Fwd: Complejidad en economía

[Nick Thompson]

Below is my “private” answer to Russ’s “private” question.  Up till now it was a bit of intimacy between us.  Now it is fully public, therefore not intimate. 

 

N

 

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

 

From: Nick Thompson [mailto:[hidden email]]
Sent: Sunday, February 21, 2016 10:02 PM
To: '[hidden email]' <[hidden email]>
Subject: RE: [FRIAM] Subjectivity and intimacy

 

Hi, Russ,

 

I think I gave you my answer, although, perhaps, you found it so unacceptable that you did not recognize it as such. 

 

Intimacy is just being so close that you see the same world from where you stand. 

 

Or it might be  when the self you see projected in another ‘s behavior toward you is the same as the self you see projected in your own behavior. 

 

Nick

 

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

 

From: Russ Abbott [[hidden email]]
Sent: Sunday, February 21, 2016 6:23 PM
To: Thompson, Nick <[hidden email]>
Subject: RE: [FRIAM] Subjectivity and intimacy

 

This started as a simple question: does "intimacy" mean anything in your framework? I'll take "no" for an answer.

On Feb 21, 2016 12:11 PM, "Nick Thompson" <[hidden email]> wrote:

Hi, Russ,

 

You wrote:

 

As Lee's father used to imply, one can't know whether one's own pain is like someone else's.

 

Rather than pose this as an epistemological issue (“one can’t know”), I would pose it as a logical one:  there is no world in which the question, “what is it like to be somebody else” is coherent.   This point is taken up in the “old new realist” article, which I forwarded earlier.

 

And you also wrote: 

 

But if we assume we are all human, have similar experiences, etc. one can imagine what someone else's pain is like based on one's own experience.

 

The “ejective anthropomorphism” article shows, I think that this project is also incoherent.  

 

They both belong to a class of “mysteries” that are created by violating the rules of a word-game.  “What is the sound of one hand clapping?”  “Nobody knows because nobody has ever heard the sound of one hand clapping.”  “Wow!  What a mystery!”  No, it’s not a mystery.  It’s just bad grammar.  Ever wonder what it would be like to be a married bachelor? 

 

 

 

Nick

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

 

From: Russ Abbott [mailto:[hidden email]]
Sent: Sunday, February 21, 2016 9:28 AM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>; Nick Thompson <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Subjectivity and intimacy

 

As Lee's father used to imply, one can't know whether one's own pain is like someone else's. But if we assume we are all human, have similar experiences, etc. one can imagine what someone else's pain is like based on one's own experience. Certainly isn't the issue; one does the best one can with what one has.  Pierce must have said something like that somewhere.

 

On Sun, Feb 21, 2016 at 6:21 AM <[hidden email]> wrote:

Re: your dental pain.  Patsy had to have a tooth pulled a couple of weeks ago; her dentist,
instead of prescribing opioids, told her to take 2 ibuprofen and 2 acetominipehn (sp.?),
together, every four hours.  It worked great.

No doubt not recommended for long term use or if you have liver problems, etc., etc.

My father used to say, when I complained of pain, "What pain?  I can't feel a thing."  Ha, ha,
ha.  (This is presumably relevant to the FRIAM thread, come to think of it.)

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[Russ Abbott]

Sorry. Guess I missed it.

Version 1: Intimacy is just being so close that you see the same world from where you stand. 

I don't know how to understand that. Do you mean close wrt Euclidean distance? How does that relate to, for example, pain? No matter how close you are to someone, you can't see, for example, their toothache.

Version 2: When the self you see projected in another ‘s behavior toward you is the same as the self you see projected in your own behavior. 

I don't know how to understand that either. What do you mean by "self?" What does it mean to project it toward someone? What does it mean to say that it's the same self as the one you project? Over what period of time must they be the same? If we're talking about behavior would it matter if the projecting entity were a robot? (Perhaps you answered those questions in the papers I haven't read. Sorry if that's the case.)

On Sun, Feb 21, 2016 at 9:05 PM Nick Thompson <[hidden email]> wrote:

Thanks, Eric.  Precisely said.  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 Eric Charles
Sent: Sunday, February 21, 2016 9:16 PM

To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Subjectivity and intimacy

 

"But what is it to know the subjective experience of another ?  You ask me about my experience, and I tell you?  Do you have to trust my account?"

 

Well.... the whole crux of psychology ("small p" psychology?) is that your account is suspect, and I would be a fool to accept it naively. Your ability to know yourself is suspect (what Henriques calls your "Freud Filter") and your ability to acknowledge what you know in an authentic fashion is suspect (what Henriques calls your "Rogerian Filter") and of course whatever you say encounters the same hurdles in "the mind" of the listener.

We all recognize "sharing subjective experience" and "intimacy" as more than this. There are people who claim to tell us about their experience, but with whom we feel no sense of connection.

"It just struck me that intimacy as I understand that term depends on an assumption of subjective experience"

Well.... The question is, as Nick has said, what you mean by "subjective", right? If you mean that the world looks differently to different people, in the literal sense, of a physical body/mind experiencing certain things, then it is fine to talk about subjective experience and about coming to understand the subjective experience of another person. To be intimate with someone, as you present it, would be to understand, a person's quirky way of experiencing the world to such an extent that you could share in their view, i.e., you could come, at least from time to time, to find yourself with "their" quirks rather than "your own."

If, on the other hand, when you talk about "subjective", you mean that there is a ghost-soul somewhere, experiencing a Cartesian theater in its own unique way, then you have a problem. (The problem isn't the one you might think, however! It matters not, for this discussion, whether such a thing exists.) The problem is that such a view rules out the intimacy you are thinking of in a much, much more dogmatic way than what you might worry about from Nick. If that is what you mean by "subjective experience" then it is by definition unsharable. You cannot possibly get yourself into another person's Cartesian theater, and you will never know if anything you experience bares even the slightest resemblance to what they experience. It is a deep rabbit hole.

Eric

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

 

On Sun, Feb 21, 2016 at 3:15 PM, Nick Thompson <[hidden email]> wrote:

Yep!  I didn’t feel I should name names. 

 

How did the wedding go?  There was a point around 4pm when I was kicking myself about bailing;  and then another point, around 8 pm, when I was wolfing hydrocodone and thanking God that I had. 

 

Debby must be exhausted.

 

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, February 21, 2016 12:25 PM

To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Subjectivity and intimacy

 

Nick,

I hope I am the "other FRIAMMER" to which you referring.

Frank

Frank Wimberly
Phone
<a href="tel:%28505%29%20670-9918" target="_blank">[phone]

On Feb 20, 2016 9:11 PM, "Nick Thompson" <[hidden email]> wrote:

Hi, Russ,

 

You wrote:

 

Intimacy is … not about just about knowing something about someone that isn't generally known, e.g., where the person went to elementary school or her mother's maiden. Intimacy has to do with the kinds of things that are known, in particular with knowing about the subjective experience of another person. At least that's how I would describe it -- and that's why I raised the question.

 

Oh, I don’t have a lot of trouble agreeing  with the first part of this statement.  Some unknowns are inherently more intimate than others. 

 

But what is it to know the subjective experience of another ?  You ask me about my experience, and I tell you?  Do you have to trust my account?  Well, if you ask me, I assert that I, for one, DON’T.  One answer to this quandary is to simply assert that Russ Abbot has subjective experience and Nick Thompson does not!  Perhaps ,N.T. is the victim of a form of autism that deprives him of that self-conscious that for you defines the human condition.  And there’s an end to it, eh?  At this point, one of my most dedicated opponents in this discussion, a former graduate student, always say, “So it’s OK to kill you eat you, right?” 

 

I am going to invoke the academic Scoundrel’s Defense here, and attach  a link to another paper.  “Ejective anthropomorphism” is the idea that we come to know animal mental states by seeing an isomorphism between some feature of an animals behavior and some behavior of our own and then, since we know infallibly the internal causes of our behavior, inferring the internal causes of the animal’s.   The whole argument hangs, of course, on the notion that we know why we do things by some special direct knowledge… “privileged access”.  The article is a bit of a slog, but if skim judiciously until you get to the section on “privileged access”, 67, then you might have enough energy to read the argument against that notion and be convinced.   

 

Russ, I think in our correspondence before you have perhaps taken the position that it simply is the case that each of us has a private consciousness.  That is a position taken by another FRIAMMER and I find it, oddly, the most winning argument.  “I choose to start here!” 

 

 

Nick

 

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

 

From: Friam [[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Russ Abbott
Sent: Friday, February 19, 2016 10:33 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Subjectivity and intimacy

 

Intimacy is not necessarily about sex, but it is also not about just about knowing something about someone that isn't generally known, e.g., where the person went to elementary school or her mother's maiden name. It's more than just being able to answer the sorts of questions web sites ask as a way to establish one's identity. Intimacy has to do with the kinds of things that are known, in particular with knowing about the subjective experience of another person. At least that's how I would describe it -- and that's why I raised the question.

 

On Fri, Feb 19, 2016 at 3:39 PM Nick Thompson <[hidden email]> wrote:

Dear John and Russ,

 

Well, you question is an example of itself.  Who is best qualified to explain the basis of Nick's denial of subjectivity?  Is this a question about etiology: I.e., the causal history of Nick's coming to deny subjectivity?  Or is it a question of what rational arguments Nick might make for his denial of subjectivity.  Note that there is nothing particularly private about either of those forms of the question.  FRIAM could get to work on answering them and Nick could stand aside and wonder at the quality and perspicacity of your answers.  My own most recent and condensed and approachable attempt to answer both versions of the question can be found in the manuscript that is attached.  I can’t find cc of the published vsn at the moment.

 

I will think about the intimacy issue.  I think it’s about having some others who know things about you that are not generally known.  I would argue that when you get into bed with somebody naked, it’s a metaphor.  But then, I am old.

 

Nick

 

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

 

-----Original Message-----
From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of John Kennison
Sent: Friday, February 19, 2016 2:30 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Subjectivity and intimacy

 

One thing I wonder about (or perhaps have forgotten) in this discussion and Nick's denial is what the denial is based on. Is the absence of subjectivity supposed to be a scientific fact? If so, we should be discussing the experimental foundations of this fact. I have read of some experiments which seem to indicate that subjectiviity is not exactly what we (or what I) used to think it is --but which do not seem to disprove subjectivity.

 

--John

________________________________________

From: Friam [[hidden email]] on behalf of Russ Abbott [[hidden email]]

Sent: Friday, February 19, 2016 3:27 PM

To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group

Subject: [FRIAM] Subjectivity and intimacy

 

We've had discussions on and off about subjectivity -- with me getting frustrated at Nick's denial thereof (if I understood him correctly).

 

It occurred to me recently that intimacy is defined -- as I understand it -- in terms of subjectivity, i.e., the sharing of one's (most private) subjective experiences with another.

 

I'm wondering what Nick thinks about this and whether anyone else has something to say about it. In particular, if there is no such thing as subjective experience, does that imply in your view that the same goes for intimacy?

 

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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 Russ Abbott
Sent: Friday, February 19, 2016 10:33 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Subjectivity and intimacy

 

Intimacy is not necessarily about sex, but it is also not about just about knowing something about someone that isn't generally known, e.g., where the person went to elementary school or her mother's maiden name. It's more than just being able to answer the sorts of questions web sites ask as a way to establish one's identity. Intimacy has to do with the kinds of things that are known, in particular with knowing about the subjective experience of another person. At least that's how I would describe it -- and that's why I raised the question.

 

On Fri, Feb 19, 2016 at 3:39 PM Nick Thompson <[hidden email]> wrote:

Dear John and Russ,

 

Well, you question is an example of it self.  Who is best qualified to explain the basis of Nick's denial of subjectivity?  Is this a question about aetiology: I.e., the causal history of Nick's coming to deny subjectivity?  Or is it a question of what rational arguments Nick might make for his denial of subjectivity.  Note that there is nothing particularly private about either of those forms of the question.  FRIAM could get to work on answering them and Nick could stand aside and wonder at the quality and perspicacity of your answers.  My own most recent and condensed and approachable attempt to answer both versions of the question can be found in the manuscript that is attached.  I can’t find cc of the published vsn at the moment.

 

I will think about the intimacy issue.  I think it’s about having some others who know things about you that are not generally known.  I would argue that when you get into bed with somebody naked, it’s a metaphor.  But then, I am old.

 

Nick

 

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

 

-----Original Message-----
From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of John Kennison
Sent: Friday, February 19, 2016 2:30 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Subjectivity and intimacy

 

One thing I wonder about (or perhaps have forgotten) in this discussion and Nick's denial is what the denial is based on. Is the absence of subjectivity supposed to be a scientific fact? If so, we should be discussing the experimental foundations of this fact. I have read of some experiments which seem to indicate that subjectiviity is not exactly what we (or what I) used to think it is --but which do not seem to disprove subjectivity.

 

--John

________________________________________

From: Friam [[hidden email]] on behalf of Russ Abbott [[hidden email]]

Sent: Friday, February 19, 2016 3:27 PM

To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group

Subject: [FRIAM] Subjectivity and intimacy

 

We've had discussions on and off about subjectivity -- with me getting frustrated at Nick's denial thereof (if I understood him correctly).

 

It occurred to me recently that intimacy is defined -- as I understand it -- in terms of subjectivity, i.e., the sharing of one's (most private) subjective experiences with another.

 

I'm wondering what Nick thinks about this and whether anyone else has something to say about it. In particular, if there is no such thing as subjective experience, does that imply in your view that the same goes for intimacy?

 

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[Nick Thompson]

Hi, Russ, 

 

Your questions are so answered by the “Old New Realist” article.  I will attach it again.   In the meantime, here is an excerpt.

 

DEVIL’S ADVOCATE: If feelings are something that one does, rather than something that one “has inside”, then the right sort of robot should be capable of feeling when it does the sorts of things that humans do when we say that humans are feeling something. Are you prepared to live with that implication?

Sure.

 DEVIL’S ADVOCATE: So a robot could be made that would feel pain?

Well, you are cheating a bit, because you are asking me to participate in a word game I have already disavowed, the game in which pain is something inside my brain that I use my pain-feelers to palpate (contra Natsoulas, this volume). To me, pain is an emergency organization of my behavior in which I deploy physical and social defenses of various sorts. You show me a robot that is part of a society of robots, becomes frantic when you break some part of it, calls upon it fellow robots to assist, etc., I will be happy to admit that it is “paining”.

DEVIL’S ADVOCATE: On your account, non-social animals don’t feel pain?

Well, not the same sort of pain. Any creature that struggles when you do something to it is “paining” in some sense. But animals that have the potential to summon help seem to pain in a different way.

DEVIL’S ADVOCATE: But Nick, while “paining” sounds nice in an academic paper, it is just silly otherwise. The other day I felt quite nauseous after a meal. I am interested in what it’s like to feel nauseous, and you cannot honestly claim that you don’t know what feeling nauseous is like. Behavioral correlates aren’t at issue, stop changing the subject.

What is “being nauseous” like? It’s like being on a small boat in a choppy sea, it’s like being in a world that is revolving when others see it as stable, it’s like being grey in the face and turning away from the sights and smells of food that others find attractive, it’s like having your head in the toilet when others have theirs in the refrigerator.

            But you have brought us to the crux of the problem. Nobody has ever been satisfied with my answers to these, “What is it like to be a _______?” questions. “What is it like to be in pain? What is it like to be a bat? What is it like to be Nick Thompson?” Notice how the grammar is contorted. If you ask the question in its natural order, you begin to see a path to an answer. “What is being Nick Thompson like?” “It’s like running around like a chicken with its head cut off.” OK. I get that. I see me doing that. You see me doing that. But most people won’t be satisfied with that sort of answer, because it’s the same as the answer to the question, “What do people like Nick Thompson do?” and therefore appears to convey no information that is inherently private. To me, the question, “What is it like to be X?”, has been fully answered when you have said where X-like people can be found and what they will be doing there. However, I seem to be pretty alone in that view.

DEVIL’S ADVOCATE: Now I see why you annoy people. I ask you a perfectly straightforward question about the quality of an experience and you keep trying to saddle me with a description of a behavior. You just change the subject. You clearly understand me when I ask you about the quality of feeling nauseous, yet you answer like a person who doesn’t understand.

Well, here you just prove my point by refusing to believe me when I say that, for me, feeling is a kind of doing, an exploring of the world. Where does somebody who believes that mental states are private, and that each person has privileged access to their own mental states, stand to deny me my account of my own mental states? You can’t have it both ways – you have run smack-dab into the ultimate foolishness of your position.

 

 

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 Russ Abbott
Sent: Sunday, February 21, 2016 10:18 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Subjectivity and intimacy

 

Sorry. Guess I missed it.

 

Version 1: Intimacy is just being so close that you see the same world from where you stand. 

 

I don't know how to understand that. Do you mean close wrt Euclidean distance? How does that relate to, for example, pain? No matter how close you are to someone, you can't see, for example, their toothache.

 

Version 2: When the self you see projected in another ‘s behavior toward you is the same as the self you see projected in your own behavior. 

 

I don't know how to understand that either. What do you mean by "self?" What does it mean to project it toward someone? What does it mean to say that it's the same self as the one you project? Over what period of time must they be the same? If we're talking about behavior would it matter if the projecting entity were a robot? (Perhaps you answered those questions in the papers I haven't read. Sorry if that's the case.)

 

 

On Sun, Feb 21, 2016 at 9:05 PM Nick Thompson <[hidden email]> wrote:

Thanks, Eric.  Precisely said.  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 Eric Charles
Sent: Sunday, February 21, 2016 9:16 PM

To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Subjectivity and intimacy

 

"But what is it to know the subjective experience of another ?  You ask me about my experience, and I tell you?  Do you have to trust my account?"

 

Well.... the whole crux of psychology ("small p" psychology?) is that your account is suspect, and I would be a fool to accept it naively. Your ability to know yourself is suspect (what Henriques calls your "Freud Filter") and your ability to acknowledge what you know in an authentic fashion is suspect (what Henriques calls your "Rogerian Filter") and of course whatever you say encounters the same hurdles in "the mind" of the listener.

We all recognize "sharing subjective experience" and "intimacy" as more than this. There are people who claim to tell us about their experience, but with whom we feel no sense of connection.

"It just struck me that intimacy as I understand that term depends on an assumption of subjective experience"

Well.... The question is, as Nick has said, what you mean by "subjective", right? If you mean that the world looks differently to different people, in the literal sense, of a physical body/mind experiencing certain things, then it is fine to talk about subjective experience and about coming to understand the subjective experience of another person. To be intimate with someone, as you present it, would be to understand, a person's quirky way of experiencing the world to such an extent that you could share in their view, i.e., you could come, at least from time to time, to find yourself with "their" quirks rather than "your own."

If, on the other hand, when you talk about "subjective", you mean that there is a ghost-soul somewhere, experiencing a Cartesian theater in its own unique way, then you have a problem. (The problem isn't the one you might think, however! It matters not, for this discussion, whether such a thing exists.) The problem is that such a view rules out the intimacy you are thinking of in a much, much more dogmatic way than what you might worry about from Nick. If that is what you mean by "subjective experience" then it is by definition unsharable. You cannot possibly get yourself into another person's Cartesian theater, and you will never know if anything you experience bares even the slightest resemblance to what they experience. It is a deep rabbit hole.

Eric

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

 

On Sun, Feb 21, 2016 at 3:15 PM, Nick Thompson <[hidden email]> wrote:

Yep!  I didn’t feel I should name names. 

 

How did the wedding go?  There was a point around 4pm when I was kicking myself about bailing;  and then another point, around 8 pm, when I was wolfing hydrocodone and thanking God that I had. 

 

Debby must be exhausted.

 

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, February 21, 2016 12:25 PM

To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Subjectivity and intimacy

 

Nick,

I hope I am the "other FRIAMMER" to which you referring.

Frank

Frank Wimberly
Phone
<a href="tel:%28505%29%20670-9918" target="_blank">[phone]

On Feb 20, 2016 9:11 PM, "Nick Thompson" <[hidden email]> wrote:

Hi, Russ,

 

You wrote:

 

Intimacy is … not about just about knowing something about someone that isn't generally known, e.g., where the person went to elementary school or her mother's maiden. Intimacy has to do with the kinds of things that are known, in particular with knowing about the subjective experience of another person. At least that's how I would describe it -- and that's why I raised the question.

 

Oh, I don’t have a lot of trouble agreeing  with the first part of this statement.  Some unknowns are inherently more intimate than others. 

 

But what is it to know the subjective experience of another ?  You ask me about my experience, and I tell you?  Do you have to trust my account?  Well, if you ask me, I assert that I, for one, DON’T.  One answer to this quandary is to simply assert that Russ Abbot has subjective experience and Nick Thompson does not!  Perhaps ,N.T. is the victim of a form of autism that deprives him of that self-conscious that for you defines the human condition.  And there’s an end to it, eh?  At this point, one of my most dedicated opponents in this discussion, a former graduate student, always say, “So it’s OK to kill you eat you, right?” 

 

I am going to invoke the academic Scoundrel’s Defense here, and attach  a link to another paper.  “Ejective anthropomorphism” is the idea that we come to know animal mental states by seeing an isomorphism between some feature of an animals behavior and some behavior of our own and then, since we know infallibly the internal causes of our behavior, inferring the internal causes of the animal’s.   The whole argument hangs, of course, on the notion that we know why we do things by some special direct knowledge… “privileged access”.  The article is a bit of a slog, but if skim judiciously until you get to the section on “privileged access”, 67, then you might have enough energy to read the argument against that notion and be convinced.   

 

Russ, I think in our correspondence before you have perhaps taken the position that it simply is the case that each of us has a private consciousness.  That is a position taken by another FRIAMMER and I find it, oddly, the most winning argument.  “I choose to start here!” 

 

 

Nick

 

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

 

From: Friam [[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Russ Abbott
Sent: Friday, February 19, 2016 10:33 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Subjectivity and intimacy

 

Intimacy is not necessarily about sex, but it is also not about just about knowing something about someone that isn't generally known, e.g., where the person went to elementary school or her mother's maiden name. It's more than just being able to answer the sorts of questions web sites ask as a way to establish one's identity. Intimacy has to do with the kinds of things that are known, in particular with knowing about the subjective experience of another person. At least that's how I would describe it -- and that's why I raised the question.

 

On Fri, Feb 19, 2016 at 3:39 PM Nick Thompson <[hidden email]> wrote:

Dear John and Russ,

 

Well, you question is an example of itself.  Who is best qualified to explain the basis of Nick's denial of subjectivity?  Is this a question about etiology: I.e., the causal history of Nick's coming to deny subjectivity?  Or is it a question of what rational arguments Nick might make for his denial of subjectivity.  Note that there is nothing particularly private about either of those forms of the question.  FRIAM could get to work on answering them and Nick could stand aside and wonder at the quality and perspicacity of your answers.  My own most recent and condensed and approachable attempt to answer both versions of the question can be found in the manuscript that is attached.  I can’t find cc of the published vsn at the moment.

 

I will think about the intimacy issue.  I think it’s about having some others who know things about you that are not generally known.  I would argue that when you get into bed with somebody naked, it’s a metaphor.  But then, I am old.

 

Nick

 

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

 

-----Original Message-----
From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of John Kennison
Sent: Friday, February 19, 2016 2:30 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Subjectivity and intimacy

 

One thing I wonder about (or perhaps have forgotten) in this discussion and Nick's denial is what the denial is based on. Is the absence of subjectivity supposed to be a scientific fact? If so, we should be discussing the experimental foundations of this fact. I have read of some experiments which seem to indicate that subjectiviity is not exactly what we (or what I) used to think it is --but which do not seem to disprove subjectivity.

 

--John

________________________________________

From: Friam [[hidden email]] on behalf of Russ Abbott [[hidden email]]

Sent: Friday, February 19, 2016 3:27 PM

To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group

Subject: [FRIAM] Subjectivity and intimacy

 

We've had discussions on and off about subjectivity -- with me getting frustrated at Nick's denial thereof (if I understood him correctly).

 

It occurred to me recently that intimacy is defined -- as I understand it -- in terms of subjectivity, i.e., the sharing of one's (most private) subjective experiences with another.

 

I'm wondering what Nick thinks about this and whether anyone else has something to say about it. In particular, if there is no such thing as subjective experience, does that imply in your view that the same goes for intimacy?

 

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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 Russ Abbott
Sent: Friday, February 19, 2016 10:33 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Subjectivity and intimacy

 

Intimacy is not necessarily about sex, but it is also not about just about knowing something about someone that isn't generally known, e.g., where the person went to elementary school or her mother's maiden name. It's more than just being able to answer the sorts of questions web sites ask as a way to establish one's identity. Intimacy has to do with the kinds of things that are known, in particular with knowing about the subjective experience of another person. At least that's how I would describe it -- and that's why I raised the question.

 

On Fri, Feb 19, 2016 at 3:39 PM Nick Thompson <[hidden email]> wrote:

Dear John and Russ,

 

Well, you question is an example of it self.  Who is best qualified to explain the basis of Nick's denial of subjectivity?  Is this a question about aetiology: I.e., the causal history of Nick's coming to deny subjectivity?  Or is it a question of what rational arguments Nick might make for his denial of subjectivity.  Note that there is nothing particularly private about either of those forms of the question.  FRIAM could get to work on answering them and Nick could stand aside and wonder at the quality and perspicacity of your answers.  My own most recent and condensed and approachable attempt to answer both versions of the question can be found in the manuscript that is attached.  I can’t find cc of the published vsn at the moment.

 

I will think about the intimacy issue.  I think it’s about having some others who know things about you that are not generally known.  I would argue that when you get into bed with somebody naked, it’s a metaphor.  But then, I am old.

 

Nick

 

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

 

-----Original Message-----
From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of John Kennison
Sent: Friday, February 19, 2016 2:30 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Subjectivity and intimacy

 

One thing I wonder about (or perhaps have forgotten) in this discussion and Nick's denial is what the denial is based on. Is the absence of subjectivity supposed to be a scientific fact? If so, we should be discussing the experimental foundations of this fact. I have read of some experiments which seem to indicate that subjectiviity is not exactly what we (or what I) used to think it is --but which do not seem to disprove subjectivity.

 

--John

________________________________________

From: Friam [[hidden email]] on behalf of Russ Abbott [[hidden email]]

Sent: Friday, February 19, 2016 3:27 PM

To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group

Subject: [FRIAM] Subjectivity and intimacy

 

We've had discussions on and off about subjectivity -- with me getting frustrated at Nick's denial thereof (if I understood him correctly).

 

It occurred to me recently that intimacy is defined -- as I understand it -- in terms of subjectivity, i.e., the sharing of one's (most private) subjective experiences with another.

 

I'm wondering what Nick thinks about this and whether anyone else has something to say about it. In particular, if there is no such thing as subjective experience, does that imply in your view that the same goes for intimacy?

