BBC News - Ant colony 'personalities' shaped by environment

[Nick Thompson]

So, now we move to the next step of the argument: 

 

On what basis do any of you confidently assert that I am conscious when I say I am not?

 

Nick

 

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 Frank Wimberly
Sent: Sunday, August 24, 2014 1:06 PM
To: 'The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group'
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] BBC News - Ant colony 'personalities' shaped by environment

 

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 [[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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[Frank Wimberly-2]

If you say you are not conscious, I defer to your superior knowledge of the subject (you).

Frank

P.s.  Nick and I have been through this argument before.

Sent from my Verizon 4G LTE Phone
(505) 670--9918

On Aug 24, 2014 11:43 AM, "Nick Thompson" <[hidden email]> wrote:

So, now we move to the next step of the argument: 

 

On what basis do any of you confidently assert that I am conscious when I say I am not?

 

Nick

 

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 Frank Wimberly
Sent: Sunday, August 24, 2014 1:06 PM
To: 'The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group'
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] BBC News - Ant colony 'personalities' shaped by environment

 

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:  <a href="tel:%28505%29%20995-8715" value="[phone]" target="_blank">[phone]      Cell:  <a href="tel:%28505%29%20670-9918" value="[phone]" target="_blank">[phone]

 

From: Friam [[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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[John Kennison]

Nick,

"Consciousness" is a term that is discussed by philosophers. If you don't have one you have proved half of Chalmers' position that it is possible for zombies (humans who lack this mysterious thing called consciousness) to exist. Th other half of Chalmers' position is that conscious humans also exist. I think I provide such an example. Chalmers would then (I suspect) conclude that consciousness is not completely physical as there seem to be no obvious physical differences that would explain which humans have consciousness and which do not.

--John
________________________________________
From: Friam [[hidden email]] on behalf of Nick Thompson [[hidden email]]
Sent: Sunday, August 24, 2014 12:05 PM
To: 'The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group'
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] BBC News - Ant colony 'personalities'      shaped  by      environment

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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[Frank Wimberly-2]

In case anyone cares, the argument ends like this:  I am forced into the extreme, but unassailable, position that I have consciousness as I conceptualize it but that I can't demonstrate that anyone or anything else has it.  Nick's conclusion, I think, is that certain entities have an illusion that they have consciousness (behavior) but cannot explain what it is.  But I may be wrong about the latter.

Frank

Sent from my Verizon 4G LTE Phone
(505) 670--9918

On Aug 24, 2014 11:46 AM, "Frank Wimberly" <[hidden email]> wrote:

If you say you are not conscious, I defer to your superior knowledge of the subject (you).

Frank

P.s.  Nick and I have been through this argument before.

Sent from my Verizon 4G LTE Phone
<a href="tel:%28505%29%20670--9918" value="[phone]" target="_blank">(505) 670--9918

On Aug 24, 2014 11:43 AM, "Nick Thompson" <[hidden email]> wrote:

So, now we move to the next step of the argument: 

 

On what basis do any of you confidently assert that I am conscious when I say I am not?

 

Nick

 

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 Frank Wimberly
Sent: Sunday, August 24, 2014 1:06 PM
To: 'The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group'
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] BBC News - Ant colony 'personalities' shaped by environment

 

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:  <a href="tel:%28505%29%20995-8715" value="[phone]" target="_blank">[phone]      Cell:  <a href="tel:%28505%29%20670-9918" value="[phone]" target="_blank">[phone]

 

From: Friam [[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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[David Eric Smith]

> 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.

Thank you for saying this, Eric.

I was reluctant to pick up this thread, because I haven't read Chalmers at length and sympathetically.  What I normally get is a version of the statements above, followed with some kind of assertion that "it is therefore logically possible that... exist" etc.

I find such statements completely incomprehensible, and I am unable to understand why anyone else thinks they have content (not that my finding something incomprehensible is a significant observation).  

But, since people on this list have proved generous in having their time wasted, let me try to explain why I am unable to distinguish any of this from full nonsense.

