with names for awareness or states of mind or whatever, and finding a language that, in symbolic form, makes a faithful representation of what it is that distinctively allows us to be what we are and do what we do.  Each of these guys seems to bring attention to the absence of such language in one or another way.  What I can't understand is why they think there is anything more than "a hard problem" of inventing a valid language to faithfully reflect the structure of a natural phenomenon, and their main difference is in how much each thinks he has captured and the others have not.  But I think they would argu
 e there is more to their positions than that.

Of course, I have no expert knowledge, and haven't put that much time even into reading their literatures as an outsider and tourist.  So it is to be expected that a lot of it will pass over me.

Several of these guys have either TED talks, or lectures that stream on the web, which are shorter than reading their papers, but even more unsatisfying.

Oops.  Too much text.

All best,

Eric





On Aug 16, 2014, at 11:04 AM, Steve Smith wrote:

> Gentlemen,
>
> I am also interested in both the nature of consciousness and the nature of knowledge regarding what appear to be entirely subjective phenonomena (arising from the fact of consciousness?).
>
> The last time I attended a Cognitive Neuroscience conference (6 years ago?) I was impressed with how far things had come with regard to correlating brain imaging and *reported* subjective experiences.    I realize that sometimes more data and even higher quality data doesn't necessarily improve a model qualitatively, but I have been hoping that there would be some conceptual breakthroughs from this work.
>
> Unfortunately, as the popular media and the population in general (which is chicken, which is egg?) have taken a stronger interest in science (or has come to fetishize the artifacts of science?) there is a lot more "noise" to sort through to find signal.   The number of articles or even entire issues of magazines and the number of books on the topic has risen dramatically in the past 10 years or so, but I rarely see what looks like new insight into the nature of consciousness.
>
> I'm hoping someone here with more direct experience or more patience with the literature (BTW, the "hard literature" on the topic is generally too opaque for me, so I'm lost in a middle-ground limbo between the popular accounts and the actual work-product of scientists) knows of new insights or new twists on the old models to share.
>
> Does anyone have a short list of recent publications which reframe the question in a new way?
>
> - Steve
>> Hi Nick,
>>
>> One of the problems in discussing consciousness is that it seems very hard to break it down into simpler concepts. There are what might be called "high-level" words such as "inner life", "awareness", "apprehension", which suggest consciousness but only to someone who already ha a sense of what consciousness is.  Whereas low level words, which refer to things that can be readily measured do not seem adequate to get at the real meaning of consciousness. So we are left with metaphors. When I use words such as "access" and "inner life" they suggest a container but they are not necessarily used to denote an actual container but to describe a situation which has some of the properties of a container.
>>
>> However, there does seem to be a real container that describes the information I have access to.  I get raw information from my body. This is not to say that my consciousness is located in my body, but that what I know about the outside world starts with how my body senses the outside world. These senses are then processed or contemplated somehow and this results in what I think I know about the world. There is no way that "I can see exactly what you see" because what you see comes from your body and what I see comes from my body. If we literally mean "see" then what you see is what enters your eyes and what I see is what enters my eyes. You might tell me about what you see, but that is not the same as seeing what you see because what you have seen has been processed by you then reformulated in terms of speech, which is then processed by me.  Even if we witnessed the same event, we would have slightly different viewpoints, and our eyes are different, and, in any case, we w

 ou!

>>  ld start interpreting the incoming rays of light as soon as they started to enter our respective eyes.
>>
>> You also gave examples in which I might infer what you saw. This seems to presuppose I have a theory of what Nick is all about or some means of making inferences. (I don't have a well-articulated theory of Nick, but I do arrive at conclusions about what to make of you. I'm not certain how I do this, but I am certain that I do it all the time, quite effortlessly and almost automatically.) At any rate this drawing of inferences does not seem to be seeing exactly what you see, but a way (not necessarily very accurate) of getting a rough approximation of what you saw.
>>
>> --John
>>
>
>
>
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[Nick Thompson]

John,

Thanks for this.  But now I have to read Dennett again.  I am afraid my copy
is in a box in Santa Fe, so may have to come over and borrow yours for a few
days.  But I am in somebody else's vacation cabin in NH for the moment, so
it will be a while.

 The following is from my shaky memory.  Please don't flame me, anybody;
just put your arm around my shoulders and lead me from error.  

There appears to be a divide amongst philosophers of science concerning how
much to be a rationalist.  Thomas Kuhn is the classic IRRATIONALIST An awful
lot of the philosophy of science that we were all taught in graduate school
is irrationalist in this sense.   Even Popper, who stressed the logic of
deduction in his philosophy ("falsification") was irrationalist in his
account of where good scientific ideas come from ("bold conjectures").  The
hallmark of an irrationalist is a tendency to put logic words in ironic
quotes, such as "proof" or "inference" or "truth" , or to use persuasion
words ("intuition pumps") that avoid invoking logical relations.  So,
Dennett's failure to organize the book in the manner you suggest is part and
parcel of his irrationalism, as is, by the way, your observation that an
argument can be effective without being clear.  

I want to pull back a bit my distinction between metaphysical and factual.
I guess I REALLY think the distinction is relative to a particular argument.
In any argument, there are the facts we argue from and the facts we argue
about.  There is a sense in which metaphysics consists in the facts we
ALWAYS argue from.  I hope I haven't shot my own high horse out from under
me, here.  

Nick

Nicholas S. Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology
Clark University
http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

-----Original Message-----
From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of John Kennison
Sent: Friday, August 22, 2014 8:35 AM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] BBC News - Ant colony 'personalities' shaped by
environment

Nick:
I find your distinction between metaphysical questions and factual questions
helpful because it clarifies the vague feeling I expressed about making
"some sort of error" when I said that consciousness is "having an inner
subjective life". I no longer feel it is an error but I should categorize it
as a metaphysical position rather than a scientific fact. (I prefer the term
``scientific fact`` to your term ``fact``.) It still seems like a good
argument ("I know consciousness exists because I experience it") even though
this cannot be a scientific argument.

Eric, Steve, et al:
Thanks for your very interesting comments. I would like to add some further
comments about Dennett. I both enjoyed and was frustrated by his book
"Consciousness Explained". I recommend it highly but with the following
caveats:

(1) I wish the book were organized differently. I think it should have
started with    
"The Challenge" (section 5 of chapter 2, p.39-42). I paraphrase this
challenge as:
             First, Dennett says he wants to explain Consciousness in
scientific terms, without invoking anything beyond contemporary science. I
take this to mean that he wants to show that we can analyze and explain
human behavior entirely in scientific, materialistic terms without appealing
to any 'mysterious' forces.  (Therefore, to focus on the behavior rather
than the motives, of conscious people, Dennett starts by telling speculative
stories about the phenomenology of consciousness.)  
            Secondly, he doesn't want to be like behaviorists who "pretend
they don't have the experiences we know darn well they share they share with
us. If I [Dennett] wish to deny the existence of some controversial feature
of consciousness, the burden falls on me to that it is somehow illusory."
(p.40 of the book).
             Thirdly he wants to do an honest job of explaining the
empirical evidence.
This challenge intrigued me. The first and second goals seem almost
contradictory. I wondered how he could possibly pull it off.
   
(2) As far as I remember, Dennett never summarizes how he met this
challenge.  (I read this book over 15 years ago and I might have forgotten
the summary.  At any rate, as I go over the book now, I can't find the kind
of summary I would like to see.) So here is my summary of how Dennett did:
(a) After having read the book, I feel there is no theoretical barrier to
explaining all of the behavior of apparently conscious beings in purely
materialistic terms.    
(b) My memory is that Dennett explains the feeling of being conscious in
terms of the strong AI hypothesis, which says that any system that carries
out a sufficiently complex task will automatically be conscious. I am not
certain if I believe this, but it or something like it seems necessary if we
take the first two goals seriously.  Dennett apparently believes that the
emergence of consciousness depends only on the behavior exhibited. By
contrast, Chalmers argues that a conscious systems and a non-conscious
system could exhibit the same type of behavior. I don't see any reason to
favor either position, but I prefer Chalmers.

(3) On Dennett's style: This is what I find both frustrating and intriguing.
He seems to discuss various ideas without fully arranging them into an
argument, as I would tend to do.  Dennett relies on this tendency of the
reader to complete the argument. So Dennett spends less time on
argumentation and more on telling stories. Sometimes it works, sometimes it
doesn't. As mentioned above, I came away with a strong feeling about the
first part of the challenge. I also had a strong feeling that our
consciousness often fools us into thinking it is in control when it isn't. I
liked Dennett's presentation of the Pandemonium model of language (based on
work of Selfridge, Dawkins and others) and I feel it explains a lot of
things that would otherwise be murky. On the other hand, I was dissatisfied
with the chapter on "Qualia Disqualified". I even found myself agreeing with
his students (and others) that he hasn't really explained consciousness
--but I think he gave us a great tour of the issues.  (If I had written the
book, and arranged it more logically, the thread of the arguments might have
been clearer, but it would have been a much less effective book.)

--John
________________________________________
From: Friam [[hidden email]] on behalf of Eric Smith
[[hidden email]]
Sent: Saturday, August 16, 2014 12:31 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] BBC News   -       Ant     colony  'personalities'
shaped  by      environment

Hi Steve,

I am neither knowledgeable, nor do I have time to report even my own
experiences, without making a mess of things.  But perhaps I can give some
titles of things people have pointed out to me.

There seem to be several schools of approach (meaning, groups of people who
criticize each other a lot).  I't hard even to know how to break them down
into clusters, because there are several axes of variation.

There is a school who are mechanistic, and who think of themselves as
mechanistic.

At one end within that school, one has Dan Dennett.  Much of what he says
seems to me like a lot of effort to beat the dead horse of mysticism, and I
have no patience for that, because I find it tedious and uninteresting.
Beyond that, it is not clear to me how much he has contributed in real
ideas.  One that seems okay, if I understand it from informal conversations
that have involved him, is that it involves a kind of recursive
self-reference of thought.  Meaning, that thought is a process for handling
responses to events (or, in a very broad use of the noun, "things"), and
part of what consciousness does is render the state of thought as a "thing"
in its own right, having the same symbolic kind of representation as the
mind gives to other "things", so that thought can then process a
representation formed about its own state.  This seems like part of the
common lore, expressed already in this thread, and not novel.  Dennett seems
to want to associate this ability specifical  ly with language, and seems
almost to want to treat it as an _application_ of linguistic faculty.  I
don't think that is a well-motivated position, but I am glad Dennett does it
because it makes an important point.  Language, in having syntax, can
manipulate words within the syntactic system, much as it uses words to
manipulate ideas within semantic systems.  That is hard to understand in
language, and making us aware of the fact that it is hard, even though it
has been before our eyes for centuries, seems helpful in expressing part of
what makes assigning clear meaning to statements about consciousness hard.

On another extreme from Dennett but still materialist, we have Giuglio
Tononi and his "Phi" measure.  Basically, Tononi adopts information theory
as a language, and within that language introduces a concrete notion of what
it means for an information system to be irreducible, in a way that I think
is analogous to the notion of irreducibility of representations of groups,
in the theory of representations.  The details are different because
information theory is a different structure from algebra, but the basic
notion of something's not being splittable into factors is the same.  I am
now a couple of years out of date wrt Tononi's publications, but I think it
is fair to say that Tononi asserts that having a very large irreducible
component of information is the _essence_ of consciousness, and that all the
other things like self-reference (which I would argue are also essential,
even if irreducibility is too) are merely other phenomena of mind but not
the thing that distinguishe  s conscious states.  The Tononi development has
the virtue of being an actual idea that is formalized and thus unambiguously
exchangeable among people.  It may also have a kernel of something
important.  Many people who work in consciousness seem to think it does.
For my taste, it is too non-embodied to likely be a very comprehensive part
of the right answer.  I think both the embodied dimensions of the things
that contribute to conscious states, and some kind of recursion, are
primitives that are essential.  Tononi has a large book about this, and I
think several shorter papers that are on the arXiv.

Somewhere in here is Christof Koch, who is also considered one of the
important contributors, but I don't know what his ideas are.  I include him
because if you are asking who the thought leaders at the moment seem to be,
my understanding is that he is one of them.

There is also Max Tegmark, who has a recent paper "Consciousness as a state
of matter", available from the arxiv.  This (which I have read) seems to me
to be a smart mathematician's discussion of a generally nice point, which
adds nothing of substance to where we are stuck.  Tegmark is making an
argument with which I agree, that most-everything we see in nature that is
robust is a "state of matter", understood as modern physics uses the term.
Hence, the distinctive and characteristic nature of consciousness too.  But
the only thing about consciousness in what Tegmark builds is what he gets
from Tononi.  The rest of it is more about the theory of measurement in
quantum mechanics, than it is anything that distinguishes consciousness from
other patterns of order to which we have given names and phenomenologies.

Now, if I understand it at a distant second hand, Chalmers has a criticism
of all of these kinds of positions, notwithstanding their technical
differences, which is that he would claim they fail to recognize what he
calls "the hard problem".  I do not know exactly how Chalmers uses language,
and I cannot speak for him, but to try to use my own language to express
what I think he says, I would say he asserts that these mere
characterizations of mechanism are not "accounting for" what we mean when we
report "the experience of" this or that.  Here, the word "qualia" is often
introduced, to refer to the antecedent of such reports.

I think Dennett thinks of (and perhaps calls) Chalmers the worst sort of
Cartesian dualist, whereas Chalmers would say that Dennett is claiming that
consciousness "doesn't really exist", or something morally equivalent.  I
believe both of them think of the axis on which they hold opposite ends as
different and bigger than any of the axes that separate the technical people
from one another.   Chalmers seems (for good or ill) to attract people who
do want to be dualists or mystics (or mysterians), so without putting in a
lot of time with original material, it is hard to get a clear picture of him
through the people who claim to render him.

Ih the middle of all this, helping us sort it all out, is John Searl, who
has a short little book "The problem of consciousness".  Searl is at his
best when using pellucid common language to explain why everyone else is
being silly.  He is much less impressive when asked to introduce an actual
new idea that moves the discussion forward.  However, in saying that, I do
not mean to diminish the value (or the enjoyment) of his criticisms.  He has
some language in there about various kinds of dualists, which I find
mystifying, because it all exists within such self-referential circles of
language that I wouldn't know how to link it to anything in the rest of the
world.  But, if you want to know about dualists, this is a good place to
find them categorized.

I find reporting on a lot of this like I think I would feel if sent to the
middle east to report on exactly why it is necessary for some factions to
fight other factions.  There seems to be a long way between being humans,
and so exercising the individual and social behaviors that constitute
bringing ourself to share or coordinate various internal states that we
refer to with names for awareness or states of mind or whatever, and finding
a language that, in symbolic form, makes a faithful representation of what
it is that distinctively allows us to be what we are and do what we do.
Each of these guys seems to bring attention to the absence of such language
in one or another way.  What I can't understand is why they think there is
anything more than "a hard problem" of inventing a valid language to
faithfully reflect the structure of a natural phenomenon, and their main
difference is in how much each thinks he has captured and the others have
not.  But I think they would argu  e there is more to their positions than
that.

Of course, I have no expert knowledge, and haven't put that much time even
into reading their literatures as an outsider and tourist.  So it is to be
expected that a lot of it will pass over me.

Several of these guys have either TED talks, or lectures that stream on the
web, which are shorter than reading their papers, but even more
unsatisfying.

Oops.  Too much text.

All best,

Eric





On Aug 16, 2014, at 11:04 AM, Steve Smith wrote:

> Gentlemen,
>
> I am also interested in both the nature of consciousness and the nature of
knowledge regarding what appear to be entirely subjective phenonomena
(arising from the fact of consciousness?).
>
> The last time I attended a Cognitive Neuroscience conference (6 years
ago?) I was impressed with how far things had come with regard to
correlating brain imaging and *reported* subjective experiences.    I
realize that sometimes more data and even higher quality data doesn't
necessarily improve a model qualitatively, but I have been hoping that there
would be some conceptual breakthroughs from this work.
>
> Unfortunately, as the popular media and the population in general (which
is chicken, which is egg?) have taken a stronger interest in science (or has
come to fetishize the artifacts of science?) there is a lot more "noise" to
sort through to find signal.   The number of articles or even entire issues
of magazines and the number of books on the topic has risen dramatically in
the past 10 years or so, but I rarely see what looks like new insight into
the nature of consciousness.
>
> I'm hoping someone here with more direct experience or more patience with
the literature (BTW, the "hard literature" on the topic is generally too
opaque for me, so I'm lost in a middle-ground limbo between the popular
accounts and the actual work-product of scientists) knows of new insights or
new twists on the old models to share.
>
> Does anyone have a short list of recent publications which reframe the
question in a new way?
>
> - Steve
>> Hi Nick,
>>
>> One of the problems in discussing consciousness is that it seems very
hard to break it down into simpler concepts. There are what might be called
"high-level" words such as "inner life", "awareness", "apprehension", which
suggest consciousness but only to someone who already ha a sense of what
consciousness is.  Whereas low level words, which refer to things that can
be readily measured do not seem adequate to get at the real meaning of
consciousness. So we are left with metaphors. When I use words such as
"access" and "inner life" they suggest a container but they are not
necessarily used to denote an actual container but to describe a situation
which has some of the properties of a container.

>>
>> However, there does seem to be a real container that describes the
>> information I have access to.  I get raw information from my body.
>> This is not to say that my consciousness is located in my body, but
>> that what I know about the outside world starts with how my body
>> senses the outside world. These senses are then processed or
>> contemplated somehow and this results in what I think I know about
>> the world. There is no way that "I can see exactly what you see"
>> because what you see comes from your body and what I see comes from
>> my body. If we literally mean "see" then what you see is what enters
>> your eyes and what I see is what enters my eyes. You might tell me
>> about what you see, but that is not the same as seeing what you see
>> because what you have seen has been processed by you then
>> reformulated in terms of speech, which is then processed by me.  Even
>> if we witnessed the same event, we would have slightly different
>> viewpoints, and our eyes are different, and, in any case, we w

 ou!
>>  ld start interpreting the incoming rays of light as soon as they started
to enter our respective eyes.
>>
>> You also gave examples in which I might infer what you saw. This seems to
presuppose I have a theory of what Nick is all about or some means of making
inferences. (I don't have a well-articulated theory of Nick, but I do arrive
at conclusions about what to make of you. I'm not certain how I do this, but
I am certain that I do it all the time, quite effortlessly and almost
automatically.) At any rate this drawing of inferences does not seem to be
seeing exactly what you see, but a way (not necessarily very accurate) of
getting a rough approximation of what you saw.

>>
>> --John
>>
>
>
>
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[John Kennison]

Thanks Nick,

I found a few statements I would revise in what I wrote.
Perhaps, I should have said that my argument seems valid rather correct.
I was careless in describing Chalmers' view (He said something like: A conscious system and a non conscious one could be physically identical).
And I was being presumptuous  in describing Dennett as giving a great tour of the issues  --I don't know that much about the issues.
--John
________________________________________
From: Friam [[hidden email]] on behalf of Nick Thompson [[hidden email]]
Sent: Friday, August 22, 2014 12:37 PM
To: 'The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group'
Subject: Re: [FRIAM]    BBC     News    -       Ant     colony  'personalities' shaped  by      environment

John,

Thanks for this.  But now I have to read Dennett again.  I am afraid my copy
is in a box in Santa Fe, so may have to come over and borrow yours for a few
days.  But I am in somebody else's vacation cabin in NH for the moment, so
it will be a while.

 The following is from my shaky memory.  Please don't flame me, anybody;
just put your arm around my shoulders and lead me from error.

There appears to be a divide amongst philosophers of science concerning how
much to be a rationalist.  Thomas Kuhn is the classic IRRATIONALIST An awful
lot of the philosophy of science that we were all taught in graduate school
is irrationalist in this sense.   Even Popper, who stressed the logic of
deduction in his philosophy ("falsification") was irrationalist in his
account of where good scientific ideas come from ("bold conjectures").  The
hallmark of an irrationalist is a tendency to put logic words in ironic
quotes, such as "proof" or "inference" or "truth" , or to use persuasion
words ("intuition pumps") that avoid invoking logical relations.  So,
Dennett's failure to organize the book in the manner you suggest is part and
parcel of his irrationalism, as is, by the way, your observation that an
argument can be effective without being clear.

I want to pull back a bit my distinction between metaphysical and factual.
I guess I REALLY think the distinction is relative to a particular argument.
In any argument, there are the facts we argue from and the facts we argue
about.  There is a sense in which metaphysics consists in the facts we
ALWAYS argue from.  I hope I haven't shot my own high horse out from under
me, here.

Nick

Nicholas S. Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology
Clark University
http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

-----Original Message-----
From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of John Kennison
Sent: Friday, August 22, 2014 8:35 AM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] BBC News - Ant colony 'personalities' shaped by
environment

Nick:
I find your distinction between metaphysical questions and factual questions
helpful because it clarifies the vague feeling I expressed about making
"some sort of error" when I said that consciousness is "having an inner
subjective life". I no longer feel it is an error but I should categorize it
as a metaphysical position rather than a scientific fact. (I prefer the term
``scientific fact`` to your term ``fact``.) It still seems like a good
argument ("I know consciousness exists because I experience it") even though
this cannot be a scientific argument.

Eric, Steve, et al:
Thanks for your very interesting comments. I would like to add some further
comments about Dennett. I both enjoyed and was frustrated by his book
"Consciousness Explained". I recommend it highly but with the following
caveats:

(1) I wish the book were organized differently. I think it should have
started with
"The Challenge" (section 5 of chapter 2, p.39-42). I paraphrase this
challenge as:
             First, Dennett says he wants to explain Consciousness in
scientific terms, without invoking anything beyond contemporary science. I
take this to mean that he wants to show that we can analyze and explain
human behavior entirely in scientific, materialistic terms without appealing
to any 'mysterious' forces.  (Therefore, to focus on the behavior rather
than the motives, of conscious people, Dennett starts by telling speculative
stories about the phenomenology of consciousness.)
            Secondly, he doesn't want to be like behaviorists who "pretend
they don't have the experiences we know darn well they share they share with
us. If I [Dennett] wish to deny the existence of some controversial feature
of consciousness, the burden falls on me to that it is somehow illusory."
(p.40 of the book).
             Thirdly he wants to do an honest job of explaining the
empirical evidence.
This challenge intrigued me. The first and second goals seem almost
contradictory. I wondered how he could possibly pull it off.

(2) As far as I remember, Dennett never summarizes how he met this
challenge.  (I read this book over 15 years ago and I might have forgotten
the summary.  At any rate, as I go over the book now, I can't find the kind
of summary I would like to see.) So here is my summary of how Dennett did:
(a) After having read the book, I feel there is no theoretical barrier to
explaining all of the behavior of apparently conscious beings in purely
materialistic terms.
(b) My memory is that Dennett explains the feeling of being conscious in
terms of the strong AI hypothesis, which says that any system that carries
out a sufficiently complex task will automatically be conscious. I am not
certain if I believe this, but it or something like it seems necessary if we
take the first two goals seriously.  Dennett apparently believes that the
emergence of consciousness depends only on the behavior exhibited. By
contrast, Chalmers argues that a conscious systems and a non-conscious
system could exhibit the same type of behavior. I don't see any reason to
favor either position, but I prefer Chalmers.

