Fascination and frustration
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Nick, if you are looking for an adequate explanation of (self-)consciousness then a simultaneous fascination and frustration might not be a completely wrong. IMHO self-consciousness is marked by this strange combination of opposites: a fascinating insight in a frustrating confusion. Fascinating because it is a new insight and allows reasoning on a new level, frustrating because it can not be resolved completely by common sense. Mathematically a strange attractor would be the best way to describe this phenomenon. I don't know if there are any any agent-based models which can be described by strange attractors? Gilbert Ryle says in "The concept of mind" that the "self" belongs to the things which remain confusing no matter how you look at it: "Should I, or should I not, put my knowing self down on my list of the sorts of things that I can have knowledge of? If I say ‘no’, it seems to reduce my knowing self to a theoretically infertile mystery, yet if I say ‘yes’, it seems to reduce the fishing-net to one of the fishes which it itself catches." I am sitting at the beach at the moment having a drink and staring at the sea, which is whirling and curling in never ending tiers of waves rolling towards the beach. If we use stream metaphors then pain is like a sink, pleasure is like a source and self-consciousness is something in between: a whirl, curl or vortex in the stream of information. If we use the metaphor of the puppet theater then self-consciousness is like an accident where the puppet becomes aware of the strings and gets tangled up in them. The selfish genes created more and more intelligent vehicles to survive until the vehicles became accidentally so smart that they can cut off their own strings - only to invent new ones. Humans are like puppets controlled by multiple strings from multiple sets of genes. The biological genes, the religious genes or the genes from other groups. If there are no genes that control us by pulling the strings we feel lost, because life seems to have no meaning then. Cheers Jochen -------- Original message -------- From: Nick Thompson <[hidden email]> Date: 5/6/19 07:53 (GMT+01:00) To: 'The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group' <[hidden email]> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] words RE: words David, I am only frustrated because I think FRIAMMERS hold the keys to the universe won't explicate them in metaphors that I can understand. So, imagine yourself talking to a group of boy (girl-) scouts. You have just demonstrated to them the phenomenon of Cellular Automaton #30 (or whatever) bursting into seething dog vomit at iteration 10,601 (or whatever) (or bursting out of seething dog vomit into grand pyramids of pyramids, ad infinitum, whatEVER!). One of the scouts asks, “Professor Dave, why did that happen then?” And once you have explained that to them, please explain to them how that explanation is not an adequate explanation of consciousness. The last time I pressed this question on the list, Lee answered with the following Kaon God:creation::fish:water which I took to mean, that you are all Gods who do not know (and therefore cannot explicate) your own powers. I.e., God:creation::fish:water:computer_scientists::emergence After you answer those questions, I promise not to be frustrated, ever again. Deal? Nick Shhhhhh! Nick has finally gone bonkers. Nicholas S. Thompson Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology Clark University http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/ -----Original Message----- Just finished Thomas K. Disch's, Camp Concentration, first published in 1968 . Very dystopian future. My pleasure reading ti came from the dozens, perhaps as many as 100, words encountered for the first time. Unusual, obscure, sometimes archaic, (e.g. orthoepy) and yet the author put these words into the mouth of the narrator in a seamless, organic, manner — the words were necessary to convey the precise, nuanced, narrative. Hours later I was reading the words," toilette spoelt automatique," above a urinal. I was wondering if "spoelt" might derive from a root common to the English word, 'spill'. it does not - spoelt = flushes. (Spill = morsen.) Before I made myself aware of the facts, I spent some time idly wondering about the circumstances and contexts in which the two words "spill/flush" might be used as synonyms despite the fact that the former word is usually far less lethargic than the latter. I mentally pictured a Venn diagram with significant overlap but with definite areas/contexts where only one word or the other could possibly convey desired precision or nuance. On the heels of that musing, a recent FRIAM discussion about vocabulary came to mind. The question was raised about whether or not "big" words were used simply to demonstrate how erudite one was. (I first encountered that word in the 1950s on "Make Room for Daddy" aka The Danny Thomas Show; to describe a learned uncle and I decided I want to be that.) My own observations of the list would suggest that such mean spirited use of vocabulary is quite rare. Vocabulary is a vehicle for conveying exact meaning — to the extent that meaning can be either 'exact' or 'communicated'. And yet there is a very definite 'Yin-Yang' stylistic difference observable in the conversation. Most participants seem to be grounded in the Yang style inherited from the rationalism of Descartes and scientism of Bacon and use vocabulary as a means for finding precision and accuracy. Others [yes you Nick, despite how you cringe at the characterization] reflect the Yin of hermeneuticism with a soupcon of post-modernism. And this, perhaps, explains Nick's simultaneous fascination and frustration with FRIAM — a well meaning group willing to explore a lot of different topics and the means to communicate a shared understanding of those topics, using the 'best' vocabulary to do so. Alas, too often, communication and understanding falter between the accuracy bias of Charybdis and the metaphor bias of Scylla. davewest ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/ FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/ FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove |
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