 

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[John Kennison]

Nick, having read your Old Realist interview, I think I now understand something that was fuzzy before. I will even try to restate what this is, at the risk of being thoroughly refuted:  Your apparent anti-subjectivism is not a scientific proposition supposedly verified by experiments, but is, instead, your definition of consciousness. The definition allows one to study consciousness scientifically, while avoiding certain paradoxes.

I am reminded of a discussion I read somewhere by a historian on the problem of historical reconstruction: How can we determine whether the reconstruction is correct since we cannot return to the past to test it? The conclusion was that the historical reconstruction of the past and the actual facts of what happened in the past are two different things. As a mathematician, I would say that historical reconstructions are attempts to find the most probable account of what happened, based on artifacts and relics (which were, with some probability,  produced in the past). It becomes a wonderful problem in conditional probability and might even be a good way to introduce students to the subject of conditional probability). One reason I mention this is that, while reading the historical discussion, the thought popped into my head: "If Nick Thompson were a historian, he would insist that the past does not really exist; all that exist are artifacts and relics." But I now see that is not what you are saying (at least I don't think so, perhaps you will say that my intruding thought was correct). For you not only does consciousness exist but it even has a physical existence, an existence more compelling than most of us would have granted.

At any rate,  I imagined that the problem of intimacy would be a difficult one for you. Intimate knowledge suggests an "objective" knowledge of consciousness (since it is obtained by people other than the subject) that is deeper than that of a scientist whose knowledge (of the subject's consciousness) might have no way of incorporating  intimate secrets known only by the subject's close friends. But now I see no problem --of course intimate knowledge might be greater than knowledge based on public information, but so what. If consciousness is, somehow, a physical thing, it could well be a physical thing that one's intimate friends know better than the general public (Oh-oh --I just thought I should rewrite this sentence because it seems to refer to the sexual meaning of intimate which we were trying to go beyond. But, on second thought, I'll leave it in.)

--John


________________________________________
From: Friam [[hidden email]] on behalf of Nick Thompson [[hidden email]]
Sent: Monday, February 22, 2016 1:05 AM
To: 'The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group'
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Subjectivity and intimacy

Hi, Russ,

Your questions are so answered by the “Old New Realist” article.  I will attach it again.   In the meantime, here is an excerpt.


DEVIL’S ADVOCATE: If feelings are something that one does, rather than something that one “has inside”, then the right sort of robot should be capable of feeling when it does the sorts of things that humans do when we say that humans are feeling something. Are you prepared to live with that implication?

Sure.

 DEVIL’S ADVOCATE: So a robot could be made that would feel pain?

Well, you are cheating a bit, because you are asking me to participate in a word game I have already disavowed, the game in which pain is something inside my brain that I use my pain-feelers to palpate (contra Natsoulas, this volume). To me, pain is an emergency organization of my behavior in which I deploy physical and social defenses of various sorts. You show me a robot that is part of a society of robots, becomes frantic when you break some part of it, calls upon it fellow robots to assist, etc., I will be happy to admit that it is “paining”.

DEVIL’S ADVOCATE: On your account, non-social animals don’t feel pain?

Well, not the same sort of pain. Any creature that struggles when you do something to it is “paining” in some sense. But animals that have the potential to summon help seem to pain in a different way.

DEVIL’S ADVOCATE: But Nick, while “paining” sounds nice in an academic paper, it is just silly otherwise. The other day I felt quite nauseous after a meal. I am interested in what it’s like to feel nauseous, and you cannot honestly claim that you don’t know what feeling nauseous is like. Behavioral correlates aren’t at issue, stop changing the subject.
What is “being nauseous” like? It’s like being on a small boat in a choppy sea, it’s like being in a world that is revolving when others see it as stable, it’s like being grey in the face and turning away from the sights and smells of food that others find attractive, it’s like having your head in the toilet when others have theirs in the refrigerator.
            But you have brought us to the crux of the problem. Nobody has ever been satisfied with my answers to these, “What is it like to be a _______?” questions. “What is it like to be in pain? What is it like to be a bat? What is it like to be Nick Thompson?” Notice how the grammar is contorted. If you ask the question in its natural order, you begin to see a path to an answer. “What is being Nick Thompson like?” “It’s like running around like a chicken with its head cut off.” OK. I get that. I see me doing that. You see me doing that. But most people won’t be satisfied with that sort of answer, because it’s the same as the answer to the question, “What do people like Nick Thompson do?” and therefore appears to convey no information that is inherently private. To me, the question, “What is it like to be X?”, has been fully answered when you have said where X-like people can be found and what they will be doing there. However, I seem to be pretty alone in that view.
DEVIL’S ADVOCATE: Now I see why you annoy people. I ask you a perfectly straightforward question about the quality of an experience and you keep trying to saddle me with a description of a behavior. You just change the subject. You clearly understand me when I ask you about the quality of feeling nauseous, yet you answer like a person who doesn’t understand.
Well, here you just prove my point by refusing to believe me when I say that, for me, feeling is a kind of doing, an exploring of the world. Where does somebody who believes that mental states are private, and that each person has privileged access to their own mental states, stand to deny me my account of my own mental states? You can’t have it both ways – you have run smack-dab into the ultimate foolishness of your position.


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 Russ Abbott
Sent: Sunday, February 21, 2016 10:18 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Subjectivity and intimacy

Sorry. Guess I missed it.

Version 1: Intimacy is just being so close that you see the same world from where you stand.

I don't know how to understand that. Do you mean close wrt Euclidean distance? How does that relate to, for example, pain? No matter how close you are to someone, you can't see, for example, their toothache.

Version 2: When the self you see projected in another ‘s behavior toward you is the same as the self you see projected in your own behavior.

I don't know how to understand that either. What do you mean by "self?" What does it mean to project it toward someone? What does it mean to say that it's the same self as the one you project? Over what period of time must they be the same? If we're talking about behavior would it matter if the projecting entity were a robot? (Perhaps you answered those questions in the papers I haven't read. Sorry if that's the case.)


On Sun, Feb 21, 2016 at 9:05 PM Nick Thompson <[hidden email]<mailto:[hidden email]>> wrote:
Thanks, Eric.  Precisely said.  Nick

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

From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]<mailto:[hidden email]>] On Behalf Of Eric Charles
Sent: Sunday, February 21, 2016 9:16 PM

To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]<mailto:[hidden email]>>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Subjectivity and intimacy

"But what is it to know the subjective experience of another ?  You ask me about my experience, and I tell you?  Do you have to trust my account?"

Well.... the whole crux of psychology ("small p" psychology?) is that your account is suspect, and I would be a fool to accept it naively. Your ability to know yourself is suspect (what Henriques calls your "Freud Filter") and your ability to acknowledge what you know in an authentic fashion is suspect (what Henriques calls your "Rogerian Filter") and of course whatever you say encounters the same hurdles in "the mind" of the listener.

We all recognize "sharing subjective experience" and "intimacy" as more than this. There are people who claim to tell us about their experience, but with whom we feel no sense of connection.

"It just struck me that intimacy as I understand that term depends on an assumption of subjective experience"
Well.... The question is, as Nick has said, what you mean by "subjective", right? If you mean that the world looks differently to different people, in the literal sense, of a physical body/mind experiencing certain things, then it is fine to talk about subjective experience and about coming to understand the subjective experience of another person. To be intimate with someone, as you present it, would be to understand, a person's quirky way of experiencing the world to such an extent that you could share in their view, i.e., you could come, at least from time to time, to find yourself with "their" quirks rather than "your own."

If, on the other hand, when you talk about "subjective", you mean that there is a ghost-soul somewhere, experiencing a Cartesian theater in its own unique way, then you have a problem. (The problem isn't the one you might think, however! It matters not, for this discussion, whether such a thing exists.) The problem is that such a view rules out the intimacy you are thinking of in a much, much more dogmatic way than what you might worry about from Nick. If that is what you mean by "subjective experience" then it is by definition unsharable. You cannot possibly get yourself into another person's Cartesian theater, and you will never know if anything you experience bares even the slightest resemblance to what they experience. It is a deep rabbit hole.
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 Sun, Feb 21, 2016 at 3:15 PM, Nick Thompson <[hidden email]<mailto:[hidden email]>> wrote:
Yep!  I didn’t feel I should name names.

How did the wedding go?  There was a point around 4pm when I was kicking myself about bailing;  and then another point, around 8 pm, when I was wolfing hydrocodone and thanking God that I had.

Debby must be exhausted.

Nick



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

From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]<mailto:[hidden email]>] On Behalf Of Frank Wimberly
Sent: Sunday, February 21, 2016 12:25 PM

To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]<mailto:[hidden email]>>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Subjectivity and intimacy


Nick,

I hope I am the "other FRIAMMER" to which you referring.

Frank

Frank Wimberly
Phone
[phone]<tel:%28505%29%20670-9918>
On Feb 20, 2016 9:11 PM, "Nick Thompson" <[hidden email]<mailto:[hidden email]>> wrote:
Hi, Russ,

You wrote:

Intimacy is … not about just about knowing something about someone that isn't generally known, e.g., where the person went to elementary school or her mother's maiden. Intimacy has to do with the kinds of things that are known, in particular with knowing about the subjective experience of another person. At least that's how I would describe it -- and that's why I raised the question.

Oh, I don’t have a lot of trouble agreeing  with the first part of this statement.  Some unknowns are inherently more intimate than others.

But what is it to know the subjective experience of another ?  You ask me about my experience, and I tell you?  Do you have to trust my account?  Well, if you ask me, I assert that I, for one, DON’T.  One answer to this quandary is to simply assert that Russ Abbot has subjective experience and Nick Thompson does not!  Perhaps ,N.T. is the victim of a form of autism that deprives him of that self-conscious that for you defines the human condition.  And there’s an end to it, eh?  At this point, one of my most dedicated opponents in this discussion, a former graduate student, always say, “So it’s OK to kill you eat you, right?”

I am going to invoke the academic Scoundrel’s Defense here, and attach  a link to another paper<http://www.clarku.edu/faculty/nthompson/1-websitestuff/Texts/1990-1994/The_many_perils_of_ejective_anthropomorphism.pdf>.  “Ejective anthropomorphism” is the idea that we come to know animal mental states by seeing an isomorphism between some feature of an animals behavior and some behavior of our own and then, since we know infallibly the internal causes of our behavior, inferring the internal causes of the animal’s.   The whole argument hangs, of course, on the notion that we know why we do things by some special direct knowledge… “privileged access”.  The article is a bit of a slog, but if skim judiciously until you get to the section on “privileged access”, 67, then you might have enough energy to read the argument against that notion and be convinced.

Russ, I think in our correspondence before you have perhaps taken the position that it simply is the case that each of us has a private consciousness.  That is a position taken by another FRIAMMER and I find it, oddly, the most winning argument.  “I choose to start here!”


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 Russ Abbott
Sent: Friday, February 19, 2016 10:33 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]<mailto:[hidden email]>>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Subjectivity and intimacy

Intimacy is not necessarily about sex, but it is also not about just about knowing something about someone that isn't generally known, e.g., where the person went to elementary school or her mother's maiden name. It's more than just being able to answer the sorts of questions web sites ask as a way to establish one's identity. Intimacy has to do with the kinds of things that are known, in particular with knowing about the subjective experience of another person. At least that's how I would describe it -- and that's why I raised the question.

On Fri, Feb 19, 2016 at 3:39 PM Nick Thompson <[hidden email]<mailto:[hidden email]>> wrote:

Dear John and Russ,



Well, you question is an example of itself.  Who is best qualified to explain the basis of Nick's denial of subjectivity?  Is this a question about etiology: I.e., the causal history of Nick's coming to deny subjectivity?  Or is it a question of what rational arguments Nick might make for his denial of subjectivity.  Note that there is nothing particularly private about either of those forms of the question.  FRIAM could get to work on answering them and Nick could stand aside and wonder at the quality and perspicacity of your answers.  My own most recent and condensed and approachable attempt to answer both versions of the question can be found in the manuscript that is attached.  I can’t find cc of the published vsn at the moment.



I will think about the intimacy issue.  I think it’s about having some others who know things about you that are not generally known.  I would argue that when you get into bed with somebody naked, it’s a metaphor.  But then, I am old.



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, February 19, 2016 2:30 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]<mailto:[hidden email]>>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Subjectivity and intimacy



One thing I wonder about (or perhaps have forgotten) in this discussion and Nick's denial is what the denial is based on. Is the absence of subjectivity supposed to be a scientific fact? If so, we should be discussing the experimental foundations of this fact. I have read of some experiments which seem to indicate that subjectiviity is not exactly what we (or what I) used to think it is --but which do not seem to disprove subjectivity.



--John

________________________________________

From: Friam [[hidden email]<mailto:[hidden email]>] on behalf of Russ Abbott [[hidden email]<mailto:[hidden email]>]

Sent: Friday, February 19, 2016 3:27 PM

To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group

Subject: [FRIAM] Subjectivity and intimacy



We've had discussions on and off about subjectivity -- with me getting frustrated at Nick's denial thereof (if I understood him correctly).



It occurred to me recently that intimacy is defined -- as I understand it -- in terms of subjectivity, i.e., the sharing of one's (most private) subjective experiences with another.



I'm wondering what Nick thinks about this and whether anyone else has something to say about it. In particular, if there is no such thing as subjective experience, does that imply in your view that the same goes for intimacy?



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FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv

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


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

From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]<mailto:[hidden email]>] On Behalf Of Russ Abbott
Sent: Friday, February 19, 2016 10:33 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]<mailto:[hidden email]>>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Subjectivity and intimacy

Intimacy is not necessarily about sex, but it is also not about just about knowing something about someone that isn't generally known, e.g., where the person went to elementary school or her mother's maiden name. It's more than just being able to answer the sorts of questions web sites ask as a way to establish one's identity. Intimacy has to do with the kinds of things that are known, in particular with knowing about the subjective experience of another person. At least that's how I would describe it -- and that's why I raised the question.

On Fri, Feb 19, 2016 at 3:39 PM Nick Thompson <[hidden email]<mailto:[hidden email]>> wrote:

Dear John and Russ,



Well, you question is an example of it self.  Who is best qualified to explain the basis of Nick's denial of subjectivity?  Is this a question about aetiology: I.e., the causal history of Nick's coming to deny subjectivity?  Or is it a question of what rational arguments Nick might make for his denial of subjectivity.  Note that there is nothing particularly private about either of those forms of the question.  FRIAM could get to work on answering them and Nick could stand aside and wonder at the quality and perspicacity of your answers.  My own most recent and condensed and approachable attempt to answer both versions of the question can be found in the manuscript that is attached.  I can’t find cc of the published vsn at the moment.



I will think about the intimacy issue.  I think it’s about having some others who know things about you that are not generally known.  I would argue that when you get into bed with somebody naked, it’s a metaphor.  But then, I am old.



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, February 19, 2016 2:30 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]<mailto:[hidden email]>>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Subjectivity and intimacy



One thing I wonder about (or perhaps have forgotten) in this discussion and Nick's denial is what the denial is based on. Is the absence of subjectivity supposed to be a scientific fact? If so, we should be discussing the experimental foundations of this fact. I have read of some experiments which seem to indicate that subjectiviity is not exactly what we (or what I) used to think it is --but which do not seem to disprove subjectivity.



--John

________________________________________

From: Friam [[hidden email]<mailto:[hidden email]>] on behalf of Russ Abbott [[hidden email]<mailto:[hidden email]>]

Sent: Friday, February 19, 2016 3:27 PM

To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group

Subject: [FRIAM] Subjectivity and intimacy



We've had discussions on and off about subjectivity -- with me getting frustrated at Nick's denial thereof (if I understood him correctly).



It occurred to me recently that intimacy is defined -- as I understand it -- in terms of subjectivity, i.e., the sharing of one's (most private) subjective experiences with another.



I'm wondering what Nick thinks about this and whether anyone else has something to say about it. In particular, if there is no such thing as subjective experience, does that imply in your view that the same goes for intimacy?



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[Jochen Fromm-5]

Nice to see FRIAM is still alive! 

I like this definition as well: "Intimacy is just being so close that you see the same world from where you stand". In a family for example we are being so close that we roughly see and experience the same world.

I still believe that the solution to the hard problem lies in Hollywood: cinemas are built like theaters. If we see a film about a person, it is like sitting in his or her cartesian theater. We see what the person sees. In a sense, we feel what the feels as well, especially the pain of loosing someone. 

-J.

Sent from my Tricorder 

-------- Original message --------

From: Russ Abbott <[hidden email]>

Date: 2/22/2016 06:17 (GMT+01:00)

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

Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Subjectivity and intimacy

Sorry. Guess I missed it.

Version 1: Intimacy is just being so close that you see the same world from where you stand. 

I don't know how to understand that. Do you mean close wrt Euclidean distance? How does that relate to, for example, pain? No matter how close you are to someone, you can't see, for example, their toothache.

Version 2: When the self you see projected in another ‘s behavior toward you is the same as the self you see projected in your own behavior. 

I don't know how to understand that either. What do you mean by "self?" What does it mean to project it toward someone? What does it mean to say that it's the same self as the one you project? Over what period of time must they be the same? If we're talking about behavior would it matter if the projecting entity were a robot? (Perhaps you answered those questions in the papers I haven't read. Sorry if that's the case.)

On Sun, Feb 21, 2016 at 9:05 PM Nick Thompson <[hidden email]> wrote:

Thanks, Eric.  Precisely said.  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 Eric Charles
Sent: Sunday, February 21, 2016 9:16 PM

To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Subjectivity and intimacy

 

"But what is it to know the subjective experience of another ?  You ask me about my experience, and I tell you?  Do you have to trust my account?"

 

Well.... the whole crux of psychology ("small p" psychology?) is that your account is suspect, and I would be a fool to accept it naively. Your ability to know yourself is suspect (what Henriques calls your "Freud Filter") and your ability to acknowledge what you know in an authentic fashion is suspect (what Henriques calls your "Rogerian Filter") and of course whatever you say encounters the same hurdles in "the mind" of the listener.

We all recognize "sharing subjective experience" and "intimacy" as more than this. There are people who claim to tell us about their experience, but with whom we feel no sense of connection.

"It just struck me that intimacy as I understand that term depends on an assumption of subjective experience"

Well.... The question is, as Nick has said, what you mean by "subjective", right? If you mean that the world looks differently to different people, in the literal sense, of a physical body/mind experiencing certain things, then it is fine to talk about subjective experience and about coming to understand the subjective experience of another person. To be intimate with someone, as you present it, would be to understand, a person's quirky way of experiencing the world to such an extent that you could share in their view, i.e., you could come, at least from time to time, to find yourself with "their" quirks rather than "your own."

If, on the other hand, when you talk about "subjective", you mean that there is a ghost-soul somewhere, experiencing a Cartesian theater in its own unique way, then you have a problem. (The problem isn't the one you might think, however! It matters not, for this discussion, whether such a thing exists.) The problem is that such a view rules out the intimacy you are thinking of in a much, much more dogmatic way than what you might worry about from Nick. If that is what you mean by "subjective experience" then it is by definition unsharable. You cannot possibly get yourself into another person's Cartesian theater, and you will never know if anything you experience bares even the slightest resemblance to what they experience. It is a deep rabbit hole.

Eric

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

 

On Sun, Feb 21, 2016 at 3:15 PM, Nick Thompson <[hidden email]> wrote:

Yep!  I didn’t feel I should name names. 

 

How did the wedding go?  There was a point around 4pm when I was kicking myself about bailing;  and then another point, around 8 pm, when I was wolfing hydrocodone and thanking God that I had. 

 

Debby must be exhausted.

 

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, February 21, 2016 12:25 PM

To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Subjectivity and intimacy

 

Nick,

I hope I am the "other FRIAMMER" to which you referring.

Frank

Frank Wimberly
Phone
<a href="tel:%28505%29%20670-9918" target="_blank">[phone]

On Feb 20, 2016 9:11 PM, "Nick Thompson" <[hidden email]> wrote:

Hi, Russ,

 

You wrote:

 

Intimacy is … not about just about knowing something about someone that isn't generally known, e.g., where the person went to elementary school or her mother's maiden. Intimacy has to do with the kinds of things that are known, in particular with knowing about the subjective experience of another person. At least that's how I would describe it -- and that's why I raised the question.

 

Oh, I don’t have a lot of trouble agreeing  with the first part of this statement.  Some unknowns are inherently more intimate than others. 

 

But what is it to know the subjective experience of another ?  You ask me about my experience, and I tell you?  Do you have to trust my account?  Well, if you ask me, I assert that I, for one, DON’T.  One answer to this quandary is to simply assert that Russ Abbot has subjective experience and Nick Thompson does not!  Perhaps ,N.T. is the victim of a form of autism that deprives him of that self-conscious that for you defines the human condition.  And there’s an end to it, eh?  At this point, one of my most dedicated opponents in this discussion, a former graduate student, always say, “So it’s OK to kill you eat you, right?” 

 

I am going to invoke the academic Scoundrel’s Defense here, and attach  a link to another paper.  “Ejective anthropomorphism” is the idea that we come to know animal mental states by seeing an isomorphism between some feature of an animals behavior and some behavior of our own and then, since we know infallibly the internal causes of our behavior, inferring the internal causes of the animal’s.   The whole argument hangs, of course, on the notion that we know why we do things by some special direct knowledge… “privileged access”.  The article is a bit of a slog, but if skim judiciously until you get to the section on “privileged access”, 67, then you might have enough energy to read the argument against that notion and be convinced.   

 

Russ, I think in our correspondence before you have perhaps taken the position that it simply is the case that each of us has a private consciousness.  That is a position taken by another FRIAMMER and I find it, oddly, the most winning argument.  “I choose to start here!” 

 

 

Nick

 

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

 

From: Friam [[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Russ Abbott
Sent: Friday, February 19, 2016 10:33 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Subjectivity and intimacy

 

Intimacy is not necessarily about sex, but it is also not about just about knowing something about someone that isn't generally known, e.g., where the person went to elementary school or her mother's maiden name. It's more than just being able to answer the sorts of questions web sites ask as a way to establish one's identity. Intimacy has to do with the kinds of things that are known, in particular with knowing about the subjective experience of another person. At least that's how I would describe it -- and that's why I raised the question.

 

On Fri, Feb 19, 2016 at 3:39 PM Nick Thompson <[hidden email]> wrote:

Dear John and Russ,

 

Well, you question is an example of itself.  Who is best qualified to explain the basis of Nick's denial of subjectivity?  Is this a question about etiology: I.e., the causal history of Nick's coming to deny subjectivity?  Or is it a question of what rational arguments Nick might make for his denial of subjectivity.  Note that there is nothing particularly private about either of those forms of the question.  FRIAM could get to work on answering them and Nick could stand aside and wonder at the quality and perspicacity of your answers.  My own most recent and condensed and approachable attempt to answer both versions of the question can be found in the manuscript that is attached.  I can’t find cc of the published vsn at the moment.

 

I will think about the intimacy issue.  I think it’s about having some others who know things about you that are not generally known.  I would argue that when you get into bed with somebody naked, it’s a metaphor.  But then, I am old.

 

Nick

 

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

 

-----Original Message-----
From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of John Kennison
Sent: Friday, February 19, 2016 2:30 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Subjectivity and intimacy

 

One thing I wonder about (or perhaps have forgotten) in this discussion and Nick's denial is what the denial is based on. Is the absence of subjectivity supposed to be a scientific fact? If so, we should be discussing the experimental foundations of this fact. I have read of some experiments which seem to indicate that subjectiviity is not exactly what we (or what I) used to think it is --but which do not seem to disprove subjectivity.

 

--John

________________________________________

From: Friam [[hidden email]] on behalf of Russ Abbott [[hidden email]]

Sent: Friday, February 19, 2016 3:27 PM

To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group

Subject: [FRIAM] Subjectivity and intimacy

 

We've had discussions on and off about subjectivity -- with me getting frustrated at Nick's denial thereof (if I understood him correctly).

 

It occurred to me recently that intimacy is defined -- as I understand it -- in terms of subjectivity, i.e., the sharing of one's (most private) subjective experiences with another.

 

I'm wondering what Nick thinks about this and whether anyone else has something to say about it. In particular, if there is no such thing as subjective experience, does that imply in your view that the same goes for intimacy?

 

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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 Russ Abbott
Sent: Friday, February 19, 2016 10:33 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Subjectivity and intimacy

 

Intimacy is not necessarily about sex, but it is also not about just about knowing something about someone that isn't generally known, e.g., where the person went to elementary school or her mother's maiden name. It's more than just being able to answer the sorts of questions web sites ask as a way to establish one's identity. Intimacy has to do with the kinds of things that are known, in particular with knowing about the subjective experience of another person. At least that's how I would describe it -- and that's why I raised the question.

 

On Fri, Feb 19, 2016 at 3:39 PM Nick Thompson <[hidden email]> wrote:

Dear John and Russ,

 

Well, you question is an example of it self.  Who is best qualified to explain the basis of Nick's denial of subjectivity?  Is this a question about aetiology: I.e., the causal history of Nick's coming to deny subjectivity?  Or is it a question of what rational arguments Nick might make for his denial of subjectivity.  Note that there is nothing particularly private about either of those forms of the question.  FRIAM could get to work on answering them and Nick could stand aside and wonder at the quality and perspicacity of your answers.  My own most recent and condensed and approachable attempt to answer both versions of the question can be found in the manuscript that is attached.  I can’t find cc of the published vsn at the moment.

 

I will think about the intimacy issue.  I think it’s about having some others who know things about you that are not generally known.  I would argue that when you get into bed with somebody naked, it’s a metaphor.  But then, I am old.

 

Nick

 

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

 

-----Original Message-----
From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of John Kennison
Sent: Friday, February 19, 2016 2:30 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Subjectivity and intimacy

 

One thing I wonder about (or perhaps have forgotten) in this discussion and Nick's denial is what the denial is based on. Is the absence of subjectivity supposed to be a scientific fact? If so, we should be discussing the experimental foundations of this fact. I have read of some experiments which seem to indicate that subjectiviity is not exactly what we (or what I) used to think it is --but which do not seem to disprove subjectivity.

 

--John

________________________________________

From: Friam [[hidden email]] on behalf of Russ Abbott [[hidden email]]

Sent: Friday, February 19, 2016 3:27 PM

To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group

Subject: [FRIAM] Subjectivity and intimacy

 

We've had discussions on and off about subjectivity -- with me getting frustrated at Nick's denial thereof (if I understood him correctly).

 

It occurred to me recently that intimacy is defined -- as I understand it -- in terms of subjectivity, i.e., the sharing of one's (most private) subjective experiences with another.

 

I'm wondering what Nick thinks about this and whether anyone else has something to say about it. In particular, if there is no such thing as subjective experience, does that imply in your view that the same goes for intimacy?

 

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[gepr]

I may as well chime in, too, since none of what's been said so far is meaningful to me.  My concept of intimacy runs along M-W's 2nd entry:

    2 :  to communicate delicately and indirectly

This is almost nothing to do with subjectivity and almost nothing to do with non-private knowledge (things others know).  It has to do with "delicate" attention to detail and, perhaps, manipulation.  A robot could easily be intimate with a human, and demonstrate such intimacy by catering to many of the tiny things the human prefers/enjoys, even if each and every tiny preference is publicly known.  Similarly, 2 robots could be intimate by way of a _special_ inter-robot interface.  But the specialness of the interface isn't its privacy or uniqueness.  It's in its handling of whatever specific details are appropriate to those robots.

