Fwd: Complejidad en economía

[Russ Abbott]

What I still don't understand (and would like to understand) is how Eric and Nick talk about mental activities. For example if I ask you to add 15 and 43, what do you say you are doing? If I ask you to think about what the other looks like, does some image come to mind? What do you say is happening as you hold that image in your mind? 

In none of my posts have I put a position forward. (Nevertheless you have often replied as if I have.) My first post asked how you describe intimacy -- or if that term means anything at all to you. This is similar. I want to know how you describe the sorts of mental activities that we (and even you presumably) find familiar.

On Fri, Feb 26, 2016 at 4:35 PM Eric Charles <[hidden email]> wrote:

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.

-----------
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 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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[Nick Thompson]

Eric,

 

Does it make any sense, in James’s terms, to assert that a problem perceived by another person does not exist?

 

I guess it would be easy for Peirce to make such an assertion, but James?

 

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: Friday, February 26, 2016 5:34 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Subjectivity and intimacy (lost in the weeks?)

 

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.

 

-----------
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 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" target="_blank">[phone]   fax: <a href="tel:%28202%29%20885-1190" 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" target="_blank">[phone]   fax: <a href="tel:%28202%29%20885-1190" 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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[Nick Thompson]

Hi, Russ,

 

Ok, so now we are out of the Weeds of Pragmatism thread, I am, FWIW, free to speak me own “mind” – i.e., give you the basis to make accurate predictions of my behavior in this sort of situation in the future. 

 

I think the short answer is that largely Eric and I  don’t.  And when we do, we think we are talking about behavior patterns.  Some of those behavior patterns may be meta meta ……. Etc. and have to be experienced over long reaches of time before they can be recognized.   Although I perhaps know too little math to use this metaphor, I like to think of mental states such as “wanting” as analogous to as derivatives of functions – measurements we speak of occurring as an instant, but actually  ways of describing events longer in duration that can only be known by multiple measurements collected over time. So when in ordinary language we speak of wanting “a hot fudge sundae”, we speak as if we are talking about an instantaneous state in some internal space called the mind, when we actually characterizing information concerning our behavior with respect to ice-cream, nuts, whipped cream, and chocolate sauce that would constitute evidence for a directedness towards those things as an end. 

 

You probably know too much math to get much pleasure out of my use of that metaphor.   John will no doubt correct me.

 

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 26, 2016 7:50 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Subjectivity and intimacy (lost in the weeks?)

 

What I still don't understand (and would like to understand) is how Eric and Nick talk about mental activities. For example if I ask you to add 15 and 43, what do you say you are doing? If I ask you to think about what the other looks like, does some image come to mind? What do you say is happening as you hold that image in your mind? 

 

In none of my posts have I put a position forward. (Nevertheless you have often replied as if I have.) My first post asked how you describe intimacy -- or if that term means anything at all to you. This is similar. I want to know how you describe the sorts of mental activities that we (and even you presumably) find familiar.

 

On Fri, Feb 26, 2016 at 4:35 PM Eric Charles <[hidden email]> wrote:

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.

 

-----------
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 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" target="_blank">[phone]   fax: <a href="tel:%28202%29%20885-1190" 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" target="_blank">[phone]   fax: <a href="tel:%28202%29%20885-1190" 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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[Russ Abbott]

Rather than wanting, which is somewhat nebulous, what about doing arithmetic or visualizing someone's face? What about counting backwards from100 by 7's: 100, 93, 86, ... How do you describe those sorts of activities in your terms?

On Fri, Feb 26, 2016 at 9:42 PM Nick Thompson <[hidden email]> wrote:

Hi, Russ,

 

Ok, so now we are out of the Weeds of Pragmatism thread, I am, FWIW, free to speak me own “mind” – i.e., give you the basis to make accurate predictions of my behavior in this sort of situation in the future. 

 

I think the short answer is that largely Eric and I  don’t.  And when we do, we think we are talking about behavior patterns.  Some of those behavior patterns may be meta meta ……. Etc. and have to be experienced over long reaches of time before they can be recognized.   Although I perhaps know too little math to use this metaphor, I like to think of mental states such as “wanting” as analogous to as derivatives of functions – measurements we speak of occurring as an instant, but actually  ways of describing events longer in duration that can only be known by multiple measurements collected over time. So when in ordinary language we speak of wanting “a hot fudge sundae”, we speak as if we are talking about an instantaneous state in some internal space called the mind, when we actually characterizing information concerning our behavior with respect to ice-cream, nuts, whipped cream, and chocolate sauce that would constitute evidence for a directedness towards those things as an end. 

 

You probably know too much math to get much pleasure out of my use of that metaphor.   John will no doubt correct me.