Let me hereby declare to the list that "I am able to imagine the existence of perpetual motion machines"  (First or second kind, your choice.)  

What is the status of that sentence?  It has the virtue that the terms in it actually have definitions, which means I can address the question what its status is, something I cannot do for the foregoing statements about consciousness.  It takes a bit of unpacking, which I won't waste everyone's time doing, but in the end, the notation of "perpetual motion machine" can be resolved to mean a sequence of successive states of matter that the laws of physics show do not exist as successive slices within any material history.  Said another way, a thing that is identified by not existing.

What then does it mean that I am able to make a declarative statement about imagining something for which the word, correctly resolved, has no referent?  I would say it means that the above sentence satisfies the basic filters of English syntax.  Good for it.  Since when were the rules of syntax believed to carry more than a first-line filter against meaninglessness?  

Sentences in which the tokens -- marked as parts of speech by the morphology we give them -- are consistent with the rules of syntax, and in which the words themselves have not been given any reliable definition, do not seem to me to carry any "logical" status at all.  Hence I do not see under what rule of "logic" it is "logically possible" that what I can imagine "could exist", apart from the transformation rules of syntax.

I don't mean, here, to refuse discussions that are carried out in approximate terms; often they are the best we can do.  My point is only that, when one is as far into the fog as this topic is, and there is a choice between assuming something magical, versus simply assuming that you don't know what you are talking about and the rules of syntax don't provide much help or protection, the latter seems to me more plausible.  The discussion of perpetual motion machines just provides an example where the anal-retentive can dot the i's and cross the t's to verify that it is indeed possible to make statements in which one does not know what one is talking about.

Eric






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[Nick Thompson]

I think your answer to that question is the only one possible under your epistemology. 

 

But then, given that I DO all the things that I do, “you” (in the non-adhominem sense) lose the ability to infer from some entity doing conscious-ish sorts of things that such entities are conscious, right? 

 

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 Frank Wimberly
Sent: Sunday, August 24, 2014 1:46 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] BBC News - Ant colony 'personalities' shaped by environment

 

If you say you are not conscious, I defer to your superior knowledge of the subject (you).

Frank

P.s.  Nick and I have been through this argument before.

Sent from my Verizon 4G LTE Phone
(505) 670--9918

On Aug 24, 2014 11:43 AM, "Nick Thompson" <[hidden email]> wrote:

So, now we move to the next step of the argument: 

 

On what basis do any of you confidently assert that I am conscious when I say I am not?

 

Nick

 

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 Frank Wimberly
Sent: Sunday, August 24, 2014 1:06 PM
To: 'The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group'
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] BBC News - Ant colony 'personalities' shaped by environment

 

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:  <a href="tel:%28505%29%20995-8715" target="_blank">[phone]      Cell:  <a href="tel:%28505%29%20670-9918" target="_blank">[phone]

 

From: Friam [[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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[Nick Thompson]

John,

Well, actually my position is not that I am not conscious, but that "your"
operating definition of consciousness has little to do with anybody's answer
to the question "Are you conscious?" and everything to do with patterns of
doing.  Frank is the only participant in this argument who disagrees with me
about what consciousness is, and yet applies his definition consistently.  I
think. ....

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 2:49 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] BBC News - Ant colony 'personalities' shaped by
environment

Nick,

"Consciousness" is a term that is discussed by philosophers. If you don't
have one you have proved half of Chalmers' position that it is possible for
zombies (humans who lack this mysterious thing called consciousness) to
exist. Th other half of Chalmers' position is that conscious humans also
exist. I think I provide such an example. Chalmers would then (I suspect)
conclude that consciousness is not completely physical as there seem to be
no obvious physical differences that would explain which humans have
consciousness and which do not.

--John
________________________________________
From: Friam [[hidden email]] on behalf of Nick Thompson
[[hidden email]]
Sent: Sunday, August 24, 2014 12:05 PM
To: 'The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group'
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] BBC News - Ant colony 'personalities'      shaped  by
environment

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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[Nick Thompson]

I may be unwinding here, but now I must contradict my assertion a moment ago that your position is consistent.  Despite your definition of consciousness, your surely behave as if Ginger is conscious, do you not?  So, while you are consistent with in accepting that your definition excludes me from consciousness, your behavior with respect to me (and Ginger) emphatically belies your reliance on your own definition, does it not? 