Even if inter-subjectivity is merely the intertwining of experiences, it's still largely unrelated to intimacy.  Two complete strangers can become intimate almost instantaneously, because/if their interfaces are pre-adapted for a specific coupling.  There it wouldn't be inter-subjectivity, but a kind of similarity of type.  And that might be mostly or entirely genetic rather than ontogenic.

And I have to again be some sort of Morlockian champion for the irrelevance of thought.  2 strangers can be intimate and hold _radically_ different understandings of the world(s) presented to them ... at least if we believe the tales told to us in countless novels. 8^)


On 02/22/2016 12:40 AM, Jochen Fromm wrote:
> Nice to see FRIAM is still alive!
> I like this definition as well: "Intimacy is just being so close that you see the same world from where you stand". In a family for example we are being so close that we roughly see and experience the same world.
>
> I still believe that the solution to the hard problem lies in Hollywood: cinemas are built like theaters. If we see a film about a person, it is like sitting in his or her cartesian theater. We see what the person sees. In a sense, we feel what the feels as well, especially the pain of loosing someone.

--
⇔ glen

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[Russ Abbott]

Sorry that I'm not responding to Glen, Jochen, or John, but I've got to defend Nick's devil's advocate.  Nick, you do keep changing the subject.  In response to your two suggested definitions of intimacy I asked the following.

--------------

Version 1: Intimacy is just being so close that you see the same world from where you stand. 

I don't know how to understand that. Do you mean close wrt Euclidean distance? How does that relate to, for example, pain? No matter how close you are to someone, you can't see, for example, their toothache.

Version 2: When the self you see projected in another ‘s behavior toward you is the same as the self you see projected in your own behavior. 

I don't know how to understand that either. What do you mean by "self?" What does it mean to project it toward someone? What does it mean to say that it's the same self as the one you project? Over what period of time must they be the same? If we're talking about behavior would it matter if the projecting entity were a robot? (Perhaps you answered those questions in the papers I haven't read. Sorry if that's the case.)

--------------

You responded with a long (and clear and definitive) extract from your paper. But I don't see how it answers my questions. Wrt the first question, if we're talking about behavior, distance doesn't see relevant. Wrt the second question, the extract doesn't (seem to) talk about what you mean by a self or what it means for the projected behaviors of two of them to be "the same" -- or even what projected behavior means. Is it the case that you also don't "believe in" intentionality? After all how can there be intentionality without a subjective intent? And if that's the case, what does "projected" mean? Is it the same as oriented in 3D space?

On Mon, Feb 22, 2016 at 1:38 PM glen <[hidden email]> wrote:

I may as well chime in, too, since none of what's been said so far is meaningful to me.  My concept of intimacy runs along M-W's 2nd entry:

    2 :  to communicate delicately and indirectly

This is almost nothing to do with subjectivity and almost nothing to do with non-private knowledge (things others know).  It has to do with "delicate" attention to detail and, perhaps, manipulation.  A robot could easily be intimate with a human, and demonstrate such intimacy by catering to many of the tiny things the human prefers/enjoys, even if each and every tiny preference is publicly known.  Similarly, 2 robots could be intimate by way of a _special_ inter-robot interface.  But the specialness of the interface isn't its privacy or uniqueness.  It's in its handling of whatever specific details are appropriate to those robots.

Even if inter-subjectivity is merely the intertwining of experiences, it's still largely unrelated to intimacy.  Two complete strangers can become intimate almost instantaneously, because/if their interfaces are pre-adapted for a specific coupling.  There it wouldn't be inter-subjectivity, but a kind of similarity of type.  And that might be mostly or entirely genetic rather than ontogenic.

And I have to again be some sort of Morlockian champion for the irrelevance of thought.  2 strangers can be intimate and hold _radically_ different understandings of the world(s) presented to them ... at least if we believe the tales told to us in countless novels. 8^)


On 02/22/2016 12:40 AM, Jochen Fromm wrote:
> Nice to see FRIAM is still alive!
> I like this definition as well: "Intimacy is just being so close that you see the same world from where you stand". In a family for example we are being so close that we roughly see and experience the same world.
>
> I still believe that the solution to the hard problem lies in Hollywood: cinemas are built like theaters. If we see a film about a person, it is like sitting in his or her cartesian theater. We see what the person sees. In a sense, we feel what the feels as well, especially the pain of loosing someone.

--
⇔ glen

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[Eric Charles-2]

John said "Your apparent anti-subjectivism is not a scientific proposition supposedly verified by experiments, but is, instead, your definition of consciousness. The definition allows one to study consciousness scientifically, while avoiding certain paradoxes."

YES, Yes! Or at least something very much along those lines. It is hard for many people to make sense of William James's later works (published circa 1895-1908), and Nick's way of thinking grows out of that work. One way in which I try to explain James's work of that period is that he was attempting to create (what he saw as) the necessary philosophical foundation for a science of psychology. If we define an other's consciousness as something which we can never know anything about, then the notion of having a  science of psychology is just plain silly. Or, to phrase it in the converse: The fact that we have managed to make advances in the scientific study of psychology suggests that it is just plain silly to define consciousness as something we can never know anything about.

Alas, psychology did not know what to do with James's work. As a result most of what has come afterwards is heavily engaged in the second kind of silliness, and many of psychology's critics are spot on when they question the philosophical foundation of the field. 

The above view of James's latter work is somewhat of a reconstruction, and would not be agreed upon by all James scholars, but I don't think anything about the interpretation is egregious. James's earlier works, and his letters and journals from those earlier times, contain consistent lamentations that he does not have the time to slow down and work out the foundation he thinks the field desperately needs. Those lamentations ceases as he offers his later works ("Radical Empiricism"), and it is clear that several of his proteges in the early 1900s viewed his work as serving the function I have described. 

The question is: What must be true if we are to have a science of psychology? And a crucial part of that answer is that minds must be akin, in crucial ways, to any other investigatable aspect of the world.

P.S. I will be giving a talk in two weeks on an "embodied cognition" podcast wherein this will be one of the main themes. I will post a link as it approaches if anyone is interested in attending. Most of the talks are research oriented, but mine will be mostly (if not all) history and theory. 

Eric

On Mon, Feb 22, 2016 at 4:38 PM, glen <[hidden email]> wrote:

I may as well chime in, too, since none of what's been said so far is meaningful to me.  My concept of intimacy runs along M-W's 2nd entry:

   2 :  to communicate delicately and indirectly

This is almost nothing to do with subjectivity and almost nothing to do with non-private knowledge (things others know).  It has to do with "delicate" attention to detail and, perhaps, manipulation.  A robot could easily be intimate with a human, and demonstrate such intimacy by catering to many of the tiny things the human prefers/enjoys, even if each and every tiny preference is publicly known.  Similarly, 2 robots could be intimate by way of a _special_ inter-robot interface.  But the specialness of the interface isn't its privacy or uniqueness.  It's in its handling of whatever specific details are appropriate to those robots.

Even if inter-subjectivity is merely the intertwining of experiences, it's still largely unrelated to intimacy.  Two complete strangers can become intimate almost instantaneously, because/if their interfaces are pre-adapted for a specific coupling.  There it wouldn't be inter-subjectivity, but a kind of similarity of type.  And that might be mostly or entirely genetic rather than ontogenic.

And I have to again be some sort of Morlockian champion for the irrelevance of thought.  2 strangers can be intimate and hold _radically_ different understandings of the world(s) presented to them ... at least if we believe the tales told to us in countless novels. 8^)


On 02/22/2016 12:40 AM, Jochen Fromm wrote:

Nice to see FRIAM is still alive!
I like this definition as well: "Intimacy is just being so close that you see the same world from where you stand". In a family for example we are being so close that we roughly see and experience the same world.

I still believe that the solution to the hard problem lies in Hollywood: cinemas are built like theaters. If we see a film about a person, it is like sitting in his or her cartesian theater. We see what the person sees. In a sense, we feel what the feels as well, especially the pain of loosing someone.

--
⇔ glen

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[Nick Thompson]

See Larding below:

 

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 Russ Abbott
Sent: Monday, February 22, 2016 3:08 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Subjectivity and intimacy

 

Sorry that I'm not responding to Glen, Jochen, or John, but I've got to defend Nick's devil's advocate.  Nick, you do keep changing the subject.  In response to your two suggested definitions of intimacy I asked the following.

 

--------------

 

Version 1: Intimacy is just being so close that you see the same world from where you stand. 

 

I don't know how to understand that. Do you mean close wrt Euclidean distance? How does that relate to, for example, pain? No matter how close you are to someone, you can't see, for example, their toothache.

[NST==>”close” is a metaphor;  I am suggesting a co-location in space metaphor to substitute for the privacy-inside metaphor which I take to be yours.  I am suggesting, roughly, that the more experiences we share, the more we are of one mind.  <==nst]

 

Version 2: When the self you see projected in another ‘s behavior toward you is the same as the self you see projected in your own behavior. [NST==>You will find this sentence totally unintelligible until you entertain the notion that the self is an inferred entity, inferred using the same sort of equipment that we use to infer the motives, aspirations, feelings, and thoughts of others.  What differs between you and me is the amount of time we spend around me.  To the extent that I spend more time than you do around me, I am probably a better source of info about what I am up to, thinking about, etc., ceteris paribus.  Thus, I may greater familiarity with me than you do, I don’t have any special access to me.   <==nst]

 

If I remember what happened when we last did this Russ, you made me clearer and a clearer (and Eric, who wrote the Devil’s Advocate questions, in some ways modeled himself after you), but in the end, you just concluded that I was nuts, and we let it go at that. 

 

I don't know how to understand that either. What do you mean by "self?" What does it mean to project it toward someone? What does it mean to say that it's the same self as the one you project? Over what period of time must they be the same? If we're talking about behavior would it matter if the projecting entity were a robot? (Perhaps you answered those questions in the papers I haven't read. Sorry if that's the case.)

[NST==>If you insist that a mind is a thing that is enclosed in a head (or a steel cabinet, etc.), than I can only say that if a robot does mind things, than a robot “has” a mind.  But I rebel against the metaphor.  <==nst]

 

--------------

 

You responded with a long (and clear and definitive) extract from your paper. But I don't see how it answers my questions. Wrt the first question, if we're talking about behavior, distance doesn't see relevant. Wrt the second question, the extract doesn't (seem to) talk about what you mean by a self or what it means for the projected behaviors of two of them to be "the same" -- or even what projected behavior means. Is it the case that you also don't "believe in" intentionality? After all how can there be intentionality without a subjective intent? And if that's the case, what does "projected" mean? Is it the same as oriented in 3D space?

[NST==>I have to run, now, but please see  Intentionality is the Mark of the Vital .  Ethology is thick with intentionality. Language is not an necessary condition for intentionalty.  All is required is the sign relation (cf Peirce). <==nst]

 

 

 

On Mon, Feb 22, 2016 at 1:38 PM glen <[hidden email]> wrote:

I may as well chime in, too, since none of what's been said so far is meaningful to me.  My concept of intimacy runs along M-W's 2nd entry:

    2 :  to communicate delicately and indirectly

This is almost nothing to do with subjectivity and almost nothing to do with non-private knowledge (things others know).  It has to do with "delicate" attention to detail and, perhaps, manipulation.  A robot could easily be intimate with a human, and demonstrate such intimacy by catering to many of the tiny things the human prefers/enjoys, even if each and every tiny preference is publicly known.  Similarly, 2 robots could be intimate by way of a _special_ inter-robot interface.  But the specialness of the interface isn't its privacy or uniqueness.  It's in its handling of whatever specific details are appropriate to those robots.

Even if inter-subjectivity is merely the intertwining of experiences, it's still largely unrelated to intimacy.  Two complete strangers can become intimate almost instantaneously, because/if their interfaces are pre-adapted for a specific coupling.  There it wouldn't be inter-subjectivity, but a kind of similarity of type.  And that might be mostly or entirely genetic rather than ontogenic.

And I have to again be some sort of Morlockian champion for the irrelevance of thought.  2 strangers can be intimate and hold _radically_ different understandings of the world(s) presented to them ... at least if we believe the tales told to us in countless novels. 8^)


On 02/22/2016 12:40 AM, Jochen Fromm wrote:
> Nice to see FRIAM is still alive!
> I like this definition as well: "Intimacy is just being so close that you see the same world from where you stand". In a family for example we are being so close that we roughly see and experience the same world.
>
> I still believe that the solution to the hard problem lies in Hollywood: cinemas are built like theaters. If we see a film about a person, it is like sitting in his or her cartesian theater. We see what the person sees. In a sense, we feel what the feels as well, especially the pain of loosing someone.

--
⇔ glen

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[Russ Abbott]

I'm flattered. Thank you. I can see myself in the Devil's Advocate role -- except for the last part. I'll grant that you can think whatever you want.

[NST==>”close” is a metaphor;  I am suggesting a co-location in space metaphor to substitute for the privacy-inside metaphor which I take to be yours.  I am suggesting, roughly, that the more experiences we share, the more we are of one mind.  <==nst]

That won't work for my sense of intimacy. One can be intimate (in my sense) on the telephone and via written words. Sharing (i.e., participating in the same) experiences is not required for intimacy in my sense. What is required (in my sense) is sharing (i.e., talking about one's subjective experiences of one's) experiences.

 [NST==>You will find this sentence totally unintelligible until you entertain the notion that the self is an inferred entity, inferred using the same sort of equipment that we use to infer the motives, aspirations, feelings, and thoughts of others.  What differs between you and me is the amount of time we spend around me.  To the extent that I spend more time than you do around me, I am probably a better source of info about what I am up to, thinking about, etc., ceteris paribus.  Thus, I may greater familiarity with me than you do, I don’t have any special access to me.   <==nst]

What does it mean to infer something if one has no subjective experience? I think of inferring something as having to do with thinking about it. More generally what does it mean to think about something in your framework? I'll agree that thinking involves stuff happening in the brain. So it's behavior in that sense. But it's not behavior in the sense you seem to be talking about. So what does it mean in your sense to think about something?

I realize I'm on shaky ground here because computers "think" about things without having what I would call subjective experience.

[NST==>If you insist that a mind is a thing that is enclosed in a head (or a steel cabinet, etc.), then I can only say that if a robot does mind things, than a robot “has” a mind.  But I rebel against the metaphor.  <==nst]

I don't insist that a mind is anything. I don't know how to talk about subjective experience scientifically. I see no reason to deny it, but I agree we have made little scientific progress in talking about it. 

By the way, Eric's point that the world must be a certain way if we are to do science doesn't make sense to me. If Schrodinger, Heisenberg, etc. thought like that they would have denied the two-slit experiments, and quantum mechanics wouldn't exist. Science (as you all know) is fundamentally empirical. You can't demand that the world be a certain way so that it's easier to do science.

[NST==>I have to run, now, but please see  Intentionality is the Mark of the Vital .  Ethology is thick with intentionality. Language is not an necessary condition for intentionalty.  All is required is the sign relation (cf Peirce). <==nst]

I looked at (but didn't read in any detail) the Intentionality paper. The upshot seems to be that non-humans have intentionality. I don't argue with that. My question for you is still how you reconcile intentionality with not having subjective experience. What is intentionality without subjectivity? (Again, I'm moving onto shaky ground since we have "goal-directed" software even though the software and the computer that runs it has no subjective experience.)

I guess in both cases in which computers seem to "think" or "plan" we are using those terms as analogs to what we see ourselves doing and not really to attribute those processes to computers or software.

On Mon, Feb 22, 2016 at 3:23 PM Nick Thompson <[hidden email]> wrote:

See Larding below:

 

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 Russ Abbott
Sent: Monday, February 22, 2016 3:08 PM

To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Subjectivity and intimacy

 

Sorry that I'm not responding to Glen, Jochen, or John, but I've got to defend Nick's devil's advocate.  Nick, you do keep changing the subject.  In response to your two suggested definitions of intimacy I asked the following.

 

--------------

 

Version 1: Intimacy is just being so close that you see the same world from where you stand. 

 

I don't know how to understand that. Do you mean close wrt Euclidean distance? How does that relate to, for example, pain? No matter how close you are to someone, you can't see, for example, their toothache.

[NST==>”close” is a metaphor;  I am suggesting a co-location in space metaphor to substitute for the privacy-inside metaphor which I take to be yours.  I am suggesting, roughly, that the more experiences we share, the more we are of one mind.  <==nst]

 

Version 2: When the self you see projected in another ‘s behavior toward you is the same as the self you see projected in your own behavior. [NST==>You will find this sentence totally unintelligible until you entertain the notion that the self is an inferred entity, inferred using the same sort of equipment that we use to infer the motives, aspirations, feelings, and thoughts of others.  What differs between you and me is the amount of time we spend around me.  To the extent that I spend more time than you do around me, I am probably a better source of info about what I am up to, thinking about, etc., ceteris paribus.  Thus, I may greater familiarity with me than you do, I don’t have any special access to me.   <==nst]

 

If I remember what happened when we last did this Russ, you made me clearer and a clearer (and Eric, who wrote the Devil’s Advocate questions, in some ways modeled himself after you), but in the end, you just concluded that I was nuts, and we let it go at that. 

 

I don't know how to understand that either. What do you mean by "self?" What does it mean to project it toward someone? What does it mean to say that it's the same self as the one you project? Over what period of time must they be the same? If we're talking about behavior would it matter if the projecting entity were a robot? (Perhaps you answered those questions in the papers I haven't read. Sorry if that's the case.)

[NST==>If you insist that a mind is a thing that is enclosed in a head (or a steel cabinet, etc.), than I can only say that if a robot does mind things, than a robot “has” a mind.  But I rebel against the metaphor.  <==nst]

 

--------------

 

You responded with a long (and clear and definitive) extract from your paper. But I don't see how it answers my questions. Wrt the first question, if we're talking about behavior, distance doesn't see relevant. Wrt the second question, the extract doesn't (seem to) talk about what you mean by a self or what it means for the projected behaviors of two of them to be "the same" -- or even what projected behavior means. Is it the case that you also don't "believe in" intentionality? After all how can there be intentionality without a subjective intent? And if that's the case, what does "projected" mean? Is it the same as oriented in 3D space?

[NST==>I have to run, now, but please see  Intentionality is the Mark of the Vital .  Ethology is thick with intentionality. Language is not an necessary condition for intentionalty.  All is required is the sign relation (cf Peirce). <==nst]

 

 

 

On Mon, Feb 22, 2016 at 1:38 PM glen <[hidden email]> wrote:

I may as well chime in, too, since none of what's been said so far is meaningful to me.  My concept of intimacy runs along M-W's 2nd entry:

    2 :  to communicate delicately and indirectly

This is almost nothing to do with subjectivity and almost nothing to do with non-private knowledge (things others know).  It has to do with "delicate" attention to detail and, perhaps, manipulation.  A robot could easily be intimate with a human, and demonstrate such intimacy by catering to many of the tiny things the human prefers/enjoys, even if each and every tiny preference is publicly known.  Similarly, 2 robots could be intimate by way of a _special_ inter-robot interface.  But the specialness of the interface isn't its privacy or uniqueness.  It's in its handling of whatever specific details are appropriate to those robots.

Even if inter-subjectivity is merely the intertwining of experiences, it's still largely unrelated to intimacy.  Two complete strangers can become intimate almost instantaneously, because/if their interfaces are pre-adapted for a specific coupling.  There it wouldn't be inter-subjectivity, but a kind of similarity of type.  And that might be mostly or entirely genetic rather than ontogenic.

And I have to again be some sort of Morlockian champion for the irrelevance of thought.  2 strangers can be intimate and hold _radically_ different understandings of the world(s) presented to them ... at least if we believe the tales told to us in countless novels. 8^)


On 02/22/2016 12:40 AM, Jochen Fromm wrote:
> Nice to see FRIAM is still alive!
> I like this definition as well: "Intimacy is just being so close that you see the same world from where you stand". In a family for example we are being so close that we roughly see and experience the same world.
>
> I still believe that the solution to the hard problem lies in Hollywood: cinemas are built like theaters. If we see a film about a person, it is like sitting in his or her cartesian theater. We see what the person sees. In a sense, we feel what the feels as well, especially the pain of loosing someone.

--
⇔ glen

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[Eric Charles-2]

Russ said: "Eric's point that the world must be a certain way if we are to do science doesn't make sense to me. If Schrodinger, Heisenberg, etc. thought like that they would have denied the two-slit experiments, and quantum mechanics wouldn't exist. Science (as you all know) is fundamentally empirical. You can't demand that the world be a certain way so that it's easier to do science."

Exactly! Let me try another tact.

1) We could imagine (with various levels of clarity) any number of worlds in which things worked differently from each other.

2) "Doing science" is largely a process of trying to figure out which of those worlds we live in, by searching for the best way to divide up empirical evidence, so that it is reliable and can be agreed up. (Peirce was particularly fascinated with the advances made in 18th century chemistry.) Scientists search for more and more stable ways to view the world, i.e., ways which stand up to more and more empirical scrutiny. (Early attempts at the periodic table, though imperfect, serve as an excellent example of this, leading to countless confirmatory experiments, including the correct prediction of the properties of yet-to-be-isolated elements.)

3) In order to do science about something, we need only one thing to be true: It can be investigated empirically. That is, it is something, "out there" which we can turn our machinations towards, and which will yield stable results once we find the appropriate methods for its investigation.

4) Many important big-name people have declared that a science of psychology is impossible, because the stuff under discussion in that context simply cannot be investigated empirically. Kant, is a prime example. Those big-names declared that another person's mind was not the type of thing that you could examine empirically, because the province of the soul did not yield itself to earthly poking and prodding. If those big-names are correct, and minds cannot be investigated, by their very nature, we would expect efforts in that direction to fail-to-produce the convergence-of-ideas characteristic of successful science.

5) We can imagine a world in which those big-names are correct. We can imagine a world in which many types of things can be investigated empirically, but not minds, and in which all attempts to produce a science of the mind would fail pathetically.

6) The above view has had a virtual strangle hold on Western thinking for centuries. However, in the late 1800's a few serious scholars started thinking that "science of psychology" might be given a go, to see how it went. They were widely dismissed, not allowed to hold their heads high in either scientific circles or philosophical ones.

7) And that's where we find ourselves. If a science of psychology is possible, then de facto the subject matter of psychology is some swath of empirically investigatable happenings, about which a community of investigators would eventually reach a consensus as the scientific process takes its course. We might not live in such a world, but we won't know without trying it. A science of ether winds never worked out. The attempted science of medieval humours was a bust. A science of studying bumps-on-people's-heads has been roundly rejected. All sorts of attempted sciences have not worked out over the years. But the science of the mind seems to be doing reasonably well. Either that progress is an illusion, and empirical-psychologists will soon go the way of the phrenologists, or that progress is evidence that the big-names who thought of "mind" as inherently uninvestigatable were wrong on a very fundamental level.

If you are to study a romantic partner's mind in order to become intimate with her, then her mind must be something that can be studied. If I am to study your feeling of intimacy, then your feeling-of-intimacy must be something that can be studied. And so on, and so forth. Whatever methods and categories that leads us two, such is the stuff of the science of psychology, whether it matches any of our preconceptions, or not.

Best,

Eric

 

On Mon, Feb 22, 2016 at 7:13 PM, Russ Abbott <[hidden email]> wrote:

I'm flattered. Thank you. I can see myself in the Devil's Advocate role -- except for the last part. I'll grant that you can think whatever you want.

[NST==>”close” is a metaphor;  I am suggesting a co-location in space metaphor to substitute for the privacy-inside metaphor which I take to be yours.  I am suggesting, roughly, that the more experiences we share, the more we are of one mind.  <==nst]

That won't work for my sense of intimacy. One can be intimate (in my sense) on the telephone and via written words. Sharing (i.e., participating in the same) experiences is not required for intimacy in my sense. What is required (in my sense) is sharing (i.e., talking about one's subjective experiences of one's) experiences.

 [NST==>You will find this sentence totally unintelligible until you entertain the notion that the self is an inferred entity, inferred using the same sort of equipment that we use to infer the motives, aspirations, feelings, and thoughts of others.  What differs between you and me is the amount of time we spend around me.  To the extent that I spend more time than you do around me, I am probably a better source of info about what I am up to, thinking about, etc., ceteris paribus.  Thus, I may greater familiarity with me than you do, I don’t have any special access to me.   <==nst]

What does it mean to infer something if one has no subjective experience? I think of inferring something as having to do with thinking about it. More generally what does it mean to think about something in your framework? I'll agree that thinking involves stuff happening in the brain. So it's behavior in that sense. But it's not behavior in the sense you seem to be talking about. So what does it mean in your sense to think about something?

I realize I'm on shaky ground here because computers "think" about things without having what I would call subjective experience.

[NST==>If you insist that a mind is a thing that is enclosed in a head (or a steel cabinet, etc.), then I can only say that if a robot does mind things, than a robot “has” a mind.  But I rebel against the metaphor.  <==nst]

I don't insist that a mind is anything. I don't know how to talk about subjective experience scientifically. I see no reason to deny it, but I agree we have made little scientific progress in talking about it. 

By the way, Eric's point that the world must be a certain way if we are to do science doesn't make sense to me. If Schrodinger, Heisenberg, etc. thought like that they would have denied the two-slit experiments, and quantum mechanics wouldn't exist. Science (as you all know) is fundamentally empirical. You can't demand that the world be a certain way so that it's easier to do science.

[NST==>I have to run, now, but please see  Intentionality is the Mark of the Vital .  Ethology is thick with intentionality. Language is not an necessary condition for intentionalty.  All is required is the sign relation (cf Peirce). <==nst]

I looked at (but didn't read in any detail) the Intentionality paper. The upshot seems to be that non-humans have intentionality. I don't argue with that. My question for you is still how you reconcile intentionality with not having subjective experience. What is intentionality without subjectivity? (Again, I'm moving onto shaky ground since we have "goal-directed" software even though the software and the computer that runs it has no subjective experience.)

I guess in both cases in which computers seem to "think" or "plan" we are using those terms as analogs to what we see ourselves doing and not really to attribute those processes to computers or software.

On Mon, Feb 22, 2016 at 3:23 PM Nick Thompson <[hidden email]> wrote:

See Larding below:

 

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 Russ Abbott
Sent: Monday, February 22, 2016 3:08 PM

To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Subjectivity and intimacy

 

Sorry that I'm not responding to Glen, Jochen, or John, but I've got to defend Nick's devil's advocate.  Nick, you do keep changing the subject.  In response to your two suggested definitions of intimacy I asked the following.

 

--------------

 

Version 1: Intimacy is just being so close that you see the same world from where you stand. 

 

I don't know how to understand that. Do you mean close wrt Euclidean distance? How does that relate to, for example, pain? No matter how close you are to someone, you can't see, for example, their toothache.