(3) On Dennett's style: This is what I find both frustrating and intriguing.
He seems to discuss various ideas without fully arranging them into an
argument, as I would tend to do.  Dennett relies on this tendency of the
reader to complete the argument. So Dennett spends less time on
argumentation and more on telling stories. Sometimes it works, sometimes it
doesn't. As mentioned above, I came away with a strong feeling about the
first part of the challenge. I also had a strong feeling that our
consciousness often fools us into thinking it is in control when it isn't. I
liked Dennett's presentation of the Pandemonium model of language (based on
work of Selfridge, Dawkins and others) and I feel it explains a lot of
things that would otherwise be murky. On the other hand, I was dissatisfied
with the chapter on "Qualia Disqualified". I even found myself agreeing with
his students (and others) that he hasn't really explained consciousness
--but I think he gave us a great tour of the issues.  (If I had written the
book, and arranged it more logically, the thread of the arguments might have
been clearer, but it would have been a much less effective book.)

--John
________________________________________
From: Friam [[hidden email]] on behalf of Eric Smith
[[hidden email]]
Sent: Saturday, August 16, 2014 12:31 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] BBC News   -       Ant     colony  'personalities'
shaped  by      environment

Hi Steve,

I am neither knowledgeable, nor do I have time to report even my own
experiences, without making a mess of things.  But perhaps I can give some
titles of things people have pointed out to me.

There seem to be several schools of approach (meaning, groups of people who
criticize each other a lot).  I't hard even to know how to break them down
into clusters, because there are several axes of variation.

There is a school who are mechanistic, and who think of themselves as
mechanistic.

At one end within that school, one has Dan Dennett.  Much of what he says
seems to me like a lot of effort to beat the dead horse of mysticism, and I
have no patience for that, because I find it tedious and uninteresting.
Beyond that, it is not clear to me how much he has contributed in real
ideas.  One that seems okay, if I understand it from informal conversations
that have involved him, is that it involves a kind of recursive
self-reference of thought.  Meaning, that thought is a process for handling
responses to events (or, in a very broad use of the noun, "things"), and
part of what consciousness does is render the state of thought as a "thing"
in its own right, having the same symbolic kind of representation as the
mind gives to other "things", so that thought can then process a
representation formed about its own state.  This seems like part of the
common lore, expressed already in this thread, and not novel.  Dennett seems
to want to associate this ability specifical  ly with language, and seems
almost to want to treat it as an _application_ of linguistic faculty.  I
don't think that is a well-motivated position, but I am glad Dennett does it
because it makes an important point.  Language, in having syntax, can
manipulate words within the syntactic system, much as it uses words to
manipulate ideas within semantic systems.  That is hard to understand in
language, and making us aware of the fact that it is hard, even though it
has been before our eyes for centuries, seems helpful in expressing part of
what makes assigning clear meaning to statements about consciousness hard.

On another extreme from Dennett but still materialist, we have Giuglio
Tononi and his "Phi" measure.  Basically, Tononi adopts information theory
as a language, and within that language introduces a concrete notion of what
it means for an information system to be irreducible, in a way that I think
is analogous to the notion of irreducibility of representations of groups,
in the theory of representations.  The details are different because
information theory is a different structure from algebra, but the basic
notion of something's not being splittable into factors is the same.  I am
now a couple of years out of date wrt Tononi's publications, but I think it
is fair to say that Tononi asserts that having a very large irreducible
component of information is the _essence_ of consciousness, and that all the
other things like self-reference (which I would argue are also essential,
even if irreducibility is too) are merely other phenomena of mind but not
the thing that distinguishe  s conscious states.  The Tononi development has
the virtue of being an actual idea that is formalized and thus unambiguously
exchangeable among people.  It may also have a kernel of something
important.  Many people who work in consciousness seem to think it does.
For my taste, it is too non-embodied to likely be a very comprehensive part
of the right answer.  I think both the embodied dimensions of the things
that contribute to conscious states, and some kind of recursion, are
primitives that are essential.  Tononi has a large book about this, and I
think several shorter papers that are on the arXiv.

Somewhere in here is Christof Koch, who is also considered one of the
important contributors, but I don't know what his ideas are.  I include him
because if you are asking who the thought leaders at the moment seem to be,
my understanding is that he is one of them.

There is also Max Tegmark, who has a recent paper "Consciousness as a state
of matter", available from the arxiv.  This (which I have read) seems to me
to be a smart mathematician's discussion of a generally nice point, which
adds nothing of substance to where we are stuck.  Tegmark is making an
argument with which I agree, that most-everything we see in nature that is
robust is a "state of matter", understood as modern physics uses the term.
Hence, the distinctive and characteristic nature of consciousness too.  But
the only thing about consciousness in what Tegmark builds is what he gets
from Tononi.  The rest of it is more about the theory of measurement in
quantum mechanics, than it is anything that distinguishes consciousness from
other patterns of order to which we have given names and phenomenologies.

Now, if I understand it at a distant second hand, Chalmers has a criticism
of all of these kinds of positions, notwithstanding their technical
differences, which is that he would claim they fail to recognize what he
calls "the hard problem".  I do not know exactly how Chalmers uses language,
and I cannot speak for him, but to try to use my own language to express
what I think he says, I would say he asserts that these mere
characterizations of mechanism are not "accounting for" what we mean when we
report "the experience of" this or that.  Here, the word "qualia" is often
introduced, to refer to the antecedent of such reports.

I think Dennett thinks of (and perhaps calls) Chalmers the worst sort of
Cartesian dualist, whereas Chalmers would say that Dennett is claiming that
consciousness "doesn't really exist", or something morally equivalent.  I
believe both of them think of the axis on which they hold opposite ends as
different and bigger than any of the axes that separate the technical people
from one another.   Chalmers seems (for good or ill) to attract people who
do want to be dualists or mystics (or mysterians), so without putting in a
lot of time with original material, it is hard to get a clear picture of him
through the people who claim to render him.

Ih the middle of all this, helping us sort it all out, is John Searl, who
has a short little book "The problem of consciousness".  Searl is at his
best when using pellucid common language to explain why everyone else is
being silly.  He is much less impressive when asked to introduce an actual
new idea that moves the discussion forward.  However, in saying that, I do
not mean to diminish the value (or the enjoyment) of his criticisms.  He has
some language in there about various kinds of dualists, which I find
mystifying, because it all exists within such self-referential circles of
language that I wouldn't know how to link it to anything in the rest of the
world.  But, if you want to know about dualists, this is a good place to
find them categorized.

I find reporting on a lot of this like I think I would feel if sent to the
middle east to report on exactly why it is necessary for some factions to
fight other factions.  There seems to be a long way between being humans,
and so exercising the individual and social behaviors that constitute
bringing ourself to share or coordinate various internal states that we
refer to with names for awareness or states of mind or whatever, and finding
a language that, in symbolic form, makes a faithful representation of what
it is that distinctively allows us to be what we are and do what we do.
Each of these guys seems to bring attention to the absence of such language
in one or another way.  What I can't understand is why they think there is
anything more than "a hard problem" of inventing a valid language to
faithfully reflect the structure of a natural phenomenon, and their main
difference is in how much each thinks he has captured and the others have
not.  But I think they would argu  e there is more to their positions than
that.

Of course, I have no expert knowledge, and haven't put that much time even
into reading their literatures as an outsider and tourist.  So it is to be
expected that a lot of it will pass over me.

Several of these guys have either TED talks, or lectures that stream on the
web, which are shorter than reading their papers, but even more
unsatisfying.

Oops.  Too much text.

All best,

Eric





On Aug 16, 2014, at 11:04 AM, Steve Smith wrote:

> Gentlemen,
>
> I am also interested in both the nature of consciousness and the nature of
knowledge regarding what appear to be entirely subjective phenonomena
(arising from the fact of consciousness?).
>
> The last time I attended a Cognitive Neuroscience conference (6 years
ago?) I was impressed with how far things had come with regard to
correlating brain imaging and *reported* subjective experiences.    I
realize that sometimes more data and even higher quality data doesn't
necessarily improve a model qualitatively, but I have been hoping that there
would be some conceptual breakthroughs from this work.
>
> Unfortunately, as the popular media and the population in general (which
is chicken, which is egg?) have taken a stronger interest in science (or has
come to fetishize the artifacts of science?) there is a lot more "noise" to
sort through to find signal.   The number of articles or even entire issues
of magazines and the number of books on the topic has risen dramatically in
the past 10 years or so, but I rarely see what looks like new insight into
the nature of consciousness.
>
> I'm hoping someone here with more direct experience or more patience with
the literature (BTW, the "hard literature" on the topic is generally too
opaque for me, so I'm lost in a middle-ground limbo between the popular
accounts and the actual work-product of scientists) knows of new insights or
new twists on the old models to share.
>
> Does anyone have a short list of recent publications which reframe the
question in a new way?
>
> - Steve
>> Hi Nick,
>>
>> One of the problems in discussing consciousness is that it seems very
hard to break it down into simpler concepts. There are what might be called
"high-level" words such as "inner life", "awareness", "apprehension", which
suggest consciousness but only to someone who already ha a sense of what
consciousness is.  Whereas low level words, which refer to things that can
be readily measured do not seem adequate to get at the real meaning of
consciousness. So we are left with metaphors. When I use words such as
"access" and "inner life" they suggest a container but they are not
necessarily used to denote an actual container but to describe a situation
which has some of the properties of a container.

>>
>> However, there does seem to be a real container that describes the
>> information I have access to.  I get raw information from my body.
>> This is not to say that my consciousness is located in my body, but
>> that what I know about the outside world starts with how my body
>> senses the outside world. These senses are then processed or
>> contemplated somehow and this results in what I think I know about
>> the world. There is no way that "I can see exactly what you see"
>> because what you see comes from your body and what I see comes from
>> my body. If we literally mean "see" then what you see is what enters
>> your eyes and what I see is what enters my eyes. You might tell me
>> about what you see, but that is not the same as seeing what you see
>> because what you have seen has been processed by you then
>> reformulated in terms of speech, which is then processed by me.  Even
>> if we witnessed the same event, we would have slightly different
>> viewpoints, and our eyes are different, and, in any case, we w

 ou!
>>  ld start interpreting the incoming rays of light as soon as they started
to enter our respective eyes.
>>
>> You also gave examples in which I might infer what you saw. This seems to
presuppose I have a theory of what Nick is all about or some means of making
inferences. (I don't have a well-articulated theory of Nick, but I do arrive
at conclusions about what to make of you. I'm not certain how I do this, but
I am certain that I do it all the time, quite effortlessly and almost
automatically.) At any rate this drawing of inferences does not seem to be
seeing exactly what you see, but a way (not necessarily very accurate) of
getting a rough approximation of what you saw.

>>
>> --John
>>
>
>
>
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[Eric Charles-2]

I'm stepping in quite late to answer one of John's questions. He asserted that what I see is what enters my eyes and what you see is what enters your eyes, and therefore we never "really" see the same thing. (I am paraphrasing, obviously.)

I would assert that we are in is a place where "plain language" philosophy can help us out. Certainly what you see is not what enters your eyes. You never "see" complex patterns of light, you see THINGS by virtue of your sensitivity to light. Your perceptual world is full of objects and events, and those are the things you see, hear, smell, etc. (Invoke James Gibson here.) This is why we can talk about seeing different sides of "the same thing", because we agree that we are seeing the same thing.

One big problem in psychology (and epistemology) is that people get a little bit of scientific knowledge and then they start loosing track of the thing to be explained. Descartes, for instance, was interested in how we see the things around us, and he did a perfectly sensible thing: He leaned about the eye ball. In so doing, he learned that there was an inverted image on the back of the retina (and for now we will avoid discussion of how ubiquitous that phenomenon). This was a perfectly legitimate discovery, and it was reasonable to think that part of the explanation for "how we see objects" would involve understanding the role of this inverted image. However, rather than proceed with that, Descartes suddenly started asking how we see the inverted retinal image. Uhg, so many unnecessary confusions were created by this poorly conceived question! We need to try to avoid this.

Incidentally, to belatedly comment on Steve's post: I am of the opinion that most neuroimaging work in psychology is motivated by similar confusions. That is not to say that fMRI and EEG can tell us nothing, but that we are not getting anywhere trying to use it to answer such poorly conceived questions.

-----------
Eric P. Charles, Ph.D.
Lab Manager
Center for Teaching, Research, and Learning
American University, Hurst Hall Room 203A
4400 Massachusetts Avenue, N.W.
Washington, DC 20016
phone: [phone]   fax: [phone]
email: [hidden email]

On Sat, Aug 16, 2014 at 10:36 AM, John Kennison <[hidden email]> wrote:

Hi Nick,

One of the problems in discussing consciousness is that it seems very hard to break it down into simpler concepts. There are what might be called "high-level" words such as "inner life", "awareness", "apprehension", which suggest consciousness but only to someone who already ha a sense of what consciousness is.  Whereas low level words, which refer to things that can be readily measured do not seem adequate to get at the real meaning of consciousness. So we are left with metaphors. When I use words such as "access" and "inner life" they suggest a container but they are not necessarily used to denote an actual container but to describe a situation which has some of the properties of a container.

However, there does seem to be a real container that describes the information I have access to.  I get raw information from my body. This is not to say that my consciousness is located in my body, but that what I know about the outside world starts with how my body senses the outside world. These senses are then processed or contemplated somehow and this results in what I think I know about the world. There is no way that "I can see exactly what you see" because what you see comes from your body and what I see comes from my body. If we literally mean "see" then what you see is what enters your eyes and what I see is what enters my eyes. You might tell me about what you see, but that is not the same as seeing what you see because what you have seen has been processed by you then reformulated in terms of speech, which is then processed by me.  Even if we witnessed the same event, we would have slightly different viewpoints, and our eyes are different, and, in any case, we would start interpreting the incoming rays of light as soon as they started to enter our respective eyes.

You also gave examples in which I might infer what you saw. This seems to presuppose I have a theory of what Nick is all about or some means of making inferences. (I don't have a well-articulated theory of Nick, but I do arrive at conclusions about what to make of you. I'm not certain how I do this, but I am certain that I do it all the time, quite effortlessly and almost automatically.) At any rate this drawing of inferences does not seem to be seeing exactly what you see, but a way (not necessarily very accurate) of getting a rough approximation of what you saw.

--John

________________________________________
From: Friam [[hidden email]] on behalf of Nick Thompson [[hidden email]]

Sent: Friday, August 15, 2014 9:07 PM

To: 'The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group'
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] BBC News - Ant     colony  'personalities' shaped  by      environment

John,

        Ok.  I am in.  But we have to go slowly, because, as somebody
famously said, "In philosophy, if you are not moving slowly, you aren't
moving."   Not clear where to start.  I don't want to try to defend my
"insight" that our vernacular understanding of consciousness  arises not
because it is accurate but because it makes society possible. I will say  in
its defense only that the McNauton Rule which  forms the basis for our
notion of legal responsibility, states that I can only be considered
criminally responsible If I know the nature and quality of my own acts.
This phrase, "knowing nature and quality of one's acts" sounds a heckuva lot
like a definition of [self] consciousness to me.

        I thought we perhaps could start with unpacking "interior", since it
appears in both of your messages ("access").  What does it mean to say that
my thoughts  are "inside" me.  It ought to mean, if we play the language
game of "inside" by the rules, that there is some sort of container that my
thoughts are enclosed within.   The use of the word, "access", would seem to
suggest that I have ways of getting at the insides of the "box" to "see" my
thoughts that you do not have.  Perhaps the box is a 5-sided box, and it's
open side faces me, so I can see inside and you cannot?   If that is how the
metaphor works, then you should be able to come around  to my side of the
box and look in examine its contents with me.  Or, if my access is provided
by a key, you should be able to use that key to get inside my box.  In other
words, there should be some set of conditions under which you can see
exactly what I see.  Since this entailment of the box metaphor undermines
the essential privacy of mind, I assume that you would rule it out by, say,
asserting that only I have the key to my box, and I cannot loan it to you.


But now we encounter another problem.  I think you would agree that you do
have some access to the inside of my box, beyond the access that I might
provide you by telling you what is inside it.   Certainly, if I wrote you
now the words, "I really have no interest in issues in the philosophy of
mind," you would have every reason to assert that I had misrepresented the
contents of my box to you.  So, to make the metaphor work, we would have to
imagine that, perhaps it's sides are not entirely opaque, or not opaque all
the time.  Perhaps they are sometimes translucent?

How about a different metaphor altogether?  How about the metaphor of "point
of view"?  My consciousness is just that what is seen from the  point of
view on the world from where I stand.  It is mine only in the sense that it
is indexed to me, not in the sense that I own it or that it is in me.  For
example, there is a cup on my desk whose inscription is turned toward me so
that if you were sitting across my desk from me right now, you would not
"have access to it".   The inscription is, "ONLY MUGS PAY POLL TAX."   I am
conscious of it in the sense that my behavior points to it.  From your point
of view, my consciousness is just all that my behavior designates.   When
your behavior designates the relations between me and some of the objects in
your environment, you become conscious of what I am conscious.  When my
behavior designates those same relations,  I become self-conscious.  I think
"self-consciousness is what we are principally arguing about, here.

I hope this answer is somewhat satisfying.  Thanks for running me around the
track.  I am trying to write some on this subject this summer.  I really
need the exercise.

Best,

Nick




Nicholas S. Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology
Clark University
http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

-----Original Message-----
From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of John Kennison
Sent: Friday, August 15, 2014 12:52 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] BBC News - Ant colony 'personalities' shaped by
environment

Hi Nick,

I certainly don't think of what you said as "rude"  --in fact I asked you to
tell what errors you might see in what I said.
And in any case, I am very glad to agree that we are old friends and can, if
necessary, forgive what might appear as rudeness.

I am willing to accept your conclusion that the words "inner subjective
life" are not really very useful and do no contribute much to my idea of
what consciousness is. I don't think I claimed that they are either of these
things.

I am having difficulty seeing the connection between these words and a
quasi-legal understanding that I and only I get to speak for myself.
I guess I would say that my sense of what my consciousness is all about
will be different from yours because I have access to my thoughts and vague
feelings etc. that differs from the kind of access you have. It's okay with
me if you speak for myself (so to speak)  --and I imagine you will, perhaps
over the previous sentence.  I invite and will (I think) welcome your
analysis.

--John

________________________________________
From: Friam [[hidden email]] on behalf of Nick Thompson
[[hidden email]]
Sent: Friday, August 15, 2014 11:38 AM
To: 'The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group'
Cc: James Laird
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] BBC News - Ant colony      'personalities' shaped  by
environment

Hi, John,

Nothing like a sober, quiet, good question to knock an old warrior off his
high horse.

Ok.  Now that I am standing on the ground ...

First, let us stipulate, we are talking about self-consciousness, here, ...
something beyond sentience, right?  If so, then I think your question is a
wonderful example of a "mystery", like we talked about yesterday.  A mystery
is a state of pleasurable confusion generated by using words outside their
realm of usefulness.  So, I would predict that if we sat down and unpacked
"inner", "subjective", and "life" we would discover that these words have
really nothing to contribute beyond the assertion that "I, and only I, get
to speak for me."  In other words, under your use of "consciousness",  it is
really a quasi-legal understanding central to human interaction that, in the
absence of a legal certification of incompetence, our assertions about our
own needs, wants, thoughts, etc., are to be taken as definitive.   So, for
instance, what I just said -- that your view of consciousness is not quite
what you think it is -- would be (may be) seen as RUDE, in polite society,
because, on your own understanding of consciousness, you and only you get to
say what you think it is.  Because we have been friends for more than 40
years, I hoping you will let that rudeness pass.

On my account, an entity is conscious of something when it acts with respect
to it, and SELF-conscious, when it acts with reference to itself.  On that
account, a simple thermostat is clearly conscious, but not self-conscious.
A more complicated thermostat, which calibrates its own sensitivity (which
most modern thermostats do), would probably have to be admitted as
self-conscious.

Nick
Nicholas S. Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology Clark University
http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

-----Original Message-----
From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of John Kennison
Sent: Friday, August 15, 2014 11:00 AM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] BBC News - Ant colony 'personalities' shaped by
environment

Nick,

I guess my criterion for consciousness would be something like "has an inner
subjective life". It's not something that I can measure and it has the
problem of circularity  --if you ask me what I mean by an "inner subjective
life" I will soon be making a circular definition. I am willing to concede
that I don't have a suitable definition for a scientific study of
consciousness. Still the question of whether a thermostat has consciousness
seems meaningful to me. (I don't have an answer --other than "I doubt it". )
Perhaps, I am making some kind of error. If so, could you explain what my
mistake is.

--John
________________________________________
From: Friam [[hidden email]] on behalf of Nick Thompson
[[hidden email]]
Sent: Friday, August 15, 2014 10:20 AM
To: 'The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group'
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] BBC News - Ant colony 'personalities' shaped       by
environment

So, I looked up David Chalmers .  Yeh, I know:  I shouldn't have HAD  to
look up David Chalmers.   Here from Philosophy Index

A potential problem with this speculation, which Chalmers acknowledges, is
that it may imply the consciousness of things that we would not normally
consider to have consciousness at all. For instance, Chalmers wonders if
this means that a thermostat may have some experiential properties, even if
they are especially dull. He does not commit to the notion that they do, but
the possibility remains in the more speculative area of his thought.

This is one of those "TED" insights, to which the only rational response is,
"Duh!"  Why exactly is that a problem?  What exactly would it have meant to
say that "humans are conscious" if it were not possible to discover that (1)
things other than humans are conscious and/or that humans are not, in fact,
conscious.  Either we have a criterion for consciousness or we don't; once
we have a criterion, we either apply it rigorously or . we are dishonest.
It's really quite simple, actually.


N

Nicholas S. Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology Clark University
http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Eric Smith
Sent: Friday, August 15, 2014 9:45 AM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] BBC News - Ant colony 'personalities' shaped by
environment

Quick, somebody call David Chalmers!


On Aug 15, 2014, at 9:25 AM, Eric Charles wrote:


Weird that they want to call it "personality" instead of more simply saying
that ant colonies seem to adapt to their local environment. Of course, the
flashiness of the claim is the only reason it is being covered on the BBC,
so I guess it isn't that weird after all.


-----------
Eric P. Charles, Ph.D.
Lab Manager
Center for Teaching, Research, and Learning American University, Hurst Hall
Room 203A
4400 Massachusetts Avenue, N.W.
Washington, DC 20016
phone: [phone]   fax: [phone]
email: [hidden email]<mailto:[hidden email]>

On Fri, Aug 8, 2014 at 3:57 PM, Gillian Densmore
<[hidden email]<mailto:[hidden email]>> wrote:
A few swarm inteligence from the 90s described that.  Scott Kelly's "Fast
Cheap and Out of Controll"  touched on that. In his case they knew ants (and
often uncles) could pass around experience- and displayed something simillar
to hummans sense of experience they didn't have a explination. Then again
his forray into science was from the 90s.