 

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 26, 2016 7:50 PM

To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Subjectivity and intimacy (lost in the weeks?)

 

What I still don't understand (and would like to understand) is how Eric and Nick talk about mental activities. For example if I ask you to add 15 and 43, what do you say you are doing? If I ask you to think about what the other looks like, does some image come to mind? What do you say is happening as you hold that image in your mind? 

 

In none of my posts have I put a position forward. (Nevertheless you have often replied as if I have.) My first post asked how you describe intimacy -- or if that term means anything at all to you. This is similar. I want to know how you describe the sorts of mental activities that we (and even you presumably) find familiar.

 

On Fri, Feb 26, 2016 at 4:35 PM Eric Charles <[hidden email]> wrote:

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.

 

-----------
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 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" target="_blank">[phone]   fax: <a href="tel:%28202%29%20885-1190" 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" target="_blank">[phone]   fax: <a href="tel:%28202%29%20885-1190" 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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[Eric Charles-2]

"What about counting backwards from100 by 7's: 100, 93, 86, ... How do you describe those sorts of activities in your terms?"

I describe it just like that. "Counting backwards from 100 by 7's." To confirm this, I asked my daughter to do that, and she did. Her mouth opened and closed, her throat vibrated, and I heard numbers just as you described. I thought the description was apt.

"what about...visualizing someone's face?"

Well, that is going to be a bit trickier, and various answers have been offered that would avoid your posited problem. 

I would point out, first, that we all, at least occasionally "see" that someone is doing this. You are around someone you are very familiar with, something happens, they get a particular contemplative look, and we see that they are remembering someone from their past. "You're thinking about her again, aren't you. I can tell." "Yes, how did you know?" "I've known you long enough. Like I said, I can tell."

Second, I would say (following the work of François Tonneau) that the best way to describe such events is as a continued response to a thing that is not currently present. Just as we no longer think there is any particular mystery about how people behaving towards objects at a spatial distance, we need not posit any particular mystery about how people behave towards objects at a temporal distance.

The brain is certainly a crucial part in such processes, but so is the rest of the body and the surrounding environment. A brain in a vat may present a mystery, but the same questions could be asked about a stomach in a vat. https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/fixing-psychology/201412/deep-thoughts-the-stomach-in-jar-problem

The "hard problem" is a conceptual confusion, not a real problem to be solved.

 

On Sat, Feb 27, 2016 at 2:02 AM, Russ Abbott <[hidden email]> wrote:

Rather than wanting, which is somewhat nebulous, what about doing arithmetic or visualizing someone's face? What about counting backwards from100 by 7's: 100, 93, 86, ... How do you describe those sorts of activities in your terms?

On Fri, Feb 26, 2016 at 9:42 PM Nick Thompson <[hidden email]> wrote:

Hi, Russ,

 

Ok, so now we are out of the Weeds of Pragmatism thread, I am, FWIW, free to speak me own “mind” – i.e., give you the basis to make accurate predictions of my behavior in this sort of situation in the future. 

 

I think the short answer is that largely Eric and I  don’t.  And when we do, we think we are talking about behavior patterns.  Some of those behavior patterns may be meta meta ……. Etc. and have to be experienced over long reaches of time before they can be recognized.   Although I perhaps know too little math to use this metaphor, I like to think of mental states such as “wanting” as analogous to as derivatives of functions – measurements we speak of occurring as an instant, but actually  ways of describing events longer in duration that can only be known by multiple measurements collected over time. So when in ordinary language we speak of wanting “a hot fudge sundae”, we speak as if we are talking about an instantaneous state in some internal space called the mind, when we actually characterizing information concerning our behavior with respect to ice-cream, nuts, whipped cream, and chocolate sauce that would constitute evidence for a directedness towards those things as an end. 

 

You probably know too much math to get much pleasure out of my use of that metaphor.   John will no doubt correct me.

 

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 26, 2016 7:50 PM

To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Subjectivity and intimacy (lost in the weeks?)

 

What I still don't understand (and would like to understand) is how Eric and Nick talk about mental activities. For example if I ask you to add 15 and 43, what do you say you are doing? If I ask you to think about what the other looks like, does some image come to mind? What do you say is happening as you hold that image in your mind? 

 

In none of my posts have I put a position forward. (Nevertheless you have often replied as if I have.) My first post asked how you describe intimacy -- or if that term means anything at all to you. This is similar. I want to know how you describe the sorts of mental activities that we (and even you presumably) find familiar.

 

On Fri, Feb 26, 2016 at 4:35 PM Eric Charles <[hidden email]> wrote:

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.

 

-----------
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 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" target="_blank">[phone]   fax: <a href="tel:%28202%29%20885-1190" 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" target="_blank">[phone]   fax: <a href="tel:%28202%29%20885-1190" 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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[Russ Abbott]

I meant counting silently and without and discernable physical motion. Same things for visualizing.  