[NST==>”close” is a metaphor;  I am suggesting a co-location in space metaphor to substitute for the privacy-inside metaphor which I take to be yours.  I am suggesting, roughly, that the more experiences we share, the more we are of one mind.  <==nst]

 

Version 2: When the self you see projected in another ‘s behavior toward you is the same as the self you see projected in your own behavior. [NST==>You will find this sentence totally unintelligible until you entertain the notion that the self is an inferred entity, inferred using the same sort of equipment that we use to infer the motives, aspirations, feelings, and thoughts of others.  What differs between you and me is the amount of time we spend around me.  To the extent that I spend more time than you do around me, I am probably a better source of info about what I am up to, thinking about, etc., ceteris paribus.  Thus, I may greater familiarity with me than you do, I don’t have any special access to me.   <==nst]

 

If I remember what happened when we last did this Russ, you made me clearer and a clearer (and Eric, who wrote the Devil’s Advocate questions, in some ways modeled himself after you), but in the end, you just concluded that I was nuts, and we let it go at that. 

 

I don't know how to understand that either. What do you mean by "self?" What does it mean to project it toward someone? What does it mean to say that it's the same self as the one you project? Over what period of time must they be the same? If we're talking about behavior would it matter if the projecting entity were a robot? (Perhaps you answered those questions in the papers I haven't read. Sorry if that's the case.)

[NST==>If you insist that a mind is a thing that is enclosed in a head (or a steel cabinet, etc.), than I can only say that if a robot does mind things, than a robot “has” a mind.  But I rebel against the metaphor.  <==nst]

 

--------------

 

You responded with a long (and clear and definitive) extract from your paper. But I don't see how it answers my questions. Wrt the first question, if we're talking about behavior, distance doesn't see relevant. Wrt the second question, the extract doesn't (seem to) talk about what you mean by a self or what it means for the projected behaviors of two of them to be "the same" -- or even what projected behavior means. Is it the case that you also don't "believe in" intentionality? After all how can there be intentionality without a subjective intent? And if that's the case, what does "projected" mean? Is it the same as oriented in 3D space?

[NST==>I have to run, now, but please see  Intentionality is the Mark of the Vital .  Ethology is thick with intentionality. Language is not an necessary condition for intentionalty.  All is required is the sign relation (cf Peirce). <==nst]

 

 

 

On Mon, Feb 22, 2016 at 1:38 PM glen <[hidden email]> wrote:

I may as well chime in, too, since none of what's been said so far is meaningful to me.  My concept of intimacy runs along M-W's 2nd entry:

    2 :  to communicate delicately and indirectly

This is almost nothing to do with subjectivity and almost nothing to do with non-private knowledge (things others know).  It has to do with "delicate" attention to detail and, perhaps, manipulation.  A robot could easily be intimate with a human, and demonstrate such intimacy by catering to many of the tiny things the human prefers/enjoys, even if each and every tiny preference is publicly known.  Similarly, 2 robots could be intimate by way of a _special_ inter-robot interface.  But the specialness of the interface isn't its privacy or uniqueness.  It's in its handling of whatever specific details are appropriate to those robots.

Even if inter-subjectivity is merely the intertwining of experiences, it's still largely unrelated to intimacy.  Two complete strangers can become intimate almost instantaneously, because/if their interfaces are pre-adapted for a specific coupling.  There it wouldn't be inter-subjectivity, but a kind of similarity of type.  And that might be mostly or entirely genetic rather than ontogenic.

And I have to again be some sort of Morlockian champion for the irrelevance of thought.  2 strangers can be intimate and hold _radically_ different understandings of the world(s) presented to them ... at least if we believe the tales told to us in countless novels. 8^)


On 02/22/2016 12:40 AM, Jochen Fromm wrote:
> Nice to see FRIAM is still alive!
> I like this definition as well: "Intimacy is just being so close that you see the same world from where you stand". In a family for example we are being so close that we roughly see and experience the same world.
>
> I still believe that the solution to the hard problem lies in Hollywood: cinemas are built like theaters. If we see a film about a person, it is like sitting in his or her cartesian theater. We see what the person sees. In a sense, we feel what the feels as well, especially the pain of loosing someone.

--
⇔ glen

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[Russ Abbott]

Eric, When you say "the science of the mind seems to be doing reasonably well" what are you referring to? I thought your position was that mind was not a useful concept. I suppose that what you mean by mind is something that can be investigated by looking at behavior. But what is that sort of mind? Wouldn't it be better to call it something else so that people like me don't get confused? So to get back to my original question and to help me understand what you are saying, what are the recent advances in the science of mind I should be thinking of in this regard?

Also, I'm not convinced that subjective experience is forever beyond the reach of scientific investigation. I wouldn't be surprised if we develop technology that lets me experience what you are experiencing via neural sensor and communication systems. And if I can experience what you are experiencing we will presumably be able to record it and parse it. 

We have taken impressive steps in computer vision in recent years. I expect that work to help us develop a more formal structure for our own visual experiences. This is not to say that the formal structure will be a subjective experience for the computer. But it is to say that it will give us some leverage for investigating subjective experience. Similarly open brain surgery has helped us understand how the brain is connected to subjective experience.  

Just as we now know a lot about how natural language works even though no science can speak or fully understand natural language, I expect that we will develop similar theories about how subjective experience works. 

I don't expect a breakthrough that will suddenly crack "the hard problem of consciousness." More likely we will be able to say more and more accurately what sort of subjective experience someone is having by looking at what their brain is doing. We now have ways to allow people to act in the world by thinking about what they want. These are fairly superficial mappings of brain signals to physical actuators. But it's pretty impressive nonetheless. More advances along these and related lines will make subjective experience less of a mystery and more just another feature of the world.

On Mon, Feb 22, 2016 at 7:09 PM Eric Charles <[hidden email]> wrote:

Russ said: "Eric's point that the world must be a certain way if we are to do science doesn't make sense to me. If Schrodinger, Heisenberg, etc. thought like that they would have denied the two-slit experiments, and quantum mechanics wouldn't exist. Science (as you all know) is fundamentally empirical. You can't demand that the world be a certain way so that it's easier to do science."

Exactly! Let me try another tact.

1) We could imagine (with various levels of clarity) any number of worlds in which things worked differently from each other.

2) "Doing science" is largely a process of trying to figure out which of those worlds we live in, by searching for the best way to divide up empirical evidence, so that it is reliable and can be agreed up. (Peirce was particularly fascinated with the advances made in 18th century chemistry.) Scientists search for more and more stable ways to view the world, i.e., ways which stand up to more and more empirical scrutiny. (Early attempts at the periodic table, though imperfect, serve as an excellent example of this, leading to countless confirmatory experiments, including the correct prediction of the properties of yet-to-be-isolated elements.)

3) In order to do science about something, we need only one thing to be true: It can be investigated empirically. That is, it is something, "out there" which we can turn our machinations towards, and which will yield stable results once we find the appropriate methods for its investigation.

4) Many important big-name people have declared that a science of psychology is impossible, because the stuff under discussion in that context simply cannot be investigated empirically. Kant, is a prime example. Those big-names declared that another person's mind was not the type of thing that you could examine empirically, because the province of the soul did not yield itself to earthly poking and prodding. If those big-names are correct, and minds cannot be investigated, by their very nature, we would expect efforts in that direction to fail-to-produce the convergence-of-ideas characteristic of successful science.

5) We can imagine a world in which those big-names are correct. We can imagine a world in which many types of things can be investigated empirically, but not minds, and in which all attempts to produce a science of the mind would fail pathetically.

6) The above view has had a virtual strangle hold on Western thinking for centuries. However, in the late 1800's a few serious scholars started thinking that "science of psychology" might be given a go, to see how it went. They were widely dismissed, not allowed to hold their heads high in either scientific circles or philosophical ones.

7) And that's where we find ourselves. If a science of psychology is possible, then de facto the subject matter of psychology is some swath of empirically investigatable happenings, about which a community of investigators would eventually reach a consensus as the scientific process takes its course. We might not live in such a world, but we won't know without trying it. A science of ether winds never worked out. The attempted science of medieval humours was a bust. A science of studying bumps-on-people's-heads has been roundly rejected. All sorts of attempted sciences have not worked out over the years. But the science of the mind seems to be doing reasonably well. Either that progress is an illusion, and empirical-psychologists will soon go the way of the phrenologists, or that progress is evidence that the big-names who thought of "mind" as inherently uninvestigatable were wrong on a very fundamental level.

If you are to study a romantic partner's mind in order to become intimate with her, then her mind must be something that can be studied. If I am to study your feeling of intimacy, then your feeling-of-intimacy must be something that can be studied. And so on, and so forth. Whatever methods and categories that leads us two, such is the stuff of the science of psychology, whether it matches any of our preconceptions, or not.

Best,

Eric

 

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

On Mon, Feb 22, 2016 at 7:13 PM, Russ Abbott <[hidden email]> wrote:

I'm flattered. Thank you. I can see myself in the Devil's Advocate role -- except for the last part. I'll grant that you can think whatever you want.

[NST==>”close” is a metaphor;  I am suggesting a co-location in space metaphor to substitute for the privacy-inside metaphor which I take to be yours.  I am suggesting, roughly, that the more experiences we share, the more we are of one mind.  <==nst]

That won't work for my sense of intimacy. One can be intimate (in my sense) on the telephone and via written words. Sharing (i.e., participating in the same) experiences is not required for intimacy in my sense. What is required (in my sense) is sharing (i.e., talking about one's subjective experiences of one's) experiences.

 [NST==>You will find this sentence totally unintelligible until you entertain the notion that the self is an inferred entity, inferred using the same sort of equipment that we use to infer the motives, aspirations, feelings, and thoughts of others.  What differs between you and me is the amount of time we spend around me.  To the extent that I spend more time than you do around me, I am probably a better source of info about what I am up to, thinking about, etc., ceteris paribus.  Thus, I may greater familiarity with me than you do, I don’t have any special access to me.   <==nst]

What does it mean to infer something if one has no subjective experience? I think of inferring something as having to do with thinking about it. More generally what does it mean to think about something in your framework? I'll agree that thinking involves stuff happening in the brain. So it's behavior in that sense. But it's not behavior in the sense you seem to be talking about. So what does it mean in your sense to think about something?

I realize I'm on shaky ground here because computers "think" about things without having what I would call subjective experience.

[NST==>If you insist that a mind is a thing that is enclosed in a head (or a steel cabinet, etc.), then I can only say that if a robot does mind things, than a robot “has” a mind.  But I rebel against the metaphor.  <==nst]

I don't insist that a mind is anything. I don't know how to talk about subjective experience scientifically. I see no reason to deny it, but I agree we have made little scientific progress in talking about it. 

By the way, Eric's point that the world must be a certain way if we are to do science doesn't make sense to me. If Schrodinger, Heisenberg, etc. thought like that they would have denied the two-slit experiments, and quantum mechanics wouldn't exist. Science (as you all know) is fundamentally empirical. You can't demand that the world be a certain way so that it's easier to do science.

[NST==>I have to run, now, but please see  Intentionality is the Mark of the Vital .  Ethology is thick with intentionality. Language is not an necessary condition for intentionalty.  All is required is the sign relation (cf Peirce). <==nst]

I looked at (but didn't read in any detail) the Intentionality paper. The upshot seems to be that non-humans have intentionality. I don't argue with that. My question for you is still how you reconcile intentionality with not having subjective experience. What is intentionality without subjectivity? (Again, I'm moving onto shaky ground since we have "goal-directed" software even though the software and the computer that runs it has no subjective experience.)

I guess in both cases in which computers seem to "think" or "plan" we are using those terms as analogs to what we see ourselves doing and not really to attribute those processes to computers or software.

On Mon, Feb 22, 2016 at 3:23 PM Nick Thompson <[hidden email]> wrote:

See Larding below:

 

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 Russ Abbott
Sent: Monday, February 22, 2016 3:08 PM

To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Subjectivity and intimacy

 

Sorry that I'm not responding to Glen, Jochen, or John, but I've got to defend Nick's devil's advocate.  Nick, you do keep changing the subject.  In response to your two suggested definitions of intimacy I asked the following.

 

--------------

 

Version 1: Intimacy is just being so close that you see the same world from where you stand. 

 

I don't know how to understand that. Do you mean close wrt Euclidean distance? How does that relate to, for example, pain? No matter how close you are to someone, you can't see, for example, their toothache.

[NST==>”close” is a metaphor;  I am suggesting a co-location in space metaphor to substitute for the privacy-inside metaphor which I take to be yours.  I am suggesting, roughly, that the more experiences we share, the more we are of one mind.  <==nst]

 

Version 2: When the self you see projected in another ‘s behavior toward you is the same as the self you see projected in your own behavior. [NST==>You will find this sentence totally unintelligible until you entertain the notion that the self is an inferred entity, inferred using the same sort of equipment that we use to infer the motives, aspirations, feelings, and thoughts of others.  What differs between you and me is the amount of time we spend around me.  To the extent that I spend more time than you do around me, I am probably a better source of info about what I am up to, thinking about, etc., ceteris paribus.  Thus, I may greater familiarity with me than you do, I don’t have any special access to me.   <==nst]

 

If I remember what happened when we last did this Russ, you made me clearer and a clearer (and Eric, who wrote the Devil’s Advocate questions, in some ways modeled himself after you), but in the end, you just concluded that I was nuts, and we let it go at that. 

 

I don't know how to understand that either. What do you mean by "self?" What does it mean to project it toward someone? What does it mean to say that it's the same self as the one you project? Over what period of time must they be the same? If we're talking about behavior would it matter if the projecting entity were a robot? (Perhaps you answered those questions in the papers I haven't read. Sorry if that's the case.)

[NST==>If you insist that a mind is a thing that is enclosed in a head (or a steel cabinet, etc.), than I can only say that if a robot does mind things, than a robot “has” a mind.  But I rebel against the metaphor.  <==nst]

 

--------------

 

You responded with a long (and clear and definitive) extract from your paper. But I don't see how it answers my questions. Wrt the first question, if we're talking about behavior, distance doesn't see relevant. Wrt the second question, the extract doesn't (seem to) talk about what you mean by a self or what it means for the projected behaviors of two of them to be "the same" -- or even what projected behavior means. Is it the case that you also don't "believe in" intentionality? After all how can there be intentionality without a subjective intent? And if that's the case, what does "projected" mean? Is it the same as oriented in 3D space?

[NST==>I have to run, now, but please see  Intentionality is the Mark of the Vital .  Ethology is thick with intentionality. Language is not an necessary condition for intentionalty.  All is required is the sign relation (cf Peirce). <==nst]

 

 

 

On Mon, Feb 22, 2016 at 1:38 PM glen <[hidden email]> wrote:

I may as well chime in, too, since none of what's been said so far is meaningful to me.  My concept of intimacy runs along M-W's 2nd entry:

    2 :  to communicate delicately and indirectly

This is almost nothing to do with subjectivity and almost nothing to do with non-private knowledge (things others know).  It has to do with "delicate" attention to detail and, perhaps, manipulation.  A robot could easily be intimate with a human, and demonstrate such intimacy by catering to many of the tiny things the human prefers/enjoys, even if each and every tiny preference is publicly known.  Similarly, 2 robots could be intimate by way of a _special_ inter-robot interface.  But the specialness of the interface isn't its privacy or uniqueness.  It's in its handling of whatever specific details are appropriate to those robots.

Even if inter-subjectivity is merely the intertwining of experiences, it's still largely unrelated to intimacy.  Two complete strangers can become intimate almost instantaneously, because/if their interfaces are pre-adapted for a specific coupling.  There it wouldn't be inter-subjectivity, but a kind of similarity of type.  And that might be mostly or entirely genetic rather than ontogenic.

And I have to again be some sort of Morlockian champion for the irrelevance of thought.  2 strangers can be intimate and hold _radically_ different understandings of the world(s) presented to them ... at least if we believe the tales told to us in countless novels. 8^)


On 02/22/2016 12:40 AM, Jochen Fromm wrote:
> Nice to see FRIAM is still alive!
> I like this definition as well: "Intimacy is just being so close that you see the same world from where you stand". In a family for example we are being so close that we roughly see and experience the same world.
>
> I still believe that the solution to the hard problem lies in Hollywood: cinemas are built like theaters. If we see a film about a person, it is like sitting in his or her cartesian theater. We see what the person sees. In a sense, we feel what the feels as well, especially the pain of loosing someone.

--
⇔ glen

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

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

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

Nick, Eric,

I'm disappointed that neither of you responded to my reply (below) to Eric's message.  Perhaps it got lost in the weeks. 

-- Russ

On Mon, Feb 22, 2016 at 9:56 PM Russ Abbott <[hidden email]> wrote:

Eric, When you say "the science of the mind seems to be doing reasonably well" what are you referring to? I thought your position was that mind was not a useful concept. I suppose that what you mean by mind is something that can be investigated by looking at behavior. But what is that sort of mind? Wouldn't it be better to call it something else so that people like me don't get confused? So to get back to my original question and to help me understand what you are saying, what are the recent advances in the science of mind I should be thinking of in this regard?

Also, I'm not convinced that subjective experience is forever beyond the reach of scientific investigation. I wouldn't be surprised if we develop technology that lets me experience what you are experiencing via neural sensor and communication systems. And if I can experience what you are experiencing we will presumably be able to record it and parse it. 

We have taken impressive steps in computer vision in recent years. I expect that work to help us develop a more formal structure for our own visual experiences. This is not to say that the formal structure will be a subjective experience for the computer. But it is to say that it will give us some leverage for investigating subjective experience. Similarly open brain surgery has helped us understand how the brain is connected to subjective experience.  

Just as we now know a lot about how natural language works even though no science can speak or fully understand natural language, I expect that we will develop similar theories about how subjective experience works. 

I don't expect a breakthrough that will suddenly crack "the hard problem of consciousness." More likely we will be able to say more and more accurately what sort of subjective experience someone is having by looking at what their brain is doing. We now have ways to allow people to act in the world by thinking about what they want. These are fairly superficial mappings of brain signals to physical actuators. But it's pretty impressive nonetheless. More advances along these and related lines will make subjective experience less of a mystery and more just another feature of the world.

On Mon, Feb 22, 2016 at 7:09 PM Eric Charles <[hidden email]> wrote:

Russ said: "Eric's point that the world must be a certain way if we are to do science doesn't make sense to me. If Schrodinger, Heisenberg, etc. thought like that they would have denied the two-slit experiments, and quantum mechanics wouldn't exist. Science (as you all know) is fundamentally empirical. You can't demand that the world be a certain way so that it's easier to do science."

Exactly! Let me try another tact.

1) We could imagine (with various levels of clarity) any number of worlds in which things worked differently from each other.

2) "Doing science" is largely a process of trying to figure out which of those worlds we live in, by searching for the best way to divide up empirical evidence, so that it is reliable and can be agreed up. (Peirce was particularly fascinated with the advances made in 18th century chemistry.) Scientists search for more and more stable ways to view the world, i.e., ways which stand up to more and more empirical scrutiny. (Early attempts at the periodic table, though imperfect, serve as an excellent example of this, leading to countless confirmatory experiments, including the correct prediction of the properties of yet-to-be-isolated elements.)

3) In order to do science about something, we need only one thing to be true: It can be investigated empirically. That is, it is something, "out there" which we can turn our machinations towards, and which will yield stable results once we find the appropriate methods for its investigation.

4) Many important big-name people have declared that a science of psychology is impossible, because the stuff under discussion in that context simply cannot be investigated empirically. Kant, is a prime example. Those big-names declared that another person's mind was not the type of thing that you could examine empirically, because the province of the soul did not yield itself to earthly poking and prodding. If those big-names are correct, and minds cannot be investigated, by their very nature, we would expect efforts in that direction to fail-to-produce the convergence-of-ideas characteristic of successful science.

5) We can imagine a world in which those big-names are correct. We can imagine a world in which many types of things can be investigated empirically, but not minds, and in which all attempts to produce a science of the mind would fail pathetically.

6) The above view has had a virtual strangle hold on Western thinking for centuries. However, in the late 1800's a few serious scholars started thinking that "science of psychology" might be given a go, to see how it went. They were widely dismissed, not allowed to hold their heads high in either scientific circles or philosophical ones.

7) And that's where we find ourselves. If a science of psychology is possible, then de facto the subject matter of psychology is some swath of empirically investigatable happenings, about which a community of investigators would eventually reach a consensus as the scientific process takes its course. We might not live in such a world, but we won't know without trying it. A science of ether winds never worked out. The attempted science of medieval humours was a bust. A science of studying bumps-on-people's-heads has been roundly rejected. All sorts of attempted sciences have not worked out over the years. But the science of the mind seems to be doing reasonably well. Either that progress is an illusion, and empirical-psychologists will soon go the way of the phrenologists, or that progress is evidence that the big-names who thought of "mind" as inherently uninvestigatable were wrong on a very fundamental level.

If you are to study a romantic partner's mind in order to become intimate with her, then her mind must be something that can be studied. If I am to study your feeling of intimacy, then your feeling-of-intimacy must be something that can be studied. And so on, and so forth. Whatever methods and categories that leads us two, such is the stuff of the science of psychology, whether it matches any of our preconceptions, or not.

Best,

Eric

 

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

On Mon, Feb 22, 2016 at 7:13 PM, Russ Abbott <[hidden email]> wrote:

I'm flattered. Thank you. I can see myself in the Devil's Advocate role -- except for the last part. I'll grant that you can think whatever you want.

[NST==>”close” is a metaphor;  I am suggesting a co-location in space metaphor to substitute for the privacy-inside metaphor which I take to be yours.  I am suggesting, roughly, that the more experiences we share, the more we are of one mind.  <==nst]

That won't work for my sense of intimacy. One can be intimate (in my sense) on the telephone and via written words. Sharing (i.e., participating in the same) experiences is not required for intimacy in my sense. What is required (in my sense) is sharing (i.e., talking about one's subjective experiences of one's) experiences.

 [NST==>You will find this sentence totally unintelligible until you entertain the notion that the self is an inferred entity, inferred using the same sort of equipment that we use to infer the motives, aspirations, feelings, and thoughts of others.  What differs between you and me is the amount of time we spend around me.  To the extent that I spend more time than you do around me, I am probably a better source of info about what I am up to, thinking about, etc., ceteris paribus.  Thus, I may greater familiarity with me than you do, I don’t have any special access to me.   <==nst]

What does it mean to infer something if one has no subjective experience? I think of inferring something as having to do with thinking about it. More generally what does it mean to think about something in your framework? I'll agree that thinking involves stuff happening in the brain. So it's behavior in that sense. But it's not behavior in the sense you seem to be talking about. So what does it mean in your sense to think about something?

I realize I'm on shaky ground here because computers "think" about things without having what I would call subjective experience.

[NST==>If you insist that a mind is a thing that is enclosed in a head (or a steel cabinet, etc.), then I can only say that if a robot does mind things, than a robot “has” a mind.  But I rebel against the metaphor.  <==nst]

I don't insist that a mind is anything. I don't know how to talk about subjective experience scientifically. I see no reason to deny it, but I agree we have made little scientific progress in talking about it. 

By the way, Eric's point that the world must be a certain way if we are to do science doesn't make sense to me. If Schrodinger, Heisenberg, etc. thought like that they would have denied the two-slit experiments, and quantum mechanics wouldn't exist. Science (as you all know) is fundamentally empirical. You can't demand that the world be a certain way so that it's easier to do science.

[NST==>I have to run, now, but please see  Intentionality is the Mark of the Vital .  Ethology is thick with intentionality. Language is not an necessary condition for intentionalty.  All is required is the sign relation (cf Peirce). <==nst]

I looked at (but didn't read in any detail) the Intentionality paper. The upshot seems to be that non-humans have intentionality. I don't argue with that. My question for you is still how you reconcile intentionality with not having subjective experience. What is intentionality without subjectivity? (Again, I'm moving onto shaky ground since we have "goal-directed" software even though the software and the computer that runs it has no subjective experience.)

I guess in both cases in which computers seem to "think" or "plan" we are using those terms as analogs to what we see ourselves doing and not really to attribute those processes to computers or software.

On Mon, Feb 22, 2016 at 3:23 PM Nick Thompson <[hidden email]> wrote:

See Larding below:

 

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 Russ Abbott
Sent: Monday, February 22, 2016 3:08 PM

To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Subjectivity and intimacy

 

Sorry that I'm not responding to Glen, Jochen, or John, but I've got to defend Nick's devil's advocate.  Nick, you do keep changing the subject.  In response to your two suggested definitions of intimacy I asked the following.

 

--------------

 

Version 1: Intimacy is just being so close that you see the same world from where you stand. 

 

I don't know how to understand that. Do you mean close wrt Euclidean distance? How does that relate to, for example, pain? No matter how close you are to someone, you can't see, for example, their toothache.

[NST==>”close” is a metaphor;  I am suggesting a co-location in space metaphor to substitute for the privacy-inside metaphor which I take to be yours.  I am suggesting, roughly, that the more experiences we share, the more we are of one mind.  <==nst]

 

Version 2: When the self you see projected in another ‘s behavior toward you is the same as the self you see projected in your own behavior. [NST==>You will find this sentence totally unintelligible until you entertain the notion that the self is an inferred entity, inferred using the same sort of equipment that we use to infer the motives, aspirations, feelings, and thoughts of others.  What differs between you and me is the amount of time we spend around me.  To the extent that I spend more time than you do around me, I am probably a better source of info about what I am up to, thinking about, etc., ceteris paribus.  Thus, I may greater familiarity with me than you do, I don’t have any special access to me.   <==nst]

 

If I remember what happened when we last did this Russ, you made me clearer and a clearer (and Eric, who wrote the Devil’s Advocate questions, in some ways modeled himself after you), but in the end, you just concluded that I was nuts, and we let it go at that. 

 

I don't know how to understand that either. What do you mean by "self?" What does it mean to project it toward someone? What does it mean to say that it's the same self as the one you project? Over what period of time must they be the same? If we're talking about behavior would it matter if the projecting entity were a robot? (Perhaps you answered those questions in the papers I haven't read. Sorry if that's the case.)

[NST==>If you insist that a mind is a thing that is enclosed in a head (or a steel cabinet, etc.), than I can only say that if a robot does mind things, than a robot “has” a mind.  But I rebel against the metaphor.  <==nst]

 

--------------

 

You responded with a long (and clear and definitive) extract from your paper. But I don't see how it answers my questions. Wrt the first question, if we're talking about behavior, distance doesn't see relevant. Wrt the second question, the extract doesn't (seem to) talk about what you mean by a self or what it means for the projected behaviors of two of them to be "the same" -- or even what projected behavior means. Is it the case that you also don't "believe in" intentionality? After all how can there be intentionality without a subjective intent? And if that's the case, what does "projected" mean? Is it the same as oriented in 3D space?