On Fri, Aug 8, 2014 at 9:01 AM, Tom Johnson
<[hidden email]<mailto:[hidden email]>> wrote:

So who is going to integrate this into the sugar model?

http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-28658268

===================================
Tom Johnson - Inst. for Analytic Journalism Santa Fe, NM
[hidden email]<mailto:[hidden email]>.
<a href="tel:[phone]" value="[phone]">505-473-9646<tel:<a href="tel:[phone]" value="[phone]">505-473-9646>
===================================

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[Eric Charles-2]

Steve claimed that we could use the Turing test to tell if we met consciousness in a dark alley. I think, by Nick's earlier assertion, that is begging the question. Nick asserted that if "Humans are conscious" mad sense as an empirical claim, it must have been the case that our definitions of "human" and "conscious" do not entail an exclusive relationship to each other. That is, just looking at the definitions, it must have been the case that other things could have been conscious and that humans could have been not-conscious.

The Turing test is to tell if the thing you are interacting with is a Human, right? But if non-human things can be conscious, then a "Yes, No" answer regarding "human" is not an answer regarding conscious.

-----------
Eric P. Charles, Ph.D.
Lab Manager
Center for Teaching, Research, and Learning
American University, Hurst Hall Room 203A
4400 Massachusetts Avenue, N.W.
Washington, DC 20016
phone: [phone]   fax: [phone]
email: [hidden email]

On Sat, Aug 16, 2014 at 1:12 PM, Steve Smith <[hidden email]> wrote:

Standard Disclaimer for most: TL;DR

Steve, 

Thanks for getting into this for real. 

Well the language *was* a bit too easy pickings there for a moment.   And I think *that* is also relevant to the conversation, even if I *was* being teasing and flippant.   The dialog in place *was* as much about language as about consciousness.  You were talking about abstractions like "cup" and "card" which are at some level simply idiomatic.  To members of a modestly (let's say non-westernized) different culture,  both "cup" and "card" would not mean the same thing and when you met in person and showed one another those artifacts, there might be as much surprise as recognition.    I know this may be tangential to the intended point, but I still think it cannot be ignored?

 

I keep starting to feel I have irresponsibly bent this thread, but then I
remind myself that, to me anyway, the question of whether ant colonies have
personalities is the same kind of question  as the question of whether
computers are conscious.

I'm not a stickler about thread-bending myself, it is certainly a motivated tangent to the original.  And don't be shy about changing the subject-line if you feel like you are being bendy.

Just to bend/fork/twist it in another direction... I can't help but imagine that Ant Hill Art is a useful technique for trying to measure the "personality" of an ant colony (the same way the Israelis are trying to measure the "personality" of the Palestinians right now?).    Other than being destructive testing to the max, can we say that such artifacts (the aluminum casts of the ant-hill) correlate with anything we might want to call "personality" of the ant-colony collectively?   I might suggest "mood" would be a more appropriate metaphor, but still implying something familiar to consciousness.   Is it not apt to refer to an ant colony as "angry" or "calm" or (when analyzing the nest structure) "curious" or "withdrawn" or "aggressive"?  

  How it gets answered depends on the kind of
question one takes it to be.  It could be a question of fact, in which case
the answer must begin with some sort of straight-forward definition of what
would constitute a personality or a consciousness: how we would recognize a
personality or a consciousness if we met it on a dark street in the middle
of the night.

Turing Test. Right?

  Or it could be a question of metaphysics, in which case the
answer concerns the most central, and closely held presumptions of the
answerer's thought.   My sense is that you and John and Frank WANT the
question to be of the first type, but that it is, for you truly, a question
of the second type.  

I believe that the question *has* a significant component of the second type and that the first type is the only thing that has a chance to be measured directly.  At worst, the first type of question suffers from perceptual and semantic differences, while the second suffers from being at some point strictly grounded in shared axioms.  

You START with the notion that at the core of every
human being is an inner, private space from which she or he speaks, and
without that presumption, all thought must stop.

I can't quite parse this completely.  I *do* think this is how we operate, or at least this is how I subjectively feel that *I* operate and for the sake of sanity or at least social embeddedness, I assume others operate in a sufficiently similar manner.   I'm not sure what "thought" is if it isn't mediated by (if not entirely originating from) the neurological (highly coupled with and informed by the vascular, the lymphatic, etc.) system of the body.  I'm not beyond granting some ground to those who want to suggest that our individual, confined to our own body, neurological systems are somehow coupled with those of others in overt (visual, aural, pheremonal, etc.) ways, or even through shared mythologies (Ancient Greeks shared the same Pantheon, the Romans, to the extent that they

  Thus, my claim about
you-all is, that you are asking for a factual answer to a metaphysical
question, and that, of course, nobody can ever provide.

I agree.  But I also think that whilst mulling over facts in the light of metaphysical perspectives, the facts can take on some (provisional) meaning that they did not have without that, and in complement, hanging facts all over one's theories can help one to refine and understand their theories more better/differently?

  My claim about
myself is that I am just treating the question as the factual question that,
and answering it in the way that factual questions are answered.  "Is there
a unicorn in the room?"  "Oh, you mean, a horsey sort of thing with a
narwhale horn in the middle of its forehead?  No, I don't think so."  So,
the template for such a conversation would be a question, "Is X conscious or
does X have a personality?", followed by an agreement on some sort of a
procedure by which consciousness or personality is to be recognized,
followed by an attempt to relate the behavior of X to those criteria.

Ok... trying to unpack this a bit...  if I understand you correctly, I would rephrase the above to say:  I intrinsically think of this as a metaphysical question (or perhaps more aptly an epistemological one?) .  I also believe that FACTUAL things (facts about the world vs relations between ideas) are the only ones which can be tested directly.   Sometimes the *expression* of ideas and their relations can be tested (this is what psychologists and anthropologists do?), which amounts to determining (experimentally and statistically) "what people believe or perceive" but not "what they experience", if the distinction is not too subtle?

So, I have some questions for you.  First, do you accept my characterization
of the template for a factual discussion?  If so, can you explain to me what
on God's green earth  you think MRI images have to do with providing a
factual answer to the question of whether X is conscious or has a
personality?  That's an honest question.  I honestly cannot see the
relevance.

It represents the only way *I* know of right now to measure or observe anything about brain states of  directly.  In this case of humans or possibly all animals.  I don't think we can put an ant colony in an MRI and get anything meaningful from it.  I suppose we might be able to put a single ant in one, though I'm not sure.   Putting a computer or a vending machine in one would be silly of course.

Well, I can see SOME relevance, but only if I adopt the
metaphysical stance I am identifying with your position.  In other words, I
think introduction of MRI "evidence" for consciousness (or personality) begs
the question of the nature of consciousness.

This is why I asked if there were any new insights that came from such activities.  It isn't clear to me that such measurements help directly (or it is somewhat clear that they are not).  The current model, as I understand it of what MRI's (or similar) measure and what can be correlated with other observables and subjective inner states ( e.g. show me flash-cards of colored shapes and maybe you can map what parts of my brain respond to which colors and shapes, and maybe you can correlate that with others' physiological responses to the same stimuli, but does that actually say anything about my subjective experience of color and/or shape?).  I realize I'm talking more about "perception" than "consciousness" but I think the two are inextricable ("Embodied Mind" arguement). 

I happen to experience modest amounts of synaesthesia, and I have never met anyone else whose synaesthesia presents identically to my own.   I recognize the *pattern* of their descriptions of the way things get tangled, but the specifics are always unique to me (and them?).  The fact that many people can agree that "blue and green are cool colors" and "red and orange are hot colors" is a lovely generalization.  I have learned to nod (up and down) to such claims, yet my experience is somewhat more complicated and unconventional.  I can speak the vernacular language of color (if someone asks me to choose a warmer or cooler color, I know what they mean and can usually satisfy them) but the metaphors aren't as fully apt for me.   Blackbody radiation and therefore most of physics maps red to "cool" and blue to "hot" for direct physical reasons, yet the average individual maps blue to water and green to vegetation  which are usually cool and red and orange to flame which is usually hot.   If we go to asian cultures however, for example, we discover that Red is associated with life and positive energy (oxygenated blood?) whilst Green is associated with warnings and death and decay (mold and overgrowing vegetation?).  Green stop signs and lights and red traffic lights meaning *GO!*.   Such things are at least learned, if not entirely culturally defined?

I guess what I am hypothesizing is that while neuroscientists are mucking around measuring the brain's activity and trying to correlate it with behaviour (including reportage of subjective experiences), that they might trip over new ways of thinking about consciousness.  I am asking if there are new models of consciousness (metaphysical issue) which might have been inspired or tripped over whilst running lots of people's brains through machines, looking for "the lost keys under the streetlight".   I don't expect them to find the keys under the streetlight, but maybe while looking there (because the light is better) they will think of other/better places to look (or more aptly, to realize that there are no keys, or that they are not needed?).

You are safe from running into me in the street in Santa Fe until October. 

Well that is a relief!  Although I don't think I have *ever* run into you on the streets of Santa Fe excepting when we were deliberately trying to find eachother (and even then it was a crapshoot).   Of course, I spend *very* little time on the streets of Santa Fe.  And not because I fear running into you. 

I will reaffirm my desire to join the St. John's crowd on Friday AMs but so far I seem to fail at it nearly every week of every year.  But knowing you will be there adds to my interest in doing so.

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[Eric Charles-2]

John,

So, in a "snapshot" I think "A conscious system and a non conscious one could be physically identical", however, I think it would be disingenuous to say that we could not tell them apart through interaction over time. This issue is not whether or not it is easy, but merely whether it is possible.

I guess the question boils down to how you respond to challenges about philosophical zombies. These discussions normally begin with someone asserting "You can imagine things that behave exactly like you and I in all ways, but not conscious." The presenter then goes on to lay out a series of riddles these creatures lead to. However, I am not sure I buy the premise. I would assert that you CANNOT imagine such creatures. Can you really imagine a creature that acts exactly like you without consciousness? Perhaps you can imagine a creature that appears to act lovingly towards your dog (if you have a dog) without feeling the love that you feel. But can you imagine a creature that appears to act lovingly towards your dog with being aware of your dog?!?

It seems like the type of claim we allow people to get away with at the start of a philosophical discussion, because it is a pretty normal seeming premise, and we all like to play such games... but if we really stopped to consider the premise, we would not let it pass.

(Obviously, this need not be read as a question to you, it is a challenge to Chalmers and others who hold those views.)

Eric

-----------
Eric P. Charles, Ph.D.
Lab Manager
Center for Teaching, Research, and Learning
American University, Hurst Hall Room 203A
4400 Massachusetts Avenue, N.W.
Washington, DC 20016
phone: [phone]   fax: [phone]
email: [hidden email]

On Fri, Aug 22, 2014 at 1:16 PM, John Kennison <[hidden email]> wrote:

Thanks Nick,

I found a few statements I would revise in what I wrote.
Perhaps, I should have said that my argument seems valid rather correct.
I was careless in describing Chalmers' view (He said something like: A conscious system and a non conscious one could be physically identical).
And I was being presumptuous  in describing Dennett as giving a great tour of the issues  --I don't know that much about the issues.
--John
________________________________________
From: Friam [[hidden email]] on behalf of Nick Thompson [[hidden email]]
Sent: Friday, August 22, 2014 12:37 PM

To: 'The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group'
Subject: Re: [FRIAM]    BBC     News    -       Ant     colony  'personalities' shaped  by      environment

John,

Thanks for this.  But now I have to read Dennett again.  I am afraid my copy
is in a box in Santa Fe, so may have to come over and borrow yours for a few
days.  But I am in somebody else's vacation cabin in NH for the moment, so
it will be a while.

 The following is from my shaky memory.  Please don't flame me, anybody;
just put your arm around my shoulders and lead me from error.

There appears to be a divide amongst philosophers of science concerning how
much to be a rationalist.  Thomas Kuhn is the classic IRRATIONALIST An awful
lot of the philosophy of science that we were all taught in graduate school
is irrationalist in this sense.   Even Popper, who stressed the logic of
deduction in his philosophy ("falsification") was irrationalist in his
account of where good scientific ideas come from ("bold conjectures").  The
hallmark of an irrationalist is a tendency to put logic words in ironic
quotes, such as "proof" or "inference" or "truth" , or to use persuasion
words ("intuition pumps") that avoid invoking logical relations.  So,
Dennett's failure to organize the book in the manner you suggest is part and
parcel of his irrationalism, as is, by the way, your observation that an
argument can be effective without being clear.

I want to pull back a bit my distinction between metaphysical and factual.
I guess I REALLY think the distinction is relative to a particular argument.
In any argument, there are the facts we argue from and the facts we argue
about.  There is a sense in which metaphysics consists in the facts we
ALWAYS argue from.  I hope I haven't shot my own high horse out from under
me, here.

Nick

Nicholas S. Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology
Clark University
http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

-----Original Message-----
From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of John Kennison
Sent: Friday, August 22, 2014 8:35 AM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] BBC News - Ant colony 'personalities' shaped by
environment

Nick:
I find your distinction between metaphysical questions and factual questions
helpful because it clarifies the vague feeling I expressed about making
"some sort of error" when I said that consciousness is "having an inner
subjective life". I no longer feel it is an error but I should categorize it
as a metaphysical position rather than a scientific fact. (I prefer the term
``scientific fact`` to your term ``fact``.) It still seems like a good
argument ("I know consciousness exists because I experience it") even though
this cannot be a scientific argument.

Eric, Steve, et al:
Thanks for your very interesting comments. I would like to add some further
comments about Dennett. I both enjoyed and was frustrated by his book
"Consciousness Explained". I recommend it highly but with the following
caveats:

(1) I wish the book were organized differently. I think it should have
started with
"The Challenge" (section 5 of chapter 2, p.39-42). I paraphrase this
challenge as:
             First, Dennett says he wants to explain Consciousness in
scientific terms, without invoking anything beyond contemporary science. I
take this to mean that he wants to show that we can analyze and explain
human behavior entirely in scientific, materialistic terms without appealing
to any 'mysterious' forces.  (Therefore, to focus on the behavior rather
than the motives, of conscious people, Dennett starts by telling speculative
stories about the phenomenology of consciousness.)
            Secondly, he doesn't want to be like behaviorists who "pretend
they don't have the experiences we know darn well they share they share with
us. If I [Dennett] wish to deny the existence of some controversial feature
of consciousness, the burden falls on me to that it is somehow illusory."
(p.40 of the book).
             Thirdly he wants to do an honest job of explaining the
empirical evidence.
This challenge intrigued me. The first and second goals seem almost
contradictory. I wondered how he could possibly pull it off.

(2) As far as I remember, Dennett never summarizes how he met this
challenge.  (I read this book over 15 years ago and I might have forgotten
the summary.  At any rate, as I go over the book now, I can't find the kind
of summary I would like to see.) So here is my summary of how Dennett did:
(a) After having read the book, I feel there is no theoretical barrier to
explaining all of the behavior of apparently conscious beings in purely
materialistic terms.
(b) My memory is that Dennett explains the feeling of being conscious in
terms of the strong AI hypothesis, which says that any system that carries
out a sufficiently complex task will automatically be conscious. I am not
certain if I believe this, but it or something like it seems necessary if we
take the first two goals seriously.  Dennett apparently believes that the
emergence of consciousness depends only on the behavior exhibited. By
contrast, Chalmers argues that a conscious systems and a non-conscious
system could exhibit the same type of behavior. I don't see any reason to
favor either position, but I prefer Chalmers.

(3) On Dennett's style: This is what I find both frustrating and intriguing.
He seems to discuss various ideas without fully arranging them into an
argument, as I would tend to do.  Dennett relies on this tendency of the
reader to complete the argument. So Dennett spends less time on
argumentation and more on telling stories. Sometimes it works, sometimes it
doesn't. As mentioned above, I came away with a strong feeling about the
first part of the challenge. I also had a strong feeling that our
consciousness often fools us into thinking it is in control when it isn't. I
liked Dennett's presentation of the Pandemonium model of language (based on
work of Selfridge, Dawkins and others) and I feel it explains a lot of
things that would otherwise be murky. On the other hand, I was dissatisfied
with the chapter on "Qualia Disqualified". I even found myself agreeing with
his students (and others) that he hasn't really explained consciousness
--but I think he gave us a great tour of the issues.  (If I had written the
book, and arranged it more logically, the thread of the arguments might have
been clearer, but it would have been a much less effective book.)

--John
________________________________________
From: Friam [[hidden email]] on behalf of Eric Smith
[[hidden email]]
Sent: Saturday, August 16, 2014 12:31 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] BBC News   -       Ant     colony  'personalities'
shaped  by      environment

Hi Steve,

I am neither knowledgeable, nor do I have time to report even my own
experiences, without making a mess of things.  But perhaps I can give some
titles of things people have pointed out to me.

There seem to be several schools of approach (meaning, groups of people who
criticize each other a lot).  I't hard even to know how to break them down
into clusters, because there are several axes of variation.

There is a school who are mechanistic, and who think of themselves as
mechanistic.

At one end within that school, one has Dan Dennett.  Much of what he says
seems to me like a lot of effort to beat the dead horse of mysticism, and I
have no patience for that, because I find it tedious and uninteresting.
Beyond that, it is not clear to me how much he has contributed in real
ideas.  One that seems okay, if I understand it from informal conversations
that have involved him, is that it involves a kind of recursive
self-reference of thought.  Meaning, that thought is a process for handling
responses to events (or, in a very broad use of the noun, "things"), and
part of what consciousness does is render the state of thought as a "thing"
in its own right, having the same symbolic kind of representation as the
mind gives to other "things", so that thought can then process a
representation formed about its own state.  This seems like part of the
common lore, expressed already in this thread, and not novel.  Dennett seems
to want to associate this ability specifical  ly with language, and seems
almost to want to treat it as an _application_ of linguistic faculty.  I
don't think that is a well-motivated position, but I am glad Dennett does it
because it makes an important point.  Language, in having syntax, can
manipulate words within the syntactic system, much as it uses words to
manipulate ideas within semantic systems.  That is hard to understand in
language, and making us aware of the fact that it is hard, even though it
has been before our eyes for centuries, seems helpful in expressing part of
what makes assigning clear meaning to statements about consciousness hard.

On another extreme from Dennett but still materialist, we have Giuglio
Tononi and his "Phi" measure.  Basically, Tononi adopts information theory
as a language, and within that language introduces a concrete notion of what
it means for an information system to be irreducible, in a way that I think
is analogous to the notion of irreducibility of representations of groups,
in the theory of representations.  The details are different because
information theory is a different structure from algebra, but the basic
notion of something's not being splittable into factors is the same.  I am
now a couple of years out of date wrt Tononi's publications, but I think it
is fair to say that Tononi asserts that having a very large irreducible
component of information is the _essence_ of consciousness, and that all the
other things like self-reference (which I would argue are also essential,
even if irreducibility is too) are merely other phenomena of mind but not
the thing that distinguishe  s conscious states.  The Tononi development has
the virtue of being an actual idea that is formalized and thus unambiguously
exchangeable among people.  It may also have a kernel of something
important.  Many people who work in consciousness seem to think it does.
For my taste, it is too non-embodied to likely be a very comprehensive part
of the right answer.  I think both the embodied dimensions of the things
that contribute to conscious states, and some kind of recursion, are
primitives that are essential.  Tononi has a large book about this, and I
think several shorter papers that are on the arXiv.

Somewhere in here is Christof Koch, who is also considered one of the
important contributors, but I don't know what his ideas are.  I include him
because if you are asking who the thought leaders at the moment seem to be,
my understanding is that he is one of them.

There is also Max Tegmark, who has a recent paper "Consciousness as a state
of matter", available from the arxiv.  This (which I have read) seems to me
to be a smart mathematician's discussion of a generally nice point, which
adds nothing of substance to where we are stuck.  Tegmark is making an
argument with which I agree, that most-everything we see in nature that is
robust is a "state of matter", understood as modern physics uses the term.
Hence, the distinctive and characteristic nature of consciousness too.  But
the only thing about consciousness in what Tegmark builds is what he gets
from Tononi.  The rest of it is more about the theory of measurement in
quantum mechanics, than it is anything that distinguishes consciousness from
other patterns of order to which we have given names and phenomenologies.

Now, if I understand it at a distant second hand, Chalmers has a criticism
of all of these kinds of positions, notwithstanding their technical
differences, which is that he would claim they fail to recognize what he
calls "the hard problem".  I do not know exactly how Chalmers uses language,
and I cannot speak for him, but to try to use my own language to express
what I think he says, I would say he asserts that these mere
characterizations of mechanism are not "accounting for" what we mean when we
report "the experience of" this or that.  Here, the word "qualia" is often
introduced, to refer to the antecedent of such reports.

I think Dennett thinks of (and perhaps calls) Chalmers the worst sort of
Cartesian dualist, whereas Chalmers would say that Dennett is claiming that
consciousness "doesn't really exist", or something morally equivalent.  I
believe both of them think of the axis on which they hold opposite ends as
different and bigger than any of the axes that separate the technical people
from one another.   Chalmers seems (for good or ill) to attract people who
do want to be dualists or mystics (or mysterians), so without putting in a
lot of time with original material, it is hard to get a clear picture of him
through the people who claim to render him.

Ih the middle of all this, helping us sort it all out, is John Searl, who
has a short little book "The problem of consciousness".  Searl is at his
best when using pellucid common language to explain why everyone else is
being silly.  He is much less impressive when asked to introduce an actual
new idea that moves the discussion forward.  However, in saying that, I do
not mean to diminish the value (or the enjoyment) of his criticisms.  He has
some language in there about various kinds of dualists, which I find
mystifying, because it all exists within such self-referential circles of
language that I wouldn't know how to link it to anything in the rest of the
world.  But, if you want to know about dualists, this is a good place to
find them categorized.

I find reporting on a lot of this like I think I would feel if sent to the
middle east to report on exactly why it is necessary for some factions to
fight other factions.  There seems to be a long way between being humans,
and so exercising the individual and social behaviors that constitute
bringing ourself to share or coordinate various internal states that we
refer to with names for awareness or states of mind or whatever, and finding
a language that, in symbolic form, makes a faithful representation of what
it is that distinctively allows us to be what we are and do what we do.
Each of these guys seems to bring attention to the absence of such language
in one or another way.  What I can't understand is why they think there is
anything more than "a hard problem" of inventing a valid language to
faithfully reflect the structure of a natural phenomenon, and their main
difference is in how much each thinks he has captured and the others have
not.  But I think they would argu  e there is more to their positions than
that.

Of course, I have no expert knowledge, and haven't put that much time even
into reading their literatures as an outsider and tourist.  So it is to be
expected that a lot of it will pass over me.

Several of these guys have either TED talks, or lectures that stream on the
web, which are shorter than reading their papers, but even more
unsatisfying.

Oops.  Too much text.