 

Now this argument could turned on me.  When I say that I believe that consciousness is a high-order pattern in behavior, a pattern of patterns, if you will, is my assertion consistent with my behavior?  Or do I actually behave as if I think I and others act from an inner awareness, inaccessible to others.  I don’t think I do the latter, but, of course, it remains to be seen. 

 

 

Nick

 

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 Frank Wimberly
Sent: Sunday, August 24, 2014 2:55 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] BBC News - Ant colony 'personalities' shaped by environment

 

In case anyone cares, the argument ends like this:  I am forced into the extreme, but unassailable, position that I have consciousness as I conceptualize it but that I can't demonstrate that anyone or anything else has it.  Nick's conclusion, I think, is that certain entities have an illusion that they have consciousness (behavior) but cannot explain what it is.  But I may be wrong about the latter.

Frank

Sent from my Verizon 4G LTE Phone
(505) 670--9918

On Aug 24, 2014 11:46 AM, "Frank Wimberly" <[hidden email]> wrote:

If you say you are not conscious, I defer to your superior knowledge of the subject (you).

Frank

P.s.  Nick and I have been through this argument before.

Sent from my Verizon 4G LTE Phone
<a href="tel:%28505%29%20670--9918" target="_blank">(505) 670--9918

On Aug 24, 2014 11:43 AM, "Nick Thompson" <[hidden email]> wrote:

So, now we move to the next step of the argument: 

 

On what basis do any of you confidently assert that I am conscious when I say I am not?

 

Nick

 

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 Frank Wimberly
Sent: Sunday, August 24, 2014 1:06 PM
To: 'The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group'
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] BBC News - Ant colony 'personalities' shaped by environment

 

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:  <a href="tel:%28505%29%20995-8715" target="_blank">[phone]      Cell:  <a href="tel:%28505%29%20670-9918" target="_blank">[phone]

 

From: Friam [[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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[Marcus G. Daniels]

On 8/24/2014 1:30 PM, Eric Smith wrote:
> The discussion of perpetual motion machines just provides an example
> where the anal-retentive can dot the i's and cross the t's to verify
> that it is indeed possible to make statements in which one does not
> know what one is talking about.
I'm torn:  Nihilism or Constructor Theory?     :-)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0zeT2npYf18

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[Frank Wimberly-2]

Nick,

Yes, I think Ginger (dog) has consciousness and I behave as if she does.  She declines to discuss it.

I don't exclude you from consciousness I just defer to your assertion that you don't have it.  You behave as if you have it but how can I contradict your claim that you don't?

You say consciousness is a pattern of patterns and I say, approximately, it's what I experience.  You might say that water is H2O and I say it's what I drink.  Both are true?  I'm not so sure about the patterns.

Frank

(505) 670--9918

On Aug 24, 2014 3:13 PM, "Nick Thompson" <[hidden email]> wrote:

I may be unwinding here, but now I must contradict my assertion a moment ago that your position is consistent.  Despite your definition of consciousness, your surely behave as if Ginger is conscious, do you not?  So, while you are consistent with in accepting that your definition excludes me from consciousness, your behavior with respect to me (and Ginger) emphatically belies your reliance on your own definition, does it not? 

 

Now this argument could turned on me.  When I say that I believe that consciousness is a high-order pattern in behavior, a pattern of patterns, if you will, is my assertion consistent with my behavior?  Or do I actually behave as if I think I and others act from an inner awareness, inaccessible to others.  I don’t think I do the latter, but, of course, it remains to be seen. 