[NST==>I have to run, now, but please see  Intentionality is the Mark of the Vital .  Ethology is thick with intentionality. Language is not an necessary condition for intentionalty.  All is required is the sign relation (cf Peirce). <==nst]

 

 

 

On Mon, Feb 22, 2016 at 1:38 PM glen <[hidden email]> wrote:

I may as well chime in, too, since none of what's been said so far is meaningful to me.  My concept of intimacy runs along M-W's 2nd entry:

    2 :  to communicate delicately and indirectly

This is almost nothing to do with subjectivity and almost nothing to do with non-private knowledge (things others know).  It has to do with "delicate" attention to detail and, perhaps, manipulation.  A robot could easily be intimate with a human, and demonstrate such intimacy by catering to many of the tiny things the human prefers/enjoys, even if each and every tiny preference is publicly known.  Similarly, 2 robots could be intimate by way of a _special_ inter-robot interface.  But the specialness of the interface isn't its privacy or uniqueness.  It's in its handling of whatever specific details are appropriate to those robots.

Even if inter-subjectivity is merely the intertwining of experiences, it's still largely unrelated to intimacy.  Two complete strangers can become intimate almost instantaneously, because/if their interfaces are pre-adapted for a specific coupling.  There it wouldn't be inter-subjectivity, but a kind of similarity of type.  And that might be mostly or entirely genetic rather than ontogenic.

And I have to again be some sort of Morlockian champion for the irrelevance of thought.  2 strangers can be intimate and hold _radically_ different understandings of the world(s) presented to them ... at least if we believe the tales told to us in countless novels. 8^)


On 02/22/2016 12:40 AM, Jochen Fromm wrote:
> Nice to see FRIAM is still alive!
> I like this definition as well: "Intimacy is just being so close that you see the same world from where you stand". In a family for example we are being so close that we roughly see and experience the same world.
>
> I still believe that the solution to the hard problem lies in Hollywood: cinemas are built like theaters. If we see a film about a person, it is like sitting in his or her cartesian theater. We see what the person sees. In a sense, we feel what the feels as well, especially the pain of loosing someone.

--
⇔ glen

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

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

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

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

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

[Nick Thompson]

Russ,

 

Partly exhaustion, I think. 

 

Once we all agree that there is no in-principle reason that I cannot ultimately tap your subjective mind, then we all know what we are and we are just dickering about the price.

 

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 Russ Abbott
Sent: Wednesday, February 24, 2016 10:15 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Subjectivity and intimacy (lost in the weeks?)

 

Nick, Eric,

 

I'm disappointed that neither of you responded to my reply (below) to Eric's message.  Perhaps it got lost in the weeks. 

 

-- Russ

 

On Mon, Feb 22, 2016 at 9:56 PM Russ Abbott <[hidden email]> wrote:

Eric, When you say "the science of the mind seems to be doing reasonably well" what are you referring to? I thought your position was that mind was not a useful concept. I suppose that what you mean by mind is something that can be investigated by looking at behavior. But what is that sort of mind? Wouldn't it be better to call it something else so that people like me don't get confused? So to get back to my original question and to help me understand what you are saying, what are the recent advances in the science of mind I should be thinking of in this regard?

 

Also, I'm not convinced that subjective experience is forever beyond the reach of scientific investigation. I wouldn't be surprised if we develop technology that lets me experience what you are experiencing via neural sensor and communication systems. And if I can experience what you are experiencing we will presumably be able to record it and parse it. 

 

We have taken impressive steps in computer vision in recent years. I expect that work to help us develop a more formal structure for our own visual experiences. This is not to say that the formal structure will be a subjective experience for the computer. But it is to say that it will give us some leverage for investigating subjective experience. Similarly open brain surgery has helped us understand how the brain is connected to subjective experience.  

 

Just as we now know a lot about how natural language works even though no science can speak or fully understand natural language, I expect that we will develop similar theories about how subjective experience works. 

 

I don't expect a breakthrough that will suddenly crack "the hard problem of consciousness." More likely we will be able to say more and more accurately what sort of subjective experience someone is having by looking at what their brain is doing. We now have ways to allow people to act in the world by thinking about what they want. These are fairly superficial mappings of brain signals to physical actuators. But it's pretty impressive nonetheless. More advances along these and related lines will make subjective experience less of a mystery and more just another feature of the world.

 

On Mon, Feb 22, 2016 at 7:09 PM Eric Charles <[hidden email]> wrote:

Russ said: "Eric's point that the world must be a certain way if we are to do science doesn't make sense to me. If Schrodinger, Heisenberg, etc. thought like that they would have denied the two-slit experiments, and quantum mechanics wouldn't exist. Science (as you all know) is fundamentally empirical. You can't demand that the world be a certain way so that it's easier to do science."

Exactly! Let me try another tact.

1) We could imagine (with various levels of clarity) any number of worlds in which things worked differently from each other.

2) "Doing science" is largely a process of trying to figure out which of those worlds we live in, by searching for the best way to divide up empirical evidence, so that it is reliable and can be agreed up. (Peirce was particularly fascinated with the advances made in 18th century chemistry.) Scientists search for more and more stable ways to view the world, i.e., ways which stand up to more and more empirical scrutiny. (Early attempts at the periodic table, though imperfect, serve as an excellent example of this, leading to countless confirmatory experiments, including the correct prediction of the properties of yet-to-be-isolated elements.)

3) In order to do science about something, we need only one thing to be true: It can be investigated empirically. That is, it is something, "out there" which we can turn our machinations towards, and which will yield stable results once we find the appropriate methods for its investigation.

 

4) Many important big-name people have declared that a science of psychology is impossible, because the stuff under discussion in that context simply cannot be investigated empirically. Kant, is a prime example. Those big-names declared that another person's mind was not the type of thing that you could examine empirically, because the province of the soul did not yield itself to earthly poking and prodding. If those big-names are correct, and minds cannot be investigated, by their very nature, we would expect efforts in that direction to fail-to-produce the convergence-of-ideas characteristic of successful science.

5) We can imagine a world in which those big-names are correct. We can imagine a world in which many types of things can be investigated empirically, but not minds, and in which all attempts to produce a science of the mind would fail pathetically.

6) The above view has had a virtual strangle hold on Western thinking for centuries. However, in the late 1800's a few serious scholars started thinking that "science of psychology" might be given a go, to see how it went. They were widely dismissed, not allowed to hold their heads high in either scientific circles or philosophical ones.

7) And that's where we find ourselves. If a science of psychology is possible, then de facto the subject matter of psychology is some swath of empirically investigatable happenings, about which a community of investigators would eventually reach a consensus as the scientific process takes its course. We might not live in such a world, but we won't know without trying it. A science of ether winds never worked out. The attempted science of medieval humours was a bust. A science of studying bumps-on-people's-heads has been roundly rejected. All sorts of attempted sciences have not worked out over the years. But the science of the mind seems to be doing reasonably well. Either that progress is an illusion, and empirical-psychologists will soon go the way of the phrenologists, or that progress is evidence that the big-names who thought of "mind" as inherently uninvestigatable were wrong on a very fundamental level.

If you are to study a romantic partner's mind in order to become intimate with her, then her mind must be something that can be studied. If I am to study your feeling of intimacy, then your feeling-of-intimacy must be something that can be studied. And so on, and so forth. Whatever methods and categories that leads us two, such is the stuff of the science of psychology, whether it matches any of our preconceptions, or not.

Best,

Eric

 

 

 

 

 

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

 

On Mon, Feb 22, 2016 at 7:13 PM, Russ Abbott <[hidden email]> wrote:

I'm flattered. Thank you. I can see myself in the Devil's Advocate role -- except for the last part. I'll grant that you can think whatever you want.

 

[NST==>”close” is a metaphor;  I am suggesting a co-location in space metaphor to substitute for the privacy-inside metaphor which I take to be yours.  I am suggesting, roughly, that the more experiences we share, the more we are of one mind.  <==nst]

 

That won't work for my sense of intimacy. One can be intimate (in my sense) on the telephone and via written words. Sharing (i.e., participating in the same) experiences is not required for intimacy in my sense. What is required (in my sense) is sharing (i.e., talking about one's subjective experiences of one's) experiences.

 

 [NST==>You will find this sentence totally unintelligible until you entertain the notion that the self is an inferred entity, inferred using the same sort of equipment that we use to infer the motives, aspirations, feelings, and thoughts of others.  What differs between you and me is the amount of time we spend around me.  To the extent that I spend more time than you do around me, I am probably a better source of info about what I am up to, thinking about, etc., ceteris paribus.  Thus, I may greater familiarity with me than you do, I don’t have any special access to me.   <==nst]

 

What does it mean to infer something if one has no subjective experience? I think of inferring something as having to do with thinking about it. More generally what does it mean to think about something in your framework? I'll agree that thinking involves stuff happening in the brain. So it's behavior in that sense. But it's not behavior in the sense you seem to be talking about. So what does it mean in your sense to think about something?

 

I realize I'm on shaky ground here because computers "think" about things without having what I would call subjective experience.

 

[NST==>If you insist that a mind is a thing that is enclosed in a head (or a steel cabinet, etc.), then I can only say that if a robot does mind things, than a robot “has” a mind.  But I rebel against the metaphor.  <==nst]

 

I don't insist that a mind is anything. I don't know how to talk about subjective experience scientifically. I see no reason to deny it, but I agree we have made little scientific progress in talking about it. 

 

By the way, Eric's point that the world must be a certain way if we are to do science doesn't make sense to me. If Schrodinger, Heisenberg, etc. thought like that they would have denied the two-slit experiments, and quantum mechanics wouldn't exist. Science (as you all know) is fundamentally empirical. You can't demand that the world be a certain way so that it's easier to do science.

 

[NST==>I have to run, now, but please see  Intentionality is the Mark of the Vital .  Ethology is thick with intentionality. Language is not an necessary condition for intentionalty.  All is required is the sign relation (cf Peirce). <==nst]

 

I looked at (but didn't read in any detail) the Intentionality paper. The upshot seems to be that non-humans have intentionality. I don't argue with that. My question for you is still how you reconcile intentionality with not having subjective experience. What is intentionality without subjectivity? (Again, I'm moving onto shaky ground since we have "goal-directed" software even though the software and the computer that runs it has no subjective experience.)

 

I guess in both cases in which computers seem to "think" or "plan" we are using those terms as analogs to what we see ourselves doing and not really to attribute those processes to computers or software.

 

On Mon, Feb 22, 2016 at 3:23 PM Nick Thompson <[hidden email]> wrote:

See Larding below:

 

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 Russ Abbott
Sent: Monday, February 22, 2016 3:08 PM

To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Subjectivity and intimacy

 

Sorry that I'm not responding to Glen, Jochen, or John, but I've got to defend Nick's devil's advocate.  Nick, you do keep changing the subject.  In response to your two suggested definitions of intimacy I asked the following.

 

--------------

 

Version 1: Intimacy is just being so close that you see the same world from where you stand. 

 

I don't know how to understand that. Do you mean close wrt Euclidean distance? How does that relate to, for example, pain? No matter how close you are to someone, you can't see, for example, their toothache.

[NST==>”close” is a metaphor;  I am suggesting a co-location in space metaphor to substitute for the privacy-inside metaphor which I take to be yours.  I am suggesting, roughly, that the more experiences we share, the more we are of one mind.  <==nst]

 

Version 2: When the self you see projected in another ‘s behavior toward you is the same as the self you see projected in your own behavior. [NST==>You will find this sentence totally unintelligible until you entertain the notion that the self is an inferred entity, inferred using the same sort of equipment that we use to infer the motives, aspirations, feelings, and thoughts of others.  What differs between you and me is the amount of time we spend around me.  To the extent that I spend more time than you do around me, I am probably a better source of info about what I am up to, thinking about, etc., ceteris paribus.  Thus, I may greater familiarity with me than you do, I don’t have any special access to me.   <==nst]

 

If I remember what happened when we last did this Russ, you made me clearer and a clearer (and Eric, who wrote the Devil’s Advocate questions, in some ways modeled himself after you), but in the end, you just concluded that I was nuts, and we let it go at that. 

 

I don't know how to understand that either. What do you mean by "self?" What does it mean to project it toward someone? What does it mean to say that it's the same self as the one you project? Over what period of time must they be the same? If we're talking about behavior would it matter if the projecting entity were a robot? (Perhaps you answered those questions in the papers I haven't read. Sorry if that's the case.)

[NST==>If you insist that a mind is a thing that is enclosed in a head (or a steel cabinet, etc.), than I can only say that if a robot does mind things, than a robot “has” a mind.  But I rebel against the metaphor.  <==nst]

 

--------------

 

You responded with a long (and clear and definitive) extract from your paper. But I don't see how it answers my questions. Wrt the first question, if we're talking about behavior, distance doesn't see relevant. Wrt the second question, the extract doesn't (seem to) talk about what you mean by a self or what it means for the projected behaviors of two of them to be "the same" -- or even what projected behavior means. Is it the case that you also don't "believe in" intentionality? After all how can there be intentionality without a subjective intent? And if that's the case, what does "projected" mean? Is it the same as oriented in 3D space?

[NST==>I have to run, now, but please see  Intentionality is the Mark of the Vital .  Ethology is thick with intentionality. Language is not an necessary condition for intentionalty.  All is required is the sign relation (cf Peirce). <==nst]

 

 

 

On Mon, Feb 22, 2016 at 1:38 PM glen <[hidden email]> wrote:

I may as well chime in, too, since none of what's been said so far is meaningful to me.  My concept of intimacy runs along M-W's 2nd entry:

    2 :  to communicate delicately and indirectly

This is almost nothing to do with subjectivity and almost nothing to do with non-private knowledge (things others know).  It has to do with "delicate" attention to detail and, perhaps, manipulation.  A robot could easily be intimate with a human, and demonstrate such intimacy by catering to many of the tiny things the human prefers/enjoys, even if each and every tiny preference is publicly known.  Similarly, 2 robots could be intimate by way of a _special_ inter-robot interface.  But the specialness of the interface isn't its privacy or uniqueness.  It's in its handling of whatever specific details are appropriate to those robots.

Even if inter-subjectivity is merely the intertwining of experiences, it's still largely unrelated to intimacy.  Two complete strangers can become intimate almost instantaneously, because/if their interfaces are pre-adapted for a specific coupling.  There it wouldn't be inter-subjectivity, but a kind of similarity of type.  And that might be mostly or entirely genetic rather than ontogenic.

And I have to again be some sort of Morlockian champion for the irrelevance of thought.  2 strangers can be intimate and hold _radically_ different understandings of the world(s) presented to them ... at least if we believe the tales told to us in countless novels. 8^)


On 02/22/2016 12:40 AM, Jochen Fromm wrote:
> Nice to see FRIAM is still alive!
> I like this definition as well: "Intimacy is just being so close that you see the same world from where you stand". In a family for example we are being so close that we roughly see and experience the same world.
>
> I still believe that the solution to the hard problem lies in Hollywood: cinemas are built like theaters. If we see a film about a person, it is like sitting in his or her cartesian theater. We see what the person sees. In a sense, we feel what the feels as well, especially the pain of loosing someone.

--
⇔ glen

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Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
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FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
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[Eric Charles-2]

Russ,

I mulled over replying a few times, but wasn't sure what to say. However, by restating your genuine interest in my response, I now feel like a jack ass for not responding earilier, so here it goes. Some of these answers might not be at all satisfying, but I will do my best so long as you accept the caveat that I am uncertain if some of it will really answer your questions.

"When you say "the science of the mind seems to be doing reasonably well" what are you referring to?"

In the original context, I am referring to what people saw when looking around in the late 1800s. In fact, I think there is very good working being done in psychology today, but what I consider "good work" is a very small, and marginalized, corner of the modern field. Most stuff that passes as "important" psychology research today is either barking up the wrong tree entirely, or is so mundane as to be uninteresting. Mainstream psychology is driven much more by the ability to make clever press releases than by a critical view to advancing the field.

Compare the recent big-press items in physics to the recent big-press items in psychology, and it makes you want to weep for our field. The biggest news item in Psychology right now is a multi-year study showing that people "feel less in control" of their actions when following the orders by another person, in comparison to a group that chose the same actions without being ordered to do them. Seriously. (Yes, seriously.)

"I wouldn't be surprised if we develop technology that lets me experience what you are experiencing via neural sensor and communication systems."

I think we do not have a sensible way to talk about the brain's role in psychological processes at this time (I've published a few papers about this), and that when such a language is worked out it will violate most our folk-psychology intuitions. If you believe that empathy a thing people sometimes do, then, I submit, you yourself do not believe we need the posited device to experience what another is experiencing.

"We have taken impressive steps in computer vision in recent years. I expect that work to help us develop a more formal structure for our own visual experiences."

Well... sure... but that is not qualitatively different than the advances made in vision research over the past hundred years. We know a lot about how vision works. Generally speaking, computer vision does not work like human vision, because, as with all evolved processes, humans are not the most computationally efficient things in the world. But, there are people  working to build inefficient and non-elegant computer vision systems for the purposes of testing hypotheses regarding human vision. Good stuff.  

"I don't expect a breakthrough that will suddenly crack "the hard problem of consciousness. More likely we will be able to say more and more accurately what sort of subjective experience someone is having by looking at what their brain is doing."

This is probably the difficult part of your comment to respond to. I simply don't believe there is a "hard problem." To the extent that I even understand what you are talking about there, I think the brain is one part of a much larger system that we would need to examine. That is not to say that examining the brain adds nothing, but to say that an exclusive focus on the brain misrepresents the phenomena of interest.

To elaborate a bit: Traditional philosophy has addressed been largely oriented towards "internalizing" psychological processes. The Cartesian claim (an extension of the Platonic claim) was that we only experience the world that plays out in the theater of our ghost-souls. "Why do I experience the grass as green?" you ask. "Because the greenness is present in the theater of your soul," is the answer. This, of course, doesn't solve anything. Saying that we only experience the world that plays out in the theater of brains has almost all of the same problems, and should be rejected. At the least, it adds nothing.

The approach that I would advocate for could be described as "externalizing" psychological processes. "Why do I experience the grass as green?" you ask. "Because there is some identifiable property of the grass that you are responding to, and that property, out there, is what you mean by the word 'green'," would be my answer. That property could be quite complex to specify (it is certainly MUCH more complicated than a narrow range of wave lengths), but whatever that property is, that is thing you are asking about when you ask about "green". If you want to know if someone is experiencing the same thing you are when they talk about "green" then we see if the parameters for their response match the parameters for your response. That is, we act if they are experiencing, quite literally, the same things. It is challenging problem, but it is a straightforward and tractable scientific problem, and it renders the philosophers so-called "hard problem" moot.

Was any of that satisfying?

Best,

Eric

 

On Thu, Feb 25, 2016 at 1:29 AM, Nick Thompson <[hidden email]> wrote:

Russ,

 

Partly exhaustion, I think. 

 

Once we all agree that there is no in-principle reason that I cannot ultimately tap your subjective mind, then we all know what we are and we are just dickering about the price.

 

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 Russ Abbott
Sent: Wednesday, February 24, 2016 10:15 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Subjectivity and intimacy (lost in the weeks?)

 

Nick, Eric,

 

I'm disappointed that neither of you responded to my reply (below) to Eric's message.  Perhaps it got lost in the weeks. 

 

-- Russ

 

On Mon, Feb 22, 2016 at 9:56 PM Russ Abbott <[hidden email]> wrote:

Eric, When you say "the science of the mind seems to be doing reasonably well" what are you referring to? I thought your position was that mind was not a useful concept. I suppose that what you mean by mind is something that can be investigated by looking at behavior. But what is that sort of mind? Wouldn't it be better to call it something else so that people like me don't get confused? So to get back to my original question and to help me understand what you are saying, what are the recent advances in the science of mind I should be thinking of in this regard?

 

Also, I'm not convinced that subjective experience is forever beyond the reach of scientific investigation. I wouldn't be surprised if we develop technology that lets me experience what you are experiencing via neural sensor and communication systems. And if I can experience what you are experiencing we will presumably be able to record it and parse it. 

 

We have taken impressive steps in computer vision in recent years. I expect that work to help us develop a more formal structure for our own visual experiences. This is not to say that the formal structure will be a subjective experience for the computer. But it is to say that it will give us some leverage for investigating subjective experience. Similarly open brain surgery has helped us understand how the brain is connected to subjective experience.  

 

Just as we now know a lot about how natural language works even though no science can speak or fully understand natural language, I expect that we will develop similar theories about how subjective experience works. 

 

I don't expect a breakthrough that will suddenly crack "the hard problem of consciousness." More likely we will be able to say more and more accurately what sort of subjective experience someone is having by looking at what their brain is doing. We now have ways to allow people to act in the world by thinking about what they want. These are fairly superficial mappings of brain signals to physical actuators. But it's pretty impressive nonetheless. More advances along these and related lines will make subjective experience less of a mystery and more just another feature of the world.

 

On Mon, Feb 22, 2016 at 7:09 PM Eric Charles <[hidden email]> wrote:

Russ said: "Eric's point that the world must be a certain way if we are to do science doesn't make sense to me. If Schrodinger, Heisenberg, etc. thought like that they would have denied the two-slit experiments, and quantum mechanics wouldn't exist. Science (as you all know) is fundamentally empirical. You can't demand that the world be a certain way so that it's easier to do science."

Exactly! Let me try another tact.

1) We could imagine (with various levels of clarity) any number of worlds in which things worked differently from each other.

2) "Doing science" is largely a process of trying to figure out which of those worlds we live in, by searching for the best way to divide up empirical evidence, so that it is reliable and can be agreed up. (Peirce was particularly fascinated with the advances made in 18th century chemistry.) Scientists search for more and more stable ways to view the world, i.e., ways which stand up to more and more empirical scrutiny. (Early attempts at the periodic table, though imperfect, serve as an excellent example of this, leading to countless confirmatory experiments, including the correct prediction of the properties of yet-to-be-isolated elements.)

3) In order to do science about something, we need only one thing to be true: It can be investigated empirically. That is, it is something, "out there" which we can turn our machinations towards, and which will yield stable results once we find the appropriate methods for its investigation.

 

4) Many important big-name people have declared that a science of psychology is impossible, because the stuff under discussion in that context simply cannot be investigated empirically. Kant, is a prime example. Those big-names declared that another person's mind was not the type of thing that you could examine empirically, because the province of the soul did not yield itself to earthly poking and prodding. If those big-names are correct, and minds cannot be investigated, by their very nature, we would expect efforts in that direction to fail-to-produce the convergence-of-ideas characteristic of successful science.

5) We can imagine a world in which those big-names are correct. We can imagine a world in which many types of things can be investigated empirically, but not minds, and in which all attempts to produce a science of the mind would fail pathetically.

6) The above view has had a virtual strangle hold on Western thinking for centuries. However, in the late 1800's a few serious scholars started thinking that "science of psychology" might be given a go, to see how it went. They were widely dismissed, not allowed to hold their heads high in either scientific circles or philosophical ones.

7) And that's where we find ourselves. If a science of psychology is possible, then de facto the subject matter of psychology is some swath of empirically investigatable happenings, about which a community of investigators would eventually reach a consensus as the scientific process takes its course. We might not live in such a world, but we won't know without trying it. A science of ether winds never worked out. The attempted science of medieval humours was a bust. A science of studying bumps-on-people's-heads has been roundly rejected. All sorts of attempted sciences have not worked out over the years. But the science of the mind seems to be doing reasonably well. Either that progress is an illusion, and empirical-psychologists will soon go the way of the phrenologists, or that progress is evidence that the big-names who thought of "mind" as inherently uninvestigatable were wrong on a very fundamental level.

If you are to study a romantic partner's mind in order to become intimate with her, then her mind must be something that can be studied. If I am to study your feeling of intimacy, then your feeling-of-intimacy must be something that can be studied. And so on, and so forth. Whatever methods and categories that leads us two, such is the stuff of the science of psychology, whether it matches any of our preconceptions, or not.

Best,

Eric

 

 

 

 

 

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

 

On Mon, Feb 22, 2016 at 7:13 PM, Russ Abbott <[hidden email]> wrote:

I'm flattered. Thank you. I can see myself in the Devil's Advocate role -- except for the last part. I'll grant that you can think whatever you want.

 

[NST==>”close” is a metaphor;  I am suggesting a co-location in space metaphor to substitute for the privacy-inside metaphor which I take to be yours.  I am suggesting, roughly, that the more experiences we share, the more we are of one mind.  <==nst]

 

That won't work for my sense of intimacy. One can be intimate (in my sense) on the telephone and via written words. Sharing (i.e., participating in the same) experiences is not required for intimacy in my sense. What is required (in my sense) is sharing (i.e., talking about one's subjective experiences of one's) experiences.

 

 [NST==>You will find this sentence totally unintelligible until you entertain the notion that the self is an inferred entity, inferred using the same sort of equipment that we use to infer the motives, aspirations, feelings, and thoughts of others.  What differs between you and me is the amount of time we spend around me.  To the extent that I spend more time than you do around me, I am probably a better source of info about what I am up to, thinking about, etc., ceteris paribus.  Thus, I may greater familiarity with me than you do, I don’t have any special access to me.   <==nst]

 

What does it mean to infer something if one has no subjective experience? I think of inferring something as having to do with thinking about it. More generally what does it mean to think about something in your framework? I'll agree that thinking involves stuff happening in the brain. So it's behavior in that sense. But it's not behavior in the sense you seem to be talking about. So what does it mean in your sense to think about something?

 

I realize I'm on shaky ground here because computers "think" about things without having what I would call subjective experience.

 

[NST==>If you insist that a mind is a thing that is enclosed in a head (or a steel cabinet, etc.), then I can only say that if a robot does mind things, than a robot “has” a mind.  But I rebel against the metaphor.  <==nst]

 

I don't insist that a mind is anything. I don't know how to talk about subjective experience scientifically. I see no reason to deny it, but I agree we have made little scientific progress in talking about it. 

 

By the way, Eric's point that the world must be a certain way if we are to do science doesn't make sense to me. If Schrodinger, Heisenberg, etc. thought like that they would have denied the two-slit experiments, and quantum mechanics wouldn't exist. Science (as you all know) is fundamentally empirical. You can't demand that the world be a certain way so that it's easier to do science.

 

[NST==>I have to run, now, but please see  Intentionality is the Mark of the Vital .  Ethology is thick with intentionality. Language is not an necessary condition for intentionalty.  All is required is the sign relation (cf Peirce). <==nst]

 

I looked at (but didn't read in any detail) the Intentionality paper. The upshot seems to be that non-humans have intentionality. I don't argue with that. My question for you is still how you reconcile intentionality with not having subjective experience. What is intentionality without subjectivity? (Again, I'm moving onto shaky ground since we have "goal-directed" software even though the software and the computer that runs it has no subjective experience.)

 

I guess in both cases in which computers seem to "think" or "plan" we are using those terms as analogs to what we see ourselves doing and not really to attribute those processes to computers or software.

 

On Mon, Feb 22, 2016 at 3:23 PM Nick Thompson <[hidden email]> wrote:

See Larding below:

 

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 Russ Abbott
Sent: Monday, February 22, 2016 3:08 PM

To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Subjectivity and intimacy

 

Sorry that I'm not responding to Glen, Jochen, or John, but I've got to defend Nick's devil's advocate.  Nick, you do keep changing the subject.  In response to your two suggested definitions of intimacy I asked the following.