All best,

Eric





On Aug 16, 2014, at 11:04 AM, Steve Smith wrote:

> Gentlemen,
>
> I am also interested in both the nature of consciousness and the nature of
knowledge regarding what appear to be entirely subjective phenonomena
(arising from the fact of consciousness?).
>
> The last time I attended a Cognitive Neuroscience conference (6 years
ago?) I was impressed with how far things had come with regard to
correlating brain imaging and *reported* subjective experiences.    I
realize that sometimes more data and even higher quality data doesn't
necessarily improve a model qualitatively, but I have been hoping that there
would be some conceptual breakthroughs from this work.
>
> Unfortunately, as the popular media and the population in general (which
is chicken, which is egg?) have taken a stronger interest in science (or has
come to fetishize the artifacts of science?) there is a lot more "noise" to
sort through to find signal.   The number of articles or even entire issues
of magazines and the number of books on the topic has risen dramatically in
the past 10 years or so, but I rarely see what looks like new insight into
the nature of consciousness.
>
> I'm hoping someone here with more direct experience or more patience with
the literature (BTW, the "hard literature" on the topic is generally too
opaque for me, so I'm lost in a middle-ground limbo between the popular
accounts and the actual work-product of scientists) knows of new insights or
new twists on the old models to share.
>
> Does anyone have a short list of recent publications which reframe the
question in a new way?
>
> - Steve
>> Hi Nick,
>>
>> One of the problems in discussing consciousness is that it seems very
hard to break it down into simpler concepts. There are what might be called
"high-level" words such as "inner life", "awareness", "apprehension", which
suggest consciousness but only to someone who already ha a sense of what
consciousness is.  Whereas low level words, which refer to things that can
be readily measured do not seem adequate to get at the real meaning of
consciousness. So we are left with metaphors. When I use words such as
"access" and "inner life" they suggest a container but they are not
necessarily used to denote an actual container but to describe a situation
which has some of the properties of a container.
>>
>> However, there does seem to be a real container that describes the
>> information I have access to.  I get raw information from my body.
>> This is not to say that my consciousness is located in my body, but
>> that what I know about the outside world starts with how my body
>> senses the outside world. These senses are then processed or
>> contemplated somehow and this results in what I think I know about
>> the world. There is no way that "I can see exactly what you see"
>> because what you see comes from your body and what I see comes from
>> my body. If we literally mean "see" then what you see is what enters
>> your eyes and what I see is what enters my eyes. You might tell me
>> about what you see, but that is not the same as seeing what you see
>> because what you have seen has been processed by you then
>> reformulated in terms of speech, which is then processed by me.  Even
>> if we witnessed the same event, we would have slightly different
>> viewpoints, and our eyes are different, and, in any case, we w
 ou!
>>  ld start interpreting the incoming rays of light as soon as they started
to enter our respective eyes.
>>
>> You also gave examples in which I might infer what you saw. This seems to
presuppose I have a theory of what Nick is all about or some means of making
inferences. (I don't have a well-articulated theory of Nick, but I do arrive
at conclusions about what to make of you. I'm not certain how I do this, but
I am certain that I do it all the time, quite effortlessly and almost
automatically.) At any rate this drawing of inferences does not seem to be
seeing exactly what you see, but a way (not necessarily very accurate) of
getting a rough approximation of what you saw.
>>
>> --John
>>
>
>
>
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[John Kennison]

Eric,

As I understand it, Dennett's position and Chalmers' are not only incompatible, their difference is more extreme than one simply being the denial of the other.
Dennett says that a zombie is simply impossible. If we tried to create a computer that could think like a human, it would be conscious --perhaps even if it just did a good job of analyzing things the way humans did --even without loving pets, etc. (I say perhaps, because I'm not sure what Dennett actually means.)
Chalmers says (I think) that even if we created a physically object that was identical to a human,  it wouldn't necessarily be conscious --which I find too extreme. When I said I favored Chalmers, I meant that it seems plausible that consciousness might not simply emerge if a system behaves in a sufficiently sophisticated way. --the way the system is constructed could make a difference.   But these are only top of my head guesses.

--John

________________________________________
From: Friam [[hidden email]] on behalf of Eric Charles [[hidden email]]
Sent: Sunday, August 24, 2014 10:04 AM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] BBC News - Ant colony 'personalities' shaped by    environment

John,
So, in a "snapshot" I think "A conscious system and a non conscious one could be physically identical", however, I think it would be disingenuous to say that we could not tell them apart through interaction over time. This issue is not whether or not it is easy, but merely whether it is possible.

I guess the question boils down to how you respond to challenges about philosophical zombies. These discussions normally begin with someone asserting "You can imagine things that behave exactly like you and I in all ways, but not conscious." The presenter then goes on to lay out a series of riddles these creatures lead to. However, I am not sure I buy the premise. I would assert that you CANNOT imagine such creatures. Can you really imagine a creature that acts exactly like you without consciousness? Perhaps you can imagine a creature that appears to act lovingly towards your dog (if you have a dog) without feeling the love that you feel. But can you imagine a creature that appears to act lovingly towards your dog with being aware of your dog?!?

It seems like the type of claim we allow people to get away with at the start of a philosophical discussion, because it is a pretty normal seeming premise, and we all like to play such games... but if we really stopped to consider the premise, we would not let it pass.

(Obviously, this need not be read as a question to you, it is a challenge to Chalmers and others who hold those views.)

Eric



-----------
Eric P. Charles, Ph.D.
Lab Manager
Center for Teaching, Research, and Learning
American University, Hurst Hall Room 203A
4400 Massachusetts Avenue, N.W.
Washington, DC 20016
phone: [phone]   fax: [phone]
email: [hidden email]<mailto:[hidden email]>


On Fri, Aug 22, 2014 at 1:16 PM, John Kennison <[hidden email]<mailto:[hidden email]>> wrote:
Thanks Nick,

I found a few statements I would revise in what I wrote.
Perhaps, I should have said that my argument seems valid rather correct.
I was careless in describing Chalmers' view (He said something like: A conscious system and a non conscious one could be physically identical).
And I was being presumptuous  in describing Dennett as giving a great tour of the issues  --I don't know that much about the issues.
--John
________________________________________
From: Friam [[hidden email]<mailto:[hidden email]>] on behalf of Nick Thompson [[hidden email]<mailto:[hidden email]>]
Sent: Friday, August 22, 2014 12:37 PM
To: 'The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group'
Subject: Re: [FRIAM]    BBC     News    -       Ant     colony  'personalities' shaped  by      environment

John,

Thanks for this.  But now I have to read Dennett again.  I am afraid my copy
is in a box in Santa Fe, so may have to come over and borrow yours for a few
days.  But I am in somebody else's vacation cabin in NH for the moment, so
it will be a while.

 The following is from my shaky memory.  Please don't flame me, anybody;
just put your arm around my shoulders and lead me from error.

There appears to be a divide amongst philosophers of science concerning how
much to be a rationalist.  Thomas Kuhn is the classic IRRATIONALIST An awful
lot of the philosophy of science that we were all taught in graduate school
is irrationalist in this sense.   Even Popper, who stressed the logic of
deduction in his philosophy ("falsification") was irrationalist in his
account of where good scientific ideas come from ("bold conjectures").  The
hallmark of an irrationalist is a tendency to put logic words in ironic
quotes, such as "proof" or "inference" or "truth" , or to use persuasion
words ("intuition pumps") that avoid invoking logical relations.  So,
Dennett's failure to organize the book in the manner you suggest is part and
parcel of his irrationalism, as is, by the way, your observation that an
argument can be effective without being clear.

I want to pull back a bit my distinction between metaphysical and factual.
I guess I REALLY think the distinction is relative to a particular argument.
In any argument, there are the facts we argue from and the facts we argue
about.  There is a sense in which metaphysics consists in the facts we
ALWAYS argue from.  I hope I haven't shot my own high horse out from under
me, here.

Nick

Nicholas S. Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology
Clark University
http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

-----Original Message-----
From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]<mailto:[hidden email]>] On Behalf Of John Kennison
Sent: Friday, August 22, 2014 8:35 AM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] BBC News - Ant colony 'personalities' shaped by
environment

Nick:
I find your distinction between metaphysical questions and factual questions
helpful because it clarifies the vague feeling I expressed about making
"some sort of error" when I said that consciousness is "having an inner
subjective life". I no longer feel it is an error but I should categorize it
as a metaphysical position rather than a scientific fact. (I prefer the term
``scientific fact`` to your term ``fact``.) It still seems like a good
argument ("I know consciousness exists because I experience it") even though
this cannot be a scientific argument.

Eric, Steve, et al:
Thanks for your very interesting comments. I would like to add some further
comments about Dennett. I both enjoyed and was frustrated by his book
"Consciousness Explained". I recommend it highly but with the following
caveats:

(1) I wish the book were organized differently. I think it should have
started with
"The Challenge" (section 5 of chapter 2, p.39-42). I paraphrase this
challenge as:
             First, Dennett says he wants to explain Consciousness in
scientific terms, without invoking anything beyond contemporary science. I
take this to mean that he wants to show that we can analyze and explain
human behavior entirely in scientific, materialistic terms without appealing
to any 'mysterious' forces.  (Therefore, to focus on the behavior rather
than the motives, of conscious people, Dennett starts by telling speculative
stories about the phenomenology of consciousness.)
            Secondly, he doesn't want to be like behaviorists who "pretend
they don't have the experiences we know darn well they share they share with
us. If I [Dennett] wish to deny the existence of some controversial feature
of consciousness, the burden falls on me to that it is somehow illusory."
(p.40 of the book).
             Thirdly he wants to do an honest job of explaining the
empirical evidence.
This challenge intrigued me. The first and second goals seem almost
contradictory. I wondered how he could possibly pull it off.

(2) As far as I remember, Dennett never summarizes how he met this
challenge.  (I read this book over 15 years ago and I might have forgotten
the summary.  At any rate, as I go over the book now, I can't find the kind
of summary I would like to see.) So here is my summary of how Dennett did:
(a) After having read the book, I feel there is no theoretical barrier to
explaining all of the behavior of apparently conscious beings in purely
materialistic terms.
(b) My memory is that Dennett explains the feeling of being conscious in
terms of the strong AI hypothesis, which says that any system that carries
out a sufficiently complex task will automatically be conscious. I am not
certain if I believe this, but it or something like it seems necessary if we
take the first two goals seriously.  Dennett apparently believes that the
emergence of consciousness depends only on the behavior exhibited. By
contrast, Chalmers argues that a conscious systems and a non-conscious
system could exhibit the same type of behavior. I don't see any reason to
favor either position, but I prefer Chalmers.

(3) On Dennett's style: This is what I find both frustrating and intriguing.
He seems to discuss various ideas without fully arranging them into an
argument, as I would tend to do.  Dennett relies on this tendency of the
reader to complete the argument. So Dennett spends less time on
argumentation and more on telling stories. Sometimes it works, sometimes it
doesn't. As mentioned above, I came away with a strong feeling about the
first part of the challenge. I also had a strong feeling that our
consciousness often fools us into thinking it is in control when it isn't. I
liked Dennett's presentation of the Pandemonium model of language (based on
work of Selfridge, Dawkins and others) and I feel it explains a lot of
things that would otherwise be murky. On the other hand, I was dissatisfied
with the chapter on "Qualia Disqualified". I even found myself agreeing with
his students (and others) that he hasn't really explained consciousness
--but I think he gave us a great tour of the issues.  (If I had written the
book, and arranged it more logically, the thread of the arguments might have
been clearer, but it would have been a much less effective book.)

--John
________________________________________
From: Friam [[hidden email]<mailto:[hidden email]>] on behalf of Eric Smith
[[hidden email]<mailto:[hidden email]>]
Sent: Saturday, August 16, 2014 12:31 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] BBC News   -       Ant     colony  'personalities'
shaped  by      environment

Hi Steve,

I am neither knowledgeable, nor do I have time to report even my own
experiences, without making a mess of things.  But perhaps I can give some
titles of things people have pointed out to me.

There seem to be several schools of approach (meaning, groups of people who
criticize each other a lot).  I't hard even to know how to break them down
into clusters, because there are several axes of variation.

There is a school who are mechanistic, and who think of themselves as
mechanistic.

At one end within that school, one has Dan Dennett.  Much of what he says
seems to me like a lot of effort to beat the dead horse of mysticism, and I
have no patience for that, because I find it tedious and uninteresting.
Beyond that, it is not clear to me how much he has contributed in real
ideas.  One that seems okay, if I understand it from informal conversations
that have involved him, is that it involves a kind of recursive
self-reference of thought.  Meaning, that thought is a process for handling
responses to events (or, in a very broad use of the noun, "things"), and
part of what consciousness does is render the state of thought as a "thing"
in its own right, having the same symbolic kind of representation as the
mind gives to other "things", so that thought can then process a
representation formed about its own state.  This seems like part of the
common lore, expressed already in this thread, and not novel.  Dennett seems
to want to associate this ability specifical  ly with language, and seems
almost to want to treat it as an _application_ of linguistic faculty.  I
don't think that is a well-motivated position, but I am glad Dennett does it
because it makes an important point.  Language, in having syntax, can
manipulate words within the syntactic system, much as it uses words to
manipulate ideas within semantic systems.  That is hard to understand in
language, and making us aware of the fact that it is hard, even though it
has been before our eyes for centuries, seems helpful in expressing part of
what makes assigning clear meaning to statements about consciousness hard.

On another extreme from Dennett but still materialist, we have Giuglio
Tononi and his "Phi" measure.  Basically, Tononi adopts information theory
as a language, and within that language introduces a concrete notion of what
it means for an information system to be irreducible, in a way that I think
is analogous to the notion of irreducibility of representations of groups,
in the theory of representations.  The details are different because
information theory is a different structure from algebra, but the basic
notion of something's not being splittable into factors is the same.  I am
now a couple of years out of date wrt Tononi's publications, but I think it
is fair to say that Tononi asserts that having a very large irreducible
component of information is the _essence_ of consciousness, and that all the
other things like self-reference (which I would argue are also essential,
even if irreducibility is too) are merely other phenomena of mind but not
the thing that distinguishe  s conscious states.  The Tononi development has
the virtue of being an actual idea that is formalized and thus unambiguously
exchangeable among people.  It may also have a kernel of something
important.  Many people who work in consciousness seem to think it does.
For my taste, it is too non-embodied to likely be a very comprehensive part
of the right answer.  I think both the embodied dimensions of the things
that contribute to conscious states, and some kind of recursion, are
primitives that are essential.  Tononi has a large book about this, and I
think several shorter papers that are on the arXiv.

Somewhere in here is Christof Koch, who is also considered one of the
important contributors, but I don't know what his ideas are.  I include him
because if you are asking who the thought leaders at the moment seem to be,
my understanding is that he is one of them.

There is also Max Tegmark, who has a recent paper "Consciousness as a state
of matter", available from the arxiv.  This (which I have read) seems to me
to be a smart mathematician's discussion of a generally nice point, which
adds nothing of substance to where we are stuck.  Tegmark is making an
argument with which I agree, that most-everything we see in nature that is
robust is a "state of matter", understood as modern physics uses the term.
Hence, the distinctive and characteristic nature of consciousness too.  But
the only thing about consciousness in what Tegmark builds is what he gets
from Tononi.  The rest of it is more about the theory of measurement in
quantum mechanics, than it is anything that distinguishes consciousness from
other patterns of order to which we have given names and phenomenologies.

Now, if I understand it at a distant second hand, Chalmers has a criticism
of all of these kinds of positions, notwithstanding their technical
differences, which is that he would claim they fail to recognize what he
calls "the hard problem".  I do not know exactly how Chalmers uses language,
and I cannot speak for him, but to try to use my own language to express
what I think he says, I would say he asserts that these mere
characterizations of mechanism are not "accounting for" what we mean when we
report "the experience of" this or that.  Here, the word "qualia" is often
introduced, to refer to the antecedent of such reports.

I think Dennett thinks of (and perhaps calls) Chalmers the worst sort of
Cartesian dualist, whereas Chalmers would say that Dennett is claiming that
consciousness "doesn't really exist", or something morally equivalent.  I
believe both of them think of the axis on which they hold opposite ends as
different and bigger than any of the axes that separate the technical people
from one another.   Chalmers seems (for good or ill) to attract people who
do want to be dualists or mystics (or mysterians), so without putting in a
lot of time with original material, it is hard to get a clear picture of him
through the people who claim to render him.

Ih the middle of all this, helping us sort it all out, is John Searl, who
has a short little book "The problem of consciousness".  Searl is at his
best when using pellucid common language to explain why everyone else is
being silly.  He is much less impressive when asked to introduce an actual
new idea that moves the discussion forward.  However, in saying that, I do
not mean to diminish the value (or the enjoyment) of his criticisms.  He has
some language in there about various kinds of dualists, which I find
mystifying, because it all exists within such self-referential circles of
language that I wouldn't know how to link it to anything in the rest of the
world.  But, if you want to know about dualists, this is a good place to
find them categorized.

I find reporting on a lot of this like I think I would feel if sent to the
middle east to report on exactly why it is necessary for some factions to
fight other factions.  There seems to be a long way between being humans,
and so exercising the individual and social behaviors that constitute
bringing ourself to share or coordinate various internal states that we
refer to with names for awareness or states of mind or whatever, and finding
a language that, in symbolic form, makes a faithful representation of what
it is that distinctively allows us to be what we are and do what we do.
Each of these guys seems to bring attention to the absence of such language
in one or another way.  What I can't understand is why they think there is
anything more than "a hard problem" of inventing a valid language to
faithfully reflect the structure of a natural phenomenon, and their main
difference is in how much each thinks he has captured and the others have
not.  But I think they would argu  e there is more to their positions than
that.

Of course, I have no expert knowledge, and haven't put that much time even
into reading their literatures as an outsider and tourist.  So it is to be
expected that a lot of it will pass over me.

Several of these guys have either TED talks, or lectures that stream on the
web, which are shorter than reading their papers, but even more
unsatisfying.

Oops.  Too much text.

All best,

Eric





On Aug 16, 2014, at 11:04 AM, Steve Smith wrote:

> Gentlemen,
>
> I am also interested in both the nature of consciousness and the nature of
knowledge regarding what appear to be entirely subjective phenonomena
(arising from the fact of consciousness?).
>
> The last time I attended a Cognitive Neuroscience conference (6 years
ago?) I was impressed with how far things had come with regard to
correlating brain imaging and *reported* subjective experiences.    I
realize that sometimes more data and even higher quality data doesn't
necessarily improve a model qualitatively, but I have been hoping that there
would be some conceptual breakthroughs from this work.
>
> Unfortunately, as the popular media and the population in general (which
is chicken, which is egg?) have taken a stronger interest in science (or has
come to fetishize the artifacts of science?) there is a lot more "noise" to
sort through to find signal.   The number of articles or even entire issues
of magazines and the number of books on the topic has risen dramatically in
the past 10 years or so, but I rarely see what looks like new insight into
the nature of consciousness.
>
> I'm hoping someone here with more direct experience or more patience with
the literature (BTW, the "hard literature" on the topic is generally too
opaque for me, so I'm lost in a middle-ground limbo between the popular
accounts and the actual work-product of scientists) knows of new insights or
new twists on the old models to share.
>
> Does anyone have a short list of recent publications which reframe the
question in a new way?
>
> - Steve
>> Hi Nick,
>>
>> One of the problems in discussing consciousness is that it seems very
hard to break it down into simpler concepts. There are what might be called
"high-level" words such as "inner life", "awareness", "apprehension", which
suggest consciousness but only to someone who already ha a sense of what
consciousness is.  Whereas low level words, which refer to things that can
be readily measured do not seem adequate to get at the real meaning of
consciousness. So we are left with metaphors. When I use words such as
"access" and "inner life" they suggest a container but they are not
necessarily used to denote an actual container but to describe a situation
which has some of the properties of a container.

>>
>> However, there does seem to be a real container that describes the
>> information I have access to.  I get raw information from my body.
>> This is not to say that my consciousness is located in my body, but
>> that what I know about the outside world starts with how my body
>> senses the outside world. These senses are then processed or
>> contemplated somehow and this results in what I think I know about
>> the world. There is no way that "I can see exactly what you see"
>> because what you see comes from your body and what I see comes from
>> my body. If we literally mean "see" then what you see is what enters
>> your eyes and what I see is what enters my eyes. You might tell me
>> about what you see, but that is not the same as seeing what you see
>> because what you have seen has been processed by you then
>> reformulated in terms of speech, which is then processed by me.  Even
>> if we witnessed the same event, we would have slightly different
>> viewpoints, and our eyes are different, and, in any case, we w

 ou!
>>  ld start interpreting the incoming rays of light as soon as they started
to enter our respective eyes.
>>
>> You also gave examples in which I might infer what you saw. This seems to
presuppose I have a theory of what Nick is all about or some means of making
inferences. (I don't have a well-articulated theory of Nick, but I do arrive
at conclusions about what to make of you. I'm not certain how I do this, but
I am certain that I do it all the time, quite effortlessly and almost
automatically.) At any rate this drawing of inferences does not seem to be
seeing exactly what you see, but a way (not necessarily very accurate) of
getting a rough approximation of what you saw.

>>
>> --John
>>
>
>
>
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[Nick Thompson]

Hey, wait a minute, guys!  You have lost me.  What is this "consciousness"
of which you speak.  I am not sure I have one and I need you to describe it
to me in a way that I can recognize it.

N

Nicholas S. Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology
Clark University
http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

-----Original Message-----
From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of John Kennison
Sent: Sunday, August 24, 2014 11:50 AM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] BBC News - Ant colony 'personalities' shaped by
environment

Eric,

As I understand it, Dennett's position and Chalmers' are not only
incompatible, their difference is more extreme than one simply being the
denial of the other.
Dennett says that a zombie is simply impossible. If we tried to create a
computer that could think like a human, it would be conscious --perhaps even
if it just did a good job of analyzing things the way humans did --even
without loving pets, etc. (I say perhaps, because I'm not sure what Dennett
actually means.)
Chalmers says (I think) that even if we created a physically object that was
identical to a human,  it wouldn't necessarily be conscious --which I find
too extreme. When I said I favored Chalmers, I meant that it seems plausible
that consciousness might not simply emerge if a system behaves in a
sufficiently sophisticated way. --the way the system is constructed could
make a difference.   But these are only top of my head guesses.

--John

________________________________________
From: Friam [[hidden email]] on behalf of Eric Charles
[[hidden email]]
Sent: Sunday, August 24, 2014 10:04 AM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] BBC News - Ant colony 'personalities' shaped by
environment

John,
So, in a "snapshot" I think "A conscious system and a non conscious one
could be physically identical", however, I think it would be disingenuous to
say that we could not tell them apart through interaction over time. This
issue is not whether or not it is easy, but merely whether it is possible.

I guess the question boils down to how you respond to challenges about
philosophical zombies. These discussions normally begin with someone
asserting "You can imagine things that behave exactly like you and I in all
ways, but not conscious." The presenter then goes on to lay out a series of
riddles these creatures lead to. However, I am not sure I buy the premise. I
would assert that you CANNOT imagine such creatures. Can you really imagine
a creature that acts exactly like you without consciousness? Perhaps you can
imagine a creature that appears to act lovingly towards your dog (if you
have a dog) without feeling the love that you feel. But can you imagine a
creature that appears to act lovingly towards your dog with being aware of
your dog?!?

It seems like the type of claim we allow people to get away with at the
start of a philosophical discussion, because it is a pretty normal seeming
premise, and we all like to play such games... but if we really stopped to
consider the premise, we would not let it pass.