 

 

Nick

 

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 Frank Wimberly
Sent: Sunday, August 24, 2014 2:55 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] BBC News - Ant colony 'personalities' shaped by environment

 

In case anyone cares, the argument ends like this:  I am forced into the extreme, but unassailable, position that I have consciousness as I conceptualize it but that I can't demonstrate that anyone or anything else has it.  Nick's conclusion, I think, is that certain entities have an illusion that they have consciousness (behavior) but cannot explain what it is.  But I may be wrong about the latter.

Frank

Sent from my Verizon 4G LTE Phone
<a href="tel:%28505%29%20670--9918" value="[phone]" target="_blank">(505) 670--9918

On Aug 24, 2014 11:46 AM, "Frank Wimberly" <[hidden email]> wrote:

If you say you are not conscious, I defer to your superior knowledge of the subject (you).

Frank

P.s.  Nick and I have been through this argument before.

Sent from my Verizon 4G LTE Phone
<a href="tel:%28505%29%20670--9918" target="_blank">(505) 670--9918

On Aug 24, 2014 11:43 AM, "Nick Thompson" <[hidden email]> wrote:

So, now we move to the next step of the argument: 

 

On what basis do any of you confidently assert that I am conscious when I say I am not?

 

Nick

 

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 Frank Wimberly
Sent: Sunday, August 24, 2014 1:06 PM
To: 'The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group'
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] BBC News - Ant colony 'personalities' shaped by environment

 

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:  <a href="tel:%28505%29%20995-8715" target="_blank">[phone]      Cell:  <a href="tel:%28505%29%20670-9918" target="_blank">[phone]

 

From: Friam [[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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[John Kennison]

Nick,

I hope that most people will give the answer "yes" to the question of whether I am conscious. I don't think of the criterion I gave as an operating definition --I don't claim it is useful in that way. It's sort of like trying to figure out whether someone did something deliberately. The actual meaning of "doing something deliberately" depends on certain assumptions (perhaps about consciousness) which might not be verifiable. But we can come up with a set of criteria for deciding whether we think that someone acted deliberately. We realize these criteria may mislead us, but they are better than nothing if we need to make a decision.

--John
________________________________________
From: Friam [[hidden email]] on behalf of Nick Thompson [[hidden email]]
Sent: Sunday, August 24, 2014 5:03 PM
To: 'The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group'
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] BBC News - Ant     colony  'personalities' shaped  by      environment

John,

Well, actually my position is not that I am not conscious, but that "your"
operating definition of consciousness has little to do with anybody's answer
to the question "Are you conscious?" and everything to do with patterns of
doing.  Frank is the only participant in this argument who disagrees with me
about what consciousness is, and yet applies his definition consistently.  I
think. ....

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 2:49 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] BBC News - Ant colony 'personalities' shaped by
environment

Nick,

"Consciousness" is a term that is discussed by philosophers. If you don't
have one you have proved half of Chalmers' position that it is possible for
zombies (humans who lack this mysterious thing called consciousness) to
exist. Th other half of Chalmers' position is that conscious humans also
exist. I think I provide such an example. Chalmers would then (I suspect)
conclude that consciousness is not completely physical as there seem to be
no obvious physical differences that would explain which humans have
consciousness and which do not.

--John
________________________________________
From: Friam [[hidden email]] on behalf of Nick Thompson
[[hidden email]]
Sent: Sunday, August 24, 2014 12:05 PM
To: 'The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group'
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] BBC News - Ant colony 'personalities'      shaped  by
environment

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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[Nick Thompson]

Hi, John,

I think a third person definition of "doing something deliberately" would
come very close to what I mean by "self-conscious".   (What we call self
consciousness in ordinary language usually refers to being conscious of
somebody else being conscious of what we are doing.)  So, I see promise in
what you say 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: Sunday, August 24, 2014 6:38 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] BBC News - Ant colony 'personalities' shaped by
environment


Nick,

I hope that most people will give the answer "yes" to the question of
whether I am conscious. I don't think of the criterion I gave as an
operating definition --I don't claim it is useful in that way. It's sort of
like trying to figure out whether someone did something deliberately. The
actual meaning of "doing something deliberately" depends on certain
assumptions (perhaps about consciousness) which might not be verifiable. But
we can come up with a set of criteria for deciding whether we think that
someone acted deliberately. We realize these criteria may mislead us, but
they are better than nothing if we need to make a decision.