On Sat, Feb 27, 2016 at 9:26 AM Eric Charles <[hidden email]> wrote:

"What about counting backwards from100 by 7's: 100, 93, 86, ... How do you describe those sorts of activities in your terms?"

I describe it just like that. "Counting backwards from 100 by 7's." To confirm this, I asked my daughter to do that, and she did. Her mouth opened and closed, her throat vibrated, and I heard numbers just as you described. I thought the description was apt.

"what about...visualizing someone's face?"

Well, that is going to be a bit trickier, and various answers have been offered that would avoid your posited problem. 

I would point out, first, that we all, at least occasionally "see" that someone is doing this. You are around someone you are very familiar with, something happens, they get a particular contemplative look, and we see that they are remembering someone from their past. "You're thinking about her again, aren't you. I can tell." "Yes, how did you know?" "I've known you long enough. Like I said, I can tell."

Second, I would say (following the work of François Tonneau) that the best way to describe such events is as a continued response to a thing that is not currently present. Just as we no longer think there is any particular mystery about how people behaving towards objects at a spatial distance, we need not posit any particular mystery about how people behave towards objects at a temporal distance.

The brain is certainly a crucial part in such processes, but so is the rest of the body and the surrounding environment. A brain in a vat may present a mystery, but the same questions could be asked about a stomach in a vat. https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/fixing-psychology/201412/deep-thoughts-the-stomach-in-jar-problem

The "hard problem" is a conceptual confusion, not a real problem to be solved.

 

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

On Sat, Feb 27, 2016 at 2:02 AM, Russ Abbott <[hidden email]> wrote:

Rather than wanting, which is somewhat nebulous, what about doing arithmetic or visualizing someone's face? What about counting backwards from100 by 7's: 100, 93, 86, ... How do you describe those sorts of activities in your terms?

On Fri, Feb 26, 2016 at 9:42 PM Nick Thompson <[hidden email]> wrote:

Hi, Russ,

 

Ok, so now we are out of the Weeds of Pragmatism thread, I am, FWIW, free to speak me own “mind” – i.e., give you the basis to make accurate predictions of my behavior in this sort of situation in the future. 

 

I think the short answer is that largely Eric and I  don’t.  And when we do, we think we are talking about behavior patterns.  Some of those behavior patterns may be meta meta ……. Etc. and have to be experienced over long reaches of time before they can be recognized.   Although I perhaps know too little math to use this metaphor, I like to think of mental states such as “wanting” as analogous to as derivatives of functions – measurements we speak of occurring as an instant, but actually  ways of describing events longer in duration that can only be known by multiple measurements collected over time. So when in ordinary language we speak of wanting “a hot fudge sundae”, we speak as if we are talking about an instantaneous state in some internal space called the mind, when we actually characterizing information concerning our behavior with respect to ice-cream, nuts, whipped cream, and chocolate sauce that would constitute evidence for a directedness towards those things as an end. 

 

You probably know too much math to get much pleasure out of my use of that metaphor.   John will no doubt correct me.

 

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 26, 2016 7:50 PM

To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Subjectivity and intimacy (lost in the weeks?)

 

What I still don't understand (and would like to understand) is how Eric and Nick talk about mental activities. For example if I ask you to add 15 and 43, what do you say you are doing? If I ask you to think about what the other looks like, does some image come to mind? What do you say is happening as you hold that image in your mind? 

 

In none of my posts have I put a position forward. (Nevertheless you have often replied as if I have.) My first post asked how you describe intimacy -- or if that term means anything at all to you. This is similar. I want to know how you describe the sorts of mental activities that we (and even you presumably) find familiar.

 

On Fri, Feb 26, 2016 at 4:35 PM Eric Charles <[hidden email]> wrote:

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.

 

-----------
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 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" target="_blank">[phone]   fax: <a href="tel:%28202%29%20885-1190" 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" target="_blank">[phone]   fax: <a href="tel:%28202%29%20885-1190" 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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[Eric Charles-2]

"I meant counting silently"

Whatever the relationship is between counting very loudly and counting in a whisper, I would posit the same as the relationship between counting in a whisper and counting with no discernible physical motion.

Instructing a child in how to "count in your head" is a process of instructing a child in how to count without their mouth-flap moving so much. After you are done with the instructions you have a child who does whatever they did before, but without their mouth-flap moving so much.

Theories of learning are, of course, quite interesting in their own right, but no other magic required.

I presume at this point you are going to assert that I have still not answered your question, because by "counting silently" you mean more than simply "counting silently." I certainly have not, with my answer above, solved the "hard problem." All I could say, once again, is that I don't think there is a hard problem to be solved. 