(Obviously, this need not be read as a question to you, it is a challenge to
Chalmers and others who hold those views.)

Eric



-----------
Eric P. Charles, Ph.D.
Lab Manager
Center for Teaching, Research, and Learning American University, Hurst Hall
Room 203A
4400 Massachusetts Avenue, N.W.
Washington, DC 20016
phone: [phone]   fax: [phone]
email: [hidden email]<mailto:[hidden email]>


On Fri, Aug 22, 2014 at 1:16 PM, John Kennison
<[hidden email]<mailto:[hidden email]>> wrote:
Thanks Nick,

I found a few statements I would revise in what I wrote.
Perhaps, I should have said that my argument seems valid rather correct.
I was careless in describing Chalmers' view (He said something like: A
conscious system and a non conscious one could be physically identical).
And I was being presumptuous  in describing Dennett as giving a great tour
of the issues  --I don't know that much about the issues.
--John
________________________________________
From: Friam [[hidden email]<mailto:[hidden email]>] on
behalf of Nick Thompson
[[hidden email]<mailto:[hidden email]>]
Sent: Friday, August 22, 2014 12:37 PM
To: 'The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group'
Subject: Re: [FRIAM]    BBC     News    -       Ant     colony
'personalities' shaped  by      environment

John,

Thanks for this.  But now I have to read Dennett again.  I am afraid my copy
is in a box in Santa Fe, so may have to come over and borrow yours for a few
days.  But I am in somebody else's vacation cabin in NH for the moment, so
it will be a while.

 The following is from my shaky memory.  Please don't flame me, anybody;
just put your arm around my shoulders and lead me from error.

There appears to be a divide amongst philosophers of science concerning how
much to be a rationalist.  Thomas Kuhn is the classic IRRATIONALIST An awful
lot of the philosophy of science that we were all taught in graduate school
is irrationalist in this sense.   Even Popper, who stressed the logic of
deduction in his philosophy ("falsification") was irrationalist in his
account of where good scientific ideas come from ("bold conjectures").  The
hallmark of an irrationalist is a tendency to put logic words in ironic
quotes, such as "proof" or "inference" or "truth" , or to use persuasion
words ("intuition pumps") that avoid invoking logical relations.  So,
Dennett's failure to organize the book in the manner you suggest is part and
parcel of his irrationalism, as is, by the way, your observation that an
argument can be effective without being clear.

I want to pull back a bit my distinction between metaphysical and factual.
I guess I REALLY think the distinction is relative to a particular argument.
In any argument, there are the facts we argue from and the facts we argue
about.  There is a sense in which metaphysics consists in the facts we
ALWAYS argue from.  I hope I haven't shot my own high horse out from under
me, here.

Nick

Nicholas S. Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology Clark University
http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

-----Original Message-----
From: Friam
[mailto:[hidden email]<mailto:[hidden email]>] On
Behalf Of John Kennison
Sent: Friday, August 22, 2014 8:35 AM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] BBC News - Ant colony 'personalities' shaped by
environment

Nick:
I find your distinction between metaphysical questions and factual questions
helpful because it clarifies the vague feeling I expressed about making
"some sort of error" when I said that consciousness is "having an inner
subjective life". I no longer feel it is an error but I should categorize it
as a metaphysical position rather than a scientific fact. (I prefer the term
``scientific fact`` to your term ``fact``.) It still seems like a good
argument ("I know consciousness exists because I experience it") even though
this cannot be a scientific argument.

Eric, Steve, et al:
Thanks for your very interesting comments. I would like to add some further
comments about Dennett. I both enjoyed and was frustrated by his book
"Consciousness Explained". I recommend it highly but with the following
caveats:

(1) I wish the book were organized differently. I think it should have
started with "The Challenge" (section 5 of chapter 2, p.39-42). I paraphrase
this challenge as:
             First, Dennett says he wants to explain Consciousness in
scientific terms, without invoking anything beyond contemporary science. I
take this to mean that he wants to show that we can analyze and explain
human behavior entirely in scientific, materialistic terms without appealing
to any 'mysterious' forces.  (Therefore, to focus on the behavior rather
than the motives, of conscious people, Dennett starts by telling speculative
stories about the phenomenology of consciousness.)
            Secondly, he doesn't want to be like behaviorists who "pretend
they don't have the experiences we know darn well they share they share with
us. If I [Dennett] wish to deny the existence of some controversial feature
of consciousness, the burden falls on me to that it is somehow illusory."
(p.40 of the book).
             Thirdly he wants to do an honest job of explaining the
empirical evidence.
This challenge intrigued me. The first and second goals seem almost
contradictory. I wondered how he could possibly pull it off.

(2) As far as I remember, Dennett never summarizes how he met this
challenge.  (I read this book over 15 years ago and I might have forgotten
the summary.  At any rate, as I go over the book now, I can't find the kind
of summary I would like to see.) So here is my summary of how Dennett did:
(a) After having read the book, I feel there is no theoretical barrier to
explaining all of the behavior of apparently conscious beings in purely
materialistic terms.
(b) My memory is that Dennett explains the feeling of being conscious in
terms of the strong AI hypothesis, which says that any system that carries
out a sufficiently complex task will automatically be conscious. I am not
certain if I believe this, but it or something like it seems necessary if we
take the first two goals seriously.  Dennett apparently believes that the
emergence of consciousness depends only on the behavior exhibited. By
contrast, Chalmers argues that a conscious systems and a non-conscious
system could exhibit the same type of behavior. I don't see any reason to
favor either position, but I prefer Chalmers.

(3) On Dennett's style: This is what I find both frustrating and intriguing.
He seems to discuss various ideas without fully arranging them into an
argument, as I would tend to do.  Dennett relies on this tendency of the
reader to complete the argument. So Dennett spends less time on
argumentation and more on telling stories. Sometimes it works, sometimes it
doesn't. As mentioned above, I came away with a strong feeling about the
first part of the challenge. I also had a strong feeling that our
consciousness often fools us into thinking it is in control when it isn't. I
liked Dennett's presentation of the Pandemonium model of language (based on
work of Selfridge, Dawkins and others) and I feel it explains a lot of
things that would otherwise be murky. On the other hand, I was dissatisfied
with the chapter on "Qualia Disqualified". I even found myself agreeing with
his students (and others) that he hasn't really explained consciousness
--but I think he gave us a great tour of the issues.  (If I had written the
book, and arranged it more logically, the thread of the arguments might have
been clearer, but it would have been a much less effective book.)

--John
________________________________________
From: Friam [[hidden email]<mailto:[hidden email]>] on
behalf of Eric Smith [[hidden email]<mailto:[hidden email]>]
Sent: Saturday, August 16, 2014 12:31 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] BBC News   -       Ant     colony  'personalities'
shaped  by      environment

Hi Steve,

I am neither knowledgeable, nor do I have time to report even my own
experiences, without making a mess of things.  But perhaps I can give some
titles of things people have pointed out to me.

There seem to be several schools of approach (meaning, groups of people who
criticize each other a lot).  I't hard even to know how to break them down
into clusters, because there are several axes of variation.

There is a school who are mechanistic, and who think of themselves as
mechanistic.

At one end within that school, one has Dan Dennett.  Much of what he says
seems to me like a lot of effort to beat the dead horse of mysticism, and I
have no patience for that, because I find it tedious and uninteresting.
Beyond that, it is not clear to me how much he has contributed in real
ideas.  One that seems okay, if I understand it from informal conversations
that have involved him, is that it involves a kind of recursive
self-reference of thought.  Meaning, that thought is a process for handling
responses to events (or, in a very broad use of the noun, "things"), and
part of what consciousness does is render the state of thought as a "thing"
in its own right, having the same symbolic kind of representation as the
mind gives to other "things", so that thought can then process a
representation formed about its own state.  This seems like part of the
common lore, expressed already in this thread, and not novel.  Dennett seems
to want to associate this ability specifical  ly with language, and seems
almost to want to treat it as an _application_ of linguistic faculty.  I
don't think that is a well-motivated position, but I am glad Dennett does it
because it makes an important point.  Language, in having syntax, can
manipulate words within the syntactic system, much as it uses words to
manipulate ideas within semantic systems.  That is hard to understand in
language, and making us aware of the fact that it is hard, even though it
has been before our eyes for centuries, seems helpful in expressing part of
what makes assigning clear meaning to statements about consciousness hard.

On another extreme from Dennett but still materialist, we have Giuglio
Tononi and his "Phi" measure.  Basically, Tononi adopts information theory
as a language, and within that language introduces a concrete notion of what
it means for an information system to be irreducible, in a way that I think
is analogous to the notion of irreducibility of representations of groups,
in the theory of representations.  The details are different because
information theory is a different structure from algebra, but the basic
notion of something's not being splittable into factors is the same.  I am
now a couple of years out of date wrt Tononi's publications, but I think it
is fair to say that Tononi asserts that having a very large irreducible
component of information is the _essence_ of consciousness, and that all the
other things like self-reference (which I would argue are also essential,
even if irreducibility is too) are merely other phenomena of mind but not
the thing that distinguishe  s conscious states.  The Tononi development has
the virtue of being an actual idea that is formalized and thus unambiguously
exchangeable among people.  It may also have a kernel of something
important.  Many people who work in consciousness seem to think it does.
For my taste, it is too non-embodied to likely be a very comprehensive part
of the right answer.  I think both the embodied dimensions of the things
that contribute to conscious states, and some kind of recursion, are
primitives that are essential.  Tononi has a large book about this, and I
think several shorter papers that are on the arXiv.

Somewhere in here is Christof Koch, who is also considered one of the
important contributors, but I don't know what his ideas are.  I include him
because if you are asking who the thought leaders at the moment seem to be,
my understanding is that he is one of them.

There is also Max Tegmark, who has a recent paper "Consciousness as a state
of matter", available from the arxiv.  This (which I have read) seems to me
to be a smart mathematician's discussion of a generally nice point, which
adds nothing of substance to where we are stuck.  Tegmark is making an
argument with which I agree, that most-everything we see in nature that is
robust is a "state of matter", understood as modern physics uses the term.
Hence, the distinctive and characteristic nature of consciousness too.  But
the only thing about consciousness in what Tegmark builds is what he gets
from Tononi.  The rest of it is more about the theory of measurement in
quantum mechanics, than it is anything that distinguishes consciousness from
other patterns of order to which we have given names and phenomenologies.

Now, if I understand it at a distant second hand, Chalmers has a criticism
of all of these kinds of positions, notwithstanding their technical
differences, which is that he would claim they fail to recognize what he
calls "the hard problem".  I do not know exactly how Chalmers uses language,
and I cannot speak for him, but to try to use my own language to express
what I think he says, I would say he asserts that these mere
characterizations of mechanism are not "accounting for" what we mean when we
report "the experience of" this or that.  Here, the word "qualia" is often
introduced, to refer to the antecedent of such reports.

I think Dennett thinks of (and perhaps calls) Chalmers the worst sort of
Cartesian dualist, whereas Chalmers would say that Dennett is claiming that
consciousness "doesn't really exist", or something morally equivalent.  I
believe both of them think of the axis on which they hold opposite ends as
different and bigger than any of the axes that separate the technical people
from one another.   Chalmers seems (for good or ill) to attract people who
do want to be dualists or mystics (or mysterians), so without putting in a
lot of time with original material, it is hard to get a clear picture of him
through the people who claim to render him.

Ih the middle of all this, helping us sort it all out, is John Searl, who
has a short little book "The problem of consciousness".  Searl is at his
best when using pellucid common language to explain why everyone else is
being silly.  He is much less impressive when asked to introduce an actual
new idea that moves the discussion forward.  However, in saying that, I do
not mean to diminish the value (or the enjoyment) of his criticisms.  He has
some language in there about various kinds of dualists, which I find
mystifying, because it all exists within such self-referential circles of
language that I wouldn't know how to link it to anything in the rest of the
world.  But, if you want to know about dualists, this is a good place to
find them categorized.

I find reporting on a lot of this like I think I would feel if sent to the
middle east to report on exactly why it is necessary for some factions to
fight other factions.  There seems to be a long way between being humans,
and so exercising the individual and social behaviors that constitute
bringing ourself to share or coordinate various internal states that we
refer to with names for awareness or states of mind or whatever, and finding
a language that, in symbolic form, makes a faithful representation of what
it is that distinctively allows us to be what we are and do what we do.
Each of these guys seems to bring attention to the absence of such language
in one or another way.  What I can't understand is why they think there is
anything more than "a hard problem" of inventing a valid language to
faithfully reflect the structure of a natural phenomenon, and their main
difference is in how much each thinks he has captured and the others have
not.  But I think they would argu  e there is more to their positions than
that.

Of course, I have no expert knowledge, and haven't put that much time even
into reading their literatures as an outsider and tourist.  So it is to be
expected that a lot of it will pass over me.

Several of these guys have either TED talks, or lectures that stream on the
web, which are shorter than reading their papers, but even more
unsatisfying.

Oops.  Too much text.

All best,

Eric





On Aug 16, 2014, at 11:04 AM, Steve Smith wrote:

> Gentlemen,
>
> I am also interested in both the nature of consciousness and the
> nature of
knowledge regarding what appear to be entirely subjective phenonomena
(arising from the fact of consciousness?).
>
> The last time I attended a Cognitive Neuroscience conference (6 years
ago?) I was impressed with how far things had come with regard to
correlating brain imaging and *reported* subjective experiences.    I
realize that sometimes more data and even higher quality data doesn't
necessarily improve a model qualitatively, but I have been hoping that there
would be some conceptual breakthroughs from this work.
>
> Unfortunately, as the popular media and the population in general
> (which
is chicken, which is egg?) have taken a stronger interest in science (or has
come to fetishize the artifacts of science?) there is a lot more "noise" to
sort through to find signal.   The number of articles or even entire issues
of magazines and the number of books on the topic has risen dramatically in
the past 10 years or so, but I rarely see what looks like new insight into
the nature of consciousness.
>
> I'm hoping someone here with more direct experience or more patience
> with
the literature (BTW, the "hard literature" on the topic is generally too
opaque for me, so I'm lost in a middle-ground limbo between the popular
accounts and the actual work-product of scientists) knows of new insights or
new twists on the old models to share.
>
> Does anyone have a short list of recent publications which reframe the
question in a new way?
>
> - Steve
>> Hi Nick,
>>
>> One of the problems in discussing consciousness is that it seems very
hard to break it down into simpler concepts. There are what might be called
"high-level" words such as "inner life", "awareness", "apprehension", which
suggest consciousness but only to someone who already ha a sense of what
consciousness is.  Whereas low level words, which refer to things that can
be readily measured do not seem adequate to get at the real meaning of
consciousness. So we are left with metaphors. When I use words such as
"access" and "inner life" they suggest a container but they are not
necessarily used to denote an actual container but to describe a situation
which has some of the properties of a container.

>>
>> However, there does seem to be a real container that describes the
>> information I have access to.  I get raw information from my body.
>> This is not to say that my consciousness is located in my body, but
>> that what I know about the outside world starts with how my body
>> senses the outside world. These senses are then processed or
>> contemplated somehow and this results in what I think I know about
>> the world. There is no way that "I can see exactly what you see"
>> because what you see comes from your body and what I see comes from
>> my body. If we literally mean "see" then what you see is what enters
>> your eyes and what I see is what enters my eyes. You might tell me
>> about what you see, but that is not the same as seeing what you see
>> because what you have seen has been processed by you then
>> reformulated in terms of speech, which is then processed by me.  Even
>> if we witnessed the same event, we would have slightly different
>> viewpoints, and our eyes are different, and, in any case, we w

 ou!
>>  ld start interpreting the incoming rays of light as soon as they
>> started
to enter our respective eyes.
>>
>> You also gave examples in which I might infer what you saw. This
>> seems to
presuppose I have a theory of what Nick is all about or some means of making
inferences. (I don't have a well-articulated theory of Nick, but I do arrive
at conclusions about what to make of you. I'm not certain how I do this, but
I am certain that I do it all the time, quite effortlessly and almost
automatically.) At any rate this drawing of inferences does not seem to be
seeing exactly what you see, but a way (not necessarily very accurate) of
getting a rough approximation of what you saw.

>>
>> --John
>>
>
>
>
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[Steve Smith]

> Hey, wait a minute, guys!  You have lost me.  What is this "consciousness"
> of which you speak.  I am not sure I have one and I need you to describe it
> to me in a way that I can recognize it.
No you don't... and if you don't know that, then you are not a truly
conscious being, but rather a clever simulacrum of one.