--John
________________________________________
From: Friam [[hidden email]] on behalf of Nick Thompson
[[hidden email]]
Sent: Sunday, August 24, 2014 5:03 PM
To: 'The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group'
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] BBC News - Ant     colony  'personalities' shaped  by
environment

John,

Well, actually my position is not that I am not conscious, but that "your"
operating definition of consciousness has little to do with anybody's answer
to the question "Are you conscious?" and everything to do with patterns of
doing.  Frank is the only participant in this argument who disagrees with me
about what consciousness is, and yet applies his definition consistently.  I
think. ....

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 2:49 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] BBC News - Ant colony 'personalities' shaped by
environment

Nick,

"Consciousness" is a term that is discussed by philosophers. If you don't
have one you have proved half of Chalmers' position that it is possible for
zombies (humans who lack this mysterious thing called consciousness) to
exist. Th other half of Chalmers' position is that conscious humans also
exist. I think I provide such an example. Chalmers would then (I suspect)
conclude that consciousness is not completely physical as there seem to be
no obvious physical differences that would explain which humans have
consciousness and which do not.

--John
________________________________________
From: Friam [[hidden email]] on behalf of Nick Thompson
[[hidden email]]
Sent: Sunday, August 24, 2014 12:05 PM
To: 'The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group'
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] BBC News - Ant colony 'personalities'      shaped  by
environment

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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[Nick Thompson]

The question for me is not whether "one knows what one is talking about" in
the sense of "has the knowledge to speak wisely on the subject at hand."  I
assume that all people have enough knowledge to speak wisely about
consciousness.  What puzzles me is that many speakers ... perhaps most ...
never use that knowledge when called upon to define consciousness, or
describe their understanding of it.  

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 Marcus G.
Daniels
Sent: Sunday, August 24, 2014 5:39 PM
To: [hidden email]
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] BBC News - Ant colony 'personalities' shaped by
environment

On 8/24/2014 1:30 PM, Eric Smith wrote:
> The discussion of perpetual motion machines just provides an example
> where the anal-retentive can dot the i's and cross the t's to verify
> that it is indeed possible to make statements in which one does not
> know what one is talking about.
I'm torn:  Nihilism or Constructor Theory?     :-)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0zeT2npYf18

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[John Kennison]

I am willing to speak about definitions of consciousness or self-consciousness or deliberateness that depend on metaphysical assumptions and to speak of operating definitions that do not depend on these assumptions.
________________________________________
From: Friam [[hidden email]] on behalf of Nick Thompson [[hidden email]]
Sent: Sunday, August 24, 2014 6:54 PM
To: 'The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group'
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] BBC News   -       Ant     colony  'personalities' shaped  by      environment

Hi, John,

I think a third person definition of "doing something deliberately" would
come very close to what I mean by "self-conscious".   (What we call self
consciousness in ordinary language usually refers to being conscious of
somebody else being conscious of what we are doing.)  So, I see promise in
what you say 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: Sunday, August 24, 2014 6:38 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] BBC News - Ant colony 'personalities' shaped by
environment


Nick,

I hope that most people will give the answer "yes" to the question of
whether I am conscious. I don't think of the criterion I gave as an
operating definition --I don't claim it is useful in that way. It's sort of
like trying to figure out whether someone did something deliberately. The
actual meaning of "doing something deliberately" depends on certain
assumptions (perhaps about consciousness) which might not be verifiable. But
we can come up with a set of criteria for deciding whether we think that
someone acted deliberately. We realize these criteria may mislead us, but
they are better than nothing if we need to make a decision.

--John
________________________________________
From: Friam [[hidden email]] on behalf of Nick Thompson
[[hidden email]]
Sent: Sunday, August 24, 2014 5:03 PM
To: 'The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group'
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] BBC News - Ant     colony  'personalities' shaped  by
environment

John,

Well, actually my position is not that I am not conscious, but that "your"
operating definition of consciousness has little to do with anybody's answer
to the question "Are you conscious?" and everything to do with patterns of
doing.  Frank is the only participant in this argument who disagrees with me
about what consciousness is, and yet applies his definition consistently.  I
think. ....