 

--------------

 

Version 1: Intimacy is just being so close that you see the same world from where you stand. 

 

I don't know how to understand that. Do you mean close wrt Euclidean distance? How does that relate to, for example, pain? No matter how close you are to someone, you can't see, for example, their toothache.

[NST==>”close” is a metaphor;  I am suggesting a co-location in space metaphor to substitute for the privacy-inside metaphor which I take to be yours.  I am suggesting, roughly, that the more experiences we share, the more we are of one mind.  <==nst]

 

Version 2: When the self you see projected in another ‘s behavior toward you is the same as the self you see projected in your own behavior. [NST==>You will find this sentence totally unintelligible until you entertain the notion that the self is an inferred entity, inferred using the same sort of equipment that we use to infer the motives, aspirations, feelings, and thoughts of others.  What differs between you and me is the amount of time we spend around me.  To the extent that I spend more time than you do around me, I am probably a better source of info about what I am up to, thinking about, etc., ceteris paribus.  Thus, I may greater familiarity with me than you do, I don’t have any special access to me.   <==nst]

 

If I remember what happened when we last did this Russ, you made me clearer and a clearer (and Eric, who wrote the Devil’s Advocate questions, in some ways modeled himself after you), but in the end, you just concluded that I was nuts, and we let it go at that. 

 

I don't know how to understand that either. What do you mean by "self?" What does it mean to project it toward someone? What does it mean to say that it's the same self as the one you project? Over what period of time must they be the same? If we're talking about behavior would it matter if the projecting entity were a robot? (Perhaps you answered those questions in the papers I haven't read. Sorry if that's the case.)

[NST==>If you insist that a mind is a thing that is enclosed in a head (or a steel cabinet, etc.), than I can only say that if a robot does mind things, than a robot “has” a mind.  But I rebel against the metaphor.  <==nst]

 

--------------

 

You responded with a long (and clear and definitive) extract from your paper. But I don't see how it answers my questions. Wrt the first question, if we're talking about behavior, distance doesn't see relevant. Wrt the second question, the extract doesn't (seem to) talk about what you mean by a self or what it means for the projected behaviors of two of them to be "the same" -- or even what projected behavior means. Is it the case that you also don't "believe in" intentionality? After all how can there be intentionality without a subjective intent? And if that's the case, what does "projected" mean? Is it the same as oriented in 3D space?

[NST==>I have to run, now, but please see  Intentionality is the Mark of the Vital .  Ethology is thick with intentionality. Language is not an necessary condition for intentionalty.  All is required is the sign relation (cf Peirce). <==nst]

 

 

 

On Mon, Feb 22, 2016 at 1:38 PM glen <[hidden email]> wrote:

I may as well chime in, too, since none of what's been said so far is meaningful to me.  My concept of intimacy runs along M-W's 2nd entry:

    2 :  to communicate delicately and indirectly

This is almost nothing to do with subjectivity and almost nothing to do with non-private knowledge (things others know).  It has to do with "delicate" attention to detail and, perhaps, manipulation.  A robot could easily be intimate with a human, and demonstrate such intimacy by catering to many of the tiny things the human prefers/enjoys, even if each and every tiny preference is publicly known.  Similarly, 2 robots could be intimate by way of a _special_ inter-robot interface.  But the specialness of the interface isn't its privacy or uniqueness.  It's in its handling of whatever specific details are appropriate to those robots.

Even if inter-subjectivity is merely the intertwining of experiences, it's still largely unrelated to intimacy.  Two complete strangers can become intimate almost instantaneously, because/if their interfaces are pre-adapted for a specific coupling.  There it wouldn't be inter-subjectivity, but a kind of similarity of type.  And that might be mostly or entirely genetic rather than ontogenic.

And I have to again be some sort of Morlockian champion for the irrelevance of thought.  2 strangers can be intimate and hold _radically_ different understandings of the world(s) presented to them ... at least if we believe the tales told to us in countless novels. 8^)


On 02/22/2016 12:40 AM, Jochen Fromm wrote:
> Nice to see FRIAM is still alive!
> I like this definition as well: "Intimacy is just being so close that you see the same world from where you stand". In a family for example we are being so close that we roughly see and experience the same world.
>
> I still believe that the solution to the hard problem lies in Hollywood: cinemas are built like theaters. If we see a film about a person, it is like sitting in his or her cartesian theater. We see what the person sees. In a sense, we feel what the feels as well, especially the pain of loosing someone.

--
⇔ glen

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[Jochen Fromm-5]

I've heard even psychologists become sometimes a bit depressed ;-)

http://www.theguardian.com/healthcare-network/2016/feb/17/were-not-surprised-half-our-psychologist-colleagues-are-depressed

-Jochen

Sent from my Tricorder

-------- Original message --------

From: Russ Abbott <[hidden email]>

Date: 2/25/2016 06:14 (GMT+01:00)

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

Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Subjectivity and intimacy (lost in the weeks?)

Nick, Eric,

I'm disappointed that neither of you responded to my reply (below) to Eric's message.  Perhaps it got lost in the weeks. 

-- Russ

On Mon, Feb 22, 2016 at 9:56 PM Russ Abbott <[hidden email]> wrote:

Eric, When you say "the science of the mind seems to be doing reasonably well" what are you referring to? I thought your position was that mind was not a useful concept. I suppose that what you mean by mind is something that can be investigated by looking at behavior. But what is that sort of mind? Wouldn't it be better to call it something else so that people like me don't get confused? So to get back to my original question and to help me understand what you are saying, what are the recent advances in the science of mind I should be thinking of in this regard?

Also, I'm not convinced that subjective experience is forever beyond the reach of scientific investigation. I wouldn't be surprised if we develop technology that lets me experience what you are experiencing via neural sensor and communication systems. And if I can experience what you are experiencing we will presumably be able to record it and parse it. 

We have taken impressive steps in computer vision in recent years. I expect that work to help us develop a more formal structure for our own visual experiences. This is not to say that the formal structure will be a subjective experience for the computer. But it is to say that it will give us some leverage for investigating subjective experience. Similarly open brain surgery has helped us understand how the brain is connected to subjective experience.  

Just as we now know a lot about how natural language works even though no science can speak or fully understand natural language, I expect that we will develop similar theories about how subjective experience works. 

I don't expect a breakthrough that will suddenly crack "the hard problem of consciousness." More likely we will be able to say more and more accurately what sort of subjective experience someone is having by looking at what their brain is doing. We now have ways to allow people to act in the world by thinking about what they want. These are fairly superficial mappings of brain signals to physical actuators. But it's pretty impressive nonetheless. More advances along these and related lines will make subjective experience less of a mystery and more just another feature of the world.

On Mon, Feb 22, 2016 at 7:09 PM Eric Charles <[hidden email]> wrote:

Russ said: "Eric's point that the world must be a certain way if we are to do science doesn't make sense to me. If Schrodinger, Heisenberg, etc. thought like that they would have denied the two-slit experiments, and quantum mechanics wouldn't exist. Science (as you all know) is fundamentally empirical. You can't demand that the world be a certain way so that it's easier to do science."

Exactly! Let me try another tact.

1) We could imagine (with various levels of clarity) any number of worlds in which things worked differently from each other.

2) "Doing science" is largely a process of trying to figure out which of those worlds we live in, by searching for the best way to divide up empirical evidence, so that it is reliable and can be agreed up. (Peirce was particularly fascinated with the advances made in 18th century chemistry.) Scientists search for more and more stable ways to view the world, i.e., ways which stand up to more and more empirical scrutiny. (Early attempts at the periodic table, though imperfect, serve as an excellent example of this, leading to countless confirmatory experiments, including the correct prediction of the properties of yet-to-be-isolated elements.)

3) In order to do science about something, we need only one thing to be true: It can be investigated empirically. That is, it is something, "out there" which we can turn our machinations towards, and which will yield stable results once we find the appropriate methods for its investigation.

4) Many important big-name people have declared that a science of psychology is impossible, because the stuff under discussion in that context simply cannot be investigated empirically. Kant, is a prime example. Those big-names declared that another person's mind was not the type of thing that you could examine empirically, because the province of the soul did not yield itself to earthly poking and prodding. If those big-names are correct, and minds cannot be investigated, by their very nature, we would expect efforts in that direction to fail-to-produce the convergence-of-ideas characteristic of successful science.

5) We can imagine a world in which those big-names are correct. We can imagine a world in which many types of things can be investigated empirically, but not minds, and in which all attempts to produce a science of the mind would fail pathetically.

6) The above view has had a virtual strangle hold on Western thinking for centuries. However, in the late 1800's a few serious scholars started thinking that "science of psychology" might be given a go, to see how it went. They were widely dismissed, not allowed to hold their heads high in either scientific circles or philosophical ones.

7) And that's where we find ourselves. If a science of psychology is possible, then de facto the subject matter of psychology is some swath of empirically investigatable happenings, about which a community of investigators would eventually reach a consensus as the scientific process takes its course. We might not live in such a world, but we won't know without trying it. A science of ether winds never worked out. The attempted science of medieval humours was a bust. A science of studying bumps-on-people's-heads has been roundly rejected. All sorts of attempted sciences have not worked out over the years. But the science of the mind seems to be doing reasonably well. Either that progress is an illusion, and empirical-psychologists will soon go the way of the phrenologists, or that progress is evidence that the big-names who thought of "mind" as inherently uninvestigatable were wrong on a very fundamental level.

If you are to study a romantic partner's mind in order to become intimate with her, then her mind must be something that can be studied. If I am to study your feeling of intimacy, then your feeling-of-intimacy must be something that can be studied. And so on, and so forth. Whatever methods and categories that leads us two, such is the stuff of the science of psychology, whether it matches any of our preconceptions, or not.

Best,

Eric

 

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

On Mon, Feb 22, 2016 at 7:13 PM, Russ Abbott <[hidden email]> wrote:

I'm flattered. Thank you. I can see myself in the Devil's Advocate role -- except for the last part. I'll grant that you can think whatever you want.

[NST==>”close” is a metaphor;  I am suggesting a co-location in space metaphor to substitute for the privacy-inside metaphor which I take to be yours.  I am suggesting, roughly, that the more experiences we share, the more we are of one mind.  <==nst]

That won't work for my sense of intimacy. One can be intimate (in my sense) on the telephone and via written words. Sharing (i.e., participating in the same) experiences is not required for intimacy in my sense. What is required (in my sense) is sharing (i.e., talking about one's subjective experiences of one's) experiences.

 [NST==>You will find this sentence totally unintelligible until you entertain the notion that the self is an inferred entity, inferred using the same sort of equipment that we use to infer the motives, aspirations, feelings, and thoughts of others.  What differs between you and me is the amount of time we spend around me.  To the extent that I spend more time than you do around me, I am probably a better source of info about what I am up to, thinking about, etc., ceteris paribus.  Thus, I may greater familiarity with me than you do, I don’t have any special access to me.   <==nst]

What does it mean to infer something if one has no subjective experience? I think of inferring something as having to do with thinking about it. More generally what does it mean to think about something in your framework? I'll agree that thinking involves stuff happening in the brain. So it's behavior in that sense. But it's not behavior in the sense you seem to be talking about. So what does it mean in your sense to think about something?

I realize I'm on shaky ground here because computers "think" about things without having what I would call subjective experience.

[NST==>If you insist that a mind is a thing that is enclosed in a head (or a steel cabinet, etc.), then I can only say that if a robot does mind things, than a robot “has” a mind.  But I rebel against the metaphor.  <==nst]

I don't insist that a mind is anything. I don't know how to talk about subjective experience scientifically. I see no reason to deny it, but I agree we have made little scientific progress in talking about it. 

By the way, Eric's point that the world must be a certain way if we are to do science doesn't make sense to me. If Schrodinger, Heisenberg, etc. thought like that they would have denied the two-slit experiments, and quantum mechanics wouldn't exist. Science (as you all know) is fundamentally empirical. You can't demand that the world be a certain way so that it's easier to do science.

[NST==>I have to run, now, but please see  Intentionality is the Mark of the Vital .  Ethology is thick with intentionality. Language is not an necessary condition for intentionalty.  All is required is the sign relation (cf Peirce). <==nst]

I looked at (but didn't read in any detail) the Intentionality paper. The upshot seems to be that non-humans have intentionality. I don't argue with that. My question for you is still how you reconcile intentionality with not having subjective experience. What is intentionality without subjectivity? (Again, I'm moving onto shaky ground since we have "goal-directed" software even though the software and the computer that runs it has no subjective experience.)

I guess in both cases in which computers seem to "think" or "plan" we are using those terms as analogs to what we see ourselves doing and not really to attribute those processes to computers or software.

On Mon, Feb 22, 2016 at 3:23 PM Nick Thompson <[hidden email]> wrote:

See Larding below:

 

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 Russ Abbott
Sent: Monday, February 22, 2016 3:08 PM

To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Subjectivity and intimacy

 

Sorry that I'm not responding to Glen, Jochen, or John, but I've got to defend Nick's devil's advocate.  Nick, you do keep changing the subject.  In response to your two suggested definitions of intimacy I asked the following.

 

--------------

 

Version 1: Intimacy is just being so close that you see the same world from where you stand. 

 

I don't know how to understand that. Do you mean close wrt Euclidean distance? How does that relate to, for example, pain? No matter how close you are to someone, you can't see, for example, their toothache.

[NST==>”close” is a metaphor;  I am suggesting a co-location in space metaphor to substitute for the privacy-inside metaphor which I take to be yours.  I am suggesting, roughly, that the more experiences we share, the more we are of one mind.  <==nst]

 

Version 2: When the self you see projected in another ‘s behavior toward you is the same as the self you see projected in your own behavior. [NST==>You will find this sentence totally unintelligible until you entertain the notion that the self is an inferred entity, inferred using the same sort of equipment that we use to infer the motives, aspirations, feelings, and thoughts of others.  What differs between you and me is the amount of time we spend around me.  To the extent that I spend more time than you do around me, I am probably a better source of info about what I am up to, thinking about, etc., ceteris paribus.  Thus, I may greater familiarity with me than you do, I don’t have any special access to me.   <==nst]

 

If I remember what happened when we last did this Russ, you made me clearer and a clearer (and Eric, who wrote the Devil’s Advocate questions, in some ways modeled himself after you), but in the end, you just concluded that I was nuts, and we let it go at that. 

 

I don't know how to understand that either. What do you mean by "self?" What does it mean to project it toward someone? What does it mean to say that it's the same self as the one you project? Over what period of time must they be the same? If we're talking about behavior would it matter if the projecting entity were a robot? (Perhaps you answered those questions in the papers I haven't read. Sorry if that's the case.)

[NST==>If you insist that a mind is a thing that is enclosed in a head (or a steel cabinet, etc.), than I can only say that if a robot does mind things, than a robot “has” a mind.  But I rebel against the metaphor.  <==nst]

 

--------------

 

You responded with a long (and clear and definitive) extract from your paper. But I don't see how it answers my questions. Wrt the first question, if we're talking about behavior, distance doesn't see relevant. Wrt the second question, the extract doesn't (seem to) talk about what you mean by a self or what it means for the projected behaviors of two of them to be "the same" -- or even what projected behavior means. Is it the case that you also don't "believe in" intentionality? After all how can there be intentionality without a subjective intent? And if that's the case, what does "projected" mean? Is it the same as oriented in 3D space?

[NST==>I have to run, now, but please see  Intentionality is the Mark of the Vital .  Ethology is thick with intentionality. Language is not an necessary condition for intentionalty.  All is required is the sign relation (cf Peirce). <==nst]

 

 

 

On Mon, Feb 22, 2016 at 1:38 PM glen <[hidden email]> wrote:

I may as well chime in, too, since none of what's been said so far is meaningful to me.  My concept of intimacy runs along M-W's 2nd entry:

    2 :  to communicate delicately and indirectly

This is almost nothing to do with subjectivity and almost nothing to do with non-private knowledge (things others know).  It has to do with "delicate" attention to detail and, perhaps, manipulation.  A robot could easily be intimate with a human, and demonstrate such intimacy by catering to many of the tiny things the human prefers/enjoys, even if each and every tiny preference is publicly known.  Similarly, 2 robots could be intimate by way of a _special_ inter-robot interface.  But the specialness of the interface isn't its privacy or uniqueness.  It's in its handling of whatever specific details are appropriate to those robots.

Even if inter-subjectivity is merely the intertwining of experiences, it's still largely unrelated to intimacy.  Two complete strangers can become intimate almost instantaneously, because/if their interfaces are pre-adapted for a specific coupling.  There it wouldn't be inter-subjectivity, but a kind of similarity of type.  And that might be mostly or entirely genetic rather than ontogenic.

And I have to again be some sort of Morlockian champion for the irrelevance of thought.  2 strangers can be intimate and hold _radically_ different understandings of the world(s) presented to them ... at least if we believe the tales told to us in countless novels. 8^)


On 02/22/2016 12:40 AM, Jochen Fromm wrote:
> Nice to see FRIAM is still alive!
> I like this definition as well: "Intimacy is just being so close that you see the same world from where you stand". In a family for example we are being so close that we roughly see and experience the same world.
>
> I still believe that the solution to the hard problem lies in Hollywood: cinemas are built like theaters. If we see a film about a person, it is like sitting in his or her cartesian theater. We see what the person sees. In a sense, we feel what the feels as well, especially the pain of loosing someone.

--
⇔ glen

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[Russ Abbott]

Sorry, No. Most of it was not satisfying. 

You originally said that the science of mind was doing reasonably well. When I asked what you meant you talked about how shallow psychology is. 

I said I expected there to be technology that lets me experience what you are experiencing. You replied that if I believed something (which I didn't claim) then I wouldn't need such technology. That wasn't the point. 

I guess we agreed that good work is being done on computer vision. I said that we will increasingly be able to link brain activity to subjective experience. I didn't say anything about a Cartesian theater. You raised the notion of a Cartesian theater to knock it down and then talked about grass. 

The "hard" problem you must know refers to Chalmers. 

On Thu, Feb 25, 2016 at 12:51 PM Eric Charles <[hidden email]> wrote:

Russ,

I mulled over replying a few times, but wasn't sure what to say. However, by restating your genuine interest in my response, I now feel like a jack ass for not responding earilier, so here it goes. Some of these answers might not be at all satisfying, but I will do my best so long as you accept the caveat that I am uncertain if some of it will really answer your questions.

"When you say "the science of the mind seems to be doing reasonably well" what are you referring to?"

In the original context, I am referring to what people saw when looking around in the late 1800s. In fact, I think there is very good working being done in psychology today, but what I consider "good work" is a very small, and marginalized, corner of the modern field. Most stuff that passes as "important" psychology research today is either barking up the wrong tree entirely, or is so mundane as to be uninteresting. Mainstream psychology is driven much more by the ability to make clever press releases than by a critical view to advancing the field.

Compare the recent big-press items in physics to the recent big-press items in psychology, and it makes you want to weep for our field. The biggest news item in Psychology right now is a multi-year study showing that people "feel less in control" of their actions when following the orders by another person, in comparison to a group that chose the same actions without being ordered to do them. Seriously. (Yes, seriously.)

"I wouldn't be surprised if we develop technology that lets me experience what you are experiencing via neural sensor and communication systems."

I think we do not have a sensible way to talk about the brain's role in psychological processes at this time (I've published a few papers about this), and that when such a language is worked out it will violate most our folk-psychology intuitions. If you believe that empathy a thing people sometimes do, then, I submit, you yourself do not believe we need the posited device to experience what another is experiencing.

"We have taken impressive steps in computer vision in recent years. I expect that work to help us develop a more formal structure for our own visual experiences."

Well... sure... but that is not qualitatively different than the advances made in vision research over the past hundred years. We know a lot about how vision works. Generally speaking, computer vision does not work like human vision, because, as with all evolved processes, humans are not the most computationally efficient things in the world. But, there are people  working to build inefficient and non-elegant computer vision systems for the purposes of testing hypotheses regarding human vision. Good stuff.  

"I don't expect a breakthrough that will suddenly crack "the hard problem of consciousness. More likely we will be able to say more and more accurately what sort of subjective experience someone is having by looking at what their brain is doing."

This is probably the difficult part of your comment to respond to. I simply don't believe there is a "hard problem." To the extent that I even understand what you are talking about there, I think the brain is one part of a much larger system that we would need to examine. That is not to say that examining the brain adds nothing, but to say that an exclusive focus on the brain misrepresents the phenomena of interest.

To elaborate a bit: Traditional philosophy has addressed been largely oriented towards "internalizing" psychological processes. The Cartesian claim (an extension of the Platonic claim) was that we only experience the world that plays out in the theater of our ghost-souls. "Why do I experience the grass as green?" you ask. "Because the greenness is present in the theater of your soul," is the answer. This, of course, doesn't solve anything. Saying that we only experience the world that plays out in the theater of brains has almost all of the same problems, and should be rejected. At the least, it adds nothing.

The approach that I would advocate for could be described as "externalizing" psychological processes. "Why do I experience the grass as green?" you ask. "Because there is some identifiable property of the grass that you are responding to, and that property, out there, is what you mean by the word 'green'," would be my answer. That property could be quite complex to specify (it is certainly MUCH more complicated than a narrow range of wave lengths), but whatever that property is, that is thing you are asking about when you ask about "green". If you want to know if someone is experiencing the same thing you are when they talk about "green" then we see if the parameters for their response match the parameters for your response. That is, we act if they are experiencing, quite literally, the same things. It is challenging problem, but it is a straightforward and tractable scientific problem, and it renders the philosophers so-called "hard problem" moot.

Was any of that satisfying?

Best,

Eric

 

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

On Thu, Feb 25, 2016 at 1:29 AM, Nick Thompson <[hidden email]> wrote:

Russ,

 

Partly exhaustion, I think. 

 

Once we all agree that there is no in-principle reason that I cannot ultimately tap your subjective mind, then we all know what we are and we are just dickering about the price.

 

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 Russ Abbott
Sent: Wednesday, February 24, 2016 10:15 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Subjectivity and intimacy (lost in the weeks?)

 

Nick, Eric,

 

I'm disappointed that neither of you responded to my reply (below) to Eric's message.  Perhaps it got lost in the weeks. 

 

-- Russ

 

On Mon, Feb 22, 2016 at 9:56 PM Russ Abbott <[hidden email]> wrote:

Eric, When you say "the science of the mind seems to be doing reasonably well" what are you referring to? I thought your position was that mind was not a useful concept. I suppose that what you mean by mind is something that can be investigated by looking at behavior. But what is that sort of mind? Wouldn't it be better to call it something else so that people like me don't get confused? So to get back to my original question and to help me understand what you are saying, what are the recent advances in the science of mind I should be thinking of in this regard?

 

Also, I'm not convinced that subjective experience is forever beyond the reach of scientific investigation. I wouldn't be surprised if we develop technology that lets me experience what you are experiencing via neural sensor and communication systems. And if I can experience what you are experiencing we will presumably be able to record it and parse it. 

 

We have taken impressive steps in computer vision in recent years. I expect that work to help us develop a more formal structure for our own visual experiences. This is not to say that the formal structure will be a subjective experience for the computer. But it is to say that it will give us some leverage for investigating subjective experience. Similarly open brain surgery has helped us understand how the brain is connected to subjective experience.  

 

Just as we now know a lot about how natural language works even though no science can speak or fully understand natural language, I expect that we will develop similar theories about how subjective experience works. 

 

I don't expect a breakthrough that will suddenly crack "the hard problem of consciousness." More likely we will be able to say more and more accurately what sort of subjective experience someone is having by looking at what their brain is doing. We now have ways to allow people to act in the world by thinking about what they want. These are fairly superficial mappings of brain signals to physical actuators. But it's pretty impressive nonetheless. More advances along these and related lines will make subjective experience less of a mystery and more just another feature of the world.

 

On Mon, Feb 22, 2016 at 7:09 PM Eric Charles <[hidden email]> wrote:

Russ said: "Eric's point that the world must be a certain way if we are to do science doesn't make sense to me. If Schrodinger, Heisenberg, etc. thought like that they would have denied the two-slit experiments, and quantum mechanics wouldn't exist. Science (as you all know) is fundamentally empirical. You can't demand that the world be a certain way so that it's easier to do science."

Exactly! Let me try another tact.

1) We could imagine (with various levels of clarity) any number of worlds in which things worked differently from each other.

2) "Doing science" is largely a process of trying to figure out which of those worlds we live in, by searching for the best way to divide up empirical evidence, so that it is reliable and can be agreed up. (Peirce was particularly fascinated with the advances made in 18th century chemistry.) Scientists search for more and more stable ways to view the world, i.e., ways which stand up to more and more empirical scrutiny. (Early attempts at the periodic table, though imperfect, serve as an excellent example of this, leading to countless confirmatory experiments, including the correct prediction of the properties of yet-to-be-isolated elements.)

3) In order to do science about something, we need only one thing to be true: It can be investigated empirically. That is, it is something, "out there" which we can turn our machinations towards, and which will yield stable results once we find the appropriate methods for its investigation.

 

4) Many important big-name people have declared that a science of psychology is impossible, because the stuff under discussion in that context simply cannot be investigated empirically. Kant, is a prime example. Those big-names declared that another person's mind was not the type of thing that you could examine empirically, because the province of the soul did not yield itself to earthly poking and prodding. If those big-names are correct, and minds cannot be investigated, by their very nature, we would expect efforts in that direction to fail-to-produce the convergence-of-ideas characteristic of successful science.

5) We can imagine a world in which those big-names are correct. We can imagine a world in which many types of things can be investigated empirically, but not minds, and in which all attempts to produce a science of the mind would fail pathetically.

6) The above view has had a virtual strangle hold on Western thinking for centuries. However, in the late 1800's a few serious scholars started thinking that "science of psychology" might be given a go, to see how it went. They were widely dismissed, not allowed to hold their heads high in either scientific circles or philosophical ones.

7) And that's where we find ourselves. If a science of psychology is possible, then de facto the subject matter of psychology is some swath of empirically investigatable happenings, about which a community of investigators would eventually reach a consensus as the scientific process takes its course. We might not live in such a world, but we won't know without trying it. A science of ether winds never worked out. The attempted science of medieval humours was a bust. A science of studying bumps-on-people's-heads has been roundly rejected. All sorts of attempted sciences have not worked out over the years. But the science of the mind seems to be doing reasonably well. Either that progress is an illusion, and empirical-psychologists will soon go the way of the phrenologists, or that progress is evidence that the big-names who thought of "mind" as inherently uninvestigatable were wrong on a very fundamental level.

If you are to study a romantic partner's mind in order to become intimate with her, then her mind must be something that can be studied. If I am to study your feeling of intimacy, then your feeling-of-intimacy must be something that can be studied. And so on, and so forth. Whatever methods and categories that leads us two, such is the stuff of the science of psychology, whether it matches any of our preconceptions, or not.