>
> N
>
> Nicholas S. Thompson
> Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology
> Clark University
> http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of John Kennison
> Sent: Sunday, August 24, 2014 11:50 AM
> To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] BBC News - Ant colony 'personalities' shaped by
> environment
>
> Eric,
>
> As I understand it, Dennett's position and Chalmers' are not only
> incompatible, their difference is more extreme than one simply being the
> denial of the other.
> Dennett says that a zombie is simply impossible. If we tried to create a
> computer that could think like a human, it would be conscious --perhaps even
> if it just did a good job of analyzing things the way humans did --even
> without loving pets, etc. (I say perhaps, because I'm not sure what Dennett
> actually means.)
> Chalmers says (I think) that even if we created a physically object that was
> identical to a human,  it wouldn't necessarily be conscious --which I find
> too extreme. When I said I favored Chalmers, I meant that it seems plausible
> that consciousness might not simply emerge if a system behaves in a
> sufficiently sophisticated way. --the way the system is constructed could
> make a difference.   But these are only top of my head guesses.
>
> --John
>
> ________________________________________
> From: Friam [[hidden email]] on behalf of Eric Charles
> [[hidden email]]
> Sent: Sunday, August 24, 2014 10:04 AM
> To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] BBC News - Ant colony 'personalities' shaped by
> environment
>
> John,
> So, in a "snapshot" I think "A conscious system and a non conscious one
> could be physically identical", however, I think it would be disingenuous to
> say that we could not tell them apart through interaction over time. This
> issue is not whether or not it is easy, but merely whether it is possible.
>
> I guess the question boils down to how you respond to challenges about
> philosophical zombies. These discussions normally begin with someone
> asserting "You can imagine things that behave exactly like you and I in all
> ways, but not conscious." The presenter then goes on to lay out a series of
> riddles these creatures lead to. However, I am not sure I buy the premise. I
> would assert that you CANNOT imagine such creatures. Can you really imagine
> a creature that acts exactly like you without consciousness? Perhaps you can
> imagine a creature that appears to act lovingly towards your dog (if you
> have a dog) without feeling the love that you feel. But can you imagine a
> creature that appears to act lovingly towards your dog with being aware of
> your dog?!?
>
> It seems like the type of claim we allow people to get away with at the
> start of a philosophical discussion, because it is a pretty normal seeming
> premise, and we all like to play such games... but if we really stopped to
> consider the premise, we would not let it pass.
>
> (Obviously, this need not be read as a question to you, it is a challenge to
> Chalmers and others who hold those views.)
>
> Eric
>
>
>
> -----------
> Eric P. Charles, Ph.D.
> Lab Manager
> Center for Teaching, Research, and Learning American University, Hurst Hall
> Room 203A
> 4400 Massachusetts Avenue, N.W.
> Washington, DC 20016
> phone: [phone]   fax: [phone]
> email: [hidden email]<mailto:[hidden email]>
>
>
> On Fri, Aug 22, 2014 at 1:16 PM, John Kennison
> <[hidden email]<mailto:[hidden email]>> wrote:
> Thanks Nick,
>
> I found a few statements I would revise in what I wrote.
> Perhaps, I should have said that my argument seems valid rather correct.
> I was careless in describing Chalmers' view (He said something like: A
> conscious system and a non conscious one could be physically identical).
> And I was being presumptuous  in describing Dennett as giving a great tour
> of the issues  --I don't know that much about the issues.
> --John
> ________________________________________
> From: Friam [[hidden email]<mailto:[hidden email]>] on
> behalf of Nick Thompson
> [[hidden email]<mailto:[hidden email]>]
> Sent: Friday, August 22, 2014 12:37 PM
> To: 'The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group'
> Subject: Re: [FRIAM]    BBC     News    -       Ant     colony
> 'personalities' shaped  by      environment
>
> John,
>
> Thanks for this.  But now I have to read Dennett again.  I am afraid my copy
> is in a box in Santa Fe, so may have to come over and borrow yours for a few
> days.  But I am in somebody else's vacation cabin in NH for the moment, so
> it will be a while.
>
>   The following is from my shaky memory.  Please don't flame me, anybody;
> just put your arm around my shoulders and lead me from error.
>
> There appears to be a divide amongst philosophers of science concerning how
> much to be a rationalist.  Thomas Kuhn is the classic IRRATIONALIST An awful
> lot of the philosophy of science that we were all taught in graduate school
> is irrationalist in this sense.   Even Popper, who stressed the logic of
> deduction in his philosophy ("falsification") was irrationalist in his
> account of where good scientific ideas come from ("bold conjectures").  The
> hallmark of an irrationalist is a tendency to put logic words in ironic
> quotes, such as "proof" or "inference" or "truth" , or to use persuasion
> words ("intuition pumps") that avoid invoking logical relations.  So,
> Dennett's failure to organize the book in the manner you suggest is part and
> parcel of his irrationalism, as is, by the way, your observation that an
> argument can be effective without being clear.
>
> I want to pull back a bit my distinction between metaphysical and factual.
> I guess I REALLY think the distinction is relative to a particular argument.
> In any argument, there are the facts we argue from and the facts we argue
> about.  There is a sense in which metaphysics consists in the facts we
> ALWAYS argue from.  I hope I haven't shot my own high horse out from under
> me, here.
>
> Nick
>
> Nicholas S. Thompson
> Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology Clark University
> http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Friam
> [mailto:[hidden email]<mailto:[hidden email]>] On
> Behalf Of John Kennison
> Sent: Friday, August 22, 2014 8:35 AM
> To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] BBC News - Ant colony 'personalities' shaped by
> environment
>
> Nick:
> I find your distinction between metaphysical questions and factual questions
> helpful because it clarifies the vague feeling I expressed about making
> "some sort of error" when I said that consciousness is "having an inner
> subjective life". I no longer feel it is an error but I should categorize it
> as a metaphysical position rather than a scientific fact. (I prefer the term
> ``scientific fact`` to your term ``fact``.) It still seems like a good
> argument ("I know consciousness exists because I experience it") even though
> this cannot be a scientific argument.
>
> Eric, Steve, et al:
> Thanks for your very interesting comments. I would like to add some further
> comments about Dennett. I both enjoyed and was frustrated by his book
> "Consciousness Explained". I recommend it highly but with the following
> caveats:
>
> (1) I wish the book were organized differently. I think it should have
> started with "The Challenge" (section 5 of chapter 2, p.39-42). I paraphrase
> this challenge as:
>               First, Dennett says he wants to explain Consciousness in
> scientific terms, without invoking anything beyond contemporary science. I
> take this to mean that he wants to show that we can analyze and explain
> human behavior entirely in scientific, materialistic terms without appealing
> to any 'mysterious' forces.  (Therefore, to focus on the behavior rather
> than the motives, of conscious people, Dennett starts by telling speculative
> stories about the phenomenology of consciousness.)
>              Secondly, he doesn't want to be like behaviorists who "pretend
> they don't have the experiences we know darn well they share they share with
> us. If I [Dennett] wish to deny the existence of some controversial feature
> of consciousness, the burden falls on me to that it is somehow illusory."
> (p.40 of the book).
>               Thirdly he wants to do an honest job of explaining the
> empirical evidence.
> This challenge intrigued me. The first and second goals seem almost
> contradictory. I wondered how he could possibly pull it off.
>
> (2) As far as I remember, Dennett never summarizes how he met this
> challenge.  (I read this book over 15 years ago and I might have forgotten
> the summary.  At any rate, as I go over the book now, I can't find the kind
> of summary I would like to see.) So here is my summary of how Dennett did:
> (a) After having read the book, I feel there is no theoretical barrier to
> explaining all of the behavior of apparently conscious beings in purely
> materialistic terms.
> (b) My memory is that Dennett explains the feeling of being conscious in
> terms of the strong AI hypothesis, which says that any system that carries
> out a sufficiently complex task will automatically be conscious. I am not
> certain if I believe this, but it or something like it seems necessary if we
> take the first two goals seriously.  Dennett apparently believes that the
> emergence of consciousness depends only on the behavior exhibited. By
> contrast, Chalmers argues that a conscious systems and a non-conscious
> system could exhibit the same type of behavior. I don't see any reason to
> favor either position, but I prefer Chalmers.
>
> (3) On Dennett's style: This is what I find both frustrating and intriguing.
> He seems to discuss various ideas without fully arranging them into an
> argument, as I would tend to do.  Dennett relies on this tendency of the
> reader to complete the argument. So Dennett spends less time on
> argumentation and more on telling stories. Sometimes it works, sometimes it
> doesn't. As mentioned above, I came away with a strong feeling about the
> first part of the challenge. I also had a strong feeling that our
> consciousness often fools us into thinking it is in control when it isn't. I
> liked Dennett's presentation of the Pandemonium model of language (based on
> work of Selfridge, Dawkins and others) and I feel it explains a lot of
> things that would otherwise be murky. On the other hand, I was dissatisfied
> with the chapter on "Qualia Disqualified". I even found myself agreeing with
> his students (and others) that he hasn't really explained consciousness
> --but I think he gave us a great tour of the issues.  (If I had written the
> book, and arranged it more logically, the thread of the arguments might have
> been clearer, but it would have been a much less effective book.)
>
> --John
> ________________________________________
> From: Friam [[hidden email]<mailto:[hidden email]>] on
> behalf of Eric Smith [[hidden email]<mailto:[hidden email]>]
> Sent: Saturday, August 16, 2014 12:31 PM
> To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] BBC News   -       Ant     colony  'personalities'
> shaped  by      environment
>
> Hi Steve,
>
> I am neither knowledgeable, nor do I have time to report even my own
> experiences, without making a mess of things.  But perhaps I can give some
> titles of things people have pointed out to me.
>
> There seem to be several schools of approach (meaning, groups of people who
> criticize each other a lot).  I't hard even to know how to break them down
> into clusters, because there are several axes of variation.
>
> There is a school who are mechanistic, and who think of themselves as
> mechanistic.
>
> At one end within that school, one has Dan Dennett.  Much of what he says
> seems to me like a lot of effort to beat the dead horse of mysticism, and I
> have no patience for that, because I find it tedious and uninteresting.
> Beyond that, it is not clear to me how much he has contributed in real
> ideas.  One that seems okay, if I understand it from informal conversations
> that have involved him, is that it involves a kind of recursive
> self-reference of thought.  Meaning, that thought is a process for handling
> responses to events (or, in a very broad use of the noun, "things"), and
> part of what consciousness does is render the state of thought as a "thing"
> in its own right, having the same symbolic kind of representation as the
> mind gives to other "things", so that thought can then process a
> representation formed about its own state.  This seems like part of the
> common lore, expressed already in this thread, and not novel.  Dennett seems
> to want to associate this ability specifical  ly with language, and seems
> almost to want to treat it as an _application_ of linguistic faculty.  I
> don't think that is a well-motivated position, but I am glad Dennett does it
> because it makes an important point.  Language, in having syntax, can
> manipulate words within the syntactic system, much as it uses words to
> manipulate ideas within semantic systems.  That is hard to understand in
> language, and making us aware of the fact that it is hard, even though it
> has been before our eyes for centuries, seems helpful in expressing part of
> what makes assigning clear meaning to statements about consciousness hard.
>
> On another extreme from Dennett but still materialist, we have Giuglio
> Tononi and his "Phi" measure.  Basically, Tononi adopts information theory
> as a language, and within that language introduces a concrete notion of what
> it means for an information system to be irreducible, in a way that I think
> is analogous to the notion of irreducibility of representations of groups,
> in the theory of representations.  The details are different because
> information theory is a different structure from algebra, but the basic
> notion of something's not being splittable into factors is the same.  I am
> now a couple of years out of date wrt Tononi's publications, but I think it
> is fair to say that Tononi asserts that having a very large irreducible
> component of information is the _essence_ of consciousness, and that all the
> other things like self-reference (which I would argue are also essential,
> even if irreducibility is too) are merely other phenomena of mind but not
> the thing that distinguishe  s conscious states.  The Tononi development has
> the virtue of being an actual idea that is formalized and thus unambiguously
> exchangeable among people.  It may also have a kernel of something
> important.  Many people who work in consciousness seem to think it does.
> For my taste, it is too non-embodied to likely be a very comprehensive part
> of the right answer.  I think both the embodied dimensions of the things
> that contribute to conscious states, and some kind of recursion, are
> primitives that are essential.  Tononi has a large book about this, and I
> think several shorter papers that are on the arXiv.
>
> Somewhere in here is Christof Koch, who is also considered one of the
> important contributors, but I don't know what his ideas are.  I include him
> because if you are asking who the thought leaders at the moment seem to be,
> my understanding is that he is one of them.
>
> There is also Max Tegmark, who has a recent paper "Consciousness as a state
> of matter", available from the arxiv.  This (which I have read) seems to me
> to be a smart mathematician's discussion of a generally nice point, which
> adds nothing of substance to where we are stuck.  Tegmark is making an
> argument with which I agree, that most-everything we see in nature that is
> robust is a "state of matter", understood as modern physics uses the term.
> Hence, the distinctive and characteristic nature of consciousness too.  But
> the only thing about consciousness in what Tegmark builds is what he gets
> from Tononi.  The rest of it is more about the theory of measurement in
> quantum mechanics, than it is anything that distinguishes consciousness from
> other patterns of order to which we have given names and phenomenologies.
>
> Now, if I understand it at a distant second hand, Chalmers has a criticism
> of all of these kinds of positions, notwithstanding their technical
> differences, which is that he would claim they fail to recognize what he
> calls "the hard problem".  I do not know exactly how Chalmers uses language,
> and I cannot speak for him, but to try to use my own language to express
> what I think he says, I would say he asserts that these mere
> characterizations of mechanism are not "accounting for" what we mean when we
> report "the experience of" this or that.  Here, the word "qualia" is often
> introduced, to refer to the antecedent of such reports.
>
> I think Dennett thinks of (and perhaps calls) Chalmers the worst sort of
> Cartesian dualist, whereas Chalmers would say that Dennett is claiming that
> consciousness "doesn't really exist", or something morally equivalent.  I
> believe both of them think of the axis on which they hold opposite ends as
> different and bigger than any of the axes that separate the technical people
> from one another.   Chalmers seems (for good or ill) to attract people who
> do want to be dualists or mystics (or mysterians), so without putting in a
> lot of time with original material, it is hard to get a clear picture of him
> through the people who claim to render him.
>
> Ih the middle of all this, helping us sort it all out, is John Searl, who
> has a short little book "The problem of consciousness".  Searl is at his
> best when using pellucid common language to explain why everyone else is
> being silly.  He is much less impressive when asked to introduce an actual
> new idea that moves the discussion forward.  However, in saying that, I do
> not mean to diminish the value (or the enjoyment) of his criticisms.  He has
> some language in there about various kinds of dualists, which I find
> mystifying, because it all exists within such self-referential circles of
> language that I wouldn't know how to link it to anything in the rest of the
> world.  But, if you want to know about dualists, this is a good place to
> find them categorized.
>
> I find reporting on a lot of this like I think I would feel if sent to the
> middle east to report on exactly why it is necessary for some factions to
> fight other factions.  There seems to be a long way between being humans,
> and so exercising the individual and social behaviors that constitute
> bringing ourself to share or coordinate various internal states that we
> refer to with names for awareness or states of mind or whatever, and finding
> a language that, in symbolic form, makes a faithful representation of what
> it is that distinctively allows us to be what we are and do what we do.
> Each of these guys seems to bring attention to the absence of such language
> in one or another way.  What I can't understand is why they think there is
> anything more than "a hard problem" of inventing a valid language to
> faithfully reflect the structure of a natural phenomenon, and their main
> difference is in how much each thinks he has captured and the others have
> not.  But I think they would argu  e there is more to their positions than
> that.
>
> Of course, I have no expert knowledge, and haven't put that much time even
> into reading their literatures as an outsider and tourist.  So it is to be
> expected that a lot of it will pass over me.
>
> Several of these guys have either TED talks, or lectures that stream on the
> web, which are shorter than reading their papers, but even more
> unsatisfying.
>
> Oops.  Too much text.
>
> All best,
>
> Eric
>
>
>
>
>
> On Aug 16, 2014, at 11:04 AM, Steve Smith wrote:
>
>> Gentlemen,
>>
>> I am also interested in both the nature of consciousness and the
>> nature of
> knowledge regarding what appear to be entirely subjective phenonomena
> (arising from the fact of consciousness?).
>> The last time I attended a Cognitive Neuroscience conference (6 years
> ago?) I was impressed with how far things had come with regard to
> correlating brain imaging and *reported* subjective experiences.    I
> realize that sometimes more data and even higher quality data doesn't
> necessarily improve a model qualitatively, but I have been hoping that there
> would be some conceptual breakthroughs from this work.
>> Unfortunately, as the popular media and the population in general
>> (which
> is chicken, which is egg?) have taken a stronger interest in science (or has
> come to fetishize the artifacts of science?) there is a lot more "noise" to
> sort through to find signal.   The number of articles or even entire issues
> of magazines and the number of books on the topic has risen dramatically in
> the past 10 years or so, but I rarely see what looks like new insight into
> the nature of consciousness.
>> I'm hoping someone here with more direct experience or more patience
>> with
> the literature (BTW, the "hard literature" on the topic is generally too
> opaque for me, so I'm lost in a middle-ground limbo between the popular
> accounts and the actual work-product of scientists) knows of new insights or
> new twists on the old models to share.
>> Does anyone have a short list of recent publications which reframe the
> question in a new way?
>> - Steve
>>> Hi Nick,
>>>
>>> One of the problems in discussing consciousness is that it seems very
> hard to break it down into simpler concepts. There are what might be called
> "high-level" words such as "inner life", "awareness", "apprehension", which
> suggest consciousness but only to someone who already ha a sense of what
> consciousness is.  Whereas low level words, which refer to things that can
> be readily measured do not seem adequate to get at the real meaning of
> consciousness. So we are left with metaphors. When I use words such as
> "access" and "inner life" they suggest a container but they are not
> necessarily used to denote an actual container but to describe a situation
> which has some of the properties of a container.
>>> However, there does seem to be a real container that describes the
>>> information I have access to.  I get raw information from my body.
>>> This is not to say that my consciousness is located in my body, but
>>> that what I know about the outside world starts with how my body
>>> senses the outside world. These senses are then processed or
>>> contemplated somehow and this results in what I think I know about
>>> the world. There is no way that "I can see exactly what you see"
>>> because what you see comes from your body and what I see comes from
>>> my body. If we literally mean "see" then what you see is what enters
>>> your eyes and what I see is what enters my eyes. You might tell me
>>> about what you see, but that is not the same as seeing what you see
>>> because what you have seen has been processed by you then
>>> reformulated in terms of speech, which is then processed by me.  Even
>>> if we witnessed the same event, we would have slightly different
>>> viewpoints, and our eyes are different, and, in any case, we w
>   ou!
>>>   ld start interpreting the incoming rays of light as soon as they
>>> started
> to enter our respective eyes.
>>> You also gave examples in which I might infer what you saw. This
>>> seems to
> presuppose I have a theory of what Nick is all about or some means of making
> inferences. (I don't have a well-articulated theory of Nick, but I do arrive
> at conclusions about what to make of you. I'm not certain how I do this, but
> I am certain that I do it all the time, quite effortlessly and almost
> automatically.) At any rate this drawing of inferences does not seem to be
> seeing exactly what you see, but a way (not necessarily very accurate) of
> getting a rough approximation of what you saw.
>>> --John
>>>
>>
>>
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[Roger Critchlow-2]

Rebuttal by shame!  If you have to ask you can't afford it.

-- rec --

On Sun, Aug 24, 2014 at 10:29 AM, Steve Smith <[hidden email]> wrote:

Hey, wait a minute, guys!  You have lost me.  What is this "consciousness"
of which you speak.  I am not sure I have one and I need you to describe it
to me in a way that I can recognize it.

No you don't... and if you don't know that, then you are not a truly conscious being, but rather a clever simulacrum of one.

N

Nicholas S. Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology
Clark University
http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

-----Original Message-----
From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of John Kennison
Sent: Sunday, August 24, 2014 11:50 AM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] BBC News - Ant colony 'personalities' shaped by
environment

Eric,

As I understand it, Dennett's position and Chalmers' are not only
incompatible, their difference is more extreme than one simply being the
denial of the other.
Dennett says that a zombie is simply impossible. If we tried to create a
computer that could think like a human, it would be conscious --perhaps even
if it just did a good job of analyzing things the way humans did --even
without loving pets, etc. (I say perhaps, because I'm not sure what Dennett
actually means.)
Chalmers says (I think) that even if we created a physically object that was
identical to a human,  it wouldn't necessarily be conscious --which I find
too extreme. When I said I favored Chalmers, I meant that it seems plausible
that consciousness might not simply emerge if a system behaves in a
sufficiently sophisticated way. --the way the system is constructed could
make a difference.   But these are only top of my head guesses.

--John

________________________________________
From: Friam [[hidden email]] on behalf of Eric Charles
[[hidden email]]
Sent: Sunday, August 24, 2014 10:04 AM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] BBC News - Ant colony 'personalities' shaped by
environment

John,
So, in a "snapshot" I think "A conscious system and a non conscious one
could be physically identical", however, I think it would be disingenuous to
say that we could not tell them apart through interaction over time. This
issue is not whether or not it is easy, but merely whether it is possible.

I guess the question boils down to how you respond to challenges about
philosophical zombies. These discussions normally begin with someone
asserting "You can imagine things that behave exactly like you and I in all
ways, but not conscious." The presenter then goes on to lay out a series of
riddles these creatures lead to. However, I am not sure I buy the premise. I
would assert that you CANNOT imagine such creatures. Can you really imagine
a creature that acts exactly like you without consciousness? Perhaps you can
imagine a creature that appears to act lovingly towards your dog (if you
have a dog) without feeling the love that you feel. But can you imagine a
creature that appears to act lovingly towards your dog with being aware of
your dog?!?

It seems like the type of claim we allow people to get away with at the
start of a philosophical discussion, because it is a pretty normal seeming
premise, and we all like to play such games... but if we really stopped to
consider the premise, we would not let it pass.

(Obviously, this need not be read as a question to you, it is a challenge to
Chalmers and others who hold those views.)

Eric



-----------
Eric P. Charles, Ph.D.
Lab Manager
Center for Teaching, Research, and Learning American University, Hurst Hall
Room 203A
4400 Massachusetts Avenue, N.W.
Washington, DC 20016
phone: <a href="tel:%28202%29%20885-3867" value="[phone]" target="_blank">[phone]   fax: <a href="tel:%28202%29%20885-1190" value="[phone]" target="_blank">[phone]
email: [hidden email]<mailto:[hidden email]>


On Fri, Aug 22, 2014 at 1:16 PM, John Kennison
<[hidden email]<mailto:[hidden email]>> wrote:
Thanks Nick,

I found a few statements I would revise in what I wrote.
Perhaps, I should have said that my argument seems valid rather correct.
I was careless in describing Chalmers' view (He said something like: A
conscious system and a non conscious one could be physically identical).
And I was being presumptuous  in describing Dennett as giving a great tour
of the issues  --I don't know that much about the issues.
--John
________________________________________
From: Friam [[hidden email]<mailto:[hidden email]>] on
behalf of Nick Thompson
[[hidden email]<mailto:[hidden email]>]
Sent: Friday, August 22, 2014 12:37 PM
To: 'The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group'
Subject: Re: [FRIAM]    BBC     News    -       Ant     colony
'personalities' shaped  by      environment

John,

Thanks for this.  But now I have to read Dennett again.  I am afraid my copy
is in a box in Santa Fe, so may have to come over and borrow yours for a few
days.  But I am in somebody else's vacation cabin in NH for the moment, so
it will be a while.

  The following is from my shaky memory.  Please don't flame me, anybody;
just put your arm around my shoulders and lead me from error.

There appears to be a divide amongst philosophers of science concerning how
much to be a rationalist.  Thomas Kuhn is the classic IRRATIONALIST An awful
lot of the philosophy of science that we were all taught in graduate school
is irrationalist in this sense.   Even Popper, who stressed the logic of
deduction in his philosophy ("falsification") was irrationalist in his
account of where good scientific ideas come from ("bold conjectures").  The
hallmark of an irrationalist is a tendency to put logic words in ironic
quotes, such as "proof" or "inference" or "truth" , or to use persuasion
words ("intuition pumps") that avoid invoking logical relations.  So,
Dennett's failure to organize the book in the manner you suggest is part and
parcel of his irrationalism, as is, by the way, your observation that an
argument can be effective without being clear.

I want to pull back a bit my distinction between metaphysical and factual.
I guess I REALLY think the distinction is relative to a particular argument.
In any argument, there are the facts we argue from and the facts we argue
about.  There is a sense in which metaphysics consists in the facts we
ALWAYS argue from.  I hope I haven't shot my own high horse out from under
me, here.

Nick

Nicholas S. Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology Clark University
http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

-----Original Message-----
From: Friam
[mailto:[hidden email]<mailto:[hidden email]>] On
Behalf Of John Kennison
Sent: Friday, August 22, 2014 8:35 AM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] BBC News - Ant colony 'personalities' shaped by
environment

Nick:
I find your distinction between metaphysical questions and factual questions
helpful because it clarifies the vague feeling I expressed about making
"some sort of error" when I said that consciousness is "having an inner
subjective life". I no longer feel it is an error but I should categorize it
as a metaphysical position rather than a scientific fact. (I prefer the term
``scientific fact`` to your term ``fact``.) It still seems like a good
argument ("I know consciousness exists because I experience it") even though
this cannot be a scientific argument.

Eric, Steve, et al:
Thanks for your very interesting comments. I would like to add some further
comments about Dennett. I both enjoyed and was frustrated by his book
"Consciousness Explained". I recommend it highly but with the following
caveats:

(1) I wish the book were organized differently. I think it should have
started with "The Challenge" (section 5 of chapter 2, p.39-42). I paraphrase
this challenge as:
              First, Dennett says he wants to explain Consciousness in
scientific terms, without invoking anything beyond contemporary science. I
take this to mean that he wants to show that we can analyze and explain
human behavior entirely in scientific, materialistic terms without appealing
to any 'mysterious' forces.  (Therefore, to focus on the behavior rather
than the motives, of conscious people, Dennett starts by telling speculative
stories about the phenomenology of consciousness.)
             Secondly, he doesn't want to be like behaviorists who "pretend
they don't have the experiences we know darn well they share they share with
us. If I [Dennett] wish to deny the existence of some controversial feature
of consciousness, the burden falls on me to that it is somehow illusory."
(p.40 of the book).
              Thirdly he wants to do an honest job of explaining the
empirical evidence.
This challenge intrigued me. The first and second goals seem almost
contradictory. I wondered how he could possibly pull it off.

(2) As far as I remember, Dennett never summarizes how he met this
challenge.  (I read this book over 15 years ago and I might have forgotten
the summary.  At any rate, as I go over the book now, I can't find the kind
of summary I would like to see.) So here is my summary of how Dennett did:
(a) After having read the book, I feel there is no theoretical barrier to
explaining all of the behavior of apparently conscious beings in purely
materialistic terms.
(b) My memory is that Dennett explains the feeling of being conscious in
terms of the strong AI hypothesis, which says that any system that carries
out a sufficiently complex task will automatically be conscious. I am not
certain if I believe this, but it or something like it seems necessary if we
take the first two goals seriously.  Dennett apparently believes that the
emergence of consciousness depends only on the behavior exhibited. By
contrast, Chalmers argues that a conscious systems and a non-conscious
system could exhibit the same type of behavior. I don't see any reason to
favor either position, but I prefer Chalmers.

(3) On Dennett's style: This is what I find both frustrating and intriguing.
He seems to discuss various ideas without fully arranging them into an
argument, as I would tend to do.  Dennett relies on this tendency of the
reader to complete the argument. So Dennett spends less time on
argumentation and more on telling stories. Sometimes it works, sometimes it
doesn't. As mentioned above, I came away with a strong feeling about the
first part of the challenge. I also had a strong feeling that our
consciousness often fools us into thinking it is in control when it isn't. I
liked Dennett's presentation of the Pandemonium model of language (based on
work of Selfridge, Dawkins and others) and I feel it explains a lot of
things that would otherwise be murky. On the other hand, I was dissatisfied
with the chapter on "Qualia Disqualified". I even found myself agreeing with
his students (and others) that he hasn't really explained consciousness
--but I think he gave us a great tour of the issues.  (If I had written the
book, and arranged it more logically, the thread of the arguments might have
been clearer, but it would have been a much less effective book.)

--John
________________________________________
From: Friam [[hidden email]<mailto:[hidden email]>] on
behalf of Eric Smith [[hidden email]<mailto:[hidden email]>]
Sent: Saturday, August 16, 2014 12:31 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] BBC News   -       Ant     colony  'personalities'
shaped  by      environment

Hi Steve,

I am neither knowledgeable, nor do I have time to report even my own
experiences, without making a mess of things.  But perhaps I can give some
titles of things people have pointed out to me.

There seem to be several schools of approach (meaning, groups of people who
criticize each other a lot).  I't hard even to know how to break them down
into clusters, because there are several axes of variation.

There is a school who are mechanistic, and who think of themselves as
mechanistic.

At one end within that school, one has Dan Dennett.  Much of what he says
seems to me like a lot of effort to beat the dead horse of mysticism, and I
have no patience for that, because I find it tedious and uninteresting.
Beyond that, it is not clear to me how much he has contributed in real
ideas.  One that seems okay, if I understand it from informal conversations
that have involved him, is that it involves a kind of recursive
self-reference of thought.  Meaning, that thought is a process for handling
responses to events (or, in a very broad use of the noun, "things"), and
part of what consciousness does is render the state of thought as a "thing"
in its own right, having the same symbolic kind of representation as the
mind gives to other "things", so that thought can then process a
representation formed about its own state.  This seems like part of the
common lore, expressed already in this thread, and not novel.  Dennett seems
to want to associate this ability specifical  ly with language, and seems
almost to want to treat it as an _application_ of linguistic faculty.  I
don't think that is a well-motivated position, but I am glad Dennett does it
because it makes an important point.  Language, in having syntax, can
manipulate words within the syntactic system, much as it uses words to
manipulate ideas within semantic systems.  That is hard to understand in
language, and making us aware of the fact that it is hard, even though it
has been before our eyes for centuries, seems helpful in expressing part of
what makes assigning clear meaning to statements about consciousness hard.