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 2:49 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] BBC News - Ant colony 'personalities' shaped by
environment

Nick,

"Consciousness" is a term that is discussed by philosophers. If you don't
have one you have proved half of Chalmers' position that it is possible for
zombies (humans who lack this mysterious thing called consciousness) to
exist. Th other half of Chalmers' position is that conscious humans also
exist. I think I provide such an example. Chalmers would then (I suspect)
conclude that consciousness is not completely physical as there seem to be
no obvious physical differences that would explain which humans have
consciousness and which do not.

--John
________________________________________
From: Friam [[hidden email]] on behalf of Nick Thompson
[[hidden email]]
Sent: Sunday, August 24, 2014 12:05 PM
To: 'The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group'
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] BBC News - Ant colony 'personalities'      shaped  by
environment

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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[Eric Charles-2]

Eric S.,
This is excellent! I think you capture the place of the naive conversationalist quite well.

The next step, I think, is to move towards Orwell / Peirce. Peirce would assert, I think, that the question is more than JUST a language game, and Orwell would assert, I think, a bit of a moral imperative to take the task more seriously than that. In the Orwell / Peirce move, we assert that there must be some aspect of the world you are gesturing at with the terms "perpetual motion" and "machine" and we assert that for you to "really" imagine a perpetual motion machine, you must ensure there is no contradiction between what you hand wave at with those terms. That is, you must see through the consequences of your imagined device, to ensure that the consequences of one trait do not contradict the consequences of the other trait. If they contradict, then you can only imagine one or the other (or be schizophrenic in at least this limited context).

Most people have a pretty good grasp on motion, and what it would mean to keep moving more-or-less forever. So, we probably have little to think about there. That means that the big question is: What do you know about machines? Most people (my naive conversationalists) know very little. On that basis, I suspect that the average person CAN imagine a perpetual motion machine - they can keep the two ideas in their heads, and their ignorance stops them from ever getting stuck in a contradiction. Peirce might not respect these people much, but at least they are not lying.

On the other hand, you admitted to knowing at least a bit about how machines operate, and therefore any "perpetual motion" and "machine" you imagine will ultimately contradict itself if you take the thought experiment seriously. So, YOU cannot imagine such a machine. Or, to be a bit more technical, given your definition of such a machine: You can imagine it, but not imagine it actually existing.

What happens when we do that same test with the philosophical zombie? I assert that anyone** who takes the imagination experiment seriously will conclude that they cannot imagine the philosophical zombie actually existing. This is because I think 1) That "consciousness" is something you do and 2) that, whether or not they would say they agree with me if asked, most people go through their day in agreement with the implications of the prior point. I think that if these people took the imagination game seriously, they could not imagine an existing entity both "doing" and "not doing" consciousness at the same time.

** This is the weird general use of "anyone" that doesn't include literally anyone. More like: Any decently function, reasonably old person, with a fairly normal amount of social experience, etc., etc., etc.

-----------
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 Sun, Aug 24, 2014 at 3:30 PM, Eric Smith <[hidden email]> wrote:

> 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.

Thank you for saying this, Eric.

I was reluctant to pick up this thread, because I haven't read Chalmers at length and sympathetically.  What I normally get is a version of the statements above, followed with some kind of assertion that "it is therefore logically possible that... exist" etc.

I find such statements completely incomprehensible, and I am unable to understand why anyone else thinks they have content (not that my finding something incomprehensible is a significant observation).

But, since people on this list have proved generous in having their time wasted, let me try to explain why I am unable to distinguish any of this from full nonsense.

Let me hereby declare to the list that "I am able to imagine the existence of perpetual motion machines"  (First or second kind, your choice.)