(P.S. Sorry to all if I am being any odder than usual in my answers. I am preparing a talk on these topics for next week, and so I am in "professional stickler" mode as a result.)

On Sat, Feb 27, 2016 at 1:35 PM, Russ Abbott <[hidden email]> wrote:

I meant counting silently and without and discernable physical motion. Same things for visualizing.  

On Sat, Feb 27, 2016 at 9:26 AM Eric Charles <[hidden email]> wrote:

"What about counting backwards from100 by 7's: 100, 93, 86, ... How do you describe those sorts of activities in your terms?"

I describe it just like that. "Counting backwards from 100 by 7's." To confirm this, I asked my daughter to do that, and she did. Her mouth opened and closed, her throat vibrated, and I heard numbers just as you described. I thought the description was apt.

"what about...visualizing someone's face?"

Well, that is going to be a bit trickier, and various answers have been offered that would avoid your posited problem. 

I would point out, first, that we all, at least occasionally "see" that someone is doing this. You are around someone you are very familiar with, something happens, they get a particular contemplative look, and we see that they are remembering someone from their past. "You're thinking about her again, aren't you. I can tell." "Yes, how did you know?" "I've known you long enough. Like I said, I can tell."

Second, I would say (following the work of François Tonneau) that the best way to describe such events is as a continued response to a thing that is not currently present. Just as we no longer think there is any particular mystery about how people behaving towards objects at a spatial distance, we need not posit any particular mystery about how people behave towards objects at a temporal distance.

The brain is certainly a crucial part in such processes, but so is the rest of the body and the surrounding environment. A brain in a vat may present a mystery, but the same questions could be asked about a stomach in a vat. https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/fixing-psychology/201412/deep-thoughts-the-stomach-in-jar-problem

The "hard problem" is a conceptual confusion, not a real problem to be solved.

 

-----------
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 Sat, Feb 27, 2016 at 2:02 AM, Russ Abbott <[hidden email]> wrote:

Rather than wanting, which is somewhat nebulous, what about doing arithmetic or visualizing someone's face? What about counting backwards from100 by 7's: 100, 93, 86, ... How do you describe those sorts of activities in your terms?

On Fri, Feb 26, 2016 at 9:42 PM Nick Thompson <[hidden email]> wrote:

Hi, Russ,

 

Ok, so now we are out of the Weeds of Pragmatism thread, I am, FWIW, free to speak me own “mind” – i.e., give you the basis to make accurate predictions of my behavior in this sort of situation in the future. 

 

I think the short answer is that largely Eric and I  don’t.  And when we do, we think we are talking about behavior patterns.  Some of those behavior patterns may be meta meta ……. Etc. and have to be experienced over long reaches of time before they can be recognized.   Although I perhaps know too little math to use this metaphor, I like to think of mental states such as “wanting” as analogous to as derivatives of functions – measurements we speak of occurring as an instant, but actually  ways of describing events longer in duration that can only be known by multiple measurements collected over time. So when in ordinary language we speak of wanting “a hot fudge sundae”, we speak as if we are talking about an instantaneous state in some internal space called the mind, when we actually characterizing information concerning our behavior with respect to ice-cream, nuts, whipped cream, and chocolate sauce that would constitute evidence for a directedness towards those things as an end. 

 

You probably know too much math to get much pleasure out of my use of that metaphor.   John will no doubt correct me.

 

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 26, 2016 7:50 PM

To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Subjectivity and intimacy (lost in the weeks?)

 

What I still don't understand (and would like to understand) is how Eric and Nick talk about mental activities. For example if I ask you to add 15 and 43, what do you say you are doing? If I ask you to think about what the other looks like, does some image come to mind? What do you say is happening as you hold that image in your mind? 

 

In none of my posts have I put a position forward. (Nevertheless you have often replied as if I have.) My first post asked how you describe intimacy -- or if that term means anything at all to you. This is similar. I want to know how you describe the sorts of mental activities that we (and even you presumably) find familiar.

 

On Fri, Feb 26, 2016 at 4:35 PM Eric Charles <[hidden email]> wrote:

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.

 

-----------
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 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" target="_blank">[phone]   fax: <a href="tel:%28202%29%20885-1190" 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" target="_blank">[phone]   fax: <a href="tel:%28202%29%20885-1190" 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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[Frank Wimberly-2]

Russ,

 

In 1967 I took a course in cognitive processes at Carnegie Mellon.  One aspect of that course could be called “what’s wrong with behaviorism?”  At one point it was said, “When behaviorists talk about ‘sub-vocal speech’ you have won the argument.”

 

The “hard problem” is hard.