Best,

Eric

 

 

 

 

 

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

 

On Mon, Feb 22, 2016 at 7:13 PM, Russ Abbott <[hidden email]> wrote:

I'm flattered. Thank you. I can see myself in the Devil's Advocate role -- except for the last part. I'll grant that you can think whatever you want.

 

[NST==>”close” is a metaphor;  I am suggesting a co-location in space metaphor to substitute for the privacy-inside metaphor which I take to be yours.  I am suggesting, roughly, that the more experiences we share, the more we are of one mind.  <==nst]

 

That won't work for my sense of intimacy. One can be intimate (in my sense) on the telephone and via written words. Sharing (i.e., participating in the same) experiences is not required for intimacy in my sense. What is required (in my sense) is sharing (i.e., talking about one's subjective experiences of one's) experiences.

 

 [NST==>You will find this sentence totally unintelligible until you entertain the notion that the self is an inferred entity, inferred using the same sort of equipment that we use to infer the motives, aspirations, feelings, and thoughts of others.  What differs between you and me is the amount of time we spend around me.  To the extent that I spend more time than you do around me, I am probably a better source of info about what I am up to, thinking about, etc., ceteris paribus.  Thus, I may greater familiarity with me than you do, I don’t have any special access to me.   <==nst]

 

What does it mean to infer something if one has no subjective experience? I think of inferring something as having to do with thinking about it. More generally what does it mean to think about something in your framework? I'll agree that thinking involves stuff happening in the brain. So it's behavior in that sense. But it's not behavior in the sense you seem to be talking about. So what does it mean in your sense to think about something?

 

I realize I'm on shaky ground here because computers "think" about things without having what I would call subjective experience.

 

[NST==>If you insist that a mind is a thing that is enclosed in a head (or a steel cabinet, etc.), then I can only say that if a robot does mind things, than a robot “has” a mind.  But I rebel against the metaphor.  <==nst]

 

I don't insist that a mind is anything. I don't know how to talk about subjective experience scientifically. I see no reason to deny it, but I agree we have made little scientific progress in talking about it. 

 

By the way, Eric's point that the world must be a certain way if we are to do science doesn't make sense to me. If Schrodinger, Heisenberg, etc. thought like that they would have denied the two-slit experiments, and quantum mechanics wouldn't exist. Science (as you all know) is fundamentally empirical. You can't demand that the world be a certain way so that it's easier to do science.

 

[NST==>I have to run, now, but please see  Intentionality is the Mark of the Vital .  Ethology is thick with intentionality. Language is not an necessary condition for intentionalty.  All is required is the sign relation (cf Peirce). <==nst]

 

I looked at (but didn't read in any detail) the Intentionality paper. The upshot seems to be that non-humans have intentionality. I don't argue with that. My question for you is still how you reconcile intentionality with not having subjective experience. What is intentionality without subjectivity? (Again, I'm moving onto shaky ground since we have "goal-directed" software even though the software and the computer that runs it has no subjective experience.)

 

I guess in both cases in which computers seem to "think" or "plan" we are using those terms as analogs to what we see ourselves doing and not really to attribute those processes to computers or software.

 

On Mon, Feb 22, 2016 at 3:23 PM Nick Thompson <[hidden email]> wrote:

See Larding below:

 

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 Russ Abbott
Sent: Monday, February 22, 2016 3:08 PM

To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Subjectivity and intimacy

 

Sorry that I'm not responding to Glen, Jochen, or John, but I've got to defend Nick's devil's advocate.  Nick, you do keep changing the subject.  In response to your two suggested definitions of intimacy I asked the following.

 

--------------

 

Version 1: Intimacy is just being so close that you see the same world from where you stand. 

 

I don't know how to understand that. Do you mean close wrt Euclidean distance? How does that relate to, for example, pain? No matter how close you are to someone, you can't see, for example, their toothache.

[NST==>”close” is a metaphor;  I am suggesting a co-location in space metaphor to substitute for the privacy-inside metaphor which I take to be yours.  I am suggesting, roughly, that the more experiences we share, the more we are of one mind.  <==nst]

 

Version 2: When the self you see projected in another ‘s behavior toward you is the same as the self you see projected in your own behavior. [NST==>You will find this sentence totally unintelligible until you entertain the notion that the self is an inferred entity, inferred using the same sort of equipment that we use to infer the motives, aspirations, feelings, and thoughts of others.  What differs between you and me is the amount of time we spend around me.  To the extent that I spend more time than you do around me, I am probably a better source of info about what I am up to, thinking about, etc., ceteris paribus.  Thus, I may greater familiarity with me than you do, I don’t have any special access to me.   <==nst]

 

If I remember what happened when we last did this Russ, you made me clearer and a clearer (and Eric, who wrote the Devil’s Advocate questions, in some ways modeled himself after you), but in the end, you just concluded that I was nuts, and we let it go at that. 

 

I don't know how to understand that either. What do you mean by "self?" What does it mean to project it toward someone? What does it mean to say that it's the same self as the one you project? Over what period of time must they be the same? If we're talking about behavior would it matter if the projecting entity were a robot? (Perhaps you answered those questions in the papers I haven't read. Sorry if that's the case.)

[NST==>If you insist that a mind is a thing that is enclosed in a head (or a steel cabinet, etc.), than I can only say that if a robot does mind things, than a robot “has” a mind.  But I rebel against the metaphor.  <==nst]

 

--------------

 

You responded with a long (and clear and definitive) extract from your paper. But I don't see how it answers my questions. Wrt the first question, if we're talking about behavior, distance doesn't see relevant. Wrt the second question, the extract doesn't (seem to) talk about what you mean by a self or what it means for the projected behaviors of two of them to be "the same" -- or even what projected behavior means. Is it the case that you also don't "believe in" intentionality? After all how can there be intentionality without a subjective intent? And if that's the case, what does "projected" mean? Is it the same as oriented in 3D space?

[NST==>I have to run, now, but please see  Intentionality is the Mark of the Vital .  Ethology is thick with intentionality. Language is not an necessary condition for intentionalty.  All is required is the sign relation (cf Peirce). <==nst]

 

 

 

On Mon, Feb 22, 2016 at 1:38 PM glen <[hidden email]> wrote:

I may as well chime in, too, since none of what's been said so far is meaningful to me.  My concept of intimacy runs along M-W's 2nd entry:

    2 :  to communicate delicately and indirectly

This is almost nothing to do with subjectivity and almost nothing to do with non-private knowledge (things others know).  It has to do with "delicate" attention to detail and, perhaps, manipulation.  A robot could easily be intimate with a human, and demonstrate such intimacy by catering to many of the tiny things the human prefers/enjoys, even if each and every tiny preference is publicly known.  Similarly, 2 robots could be intimate by way of a _special_ inter-robot interface.  But the specialness of the interface isn't its privacy or uniqueness.  It's in its handling of whatever specific details are appropriate to those robots.

Even if inter-subjectivity is merely the intertwining of experiences, it's still largely unrelated to intimacy.  Two complete strangers can become intimate almost instantaneously, because/if their interfaces are pre-adapted for a specific coupling.  There it wouldn't be inter-subjectivity, but a kind of similarity of type.  And that might be mostly or entirely genetic rather than ontogenic.

And I have to again be some sort of Morlockian champion for the irrelevance of thought.  2 strangers can be intimate and hold _radically_ different understandings of the world(s) presented to them ... at least if we believe the tales told to us in countless novels. 8^)


On 02/22/2016 12:40 AM, Jochen Fromm wrote:
> Nice to see FRIAM is still alive!
> I like this definition as well: "Intimacy is just being so close that you see the same world from where you stand". In a family for example we are being so close that we roughly see and experience the same world.
>
> I still believe that the solution to the hard problem lies in Hollywood: cinemas are built like theaters. If we see a film about a person, it is like sitting in his or her cartesian theater. We see what the person sees. In a sense, we feel what the feels as well, especially the pain of loosing someone.

--
⇔ glen

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

Oh, yes, Jochen;  more than you can imagine.

 

That’s a great article about NHS psychologists.  One of my great regrets about my retirement is that I did not start a Doctors/Patients association.  It time for the rest of us to get together and start to organize against Medicare and the insurance companies.  I am told that it is not possible to find a Medicare psychiatrist in Santa Fe.  Just not possible.  Are they all seeing rich Texas neurotics on the weekends?  My own doctor’s office no longer has operator service, and the place is total chaos.  It’s really all quite scary.  A DPA could work together to develop a set of rational expectations for what the doctor patient relation should like  in this day and age. 

 

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 Jochen Fromm
Sent: Thursday, February 25, 2016 3:20 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Subjectivity and intimacy (lost in the weeks?)

 

I've heard even psychologists become sometimes a bit depressed ;-)

http://www.theguardian.com/healthcare-network/2016/feb/17/were-not-surprised-half-our-psychologist-colleagues-are-depressed

 

-Jochen

 

Sent from my Tricorder

-------- Original message --------

From: Russ Abbott <[hidden email]>

Date: 2/25/2016 06:14 (GMT+01:00)

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

Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Subjectivity and intimacy (lost in the weeks?)

 

Nick, Eric,

 

I'm disappointed that neither of you responded to my reply (below) to Eric's message.  Perhaps it got lost in the weeks. 

 

-- Russ

 

On Mon, Feb 22, 2016 at 9:56 PM Russ Abbott <[hidden email]> wrote:

Eric, When you say "the science of the mind seems to be doing reasonably well" what are you referring to? I thought your position was that mind was not a useful concept. I suppose that what you mean by mind is something that can be investigated by looking at behavior. But what is that sort of mind? Wouldn't it be better to call it something else so that people like me don't get confused? So to get back to my original question and to help me understand what you are saying, what are the recent advances in the science of mind I should be thinking of in this regard?

 

Also, I'm not convinced that subjective experience is forever beyond the reach of scientific investigation. I wouldn't be surprised if we develop technology that lets me experience what you are experiencing via neural sensor and communication systems. And if I can experience what you are experiencing we will presumably be able to record it and parse it. 

 

We have taken impressive steps in computer vision in recent years. I expect that work to help us develop a more formal structure for our own visual experiences. This is not to say that the formal structure will be a subjective experience for the computer. But it is to say that it will give us some leverage for investigating subjective experience. Similarly open brain surgery has helped us understand how the brain is connected to subjective experience.  

 

Just as we now know a lot about how natural language works even though no science can speak or fully understand natural language, I expect that we will develop similar theories about how subjective experience works. 

 

I don't expect a breakthrough that will suddenly crack "the hard problem of consciousness." More likely we will be able to say more and more accurately what sort of subjective experience someone is having by looking at what their brain is doing. We now have ways to allow people to act in the world by thinking about what they want. These are fairly superficial mappings of brain signals to physical actuators. But it's pretty impressive nonetheless. More advances along these and related lines will make subjective experience less of a mystery and more just another feature of the world.

 

On Mon, Feb 22, 2016 at 7:09 PM Eric Charles <[hidden email]> wrote:

Russ said: "Eric's point that the world must be a certain way if we are to do science doesn't make sense to me. If Schrodinger, Heisenberg, etc. thought like that they would have denied the two-slit experiments, and quantum mechanics wouldn't exist. Science (as you all know) is fundamentally empirical. You can't demand that the world be a certain way so that it's easier to do science."

Exactly! Let me try another tact.

1) We could imagine (with various levels of clarity) any number of worlds in which things worked differently from each other.

2) "Doing science" is largely a process of trying to figure out which of those worlds we live in, by searching for the best way to divide up empirical evidence, so that it is reliable and can be agreed up. (Peirce was particularly fascinated with the advances made in 18th century chemistry.) Scientists search for more and more stable ways to view the world, i.e., ways which stand up to more and more empirical scrutiny. (Early attempts at the periodic table, though imperfect, serve as an excellent example of this, leading to countless confirmatory experiments, including the correct prediction of the properties of yet-to-be-isolated elements.)

3) In order to do science about something, we need only one thing to be true: It can be investigated empirically. That is, it is something, "out there" which we can turn our machinations towards, and which will yield stable results once we find the appropriate methods for its investigation.

 

4) Many important big-name people have declared that a science of psychology is impossible, because the stuff under discussion in that context simply cannot be investigated empirically. Kant, is a prime example. Those big-names declared that another person's mind was not the type of thing that you could examine empirically, because the province of the soul did not yield itself to earthly poking and prodding. If those big-names are correct, and minds cannot be investigated, by their very nature, we would expect efforts in that direction to fail-to-produce the convergence-of-ideas characteristic of successful science.

5) We can imagine a world in which those big-names are correct. We can imagine a world in which many types of things can be investigated empirically, but not minds, and in which all attempts to produce a science of the mind would fail pathetically.

6) The above view has had a virtual strangle hold on Western thinking for centuries. However, in the late 1800's a few serious scholars started thinking that "science of psychology" might be given a go, to see how it went. They were widely dismissed, not allowed to hold their heads high in either scientific circles or philosophical ones.

7) And that's where we find ourselves. If a science of psychology is possible, then de facto the subject matter of psychology is some swath of empirically investigatable happenings, about which a community of investigators would eventually reach a consensus as the scientific process takes its course. We might not live in such a world, but we won't know without trying it. A science of ether winds never worked out. The attempted science of medieval humours was a bust. A science of studying bumps-on-people's-heads has been roundly rejected. All sorts of attempted sciences have not worked out over the years. But the science of the mind seems to be doing reasonably well. Either that progress is an illusion, and empirical-psychologists will soon go the way of the phrenologists, or that progress is evidence that the big-names who thought of "mind" as inherently uninvestigatable were wrong on a very fundamental level.

If you are to study a romantic partner's mind in order to become intimate with her, then her mind must be something that can be studied. If I am to study your feeling of intimacy, then your feeling-of-intimacy must be something that can be studied. And so on, and so forth. Whatever methods and categories that leads us two, such is the stuff of the science of psychology, whether it matches any of our preconceptions, or not.

Best,

Eric

 

 

 

 

 

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

 

On Mon, Feb 22, 2016 at 7:13 PM, Russ Abbott <[hidden email]> wrote:

I'm flattered. Thank you. I can see myself in the Devil's Advocate role -- except for the last part. I'll grant that you can think whatever you want.

 

[NST==>”close” is a metaphor;  I am suggesting a co-location in space metaphor to substitute for the privacy-inside metaphor which I take to be yours.  I am suggesting, roughly, that the more experiences we share, the more we are of one mind.  <==nst]

 

That won't work for my sense of intimacy. One can be intimate (in my sense) on the telephone and via written words. Sharing (i.e., participating in the same) experiences is not required for intimacy in my sense. What is required (in my sense) is sharing (i.e., talking about one's subjective experiences of one's) experiences.

 

 [NST==>You will find this sentence totally unintelligible until you entertain the notion that the self is an inferred entity, inferred using the same sort of equipment that we use to infer the motives, aspirations, feelings, and thoughts of others.  What differs between you and me is the amount of time we spend around me.  To the extent that I spend more time than you do around me, I am probably a better source of info about what I am up to, thinking about, etc., ceteris paribus.  Thus, I may greater familiarity with me than you do, I don’t have any special access to me.   <==nst]

 

What does it mean to infer something if one has no subjective experience? I think of inferring something as having to do with thinking about it. More generally what does it mean to think about something in your framework? I'll agree that thinking involves stuff happening in the brain. So it's behavior in that sense. But it's not behavior in the sense you seem to be talking about. So what does it mean in your sense to think about something?

 

I realize I'm on shaky ground here because computers "think" about things without having what I would call subjective experience.

 

[NST==>If you insist that a mind is a thing that is enclosed in a head (or a steel cabinet, etc.), then I can only say that if a robot does mind things, than a robot “has” a mind.  But I rebel against the metaphor.  <==nst]

 

I don't insist that a mind is anything. I don't know how to talk about subjective experience scientifically. I see no reason to deny it, but I agree we have made little scientific progress in talking about it. 

 

By the way, Eric's point that the world must be a certain way if we are to do science doesn't make sense to me. If Schrodinger, Heisenberg, etc. thought like that they would have denied the two-slit experiments, and quantum mechanics wouldn't exist. Science (as you all know) is fundamentally empirical. You can't demand that the world be a certain way so that it's easier to do science.

 

[NST==>I have to run, now, but please see  Intentionality is the Mark of the Vital .  Ethology is thick with intentionality. Language is not an necessary condition for intentionalty.  All is required is the sign relation (cf Peirce). <==nst]

 

I looked at (but didn't read in any detail) the Intentionality paper. The upshot seems to be that non-humans have intentionality. I don't argue with that. My question for you is still how you reconcile intentionality with not having subjective experience. What is intentionality without subjectivity? (Again, I'm moving onto shaky ground since we have "goal-directed" software even though the software and the computer that runs it has no subjective experience.)

 

I guess in both cases in which computers seem to "think" or "plan" we are using those terms as analogs to what we see ourselves doing and not really to attribute those processes to computers or software.

 

On Mon, Feb 22, 2016 at 3:23 PM Nick Thompson <[hidden email]> wrote:

See Larding below:

 

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 Russ Abbott
Sent: Monday, February 22, 2016 3:08 PM

To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Subjectivity and intimacy

 

Sorry that I'm not responding to Glen, Jochen, or John, but I've got to defend Nick's devil's advocate.  Nick, you do keep changing the subject.  In response to your two suggested definitions of intimacy I asked the following.

 

--------------

 

Version 1: Intimacy is just being so close that you see the same world from where you stand. 

 

I don't know how to understand that. Do you mean close wrt Euclidean distance? How does that relate to, for example, pain? No matter how close you are to someone, you can't see, for example, their toothache.

[NST==>”close” is a metaphor;  I am suggesting a co-location in space metaphor to substitute for the privacy-inside metaphor which I take to be yours.  I am suggesting, roughly, that the more experiences we share, the more we are of one mind.  <==nst]

 

Version 2: When the self you see projected in another ‘s behavior toward you is the same as the self you see projected in your own behavior. [NST==>You will find this sentence totally unintelligible until you entertain the notion that the self is an inferred entity, inferred using the same sort of equipment that we use to infer the motives, aspirations, feelings, and thoughts of others.  What differs between you and me is the amount of time we spend around me.  To the extent that I spend more time than you do around me, I am probably a better source of info about what I am up to, thinking about, etc., ceteris paribus.  Thus, I may greater familiarity with me than you do, I don’t have any special access to me.   <==nst]

 

If I remember what happened when we last did this Russ, you made me clearer and a clearer (and Eric, who wrote the Devil’s Advocate questions, in some ways modeled himself after you), but in the end, you just concluded that I was nuts, and we let it go at that. 

 

I don't know how to understand that either. What do you mean by "self?" What does it mean to project it toward someone? What does it mean to say that it's the same self as the one you project? Over what period of time must they be the same? If we're talking about behavior would it matter if the projecting entity were a robot? (Perhaps you answered those questions in the papers I haven't read. Sorry if that's the case.)

[NST==>If you insist that a mind is a thing that is enclosed in a head (or a steel cabinet, etc.), than I can only say that if a robot does mind things, than a robot “has” a mind.  But I rebel against the metaphor.  <==nst]

 

--------------

 

You responded with a long (and clear and definitive) extract from your paper. But I don't see how it answers my questions. Wrt the first question, if we're talking about behavior, distance doesn't see relevant. Wrt the second question, the extract doesn't (seem to) talk about what you mean by a self or what it means for the projected behaviors of two of them to be "the same" -- or even what projected behavior means. Is it the case that you also don't "believe in" intentionality? After all how can there be intentionality without a subjective intent? And if that's the case, what does "projected" mean? Is it the same as oriented in 3D space?

[NST==>I have to run, now, but please see  Intentionality is the Mark of the Vital .  Ethology is thick with intentionality. Language is not an necessary condition for intentionalty.  All is required is the sign relation (cf Peirce). <==nst]

 

 

 

On Mon, Feb 22, 2016 at 1:38 PM glen <[hidden email]> wrote:

I may as well chime in, too, since none of what's been said so far is meaningful to me.  My concept of intimacy runs along M-W's 2nd entry:

    2 :  to communicate delicately and indirectly

This is almost nothing to do with subjectivity and almost nothing to do with non-private knowledge (things others know).  It has to do with "delicate" attention to detail and, perhaps, manipulation.  A robot could easily be intimate with a human, and demonstrate such intimacy by catering to many of the tiny things the human prefers/enjoys, even if each and every tiny preference is publicly known.  Similarly, 2 robots could be intimate by way of a _special_ inter-robot interface.  But the specialness of the interface isn't its privacy or uniqueness.  It's in its handling of whatever specific details are appropriate to those robots.

Even if inter-subjectivity is merely the intertwining of experiences, it's still largely unrelated to intimacy.  Two complete strangers can become intimate almost instantaneously, because/if their interfaces are pre-adapted for a specific coupling.  There it wouldn't be inter-subjectivity, but a kind of similarity of type.  And that might be mostly or entirely genetic rather than ontogenic.

And I have to again be some sort of Morlockian champion for the irrelevance of thought.  2 strangers can be intimate and hold _radically_ different understandings of the world(s) presented to them ... at least if we believe the tales told to us in countless novels. 8^)


On 02/22/2016 12:40 AM, Jochen Fromm wrote:
> Nice to see FRIAM is still alive!
> I like this definition as well: "Intimacy is just being so close that you see the same world from where you stand". In a family for example we are being so close that we roughly see and experience the same world.
>
> I still believe that the solution to the hard problem lies in Hollywood: cinemas are built like theaters. If we see a film about a person, it is like sitting in his or her cartesian theater. We see what the person sees. In a sense, we feel what the feels as well, especially the pain of loosing someone.

--
⇔ glen

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[Nick Thompson]

R.

 

I suppose that if the robot met the conditions I laid out, I would have to consider it. 

 

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 Russ Abbott
Sent: Thursday, February 25, 2016 9:40 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Subjectivity and intimacy

 

I meant to follow up on this from Nick.

 

DEVIL’S ADVOCATE: So a robot could be made that would feel pain?

Well, you are cheating a bit, because you are asking me to participate in a word game I have already disavowed, the game in which pain is something inside my brain that I use my pain-feelers to palpate (contra Natsoulas, this volume). To me, pain is an emergency organization of my behavior in which I deploy physical and social defenses of various sorts. You show me a robot that is part of a society of robots, becomes frantic when you break some part of it, calls upon it fellow robots to assist, etc., I will be happy to admit that it is “paining”.

 

Do you apply that standard to ethics and the law? That is, from an ethical perspective should entities that "pain" in your sense not be acted upon in such a way as to result in their performing their "paining" activities? Would you recommend that anything along those lines be enshrined in the law? 

 

What about "killing" a robot by (turning it off and) dismantling it? It will have "died" because it stops acting "alive."

 

On Sun, Feb 21, 2016 at 10:06 PM Nick Thompson <[hidden email]> wrote:

Hi, Russ, 

 

Your questions are so answered by the “Old New Realist” article.  I will attach it again.   In the meantime, here is an excerpt.

 

DEVIL’S ADVOCATE: If feelings are something that one does, rather than something that one “has inside”, then the right sort of robot should be capable of feeling when it does the sorts of things that humans do when we say that humans are feeling something. Are you prepared to live with that implication?

Sure.

 DEVIL’S ADVOCATE: So a robot could be made that would feel pain?

Well, you are cheating a bit, because you are asking me to participate in a word game I have already disavowed, the game in which pain is something inside my brain that I use my pain-feelers to palpate (contra Natsoulas, this volume). To me, pain is an emergency organization of my behavior in which I deploy physical and social defenses of various sorts. You show me a robot that is part of a society of robots, becomes frantic when you break some part of it, calls upon it fellow robots to assist, etc., I will be happy to admit that it is “paining”.

DEVIL’S ADVOCATE: On your account, non-social animals don’t feel pain?

Well, not the same sort of pain. Any creature that struggles when you do something to it is “paining” in some sense. But animals that have the potential to summon help seem to pain in a different way.

DEVIL’S ADVOCATE: But Nick, while “paining” sounds nice in an academic paper, it is just silly otherwise. The other day I felt quite nauseous after a meal. I am interested in what it’s like to feel nauseous, and you cannot honestly claim that you don’t know what feeling nauseous is like. Behavioral correlates aren’t at issue, stop changing the subject.

What is “being nauseous” like? It’s like being on a small boat in a choppy sea, it’s like being in a world that is revolving when others see it as stable, it’s like being grey in the face and turning away from the sights and smells of food that others find attractive, it’s like having your head in the toilet when others have theirs in the refrigerator.

            But you have brought us to the crux of the problem. Nobody has ever been satisfied with my answers to these, “What is it like to be a _______?” questions. “What is it like to be in pain? What is it like to be a bat? What is it like to be Nick Thompson?” Notice how the grammar is contorted. If you ask the question in its natural order, you begin to see a path to an answer. “What is being Nick Thompson like?” “It’s like running around like a chicken with its head cut off.” OK. I get that. I see me doing that. You see me doing that. But most people won’t be satisfied with that sort of answer, because it’s the same as the answer to the question, “What do people like Nick Thompson do?” and therefore appears to convey no information that is inherently private. To me, the question, “What is it like to be X?”, has been fully answered when you have said where X-like people can be found and what they will be doing there. However, I seem to be pretty alone in that view.

DEVIL’S ADVOCATE: Now I see why you annoy people. I ask you a perfectly straightforward question about the quality of an experience and you keep trying to saddle me with a description of a behavior. You just change the subject. You clearly understand me when I ask you about the quality of feeling nauseous, yet you answer like a person who doesn’t understand.

Well, here you just prove my point by refusing to believe me when I say that, for me, feeling is a kind of doing, an exploring of the world. Where does somebody who believes that mental states are private, and that each person has privileged access to their own mental states, stand to deny me my account of my own mental states? You can’t have it both ways – you have run smack-dab into the ultimate foolishness of your position.

 

 

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 Russ Abbott
Sent: Sunday, February 21, 2016 10:18 PM

To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Subjectivity and intimacy

 

Sorry. Guess I missed it.

 

Version 1: Intimacy is just being so close that you see the same world from where you stand. 

 

I don't know how to understand that. Do you mean close wrt Euclidean distance? How does that relate to, for example, pain? No matter how close you are to someone, you can't see, for example, their toothache.

 

Version 2: When the self you see projected in another ‘s behavior toward you is the same as the self you see projected in your own behavior. 

 

I don't know how to understand that either. What do you mean by "self?" What does it mean to project it toward someone? What does it mean to say that it's the same self as the one you project? Over what period of time must they be the same? If we're talking about behavior would it matter if the projecting entity were a robot? (Perhaps you answered those questions in the papers I haven't read. Sorry if that's the case.)

 

 

On Sun, Feb 21, 2016 at 9:05 PM Nick Thompson <[hidden email]> wrote:

Thanks, Eric.  Precisely said.  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 Eric Charles
Sent: Sunday, February 21, 2016 9:16 PM

To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Subjectivity and intimacy

 

"But what is it to know the subjective experience of another ?  You ask me about my experience, and I tell you?  Do you have to trust my account?"