On another extreme from Dennett but still materialist, we have Giuglio
Tononi and his "Phi" measure.  Basically, Tononi adopts information theory
as a language, and within that language introduces a concrete notion of what
it means for an information system to be irreducible, in a way that I think
is analogous to the notion of irreducibility of representations of groups,
in the theory of representations.  The details are different because
information theory is a different structure from algebra, but the basic
notion of something's not being splittable into factors is the same.  I am
now a couple of years out of date wrt Tononi's publications, but I think it
is fair to say that Tononi asserts that having a very large irreducible
component of information is the _essence_ of consciousness, and that all the
other things like self-reference (which I would argue are also essential,
even if irreducibility is too) are merely other phenomena of mind but not
the thing that distinguishe  s conscious states.  The Tononi development has
the virtue of being an actual idea that is formalized and thus unambiguously
exchangeable among people.  It may also have a kernel of something
important.  Many people who work in consciousness seem to think it does.
For my taste, it is too non-embodied to likely be a very comprehensive part
of the right answer.  I think both the embodied dimensions of the things
that contribute to conscious states, and some kind of recursion, are
primitives that are essential.  Tononi has a large book about this, and I
think several shorter papers that are on the arXiv.

Somewhere in here is Christof Koch, who is also considered one of the
important contributors, but I don't know what his ideas are.  I include him
because if you are asking who the thought leaders at the moment seem to be,
my understanding is that he is one of them.

There is also Max Tegmark, who has a recent paper "Consciousness as a state
of matter", available from the arxiv.  This (which I have read) seems to me
to be a smart mathematician's discussion of a generally nice point, which
adds nothing of substance to where we are stuck.  Tegmark is making an
argument with which I agree, that most-everything we see in nature that is
robust is a "state of matter", understood as modern physics uses the term.
Hence, the distinctive and characteristic nature of consciousness too.  But
the only thing about consciousness in what Tegmark builds is what he gets
from Tononi.  The rest of it is more about the theory of measurement in
quantum mechanics, than it is anything that distinguishes consciousness from
other patterns of order to which we have given names and phenomenologies.

Now, if I understand it at a distant second hand, Chalmers has a criticism
of all of these kinds of positions, notwithstanding their technical
differences, which is that he would claim they fail to recognize what he
calls "the hard problem".  I do not know exactly how Chalmers uses language,
and I cannot speak for him, but to try to use my own language to express
what I think he says, I would say he asserts that these mere
characterizations of mechanism are not "accounting for" what we mean when we
report "the experience of" this or that.  Here, the word "qualia" is often
introduced, to refer to the antecedent of such reports.

I think Dennett thinks of (and perhaps calls) Chalmers the worst sort of
Cartesian dualist, whereas Chalmers would say that Dennett is claiming that
consciousness "doesn't really exist", or something morally equivalent.  I
believe both of them think of the axis on which they hold opposite ends as
different and bigger than any of the axes that separate the technical people
from one another.   Chalmers seems (for good or ill) to attract people who
do want to be dualists or mystics (or mysterians), so without putting in a
lot of time with original material, it is hard to get a clear picture of him
through the people who claim to render him.

Ih the middle of all this, helping us sort it all out, is John Searl, who
has a short little book "The problem of consciousness".  Searl is at his
best when using pellucid common language to explain why everyone else is
being silly.  He is much less impressive when asked to introduce an actual
new idea that moves the discussion forward.  However, in saying that, I do
not mean to diminish the value (or the enjoyment) of his criticisms.  He has
some language in there about various kinds of dualists, which I find
mystifying, because it all exists within such self-referential circles of
language that I wouldn't know how to link it to anything in the rest of the
world.  But, if you want to know about dualists, this is a good place to
find them categorized.

I find reporting on a lot of this like I think I would feel if sent to the
middle east to report on exactly why it is necessary for some factions to
fight other factions.  There seems to be a long way between being humans,
and so exercising the individual and social behaviors that constitute
bringing ourself to share or coordinate various internal states that we
refer to with names for awareness or states of mind or whatever, and finding
a language that, in symbolic form, makes a faithful representation of what
it is that distinctively allows us to be what we are and do what we do.
Each of these guys seems to bring attention to the absence of such language
in one or another way.  What I can't understand is why they think there is
anything more than "a hard problem" of inventing a valid language to
faithfully reflect the structure of a natural phenomenon, and their main
difference is in how much each thinks he has captured and the others have
not.  But I think they would argu  e there is more to their positions than
that.

Of course, I have no expert knowledge, and haven't put that much time even
into reading their literatures as an outsider and tourist.  So it is to be
expected that a lot of it will pass over me.

Several of these guys have either TED talks, or lectures that stream on the
web, which are shorter than reading their papers, but even more
unsatisfying.

Oops.  Too much text.

All best,

Eric





On Aug 16, 2014, at 11:04 AM, Steve Smith wrote:

Gentlemen,

I am also interested in both the nature of consciousness and the
nature of

knowledge regarding what appear to be entirely subjective phenonomena
(arising from the fact of consciousness?).

The last time I attended a Cognitive Neuroscience conference (6 years

ago?) I was impressed with how far things had come with regard to
correlating brain imaging and *reported* subjective experiences.    I
realize that sometimes more data and even higher quality data doesn't
necessarily improve a model qualitatively, but I have been hoping that there
would be some conceptual breakthroughs from this work.

Unfortunately, as the popular media and the population in general
(which

is chicken, which is egg?) have taken a stronger interest in science (or has
come to fetishize the artifacts of science?) there is a lot more "noise" to
sort through to find signal.   The number of articles or even entire issues
of magazines and the number of books on the topic has risen dramatically in
the past 10 years or so, but I rarely see what looks like new insight into
the nature of consciousness.

I'm hoping someone here with more direct experience or more patience
with

the literature (BTW, the "hard literature" on the topic is generally too
opaque for me, so I'm lost in a middle-ground limbo between the popular
accounts and the actual work-product of scientists) knows of new insights or
new twists on the old models to share.

Does anyone have a short list of recent publications which reframe the

question in a new way?

- Steve

Hi Nick,

One of the problems in discussing consciousness is that it seems very

hard to break it down into simpler concepts. There are what might be called
"high-level" words such as "inner life", "awareness", "apprehension", which
suggest consciousness but only to someone who already ha a sense of what
consciousness is.  Whereas low level words, which refer to things that can
be readily measured do not seem adequate to get at the real meaning of
consciousness. So we are left with metaphors. When I use words such as
"access" and "inner life" they suggest a container but they are not
necessarily used to denote an actual container but to describe a situation
which has some of the properties of a container.

However, there does seem to be a real container that describes the
information I have access to.  I get raw information from my body.
This is not to say that my consciousness is located in my body, but
that what I know about the outside world starts with how my body
senses the outside world. These senses are then processed or
contemplated somehow and this results in what I think I know about
the world. There is no way that "I can see exactly what you see"
because what you see comes from your body and what I see comes from
my body. If we literally mean "see" then what you see is what enters
your eyes and what I see is what enters my eyes. You might tell me
about what you see, but that is not the same as seeing what you see
because what you have seen has been processed by you then
reformulated in terms of speech, which is then processed by me.  Even
if we witnessed the same event, we would have slightly different
viewpoints, and our eyes are different, and, in any case, we w

  ou!

  ld start interpreting the incoming rays of light as soon as they
started

to enter our respective eyes.

You also gave examples in which I might infer what you saw. This
seems to

presuppose I have a theory of what Nick is all about or some means of making
inferences. (I don't have a well-articulated theory of Nick, but I do arrive
at conclusions about what to make of you. I'm not certain how I do this, but
I am certain that I do it all the time, quite effortlessly and almost
automatically.) At any rate this drawing of inferences does not seem to be
seeing exactly what you see, but a way (not necessarily very accurate) of
getting a rough approximation of what you saw.

--John

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[Steve Smith]

Rebuttal by shame!  If you have to ask you can't afford it.

<grin> you saw right through me!

-- rec --

On Sun, Aug 24, 2014 at 10:29 AM, Steve Smith <[hidden email]> wrote:

Hey, wait a minute, guys!  You have lost me.  What is this "consciousness"
of which you speak.  I am not sure I have one and I need you to describe it
to me in a way that I can recognize it.

No you don't... and if you don't know that, then you are not a truly conscious being, but rather a clever simulacrum of one.

N

Nicholas S. Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology
Clark University
http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

-----Original Message-----
From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of John Kennison
Sent: Sunday, August 24, 2014 11:50 AM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] BBC News - Ant colony 'personalities' shaped by
environment

Eric,

As I understand it, Dennett's position and Chalmers' are not only
incompatible, their difference is more extreme than one simply being the
denial of the other.
Dennett says that a zombie is simply impossible. If we tried to create a
computer that could think like a human, it would be conscious --perhaps even
if it just did a good job of analyzing things the way humans did --even
without loving pets, etc. (I say perhaps, because I'm not sure what Dennett
actually means.)
Chalmers says (I think) that even if we created a physically object that was
identical to a human,  it wouldn't necessarily be conscious --which I find
too extreme. When I said I favored Chalmers, I meant that it seems plausible
that consciousness might not simply emerge if a system behaves in a
sufficiently sophisticated way. --the way the system is constructed could
make a difference.   But these are only top of my head guesses.

--John

________________________________________
From: Friam [[hidden email]] on behalf of Eric Charles
[[hidden email]]
Sent: Sunday, August 24, 2014 10:04 AM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] BBC News - Ant colony 'personalities' shaped by
environment

John,
So, in a "snapshot" I think "A conscious system and a non conscious one
could be physically identical", however, I think it would be disingenuous to
say that we could not tell them apart through interaction over time. This
issue is not whether or not it is easy, but merely whether it is possible.

I guess the question boils down to how you respond to challenges about
philosophical zombies. These discussions normally begin with someone
asserting "You can imagine things that behave exactly like you and I in all
ways, but not conscious." The presenter then goes on to lay out a series of
riddles these creatures lead to. However, I am not sure I buy the premise. I
would assert that you CANNOT imagine such creatures. Can you really imagine
a creature that acts exactly like you without consciousness? Perhaps you can
imagine a creature that appears to act lovingly towards your dog (if you
have a dog) without feeling the love that you feel. But can you imagine a
creature that appears to act lovingly towards your dog with being aware of
your dog?!?

It seems like the type of claim we allow people to get away with at the
start of a philosophical discussion, because it is a pretty normal seeming
premise, and we all like to play such games... but if we really stopped to
consider the premise, we would not let it pass.

(Obviously, this need not be read as a question to you, it is a challenge to
Chalmers and others who hold those views.)

Eric



-----------
Eric P. Charles, Ph.D.
Lab Manager
Center for Teaching, Research, and Learning American University, Hurst Hall
Room 203A
4400 Massachusetts Avenue, N.W.
Washington, DC 20016
phone: <a moz-do-not-send="true" href="tel:%28202%29%20885-3867" value="[phone]" target="_blank">[phone]   fax: <a moz-do-not-send="true" href="tel:%28202%29%20885-1190" value="[phone]" target="_blank">[phone]
email: [hidden email]<mailto:[hidden email]>


On Fri, Aug 22, 2014 at 1:16 PM, John Kennison
<[hidden email]<mailto:[hidden email]>> wrote:
Thanks Nick,

I found a few statements I would revise in what I wrote.
Perhaps, I should have said that my argument seems valid rather correct.
I was careless in describing Chalmers' view (He said something like: A
conscious system and a non conscious one could be physically identical).
And I was being presumptuous  in describing Dennett as giving a great tour
of the issues  --I don't know that much about the issues.
--John
________________________________________
From: Friam [[hidden email]<mailto:[hidden email]>] on
behalf of Nick Thompson
[[hidden email]<mailto:[hidden email]>]
Sent: Friday, August 22, 2014 12:37 PM
To: 'The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group'
Subject: Re: [FRIAM]    BBC     News    -       Ant     colony
'personalities' shaped  by      environment

John,

Thanks for this.  But now I have to read Dennett again.  I am afraid my copy
is in a box in Santa Fe, so may have to come over and borrow yours for a few
days.  But I am in somebody else's vacation cabin in NH for the moment, so
it will be a while.

  The following is from my shaky memory.  Please don't flame me, anybody;
just put your arm around my shoulders and lead me from error.

There appears to be a divide amongst philosophers of science concerning how
much to be a rationalist.  Thomas Kuhn is the classic IRRATIONALIST An awful
lot of the philosophy of science that we were all taught in graduate school
is irrationalist in this sense.   Even Popper, who stressed the logic of
deduction in his philosophy ("falsification") was irrationalist in his
account of where good scientific ideas come from ("bold conjectures").  The
hallmark of an irrationalist is a tendency to put logic words in ironic
quotes, such as "proof" or "inference" or "truth" , or to use persuasion
words ("intuition pumps") that avoid invoking logical relations.  So,
Dennett's failure to organize the book in the manner you suggest is part and
parcel of his irrationalism, as is, by the way, your observation that an
argument can be effective without being clear.

I want to pull back a bit my distinction between metaphysical and factual.
I guess I REALLY think the distinction is relative to a particular argument.
In any argument, there are the facts we argue from and the facts we argue
about.  There is a sense in which metaphysics consists in the facts we
ALWAYS argue from.  I hope I haven't shot my own high horse out from under
me, here.

Nick

Nicholas S. Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology Clark University
http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

-----Original Message-----
From: Friam
[mailto:[hidden email]<mailto:[hidden email]>] On
Behalf Of John Kennison
Sent: Friday, August 22, 2014 8:35 AM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] BBC News - Ant colony 'personalities' shaped by
environment

Nick:
I find your distinction between metaphysical questions and factual questions
helpful because it clarifies the vague feeling I expressed about making
"some sort of error" when I said that consciousness is "having an inner
subjective life". I no longer feel it is an error but I should categorize it
as a metaphysical position rather than a scientific fact. (I prefer the term
``scientific fact`` to your term ``fact``.) It still seems like a good
argument ("I know consciousness exists because I experience it") even though
this cannot be a scientific argument.

Eric, Steve, et al:
Thanks for your very interesting comments. I would like to add some further
comments about Dennett. I both enjoyed and was frustrated by his book
"Consciousness Explained". I recommend it highly but with the following
caveats:

(1) I wish the book were organized differently. I think it should have
started with "The Challenge" (section 5 of chapter 2, p.39-42). I paraphrase
this challenge as:
              First, Dennett says he wants to explain Consciousness in
scientific terms, without invoking anything beyond contemporary science. I
take this to mean that he wants to show that we can analyze and explain
human behavior entirely in scientific, materialistic terms without appealing
to any 'mysterious' forces.  (Therefore, to focus on the behavior rather
than the motives, of conscious people, Dennett starts by telling speculative
stories about the phenomenology of consciousness.)
             Secondly, he doesn't want to be like behaviorists who "pretend
they don't have the experiences we know darn well they share they share with
us. If I [Dennett] wish to deny the existence of some controversial feature
of consciousness, the burden falls on me to that it is somehow illusory."
(p.40 of the book).
              Thirdly he wants to do an honest job of explaining the
empirical evidence.
This challenge intrigued me. The first and second goals seem almost
contradictory. I wondered how he could possibly pull it off.

(2) As far as I remember, Dennett never summarizes how he met this
challenge.  (I read this book over 15 years ago and I might have forgotten
the summary.  At any rate, as I go over the book now, I can't find the kind
of summary I would like to see.) So here is my summary of how Dennett did:
(a) After having read the book, I feel there is no theoretical barrier to
explaining all of the behavior of apparently conscious beings in purely
materialistic terms.
(b) My memory is that Dennett explains the feeling of being conscious in
terms of the strong AI hypothesis, which says that any system that carries
out a sufficiently complex task will automatically be conscious. I am not
certain if I believe this, but it or something like it seems necessary if we
take the first two goals seriously.  Dennett apparently believes that the
emergence of consciousness depends only on the behavior exhibited. By
contrast, Chalmers argues that a conscious systems and a non-conscious
system could exhibit the same type of behavior. I don't see any reason to
favor either position, but I prefer Chalmers.

(3) On Dennett's style: This is what I find both frustrating and intriguing.
He seems to discuss various ideas without fully arranging them into an
argument, as I would tend to do.  Dennett relies on this tendency of the
reader to complete the argument. So Dennett spends less time on
argumentation and more on telling stories. Sometimes it works, sometimes it
doesn't. As mentioned above, I came away with a strong feeling about the
first part of the challenge. I also had a strong feeling that our
consciousness often fools us into thinking it is in control when it isn't. I
liked Dennett's presentation of the Pandemonium model of language (based on
work of Selfridge, Dawkins and others) and I feel it explains a lot of
things that would otherwise be murky. On the other hand, I was dissatisfied
with the chapter on "Qualia Disqualified". I even found myself agreeing with
his students (and others) that he hasn't really explained consciousness
--but I think he gave us a great tour of the issues.  (If I had written the
book, and arranged it more logically, the thread of the arguments might have
been clearer, but it would have been a much less effective book.)

--John
________________________________________
From: Friam [[hidden email]<mailto:[hidden email]>] on
behalf of Eric Smith [[hidden email]<mailto:[hidden email]>]
Sent: Saturday, August 16, 2014 12:31 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] BBC News   -       Ant     colony  'personalities'
shaped  by      environment

Hi Steve,

I am neither knowledgeable, nor do I have time to report even my own
experiences, without making a mess of things.  But perhaps I can give some
titles of things people have pointed out to me.

There seem to be several schools of approach (meaning, groups of people who
criticize each other a lot).  I't hard even to know how to break them down
into clusters, because there are several axes of variation.

There is a school who are mechanistic, and who think of themselves as
mechanistic.

At one end within that school, one has Dan Dennett.  Much of what he says
seems to me like a lot of effort to beat the dead horse of mysticism, and I
have no patience for that, because I find it tedious and uninteresting.
Beyond that, it is not clear to me how much he has contributed in real
ideas.  One that seems okay, if I understand it from informal conversations
that have involved him, is that it involves a kind of recursive
self-reference of thought.  Meaning, that thought is a process for handling
responses to events (or, in a very broad use of the noun, "things"), and
part of what consciousness does is render the state of thought as a "thing"
in its own right, having the same symbolic kind of representation as the
mind gives to other "things", so that thought can then process a
representation formed about its own state.  This seems like part of the
common lore, expressed already in this thread, and not novel.  Dennett seems
to want to associate this ability specifical  ly with language, and seems
almost to want to treat it as an _application_ of linguistic faculty.  I
don't think that is a well-motivated position, but I am glad Dennett does it
because it makes an important point.  Language, in having syntax, can
manipulate words within the syntactic system, much as it uses words to
manipulate ideas within semantic systems.  That is hard to understand in
language, and making us aware of the fact that it is hard, even though it
has been before our eyes for centuries, seems helpful in expressing part of
what makes assigning clear meaning to statements about consciousness hard.

On another extreme from Dennett but still materialist, we have Giuglio
Tononi and his "Phi" measure.  Basically, Tononi adopts information theory
as a language, and within that language introduces a concrete notion of what
it means for an information system to be irreducible, in a way that I think
is analogous to the notion of irreducibility of representations of groups,
in the theory of representations.  The details are different because
information theory is a different structure from algebra, but the basic
notion of something's not being splittable into factors is the same.  I am
now a couple of years out of date wrt Tononi's publications, but I think it
is fair to say that Tononi asserts that having a very large irreducible
component of information is the _essence_ of consciousness, and that all the
other things like self-reference (which I would argue are also essential,
even if irreducibility is too) are merely other phenomena of mind but not
the thing that distinguishe  s conscious states.  The Tononi development has
the virtue of being an actual idea that is formalized and thus unambiguously
exchangeable among people.  It may also have a kernel of something
important.  Many people who work in consciousness seem to think it does.
For my taste, it is too non-embodied to likely be a very comprehensive part
of the right answer.  I think both the embodied dimensions of the things
that contribute to conscious states, and some kind of recursion, are
primitives that are essential.  Tononi has a large book about this, and I
think several shorter papers that are on the arXiv.

Somewhere in here is Christof Koch, who is also considered one of the
important contributors, but I don't know what his ideas are.  I include him
because if you are asking who the thought leaders at the moment seem to be,
my understanding is that he is one of them.

There is also Max Tegmark, who has a recent paper "Consciousness as a state
of matter", available from the arxiv.  This (which I have read) seems to me
to be a smart mathematician's discussion of a generally nice point, which
adds nothing of substance to where we are stuck.  Tegmark is making an
argument with which I agree, that most-everything we see in nature that is
robust is a "state of matter", understood as modern physics uses the term.
Hence, the distinctive and characteristic nature of consciousness too.  But
the only thing about consciousness in what Tegmark builds is what he gets
from Tononi.  The rest of it is more about the theory of measurement in
quantum mechanics, than it is anything that distinguishes consciousness from
other patterns of order to which we have given names and phenomenologies.

Now, if I understand it at a distant second hand, Chalmers has a criticism
of all of these kinds of positions, notwithstanding their technical
differences, which is that he would claim they fail to recognize what he
calls "the hard problem".  I do not know exactly how Chalmers uses language,
and I cannot speak for him, but to try to use my own language to express
what I think he says, I would say he asserts that these mere
characterizations of mechanism are not "accounting for" what we mean when we
report "the experience of" this or that.  Here, the word "qualia" is often
introduced, to refer to the antecedent of such reports.

I think Dennett thinks of (and perhaps calls) Chalmers the worst sort of
Cartesian dualist, whereas Chalmers would say that Dennett is claiming that
consciousness "doesn't really exist", or something morally equivalent.  I
believe both of them think of the axis on which they hold opposite ends as
different and bigger than any of the axes that separate the technical people
from one another.   Chalmers seems (for good or ill) to attract people who
do want to be dualists or mystics (or mysterians), so without putting in a
lot of time with original material, it is hard to get a clear picture of him
through the people who claim to render him.

Ih the middle of all this, helping us sort it all out, is John Searl, who
has a short little book "The problem of consciousness".  Searl is at his
best when using pellucid common language to explain why everyone else is
being silly.  He is much less impressive when asked to introduce an actual
new idea that moves the discussion forward.  However, in saying that, I do
not mean to diminish the value (or the enjoyment) of his criticisms.  He has
some language in there about various kinds of dualists, which I find
mystifying, because it all exists within such self-referential circles of
language that I wouldn't know how to link it to anything in the rest of the
world.  But, if you want to know about dualists, this is a good place to
find them categorized.