 

Nick and I have been arguing (in a friendly way) about these issues for years.  There’s the “rabbit hole”.

 

In my opinion and for what it’s worth.

 

Frank

 

 

Frank C. Wimberly

140 Calle Ojo Feliz

Santa Fe, NM 87505

 

[hidden email]     [hidden email]

Phone:  [phone]      Cell:  [phone]

 

From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Eric Charles
Sent: Saturday, February 27, 2016 11:58 AM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Subjectivity and intimacy (lost in the weeks?)

 

"I meant counting silently"

Whatever the relationship is between counting very loudly and counting in a whisper, I would posit the same as the relationship between counting in a whisper and counting with no discernible physical motion.

Instructing a child in how to "count in your head" is a process of instructing a child in how to count without their mouth-flap moving so much. After you are done with the instructions you have a child who does whatever they did before, but without their mouth-flap moving so much.

Theories of learning are, of course, quite interesting in their own right, but no other magic required.

I presume at this point you are going to assert that I have still not answered your question, because by "counting silently" you mean more than simply "counting silently." I certainly have not, with my answer above, solved the "hard problem." All I could say, once again, is that I don't think there is a hard problem to be solved. 

 

(P.S. Sorry to all if I am being any odder than usual in my answers. I am preparing a talk on these topics for next week, and so I am in "professional stickler" mode as a result.)

 

 

 

 

 

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

 

On Sat, Feb 27, 2016 at 1:35 PM, Russ Abbott <[hidden email]> wrote:

I meant counting silently and without and discernable physical motion. Same things for visualizing.  

 

On Sat, Feb 27, 2016 at 9:26 AM Eric Charles <[hidden email]> wrote:

"What about counting backwards from100 by 7's: 100, 93, 86, ... How do you describe those sorts of activities in your terms?"

I describe it just like that. "Counting backwards from 100 by 7's." To confirm this, I asked my daughter to do that, and she did. Her mouth opened and closed, her throat vibrated, and I heard numbers just as you described. I thought the description was apt.

"what about...visualizing someone's face?"

Well, that is going to be a bit trickier, and various answers have been offered that would avoid your posited problem. 

I would point out, first, that we all, at least occasionally "see" that someone is doing this. You are around someone you are very familiar with, something happens, they get a particular contemplative look, and we see that they are remembering someone from their past. "You're thinking about her again, aren't you. I can tell." "Yes, how did you know?" "I've known you long enough. Like I said, I can tell."

Second, I would say (following the work of François Tonneau) that the best way to describe such events is as a continued response to a thing that is not currently present. Just as we no longer think there is any particular mystery about how people behaving towards objects at a spatial distance, we need not posit any particular mystery about how people behave towards objects at a temporal distance.

The brain is certainly a crucial part in such processes, but so is the rest of the body and the surrounding environment. A brain in a vat may present a mystery, but the same questions could be asked about a stomach in a vat. https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/fixing-psychology/201412/deep-thoughts-the-stomach-in-jar-problem

The "hard problem" is a conceptual confusion, not a real problem to be solved.

 

 

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

 

On Sat, Feb 27, 2016 at 2:02 AM, Russ Abbott <[hidden email]> wrote:

Rather than wanting, which is somewhat nebulous, what about doing arithmetic or visualizing someone's face? What about counting backwards from100 by 7's: 100, 93, 86, ... How do you describe those sorts of activities in your terms?

 

 

On Fri, Feb 26, 2016 at 9:42 PM Nick Thompson <[hidden email]> wrote:

Hi, Russ,

 

Ok, so now we are out of the Weeds of Pragmatism thread, I am, FWIW, free to speak me own “mind” – i.e., give you the basis to make accurate predictions of my behavior in this sort of situation in the future. 

 

I think the short answer is that largely Eric and I  don’t.  And when we do, we think we are talking about behavior patterns.  Some of those behavior patterns may be meta meta ……. Etc. and have to be experienced over long reaches of time before they can be recognized.   Although I perhaps know too little math to use this metaphor, I like to think of mental states such as “wanting” as analogous to as derivatives of functions – measurements we speak of occurring as an instant, but actually  ways of describing events longer in duration that can only be known by multiple measurements collected over time. So when in ordinary language we speak of wanting “a hot fudge sundae”, we speak as if we are talking about an instantaneous state in some internal space called the mind, when we actually characterizing information concerning our behavior with respect to ice-cream, nuts, whipped cream, and chocolate sauce that would constitute evidence for a directedness towards those things as an end. 

 

You probably know too much math to get much pleasure out of my use of that metaphor.   John will no doubt correct me.

 

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 26, 2016 7:50 PM

To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Subjectivity and intimacy (lost in the weeks?)