 

Well.... the whole crux of psychology ("small p" psychology?) is that your account is suspect, and I would be a fool to accept it naively. Your ability to know yourself is suspect (what Henriques calls your "Freud Filter") and your ability to acknowledge what you know in an authentic fashion is suspect (what Henriques calls your "Rogerian Filter") and of course whatever you say encounters the same hurdles in "the mind" of the listener.

We all recognize "sharing subjective experience" and "intimacy" as more than this. There are people who claim to tell us about their experience, but with whom we feel no sense of connection.

"It just struck me that intimacy as I understand that term depends on an assumption of subjective experience"

Well.... The question is, as Nick has said, what you mean by "subjective", right? If you mean that the world looks differently to different people, in the literal sense, of a physical body/mind experiencing certain things, then it is fine to talk about subjective experience and about coming to understand the subjective experience of another person. To be intimate with someone, as you present it, would be to understand, a person's quirky way of experiencing the world to such an extent that you could share in their view, i.e., you could come, at least from time to time, to find yourself with "their" quirks rather than "your own."

If, on the other hand, when you talk about "subjective", you mean that there is a ghost-soul somewhere, experiencing a Cartesian theater in its own unique way, then you have a problem. (The problem isn't the one you might think, however! It matters not, for this discussion, whether such a thing exists.) The problem is that such a view rules out the intimacy you are thinking of in a much, much more dogmatic way than what you might worry about from Nick. If that is what you mean by "subjective experience" then it is by definition unsharable. You cannot possibly get yourself into another person's Cartesian theater, and you will never know if anything you experience bares even the slightest resemblance to what they experience. It is a deep rabbit hole.

Eric

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

 

On Sun, Feb 21, 2016 at 3:15 PM, Nick Thompson <[hidden email]> wrote:

Yep!  I didn’t feel I should name names. 

 

How did the wedding go?  There was a point around 4pm when I was kicking myself about bailing;  and then another point, around 8 pm, when I was wolfing hydrocodone and thanking God that I had. 

 

Debby must be exhausted.

 

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, February 21, 2016 12:25 PM

To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Subjectivity and intimacy

 

Nick,

I hope I am the "other FRIAMMER" to which you referring.

Frank

Frank Wimberly
Phone
<a href="tel:%28505%29%20670-9918" target="_blank">[phone]

On Feb 20, 2016 9:11 PM, "Nick Thompson" <[hidden email]> wrote:

Hi, Russ,

 

You wrote:

 

Intimacy is … not about just about knowing something about someone that isn't generally known, e.g., where the person went to elementary school or her mother's maiden. Intimacy has to do with the kinds of things that are known, in particular with knowing about the subjective experience of another person. At least that's how I would describe it -- and that's why I raised the question.

 

Oh, I don’t have a lot of trouble agreeing  with the first part of this statement.  Some unknowns are inherently more intimate than others. 

 

But what is it to know the subjective experience of another ?  You ask me about my experience, and I tell you?  Do you have to trust my account?  Well, if you ask me, I assert that I, for one, DON’T.  One answer to this quandary is to simply assert that Russ Abbot has subjective experience and Nick Thompson does not!  Perhaps ,N.T. is the victim of a form of autism that deprives him of that self-conscious that for you defines the human condition.  And there’s an end to it, eh?  At this point, one of my most dedicated opponents in this discussion, a former graduate student, always say, “So it’s OK to kill you eat you, right?” 

 

I am going to invoke the academic Scoundrel’s Defense here, and attach  a link to another paper.  “Ejective anthropomorphism” is the idea that we come to know animal mental states by seeing an isomorphism between some feature of an animals behavior and some behavior of our own and then, since we know infallibly the internal causes of our behavior, inferring the internal causes of the animal’s.   The whole argument hangs, of course, on the notion that we know why we do things by some special direct knowledge… “privileged access”.  The article is a bit of a slog, but if skim judiciously until you get to the section on “privileged access”, 67, then you might have enough energy to read the argument against that notion and be convinced.   

 

Russ, I think in our correspondence before you have perhaps taken the position that it simply is the case that each of us has a private consciousness.  That is a position taken by another FRIAMMER and I find it, oddly, the most winning argument.  “I choose to start here!” 

 

 

Nick

 

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

 

From: Friam [[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Russ Abbott
Sent: Friday, February 19, 2016 10:33 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Subjectivity and intimacy

 

Intimacy is not necessarily about sex, but it is also not about just about knowing something about someone that isn't generally known, e.g., where the person went to elementary school or her mother's maiden name. It's more than just being able to answer the sorts of questions web sites ask as a way to establish one's identity. Intimacy has to do with the kinds of things that are known, in particular with knowing about the subjective experience of another person. At least that's how I would describe it -- and that's why I raised the question.

 

On Fri, Feb 19, 2016 at 3:39 PM Nick Thompson <[hidden email]> wrote:

Dear John and Russ,

 

Well, you question is an example of itself.  Who is best qualified to explain the basis of Nick's denial of subjectivity?  Is this a question about etiology: I.e., the causal history of Nick's coming to deny subjectivity?  Or is it a question of what rational arguments Nick might make for his denial of subjectivity.  Note that there is nothing particularly private about either of those forms of the question.  FRIAM could get to work on answering them and Nick could stand aside and wonder at the quality and perspicacity of your answers.  My own most recent and condensed and approachable attempt to answer both versions of the question can be found in the manuscript that is attached.  I can’t find cc of the published vsn at the moment.

 

I will think about the intimacy issue.  I think it’s about having some others who know things about you that are not generally known.  I would argue that when you get into bed with somebody naked, it’s a metaphor.  But then, I am old.

 

Nick

 

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

 

-----Original Message-----
From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of John Kennison
Sent: Friday, February 19, 2016 2:30 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Subjectivity and intimacy

 

One thing I wonder about (or perhaps have forgotten) in this discussion and Nick's denial is what the denial is based on. Is the absence of subjectivity supposed to be a scientific fact? If so, we should be discussing the experimental foundations of this fact. I have read of some experiments which seem to indicate that subjectiviity is not exactly what we (or what I) used to think it is --but which do not seem to disprove subjectivity.

 

--John

________________________________________

From: Friam [[hidden email]] on behalf of Russ Abbott [[hidden email]]

Sent: Friday, February 19, 2016 3:27 PM

To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group

Subject: [FRIAM] Subjectivity and intimacy

 

We've had discussions on and off about subjectivity -- with me getting frustrated at Nick's denial thereof (if I understood him correctly).

 

It occurred to me recently that intimacy is defined -- as I understand it -- in terms of subjectivity, i.e., the sharing of one's (most private) subjective experiences with another.

 

I'm wondering what Nick thinks about this and whether anyone else has something to say about it. In particular, if there is no such thing as subjective experience, does that imply in your view that the same goes for intimacy?

 

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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 Russ Abbott
Sent: Friday, February 19, 2016 10:33 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Subjectivity and intimacy

 

Intimacy is not necessarily about sex, but it is also not about just about knowing something about someone that isn't generally known, e.g., where the person went to elementary school or her mother's maiden name. It's more than just being able to answer the sorts of questions web sites ask as a way to establish one's identity. Intimacy has to do with the kinds of things that are known, in particular with knowing about the subjective experience of another person. At least that's how I would describe it -- and that's why I raised the question.

 

On Fri, Feb 19, 2016 at 3:39 PM Nick Thompson <[hidden email]> wrote:

Dear John and Russ,

 

Well, you question is an example of it self.  Who is best qualified to explain the basis of Nick's denial of subjectivity?  Is this a question about aetiology: I.e., the causal history of Nick's coming to deny subjectivity?  Or is it a question of what rational arguments Nick might make for his denial of subjectivity.  Note that there is nothing particularly private about either of those forms of the question.  FRIAM could get to work on answering them and Nick could stand aside and wonder at the quality and perspicacity of your answers.  My own most recent and condensed and approachable attempt to answer both versions of the question can be found in the manuscript that is attached.  I can’t find cc of the published vsn at the moment.

 

I will think about the intimacy issue.  I think it’s about having some others who know things about you that are not generally known.  I would argue that when you get into bed with somebody naked, it’s a metaphor.  But then, I am old.

 

Nick

 

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

 

-----Original Message-----
From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of John Kennison
Sent: Friday, February 19, 2016 2:30 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Subjectivity and intimacy

 

One thing I wonder about (or perhaps have forgotten) in this discussion and Nick's denial is what the denial is based on. Is the absence of subjectivity supposed to be a scientific fact? If so, we should be discussing the experimental foundations of this fact. I have read of some experiments which seem to indicate that subjectiviity is not exactly what we (or what I) used to think it is --but which do not seem to disprove subjectivity.

 

--John

________________________________________

From: Friam [[hidden email]] on behalf of Russ Abbott [[hidden email]]

Sent: Friday, February 19, 2016 3:27 PM

To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group

Subject: [FRIAM] Subjectivity and intimacy

 

We've had discussions on and off about subjectivity -- with me getting frustrated at Nick's denial thereof (if I understood him correctly).

 

It occurred to me recently that intimacy is defined -- as I understand it -- in terms of subjectivity, i.e., the sharing of one's (most private) subjective experiences with another.

 

I'm wondering what Nick thinks about this and whether anyone else has something to say about it. In particular, if there is no such thing as subjective experience, does that imply in your view that the same goes for intimacy?

 

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[Eric Charles-2]

Russ... well... there we are.

I know the supposed "hard problem" of which you speak, but I think it is a rabbit hole full of confusion, not an actual problem to be solved. The posited mystery simply does not exist. We might as well be discussing a philosopher's stone or the universal solvent. No amount of technological innovation, or details about the activities of cells in a particular part of our body, will solve a problem that doesn't exist.

On Thu, Feb 25, 2016 at 11:10 PM, Russ Abbott <[hidden email]> wrote:

Sorry, No. Most of it was not satisfying. 

You originally said that the science of mind was doing reasonably well. When I asked what you meant you talked about how shallow psychology is. 

I said I expected there to be technology that lets me experience what you are experiencing. You replied that if I believed something (which I didn't claim) then I wouldn't need such technology. That wasn't the point. 

I guess we agreed that good work is being done on computer vision. I said that we will increasingly be able to link brain activity to subjective experience. I didn't say anything about a Cartesian theater. You raised the notion of a Cartesian theater to knock it down and then talked about grass. 

The "hard" problem you must know refers to Chalmers. 

On Thu, Feb 25, 2016 at 12:51 PM Eric Charles <[hidden email]> wrote:

Russ,

I mulled over replying a few times, but wasn't sure what to say. However, by restating your genuine interest in my response, I now feel like a jack ass for not responding earilier, so here it goes. Some of these answers might not be at all satisfying, but I will do my best so long as you accept the caveat that I am uncertain if some of it will really answer your questions.

"When you say "the science of the mind seems to be doing reasonably well" what are you referring to?"

In the original context, I am referring to what people saw when looking around in the late 1800s. In fact, I think there is very good working being done in psychology today, but what I consider "good work" is a very small, and marginalized, corner of the modern field. Most stuff that passes as "important" psychology research today is either barking up the wrong tree entirely, or is so mundane as to be uninteresting. Mainstream psychology is driven much more by the ability to make clever press releases than by a critical view to advancing the field.

Compare the recent big-press items in physics to the recent big-press items in psychology, and it makes you want to weep for our field. The biggest news item in Psychology right now is a multi-year study showing that people "feel less in control" of their actions when following the orders by another person, in comparison to a group that chose the same actions without being ordered to do them. Seriously. (Yes, seriously.)

"I wouldn't be surprised if we develop technology that lets me experience what you are experiencing via neural sensor and communication systems."

I think we do not have a sensible way to talk about the brain's role in psychological processes at this time (I've published a few papers about this), and that when such a language is worked out it will violate most our folk-psychology intuitions. If you believe that empathy a thing people sometimes do, then, I submit, you yourself do not believe we need the posited device to experience what another is experiencing.

"We have taken impressive steps in computer vision in recent years. I expect that work to help us develop a more formal structure for our own visual experiences."

Well... sure... but that is not qualitatively different than the advances made in vision research over the past hundred years. We know a lot about how vision works. Generally speaking, computer vision does not work like human vision, because, as with all evolved processes, humans are not the most computationally efficient things in the world. But, there are people  working to build inefficient and non-elegant computer vision systems for the purposes of testing hypotheses regarding human vision. Good stuff.  

"I don't expect a breakthrough that will suddenly crack "the hard problem of consciousness. More likely we will be able to say more and more accurately what sort of subjective experience someone is having by looking at what their brain is doing."

This is probably the difficult part of your comment to respond to. I simply don't believe there is a "hard problem." To the extent that I even understand what you are talking about there, I think the brain is one part of a much larger system that we would need to examine. That is not to say that examining the brain adds nothing, but to say that an exclusive focus on the brain misrepresents the phenomena of interest.

To elaborate a bit: Traditional philosophy has addressed been largely oriented towards "internalizing" psychological processes. The Cartesian claim (an extension of the Platonic claim) was that we only experience the world that plays out in the theater of our ghost-souls. "Why do I experience the grass as green?" you ask. "Because the greenness is present in the theater of your soul," is the answer. This, of course, doesn't solve anything. Saying that we only experience the world that plays out in the theater of brains has almost all of the same problems, and should be rejected. At the least, it adds nothing.

The approach that I would advocate for could be described as "externalizing" psychological processes. "Why do I experience the grass as green?" you ask. "Because there is some identifiable property of the grass that you are responding to, and that property, out there, is what you mean by the word 'green'," would be my answer. That property could be quite complex to specify (it is certainly MUCH more complicated than a narrow range of wave lengths), but whatever that property is, that is thing you are asking about when you ask about "green". If you want to know if someone is experiencing the same thing you are when they talk about "green" then we see if the parameters for their response match the parameters for your response. That is, we act if they are experiencing, quite literally, the same things. It is challenging problem, but it is a straightforward and tractable scientific problem, and it renders the philosophers so-called "hard problem" moot.

Was any of that satisfying?

Best,

Eric

 

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

On Thu, Feb 25, 2016 at 1:29 AM, Nick Thompson <[hidden email]> wrote:

Russ,

 

Partly exhaustion, I think. 

 

Once we all agree that there is no in-principle reason that I cannot ultimately tap your subjective mind, then we all know what we are and we are just dickering about the price.

 

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 Russ Abbott
Sent: Wednesday, February 24, 2016 10:15 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Subjectivity and intimacy (lost in the weeks?)

 

Nick, Eric,

 

I'm disappointed that neither of you responded to my reply (below) to Eric's message.  Perhaps it got lost in the weeks. 

 

-- Russ

 

On Mon, Feb 22, 2016 at 9:56 PM Russ Abbott <[hidden email]> wrote:

Eric, When you say "the science of the mind seems to be doing reasonably well" what are you referring to? I thought your position was that mind was not a useful concept. I suppose that what you mean by mind is something that can be investigated by looking at behavior. But what is that sort of mind? Wouldn't it be better to call it something else so that people like me don't get confused? So to get back to my original question and to help me understand what you are saying, what are the recent advances in the science of mind I should be thinking of in this regard?

 

Also, I'm not convinced that subjective experience is forever beyond the reach of scientific investigation. I wouldn't be surprised if we develop technology that lets me experience what you are experiencing via neural sensor and communication systems. And if I can experience what you are experiencing we will presumably be able to record it and parse it. 

 

We have taken impressive steps in computer vision in recent years. I expect that work to help us develop a more formal structure for our own visual experiences. This is not to say that the formal structure will be a subjective experience for the computer. But it is to say that it will give us some leverage for investigating subjective experience. Similarly open brain surgery has helped us understand how the brain is connected to subjective experience.  

 

Just as we now know a lot about how natural language works even though no science can speak or fully understand natural language, I expect that we will develop similar theories about how subjective experience works. 

 

I don't expect a breakthrough that will suddenly crack "the hard problem of consciousness." More likely we will be able to say more and more accurately what sort of subjective experience someone is having by looking at what their brain is doing. We now have ways to allow people to act in the world by thinking about what they want. These are fairly superficial mappings of brain signals to physical actuators. But it's pretty impressive nonetheless. More advances along these and related lines will make subjective experience less of a mystery and more just another feature of the world.

 

On Mon, Feb 22, 2016 at 7:09 PM Eric Charles <[hidden email]> wrote:

Russ said: "Eric's point that the world must be a certain way if we are to do science doesn't make sense to me. If Schrodinger, Heisenberg, etc. thought like that they would have denied the two-slit experiments, and quantum mechanics wouldn't exist. Science (as you all know) is fundamentally empirical. You can't demand that the world be a certain way so that it's easier to do science."

Exactly! Let me try another tact.

1) We could imagine (with various levels of clarity) any number of worlds in which things worked differently from each other.

2) "Doing science" is largely a process of trying to figure out which of those worlds we live in, by searching for the best way to divide up empirical evidence, so that it is reliable and can be agreed up. (Peirce was particularly fascinated with the advances made in 18th century chemistry.) Scientists search for more and more stable ways to view the world, i.e., ways which stand up to more and more empirical scrutiny. (Early attempts at the periodic table, though imperfect, serve as an excellent example of this, leading to countless confirmatory experiments, including the correct prediction of the properties of yet-to-be-isolated elements.)

3) In order to do science about something, we need only one thing to be true: It can be investigated empirically. That is, it is something, "out there" which we can turn our machinations towards, and which will yield stable results once we find the appropriate methods for its investigation.

 

4) Many important big-name people have declared that a science of psychology is impossible, because the stuff under discussion in that context simply cannot be investigated empirically. Kant, is a prime example. Those big-names declared that another person's mind was not the type of thing that you could examine empirically, because the province of the soul did not yield itself to earthly poking and prodding. If those big-names are correct, and minds cannot be investigated, by their very nature, we would expect efforts in that direction to fail-to-produce the convergence-of-ideas characteristic of successful science.

5) We can imagine a world in which those big-names are correct. We can imagine a world in which many types of things can be investigated empirically, but not minds, and in which all attempts to produce a science of the mind would fail pathetically.

6) The above view has had a virtual strangle hold on Western thinking for centuries. However, in the late 1800's a few serious scholars started thinking that "science of psychology" might be given a go, to see how it went. They were widely dismissed, not allowed to hold their heads high in either scientific circles or philosophical ones.

7) And that's where we find ourselves. If a science of psychology is possible, then de facto the subject matter of psychology is some swath of empirically investigatable happenings, about which a community of investigators would eventually reach a consensus as the scientific process takes its course. We might not live in such a world, but we won't know without trying it. A science of ether winds never worked out. The attempted science of medieval humours was a bust. A science of studying bumps-on-people's-heads has been roundly rejected. All sorts of attempted sciences have not worked out over the years. But the science of the mind seems to be doing reasonably well. Either that progress is an illusion, and empirical-psychologists will soon go the way of the phrenologists, or that progress is evidence that the big-names who thought of "mind" as inherently uninvestigatable were wrong on a very fundamental level.

If you are to study a romantic partner's mind in order to become intimate with her, then her mind must be something that can be studied. If I am to study your feeling of intimacy, then your feeling-of-intimacy must be something that can be studied. And so on, and so forth. Whatever methods and categories that leads us two, such is the stuff of the science of psychology, whether it matches any of our preconceptions, or not.

Best,

Eric

 

 

 

 

 

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

 

On Mon, Feb 22, 2016 at 7:13 PM, Russ Abbott <[hidden email]> wrote:

I'm flattered. Thank you. I can see myself in the Devil's Advocate role -- except for the last part. I'll grant that you can think whatever you want.

 

[NST==>”close” is a metaphor;  I am suggesting a co-location in space metaphor to substitute for the privacy-inside metaphor which I take to be yours.  I am suggesting, roughly, that the more experiences we share, the more we are of one mind.  <==nst]

 

That won't work for my sense of intimacy. One can be intimate (in my sense) on the telephone and via written words. Sharing (i.e., participating in the same) experiences is not required for intimacy in my sense. What is required (in my sense) is sharing (i.e., talking about one's subjective experiences of one's) experiences.

 

 [NST==>You will find this sentence totally unintelligible until you entertain the notion that the self is an inferred entity, inferred using the same sort of equipment that we use to infer the motives, aspirations, feelings, and thoughts of others.  What differs between you and me is the amount of time we spend around me.  To the extent that I spend more time than you do around me, I am probably a better source of info about what I am up to, thinking about, etc., ceteris paribus.  Thus, I may greater familiarity with me than you do, I don’t have any special access to me.   <==nst]

 

What does it mean to infer something if one has no subjective experience? I think of inferring something as having to do with thinking about it. More generally what does it mean to think about something in your framework? I'll agree that thinking involves stuff happening in the brain. So it's behavior in that sense. But it's not behavior in the sense you seem to be talking about. So what does it mean in your sense to think about something?

 

I realize I'm on shaky ground here because computers "think" about things without having what I would call subjective experience.

 

[NST==>If you insist that a mind is a thing that is enclosed in a head (or a steel cabinet, etc.), then I can only say that if a robot does mind things, than a robot “has” a mind.  But I rebel against the metaphor.  <==nst]

 

I don't insist that a mind is anything. I don't know how to talk about subjective experience scientifically. I see no reason to deny it, but I agree we have made little scientific progress in talking about it. 

 

By the way, Eric's point that the world must be a certain way if we are to do science doesn't make sense to me. If Schrodinger, Heisenberg, etc. thought like that they would have denied the two-slit experiments, and quantum mechanics wouldn't exist. Science (as you all know) is fundamentally empirical. You can't demand that the world be a certain way so that it's easier to do science.

 

[NST==>I have to run, now, but please see  Intentionality is the Mark of the Vital .  Ethology is thick with intentionality. Language is not an necessary condition for intentionalty.  All is required is the sign relation (cf Peirce). <==nst]

 

I looked at (but didn't read in any detail) the Intentionality paper. The upshot seems to be that non-humans have intentionality. I don't argue with that. My question for you is still how you reconcile intentionality with not having subjective experience. What is intentionality without subjectivity? (Again, I'm moving onto shaky ground since we have "goal-directed" software even though the software and the computer that runs it has no subjective experience.)

 

I guess in both cases in which computers seem to "think" or "plan" we are using those terms as analogs to what we see ourselves doing and not really to attribute those processes to computers or software.

 

On Mon, Feb 22, 2016 at 3:23 PM Nick Thompson <[hidden email]> wrote:

See Larding below:

 

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 Russ Abbott
Sent: Monday, February 22, 2016 3:08 PM

To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Subjectivity and intimacy

 

Sorry that I'm not responding to Glen, Jochen, or John, but I've got to defend Nick's devil's advocate.  Nick, you do keep changing the subject.  In response to your two suggested definitions of intimacy I asked the following.

 

--------------

 

Version 1: Intimacy is just being so close that you see the same world from where you stand. 

 

I don't know how to understand that. Do you mean close wrt Euclidean distance? How does that relate to, for example, pain? No matter how close you are to someone, you can't see, for example, their toothache.

[NST==>”close” is a metaphor;  I am suggesting a co-location in space metaphor to substitute for the privacy-inside metaphor which I take to be yours.  I am suggesting, roughly, that the more experiences we share, the more we are of one mind.  <==nst]

 

Version 2: When the self you see projected in another ‘s behavior toward you is the same as the self you see projected in your own behavior. [NST==>You will find this sentence totally unintelligible until you entertain the notion that the self is an inferred entity, inferred using the same sort of equipment that we use to infer the motives, aspirations, feelings, and thoughts of others.  What differs between you and me is the amount of time we spend around me.  To the extent that I spend more time than you do around me, I am probably a better source of info about what I am up to, thinking about, etc., ceteris paribus.  Thus, I may greater familiarity with me than you do, I don’t have any special access to me.   <==nst]

 

If I remember what happened when we last did this Russ, you made me clearer and a clearer (and Eric, who wrote the Devil’s Advocate questions, in some ways modeled himself after you), but in the end, you just concluded that I was nuts, and we let it go at that. 

 

I don't know how to understand that either. What do you mean by "self?" What does it mean to project it toward someone? What does it mean to say that it's the same self as the one you project? Over what period of time must they be the same? If we're talking about behavior would it matter if the projecting entity were a robot? (Perhaps you answered those questions in the papers I haven't read. Sorry if that's the case.)

[NST==>If you insist that a mind is a thing that is enclosed in a head (or a steel cabinet, etc.), than I can only say that if a robot does mind things, than a robot “has” a mind.  But I rebel against the metaphor.  <==nst]

 

--------------

 

You responded with a long (and clear and definitive) extract from your paper. But I don't see how it answers my questions. Wrt the first question, if we're talking about behavior, distance doesn't see relevant. Wrt the second question, the extract doesn't (seem to) talk about what you mean by a self or what it means for the projected behaviors of two of them to be "the same" -- or even what projected behavior means. Is it the case that you also don't "believe in" intentionality? After all how can there be intentionality without a subjective intent? And if that's the case, what does "projected" mean? Is it the same as oriented in 3D space?

[NST==>I have to run, now, but please see  Intentionality is the Mark of the Vital .  Ethology is thick with intentionality. Language is not an necessary condition for intentionalty.  All is required is the sign relation (cf Peirce). <==nst]

 

 

 

On Mon, Feb 22, 2016 at 1:38 PM glen <[hidden email]> wrote:

I may as well chime in, too, since none of what's been said so far is meaningful to me.  My concept of intimacy runs along M-W's 2nd entry:

    2 :  to communicate delicately and indirectly

This is almost nothing to do with subjectivity and almost nothing to do with non-private knowledge (things others know).  It has to do with "delicate" attention to detail and, perhaps, manipulation.  A robot could easily be intimate with a human, and demonstrate such intimacy by catering to many of the tiny things the human prefers/enjoys, even if each and every tiny preference is publicly known.  Similarly, 2 robots could be intimate by way of a _special_ inter-robot interface.  But the specialness of the interface isn't its privacy or uniqueness.  It's in its handling of whatever specific details are appropriate to those robots.

Even if inter-subjectivity is merely the intertwining of experiences, it's still largely unrelated to intimacy.  Two complete strangers can become intimate almost instantaneously, because/if their interfaces are pre-adapted for a specific coupling.  There it wouldn't be inter-subjectivity, but a kind of similarity of type.  And that might be mostly or entirely genetic rather than ontogenic.

And I have to again be some sort of Morlockian champion for the irrelevance of thought.  2 strangers can be intimate and hold _radically_ different understandings of the world(s) presented to them ... at least if we believe the tales told to us in countless novels. 8^)


On 02/22/2016 12:40 AM, Jochen Fromm wrote:
> Nice to see FRIAM is still alive!
> I like this definition as well: "Intimacy is just being so close that you see the same world from where you stand". In a family for example we are being so close that we roughly see and experience the same world.
>
> I still believe that the solution to the hard problem lies in Hollywood: cinemas are built like theaters. If we see a film about a person, it is like sitting in his or her cartesian theater. We see what the person sees. In a sense, we feel what the feels as well, especially the pain of loosing someone.

--
⇔ glen

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