I find reporting on a lot of this like I think I would feel if sent to the
middle east to report on exactly why it is necessary for some factions to
fight other factions.  There seems to be a long way between being humans,
and so exercising the individual and social behaviors that constitute
bringing ourself to share or coordinate various internal states that we
refer to with names for awareness or states of mind or whatever, and finding
a language that, in symbolic form, makes a faithful representation of what
it is that distinctively allows us to be what we are and do what we do.
Each of these guys seems to bring attention to the absence of such language
in one or another way.  What I can't understand is why they think there is
anything more than "a hard problem" of inventing a valid language to
faithfully reflect the structure of a natural phenomenon, and their main
difference is in how much each thinks he has captured and the others have
not.  But I think they would argu  e there is more to their positions than
that.

Of course, I have no expert knowledge, and haven't put that much time even
into reading their literatures as an outsider and tourist.  So it is to be
expected that a lot of it will pass over me.

Several of these guys have either TED talks, or lectures that stream on the
web, which are shorter than reading their papers, but even more
unsatisfying.

Oops.  Too much text.

All best,

Eric





On Aug 16, 2014, at 11:04 AM, Steve Smith wrote:

Gentlemen,

I am also interested in both the nature of consciousness and the
nature of

knowledge regarding what appear to be entirely subjective phenonomena
(arising from the fact of consciousness?).

The last time I attended a Cognitive Neuroscience conference (6 years

ago?) I was impressed with how far things had come with regard to
correlating brain imaging and *reported* subjective experiences.    I
realize that sometimes more data and even higher quality data doesn't
necessarily improve a model qualitatively, but I have been hoping that there
would be some conceptual breakthroughs from this work.

Unfortunately, as the popular media and the population in general
(which

is chicken, which is egg?) have taken a stronger interest in science (or has
come to fetishize the artifacts of science?) there is a lot more "noise" to
sort through to find signal.   The number of articles or even entire issues
of magazines and the number of books on the topic has risen dramatically in
the past 10 years or so, but I rarely see what looks like new insight into
the nature of consciousness.

I'm hoping someone here with more direct experience or more patience
with

the literature (BTW, the "hard literature" on the topic is generally too
opaque for me, so I'm lost in a middle-ground limbo between the popular
accounts and the actual work-product of scientists) knows of new insights or
new twists on the old models to share.

Does anyone have a short list of recent publications which reframe the

question in a new way?

- Steve

Hi Nick,

One of the problems in discussing consciousness is that it seems very

hard to break it down into simpler concepts. There are what might be called
"high-level" words such as "inner life", "awareness", "apprehension", which
suggest consciousness but only to someone who already ha a sense of what
consciousness is.  Whereas low level words, which refer to things that can
be readily measured do not seem adequate to get at the real meaning of
consciousness. So we are left with metaphors. When I use words such as
"access" and "inner life" they suggest a container but they are not
necessarily used to denote an actual container but to describe a situation
which has some of the properties of a container.

However, there does seem to be a real container that describes the
information I have access to.  I get raw information from my body.
This is not to say that my consciousness is located in my body, but
that what I know about the outside world starts with how my body
senses the outside world. These senses are then processed or
contemplated somehow and this results in what I think I know about
the world. There is no way that "I can see exactly what you see"
because what you see comes from your body and what I see comes from
my body. If we literally mean "see" then what you see is what enters
your eyes and what I see is what enters my eyes. You might tell me
about what you see, but that is not the same as seeing what you see
because what you have seen has been processed by you then
reformulated in terms of speech, which is then processed by me.  Even
if we witnessed the same event, we would have slightly different
viewpoints, and our eyes are different, and, in any case, we w

  ou!

  ld start interpreting the incoming rays of light as soon as they
started

to enter our respective eyes.

You also gave examples in which I might infer what you saw. This
seems to

presuppose I have a theory of what Nick is all about or some means of making
inferences. (I don't have a well-articulated theory of Nick, but I do arrive
at conclusions about what to make of you. I'm not certain how I do this, but
I am certain that I do it all the time, quite effortlessly and almost
automatically.) At any rate this drawing of inferences does not seem to be
seeing exactly what you see, but a way (not necessarily very accurate) of
getting a rough approximation of what you saw.

--John

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[Frank Wimberly-2]

But you are nonetheless correct.  All this reminds me of the old joke:  A skeptic asks God, “How do I know that I exist?”  God replies, “And who is asking?”

 

Frank

 

 

Frank C. Wimberly

140 Calle Ojo Feliz

Santa Fe, NM 87505

 

[hidden email]     [hidden email]

Phone:  [phone]      Cell:  [phone]

 

From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Steve Smith
Sent: Sunday, August 24, 2014 10:41 AM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] BBC News - Ant colony 'personalities' shaped by environment

 

 

Rebuttal by shame!  If you have to ask you can't afford it.

<grin> you saw right through me!

 

-- rec --

 

On Sun, Aug 24, 2014 at 10:29 AM, Steve Smith <[hidden email]> wrote:

 

Hey, wait a minute, guys!  You have lost me.  What is this "consciousness"
of which you speak.  I am not sure I have one and I need you to describe it
to me in a way that I can recognize it.

No you don't... and if you don't know that, then you are not a truly conscious being, but rather a clever simulacrum of one.

 

N

Nicholas S. Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology
Clark University
http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

-----Original Message-----
From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of John Kennison
Sent: Sunday, August 24, 2014 11:50 AM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] BBC News - Ant colony 'personalities' shaped by
environment

Eric,

As I understand it, Dennett's position and Chalmers' are not only
incompatible, their difference is more extreme than one simply being the
denial of the other.
Dennett says that a zombie is simply impossible. If we tried to create a
computer that could think like a human, it would be conscious --perhaps even
if it just did a good job of analyzing things the way humans did --even
without loving pets, etc. (I say perhaps, because I'm not sure what Dennett
actually means.)
Chalmers says (I think) that even if we created a physically object that was
identical to a human,  it wouldn't necessarily be conscious --which I find
too extreme. When I said I favored Chalmers, I meant that it seems plausible
that consciousness might not simply emerge if a system behaves in a
sufficiently sophisticated way. --the way the system is constructed could
make a difference.   But these are only top of my head guesses.

--John

________________________________________
From: Friam [[hidden email]] on behalf of Eric Charles
[[hidden email]]
Sent: Sunday, August 24, 2014 10:04 AM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] BBC News - Ant colony 'personalities' shaped by
environment

John,
So, in a "snapshot" I think "A conscious system and a non conscious one
could be physically identical", however, I think it would be disingenuous to
say that we could not tell them apart through interaction over time. This
issue is not whether or not it is easy, but merely whether it is possible.

I guess the question boils down to how you respond to challenges about
philosophical zombies. These discussions normally begin with someone
asserting "You can imagine things that behave exactly like you and I in all
ways, but not conscious." The presenter then goes on to lay out a series of
riddles these creatures lead to. However, I am not sure I buy the premise. I
would assert that you CANNOT imagine such creatures. Can you really imagine
a creature that acts exactly like you without consciousness? Perhaps you can
imagine a creature that appears to act lovingly towards your dog (if you
have a dog) without feeling the love that you feel. But can you imagine a
creature that appears to act lovingly towards your dog with being aware of
your dog?!?

It seems like the type of claim we allow people to get away with at the
start of a philosophical discussion, because it is a pretty normal seeming
premise, and we all like to play such games... but if we really stopped to
consider the premise, we would not let it pass.

(Obviously, this need not be read as a question to you, it is a challenge to
Chalmers and others who hold those views.)

Eric



-----------
Eric P. Charles, Ph.D.
Lab Manager
Center for Teaching, Research, and Learning American University, Hurst Hall
Room 203A
4400 Massachusetts Avenue, N.W.
Washington, DC 20016
phone: <a href="tel:%28202%29%20885-3867" target="_blank">[phone]   fax: <a href="tel:%28202%29%20885-1190" target="_blank">[phone]
email: [hidden email]<mailto:[hidden email]>


On Fri, Aug 22, 2014 at 1:16 PM, John Kennison
<[hidden email]<mailto:[hidden email]>> wrote:
Thanks Nick,

I found a few statements I would revise in what I wrote.
Perhaps, I should have said that my argument seems valid rather correct.
I was careless in describing Chalmers' view (He said something like: A
conscious system and a non conscious one could be physically identical).
And I was being presumptuous  in describing Dennett as giving a great tour
of the issues  --I don't know that much about the issues.
--John
________________________________________
From: Friam [[hidden email]<mailto:[hidden email]>] on
behalf of Nick Thompson
[[hidden email]<mailto:[hidden email]>]
Sent: Friday, August 22, 2014 12:37 PM
To: 'The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group'
Subject: Re: [FRIAM]    BBC     News    -       Ant     colony
'personalities' shaped  by      environment

John,

Thanks for this.  But now I have to read Dennett again.  I am afraid my copy
is in a box in Santa Fe, so may have to come over and borrow yours for a few
days.  But I am in somebody else's vacation cabin in NH for the moment, so
it will be a while.

  The following is from my shaky memory.  Please don't flame me, anybody;
just put your arm around my shoulders and lead me from error.

There appears to be a divide amongst philosophers of science concerning how
much to be a rationalist.  Thomas Kuhn is the classic IRRATIONALIST An awful
lot of the philosophy of science that we were all taught in graduate school
is irrationalist in this sense.   Even Popper, who stressed the logic of
deduction in his philosophy ("falsification") was irrationalist in his
account of where good scientific ideas come from ("bold conjectures").  The
hallmark of an irrationalist is a tendency to put logic words in ironic
quotes, such as "proof" or "inference" or "truth" , or to use persuasion
words ("intuition pumps") that avoid invoking logical relations.  So,
Dennett's failure to organize the book in the manner you suggest is part and
parcel of his irrationalism, as is, by the way, your observation that an
argument can be effective without being clear.

I want to pull back a bit my distinction between metaphysical and factual.
I guess I REALLY think the distinction is relative to a particular argument.
In any argument, there are the facts we argue from and the facts we argue
about.  There is a sense in which metaphysics consists in the facts we
ALWAYS argue from.  I hope I haven't shot my own high horse out from under
me, here.

Nick

Nicholas S. Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology Clark University
http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

-----Original Message-----
From: Friam
[mailto:[hidden email]<mailto:[hidden email]>] On
Behalf Of John Kennison
Sent: Friday, August 22, 2014 8:35 AM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] BBC News - Ant colony 'personalities' shaped by
environment

Nick:
I find your distinction between metaphysical questions and factual questions
helpful because it clarifies the vague feeling I expressed about making
"some sort of error" when I said that consciousness is "having an inner
subjective life". I no longer feel it is an error but I should categorize it
as a metaphysical position rather than a scientific fact. (I prefer the term
``scientific fact`` to your term ``fact``.) It still seems like a good
argument ("I know consciousness exists because I experience it") even though
this cannot be a scientific argument.

Eric, Steve, et al:
Thanks for your very interesting comments. I would like to add some further
comments about Dennett. I both enjoyed and was frustrated by his book
"Consciousness Explained". I recommend it highly but with the following
caveats:

(1) I wish the book were organized differently. I think it should have
started with "The Challenge" (section 5 of chapter 2, p.39-42). I paraphrase
this challenge as:
              First, Dennett says he wants to explain Consciousness in
scientific terms, without invoking anything beyond contemporary science. I
take this to mean that he wants to show that we can analyze and explain
human behavior entirely in scientific, materialistic terms without appealing
to any 'mysterious' forces.  (Therefore, to focus on the behavior rather
than the motives, of conscious people, Dennett starts by telling speculative
stories about the phenomenology of consciousness.)
             Secondly, he doesn't want to be like behaviorists who "pretend
they don't have the experiences we know darn well they share they share with
us. If I [Dennett] wish to deny the existence of some controversial feature
of consciousness, the burden falls on me to that it is somehow illusory."
(p.40 of the book).
              Thirdly he wants to do an honest job of explaining the
empirical evidence.
This challenge intrigued me. The first and second goals seem almost
contradictory. I wondered how he could possibly pull it off.

(2) As far as I remember, Dennett never summarizes how he met this
challenge.  (I read this book over 15 years ago and I might have forgotten
the summary.  At any rate, as I go over the book now, I can't find the kind
of summary I would like to see.) So here is my summary of how Dennett did:
(a) After having read the book, I feel there is no theoretical barrier to
explaining all of the behavior of apparently conscious beings in purely
materialistic terms.
(b) My memory is that Dennett explains the feeling of being conscious in
terms of the strong AI hypothesis, which says that any system that carries
out a sufficiently complex task will automatically be conscious. I am not
certain if I believe this, but it or something like it seems necessary if we
take the first two goals seriously.  Dennett apparently believes that the
emergence of consciousness depends only on the behavior exhibited. By
contrast, Chalmers argues that a conscious systems and a non-conscious
system could exhibit the same type of behavior. I don't see any reason to
favor either position, but I prefer Chalmers.

(3) On Dennett's style: This is what I find both frustrating and intriguing.
He seems to discuss various ideas without fully arranging them into an
argument, as I would tend to do.  Dennett relies on this tendency of the
reader to complete the argument. So Dennett spends less time on
argumentation and more on telling stories. Sometimes it works, sometimes it
doesn't. As mentioned above, I came away with a strong feeling about the
first part of the challenge. I also had a strong feeling that our
consciousness often fools us into thinking it is in control when it isn't. I
liked Dennett's presentation of the Pandemonium model of language (based on
work of Selfridge, Dawkins and others) and I feel it explains a lot of
things that would otherwise be murky. On the other hand, I was dissatisfied
with the chapter on "Qualia Disqualified". I even found myself agreeing with
his students (and others) that he hasn't really explained consciousness
--but I think he gave us a great tour of the issues.  (If I had written the
book, and arranged it more logically, the thread of the arguments might have
been clearer, but it would have been a much less effective book.)

--John
________________________________________
From: Friam [[hidden email]<mailto:[hidden email]>] on
behalf of Eric Smith [[hidden email]<mailto:[hidden email]>]
Sent: Saturday, August 16, 2014 12:31 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] BBC News   -       Ant     colony  'personalities'
shaped  by      environment

Hi Steve,

I am neither knowledgeable, nor do I have time to report even my own
experiences, without making a mess of things.  But perhaps I can give some
titles of things people have pointed out to me.

There seem to be several schools of approach (meaning, groups of people who
criticize each other a lot).  I't hard even to know how to break them down
into clusters, because there are several axes of variation.

There is a school who are mechanistic, and who think of themselves as
mechanistic.

At one end within that school, one has Dan Dennett.  Much of what he says
seems to me like a lot of effort to beat the dead horse of mysticism, and I
have no patience for that, because I find it tedious and uninteresting.
Beyond that, it is not clear to me how much he has contributed in real
ideas.  One that seems okay, if I understand it from informal conversations
that have involved him, is that it involves a kind of recursive
self-reference of thought.  Meaning, that thought is a process for handling
responses to events (or, in a very broad use of the noun, "things"), and
part of what consciousness does is render the state of thought as a "thing"
in its own right, having the same symbolic kind of representation as the
mind gives to other "things", so that thought can then process a
representation formed about its own state.  This seems like part of the
common lore, expressed already in this thread, and not novel.  Dennett seems
to want to associate this ability specifical  ly with language, and seems
almost to want to treat it as an _application_ of linguistic faculty.  I
don't think that is a well-motivated position, but I am glad Dennett does it
because it makes an important point.  Language, in having syntax, can
manipulate words within the syntactic system, much as it uses words to
manipulate ideas within semantic systems.  That is hard to understand in
language, and making us aware of the fact that it is hard, even though it
has been before our eyes for centuries, seems helpful in expressing part of
what makes assigning clear meaning to statements about consciousness hard.

On another extreme from Dennett but still materialist, we have Giuglio
Tononi and his "Phi" measure.  Basically, Tononi adopts information theory
as a language, and within that language introduces a concrete notion of what
it means for an information system to be irreducible, in a way that I think
is analogous to the notion of irreducibility of representations of groups,
in the theory of representations.  The details are different because
information theory is a different structure from algebra, but the basic
notion of something's not being splittable into factors is the same.  I am
now a couple of years out of date wrt Tononi's publications, but I think it
is fair to say that Tononi asserts that having a very large irreducible
component of information is the _essence_ of consciousness, and that all the
other things like self-reference (which I would argue are also essential,
even if irreducibility is too) are merely other phenomena of mind but not
the thing that distinguishe  s conscious states.  The Tononi development has
the virtue of being an actual idea that is formalized and thus unambiguously
exchangeable among people.  It may also have a kernel of something
important.  Many people who work in consciousness seem to think it does.
For my taste, it is too non-embodied to likely be a very comprehensive part
of the right answer.  I think both the embodied dimensions of the things
that contribute to conscious states, and some kind of recursion, are
primitives that are essential.  Tononi has a large book about this, and I
think several shorter papers that are on the arXiv.

Somewhere in here is Christof Koch, who is also considered one of the
important contributors, but I don't know what his ideas are.  I include him
because if you are asking who the thought leaders at the moment seem to be,
my understanding is that he is one of them.

There is also Max Tegmark, who has a recent paper "Consciousness as a state
of matter", available from the arxiv.  This (which I have read) seems to me
to be a smart mathematician's discussion of a generally nice point, which
adds nothing of substance to where we are stuck.  Tegmark is making an
argument with which I agree, that most-everything we see in nature that is
robust is a "state of matter", understood as modern physics uses the term.
Hence, the distinctive and characteristic nature of consciousness too.  But
the only thing about consciousness in what Tegmark builds is what he gets
from Tononi.  The rest of it is more about the theory of measurement in
quantum mechanics, than it is anything that distinguishes consciousness from
other patterns of order to which we have given names and phenomenologies.

Now, if I understand it at a distant second hand, Chalmers has a criticism
of all of these kinds of positions, notwithstanding their technical
differences, which is that he would claim they fail to recognize what he
calls "the hard problem".  I do not know exactly how Chalmers uses language,
and I cannot speak for him, but to try to use my own language to express
what I think he says, I would say he asserts that these mere
characterizations of mechanism are not "accounting for" what we mean when we
report "the experience of" this or that.  Here, the word "qualia" is often
introduced, to refer to the antecedent of such reports.

I think Dennett thinks of (and perhaps calls) Chalmers the worst sort of
Cartesian dualist, whereas Chalmers would say that Dennett is claiming that
consciousness "doesn't really exist", or something morally equivalent.  I
believe both of them think of the axis on which they hold opposite ends as
different and bigger than any of the axes that separate the technical people
from one another.   Chalmers seems (for good or ill) to attract people who
do want to be dualists or mystics (or mysterians), so without putting in a
lot of time with original material, it is hard to get a clear picture of him
through the people who claim to render him.

Ih the middle of all this, helping us sort it all out, is John Searl, who
has a short little book "The problem of consciousness".  Searl is at his
best when using pellucid common language to explain why everyone else is
being silly.  He is much less impressive when asked to introduce an actual
new idea that moves the discussion forward.  However, in saying that, I do
not mean to diminish the value (or the enjoyment) of his criticisms.  He has
some language in there about various kinds of dualists, which I find
mystifying, because it all exists within such self-referential circles of
language that I wouldn't know how to link it to anything in the rest of the
world.  But, if you want to know about dualists, this is a good place to
find them categorized.

I find reporting on a lot of this like I think I would feel if sent to the
middle east to report on exactly why it is necessary for some factions to
fight other factions.  There seems to be a long way between being humans,
and so exercising the individual and social behaviors that constitute
bringing ourself to share or coordinate various internal states that we
refer to with names for awareness or states of mind or whatever, and finding
a language that, in symbolic form, makes a faithful representation of what
it is that distinctively allows us to be what we are and do what we do.
Each of these guys seems to bring attention to the absence of such language
in one or another way.  What I can't understand is why they think there is
anything more than "a hard problem" of inventing a valid language to
faithfully reflect the structure of a natural phenomenon, and their main
difference is in how much each thinks he has captured and the others have
not.  But I think they would argu  e there is more to their positions than
that.

Of course, I have no expert knowledge, and haven't put that much time even
into reading their literatures as an outsider and tourist.  So it is to be
expected that a lot of it will pass over me.

Several of these guys have either TED talks, or lectures that stream on the
web, which are shorter than reading their papers, but even more
unsatisfying.

Oops.  Too much text.

All best,

Eric





On Aug 16, 2014, at 11:04 AM, Steve Smith wrote:

Gentlemen,

I am also interested in both the nature of consciousness and the
nature of

knowledge regarding what appear to be entirely subjective phenonomena
(arising from the fact of consciousness?).

The last time I attended a Cognitive Neuroscience conference (6 years

ago?) I was impressed with how far things had come with regard to
correlating brain imaging and *reported* subjective experiences.    I
realize that sometimes more data and even higher quality data doesn't
necessarily improve a model qualitatively, but I have been hoping that there
would be some conceptual breakthroughs from this work.

Unfortunately, as the popular media and the population in general
(which

is chicken, which is egg?) have taken a stronger interest in science (or has
come to fetishize the artifacts of science?) there is a lot more "noise" to
sort through to find signal.   The number of articles or even entire issues
of magazines and the number of books on the topic has risen dramatically in
the past 10 years or so, but I rarely see what looks like new insight into
the nature of consciousness.

I'm hoping someone here with more direct experience or more patience
with

the literature (BTW, the "hard literature" on the topic is generally too
opaque for me, so I'm lost in a middle-ground limbo between the popular
accounts and the actual work-product of scientists) knows of new insights or
new twists on the old models to share.

Does anyone have a short list of recent publications which reframe the

question in a new way?

- Steve

Hi Nick,

One of the problems in discussing consciousness is that it seems very

hard to break it down into simpler concepts. There are what might be called
"high-level" words such as "inner life", "awareness", "apprehension", which
suggest consciousness but only to someone who already ha a sense of what
consciousness is.  Whereas low level words, which refer to things that can
be readily measured do not seem adequate to get at the real meaning of
consciousness. So we are left with metaphors. When I use words such as
"access" and "inner life" they suggest a container but they are not
necessarily used to denote an actual container but to describe a situation
which has some of the properties of a container.

However, there does seem to be a real container that describes the
information I have access to.  I get raw information from my body.
This is not to say that my consciousness is located in my body, but
that what I know about the outside world starts with how my body
senses the outside world. These senses are then processed or
contemplated somehow and this results in what I think I know about
the world. There is no way that "I can see exactly what you see"
because what you see comes from your body and what I see comes from
my body. If we literally mean "see" then what you see is what enters
your eyes and what I see is what enters my eyes. You might tell me
about what you see, but that is not the same as seeing what you see
because what you have seen has been processed by you then
reformulated in terms of speech, which is then processed by me.  Even
if we witnessed the same event, we would have slightly different
viewpoints, and our eyes are different, and, in any case, we w

  ou!

  ld start interpreting the incoming rays of light as soon as they
started

to enter our respective eyes.

You also gave examples in which I might infer what you saw. This
seems to

presuppose I have a theory of what Nick is all about or some means of making
inferences. (I don't have a well-articulated theory of Nick, but I do arrive
at conclusions about what to make of you. I'm not certain how I do this, but
I am certain that I do it all the time, quite effortlessly and almost
automatically.) At any rate this drawing of inferences does not seem to be
seeing exactly what you see, but a way (not necessarily very accurate) of
getting a rough approximation of what you saw.

--John

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