 

What I still don't understand (and would like to understand) is how Eric and Nick talk about mental activities. For example if I ask you to add 15 and 43, what do you say you are doing? If I ask you to think about what the other looks like, does some image come to mind? What do you say is happening as you hold that image in your mind? 

 

In none of my posts have I put a position forward. (Nevertheless you have often replied as if I have.) My first post asked how you describe intimacy -- or if that term means anything at all to you. This is similar. I want to know how you describe the sorts of mental activities that we (and even you presumably) find familiar.

 

On Fri, Feb 26, 2016 at 4:35 PM Eric Charles <[hidden email]> wrote:

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.

 

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

 

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" target="_blank">[phone]   fax: <a href="tel:%28202%29%20885-1190" 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" target="_blank">[phone]   fax: <a href="tel:%28202%29%20885-1190" 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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[Nick Thompson]

Hi, Russ and Eric,

 

I am wondering  if one count silently any more than one can clap one-handedly.   Thus, the problem might arise from the tortured grammar of the question, not from any question of fact. 

 

Alternatively, perhaps we might appeal to some sort of limit notion  Just as we say the slope of a curve at a point is the limit of slope of a line drawn between two points on the curve as those points are brought infinitesimally close together, we might say that “counting internally” is the limit toward which counting approaches as the motions involved in it are made infinitesimally small.  Thus, “counting” is no more defined in the absence of any behavior, than is the slope of the curve is defined when the denominator (delta X?) is zero. 

 

But I guess the best way to deal with this sort of question is the way Eric suggests:  we ask the child to do some calculations “in her head”.  Her face goes blank, for a few seconds, and then she gives us an answer.  What we have is the question, the answer, and the moment of blankness.  What you get is what you see.  Full stop. 

 

Since Eric is giving a talk on this next week, I am hoping he will be prepared for the following question: 

 

Does it make any sense, in James’s terms, to assert that a problem perceived by another person does not exist?  I guess it would be easy for Peirce to make such an assertion, but James?

 

In other words, how can a Jamesian claim that the Hard Problem doesn’t exist, when Russ clearly sees such a problem. 

 

 

. 

 

 

 

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: Saturday, February 27, 2016 11:58 AM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Subjectivity and intimacy (lost in the weeks?)

 

"I meant counting silently"

Whatever the relationship is between counting very loudly and counting in a whisper, I would posit the same as the relationship between counting in a whisper and counting with no discernible physical motion.

Instructing a child in how to "count in your head" is a process of instructing a child in how to count without their mouth-flap moving so much. After you are done with the instructions you have a child who does whatever they did before, but without their mouth-flap moving so much.

Theories of learning are, of course, quite interesting in their own right, but no other magic required.

I presume at this point you are going to assert that I have still not answered your question, because by "counting silently" you mean more than simply "counting silently." I certainly have not, with my answer above, solved the "hard problem." All I could say, once again, is that I don't think there is a hard problem to be solved. 

 

(P.S. Sorry to all if I am being any odder than usual in my answers. I am preparing a talk on these topics for next week, and so I am in "professional stickler" mode as a result.)

 

 

 

 

 

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

 

On Sat, Feb 27, 2016 at 1:35 PM, Russ Abbott <[hidden email]> wrote:

I meant counting silently and without and discernable physical motion. Same things for visualizing.  

 

On Sat, Feb 27, 2016 at 9:26 AM Eric Charles <[hidden email]> wrote:

"What about counting backwards from100 by 7's: 100, 93, 86, ... How do you describe those sorts of activities in your terms?"

I describe it just like that. "Counting backwards from 100 by 7's." To confirm this, I asked my daughter to do that, and she did. Her mouth opened and closed, her throat vibrated, and I heard numbers just as you described. I thought the description was apt.

"what about...visualizing someone's face?"

Well, that is going to be a bit trickier, and various answers have been offered that would avoid your posited problem. 

I would point out, first, that we all, at least occasionally "see" that someone is doing this. You are around someone you are very familiar with, something happens, they get a particular contemplative look, and we see that they are remembering someone from their past. "You're thinking about her again, aren't you. I can tell." "Yes, how did you know?" "I've known you long enough. Like I said, I can tell."

Second, I would say (following the work of François Tonneau) that the best way to describe such events is as a continued response to a thing that is not currently present. Just as we no longer think there is any particular mystery about how people behaving towards objects at a spatial distance, we need not posit any particular mystery about how people behave towards objects at a temporal distance.

The brain is certainly a crucial part in such processes, but so is the rest of the body and the surrounding environment. A brain in a vat may present a mystery, but the same questions could be asked about a stomach in a vat. https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/fixing-psychology/201412/deep-thoughts-the-stomach-in-jar-problem

The "hard problem" is a conceptual confusion, not a real problem to be solved.