What is the status of that sentence?  It has the virtue that the terms in it actually have definitions, which means I can address the question what its status is, something I cannot do for the foregoing statements about consciousness.  It takes a bit of unpacking, which I won't waste everyone's time doing, but in the end, the notation of "perpetual motion machine" can be resolved to mean a sequence of successive states of matter that the laws of physics show do not exist as successive slices within any material history.  Said another way, a thing that is identified by not existing.

What then does it mean that I am able to make a declarative statement about imagining something for which the word, correctly resolved, has no referent?  I would say it means that the above sentence satisfies the basic filters of English syntax.  Good for it.  Since when were the rules of syntax believed to carry more than a first-line filter against meaninglessness?

Sentences in which the tokens -- marked as parts of speech by the morphology we give them -- are consistent with the rules of syntax, and in which the words themselves have not been given any reliable definition, do not seem to me to carry any "logical" status at all.  Hence I do not see under what rule of "logic" it is "logically possible" that what I can imagine "could exist", apart from the transformation rules of syntax.

I don't mean, here, to refuse discussions that are carried out in approximate terms; often they are the best we can do.  My point is only that, when one is as far into the fog as this topic is, and there is a choice between assuming something magical, versus simply assuming that you don't know what you are talking about and the rules of syntax don't provide much help or protection, the latter seems to me more plausible.  The discussion of perpetual motion machines just provides an example where the anal-retentive can dot the i's and cross the t's to verify that it is indeed possible to make statements in which one does not know what one is talking about.

Eric

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[Steve Smith]

Marcus sed:
     I'm torn:  Nihilism or Constructor Theory?     :-)

Very nice work...
    http://constructortheory.org/

Seems like it goes hand-in-glove with Stu's Adjacent Possibles ?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0zeT2npYf18

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[David Eric Smith]

On Aug 24, 2014, at 11:38 PM, Steve Smith wrote:

Marcus sed:
     I'm torn:  Nihilism or Constructor Theory?     :-)

Very nice work...
    http://constructortheory.org/

Seems like it goes hand-in-glove with Stu's Adjacent Possibles ?

I make a pact with you, Stu Kaufmann

Sorry, too good to let go...

Eric

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[Marcus G. Daniels]

On Thu, 2014-08-28 at 20:39 -0400, Eric Smith wrote:

> I make a pact with you, Stu Kaufmann

Now if you could _only_ extend this into a poem, it could be etched on rock
along a hiking trail!  Perhaps at the SFI Tesuque estate?

Marcus


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[Steve Smith]

Eric sed:

I make a pact with you, Stu Kaufmann

Marcus sed:

Now if you could _only_ extend this into a poem, it could be etched on rock
along a hiking trail!  Perhaps at the SFI Tesuque estate?

Like the classic, anonymously carved E=MC^2 on the rock face of Los Alamos Canyon?

Following the sentiments of Pound's Ode to Whitman but the stylistic elements of Trurl's electronic bard brought to us by way of Lem's Cyberiad... Love and Tensor Algebra perhaps?

... It is you who broke the new wood
now is a time for carving ...
    -Pound
... Cancel me not — for what then shall remain?
Abscissas some mantissas, modules, modes,
A root or two, a torus and a node:
The inverse of my verse, a null domain...
    -Lem

Trurl the Constructor of course.

- Steve

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[Steve Smith]

Eric sed:

I make a pact with you, Stu Kaufmann

Marcus sed:

Now if you could _only_ extend this into a poem, it could be etched on rock
along a hiking trail!  Perhaps at the SFI Tesuque estate?

Like the classic, anonymously carved E=MC^2 on the rock face of Los Alamos Canyon?

Following the sentiments of Pound's Ode to Whitman but the stylistic elements of Trurl's electronic bard brought to us by way of Lem's Cyberiad... Love and Tensor Algebra perhaps?

... It is you who broke the new wood
now is a time for carving ...
    -Pound
... Cancel me not — for what then shall remain?
Abscissas some mantissas, modules, modes,
A root or two, a torus and a node:
The inverse of my verse, a null domain...
    -Lem

Trurl the Constructor of course.

- Steve

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