 

 

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

 

On Sat, Feb 27, 2016 at 2:02 AM, Russ Abbott <[hidden email]> wrote:

Rather than wanting, which is somewhat nebulous, what about doing arithmetic or visualizing someone's face? What about counting backwards from100 by 7's: 100, 93, 86, ... How do you describe those sorts of activities in your terms?

 

 

On Fri, Feb 26, 2016 at 9:42 PM Nick Thompson <[hidden email]> wrote:

Hi, Russ,

 

Ok, so now we are out of the Weeds of Pragmatism thread, I am, FWIW, free to speak me own “mind” – i.e., give you the basis to make accurate predictions of my behavior in this sort of situation in the future. 

 

I think the short answer is that largely Eric and I  don’t.  And when we do, we think we are talking about behavior patterns.  Some of those behavior patterns may be meta meta ……. Etc. and have to be experienced over long reaches of time before they can be recognized.   Although I perhaps know too little math to use this metaphor, I like to think of mental states such as “wanting” as analogous to as derivatives of functions – measurements we speak of occurring as an instant, but actually  ways of describing events longer in duration that can only be known by multiple measurements collected over time. So when in ordinary language we speak of wanting “a hot fudge sundae”, we speak as if we are talking about an instantaneous state in some internal space called the mind, when we actually characterizing information concerning our behavior with respect to ice-cream, nuts, whipped cream, and chocolate sauce that would constitute evidence for a directedness towards those things as an end. 

 

You probably know too much math to get much pleasure out of my use of that metaphor.   John will no doubt correct me.

 

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 26, 2016 7:50 PM

To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Subjectivity and intimacy (lost in the weeks?)

 

What I still don't understand (and would like to understand) is how Eric and Nick talk about mental activities. For example if I ask you to add 15 and 43, what do you say you are doing? If I ask you to think about what the other looks like, does some image come to mind? What do you say is happening as you hold that image in your mind? 

 

In none of my posts have I put a position forward. (Nevertheless you have often replied as if I have.) My first post asked how you describe intimacy -- or if that term means anything at all to you. This is similar. I want to know how you describe the sorts of mental activities that we (and even you presumably) find familiar.

 

On Fri, Feb 26, 2016 at 4:35 PM Eric Charles <[hidden email]> wrote:

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.

 

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

 

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" target="_blank">[phone]   fax: <a href="tel:%28202%29%20885-1190" 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" target="_blank">[phone]   fax: <a href="tel:%28202%29%20885-1190" 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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[Nick Thompson]

Frank,

 

Will you look at my last post to russ and comment (on line, if possible) on the plausibility of my mathematical interpretation?

 

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: Saturday, February 27, 2016 12:25 PM
To: 'The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group' <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Subjectivity and intimacy (lost in the weeks?)

 

Russ,

 

In 1967 I took a course in cognitive processes at Carnegie Mellon.  One aspect of that course could be called “what’s wrong with behaviorism?”  At one point it was said, “When behaviorists talk about ‘sub-vocal speech’ you have won the argument.”

 

The “hard problem” is hard.

 

Nick and I have been arguing (in a friendly way) about these issues for years.  There’s the “rabbit hole”.

 

In my opinion and for what it’s worth.

 

Frank

 

 

Frank C. Wimberly

140 Calle Ojo Feliz

Santa Fe, NM 87505

 

[hidden email]     [hidden email]

Phone:  [phone]      Cell:  [phone]

 

From: Friam [[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Eric Charles
Sent: Saturday, February 27, 2016 11:58 AM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Subjectivity and intimacy (lost in the weeks?)

 

"I meant counting silently"

Whatever the relationship is between counting very loudly and counting in a whisper, I would posit the same as the relationship between counting in a whisper and counting with no discernible physical motion.

Instructing a child in how to "count in your head" is a process of instructing a child in how to count without their mouth-flap moving so much. After you are done with the instructions you have a child who does whatever they did before, but without their mouth-flap moving so much.

Theories of learning are, of course, quite interesting in their own right, but no other magic required.

I presume at this point you are going to assert that I have still not answered your question, because by "counting silently" you mean more than simply "counting silently." I certainly have not, with my answer above, solved the "hard problem." All I could say, once again, is that I don't think there is a hard problem to be solved. 

 

(P.S. Sorry to all if I am being any odder than usual in my answers. I am preparing a talk on these topics for next week, and so I am in "professional stickler" mode as a result.)

 

 

 

 

 

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

 

On Sat, Feb 27, 2016 at 1:35 PM, Russ Abbott <[hidden email]> wrote:

I meant counting silently and without and discernable physical motion. Same things for visualizing.  

 

On Sat, Feb 27, 2016 at 9:26 AM Eric Charles <[hidden email]> wrote:

"What about counting backwards from100 by 7's: 100, 93, 86, ... How do you describe those sorts of activities in your terms?"

I describe it just like that. "Counting backwards from 100 by 7's." To confirm this, I asked my daughter to do that, and she did. Her mouth opened and closed, her throat vibrated, and I heard numbers just as you described. I thought the description was apt.

"what about...visualizing someone's face?"

Well, that is going to be a bit trickier, and various answers have been offered that would avoid your posited problem. 

I would point out, first, that we all, at least occasionally "see" that someone is doing this. You are around someone you are very familiar with, something happens, they get a particular contemplative look, and we see that they are remembering someone from their past. "You're thinking about her again, aren't you. I can tell." "Yes, how did you know?" "I've known you long enough. Like I said, I can tell."

Second, I would say (following the work of François Tonneau) that the best way to describe such events is as a continued response to a thing that is not currently present. Just as we no longer think there is any particular mystery about how people behaving towards objects at a spatial distance, we need not posit any particular mystery about how people behave towards objects at a temporal distance.

The brain is certainly a crucial part in such processes, but so is the rest of the body and the surrounding environment. A brain in a vat may present a mystery, but the same questions could be asked about a stomach in a vat. https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/fixing-psychology/201412/deep-thoughts-the-stomach-in-jar-problem

The "hard problem" is a conceptual confusion, not a real problem to be solved.

 

 

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

 

On Sat, Feb 27, 2016 at 2:02 AM, Russ Abbott <[hidden email]> wrote:

Rather than wanting, which is somewhat nebulous, what about doing arithmetic or visualizing someone's face? What about counting backwards from100 by 7's: 100, 93, 86, ... How do you describe those sorts of activities in your terms?

 

 

On Fri, Feb 26, 2016 at 9:42 PM Nick Thompson <[hidden email]> wrote:

Hi, Russ,

 

Ok, so now we are out of the Weeds of Pragmatism thread, I am, FWIW, free to speak me own “mind” – i.e., give you the basis to make accurate predictions of my behavior in this sort of situation in the future. 

 

I think the short answer is that largely Eric and I  don’t.  And when we do, we think we are talking about behavior patterns.  Some of those behavior patterns may be meta meta ……. Etc. and have to be experienced over long reaches of time before they can be recognized.   Although I perhaps know too little math to use this metaphor, I like to think of mental states such as “wanting” as analogous to as derivatives of functions – measurements we speak of occurring as an instant, but actually  ways of describing events longer in duration that can only be known by multiple measurements collected over time. So when in ordinary language we speak of wanting “a hot fudge sundae”, we speak as if we are talking about an instantaneous state in some internal space called the mind, when we actually characterizing information concerning our behavior with respect to ice-cream, nuts, whipped cream, and chocolate sauce that would constitute evidence for a directedness towards those things as an end. 

 

You probably know too much math to get much pleasure out of my use of that metaphor.   John will no doubt correct me.

 

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 26, 2016 7:50 PM

To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Subjectivity and intimacy (lost in the weeks?)

 

What I still don't understand (and would like to understand) is how Eric and Nick talk about mental activities. For example if I ask you to add 15 and 43, what do you say you are doing? If I ask you to think about what the other looks like, does some image come to mind? What do you say is happening as you hold that image in your mind? 

 

In none of my posts have I put a position forward. (Nevertheless you have often replied as if I have.) My first post asked how you describe intimacy -- or if that term means anything at all to you. This is similar. I want to know how you describe the sorts of mental activities that we (and even you presumably) find familiar.

 

On Fri, Feb 26, 2016 at 4:35 PM Eric Charles <[hidden email]> wrote:

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.

 

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

 

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" target="_blank">[phone]   fax: <a href="tel:%28202%29%20885-1190" 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" target="_blank">[phone]   fax: <a href="tel:%28202%29%20885-1190" 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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[Russ Abbott]

I don't think the mathematical analogy is relevant. It doesn't seem to me to apply to remembering a face.

Nick said about someone doing arithmetic silently: Her face goes blank, for a few seconds, and then she gives us an answer.  What we have is the question, the answer, and the moment of blankness.

I still want to know what you say is going on during the moment of silence -- and especially how you talk about the "visions" in her mind that accompany the arithmetic work she is doing. Do you deny there are "visions of some sort" as she works out the answer?  What's going on in your mind as you count backwards (silently)? How do you talk about that stuff?

BTY I don't deny that physical activity is taking place. There are certainly neurons firing, blood flowing, ATP being converted to ADP with the released energy being used for something, etc. 

On Sat, Feb 27, 2016 at 11:29 AM Nick Thompson <[hidden email]> wrote:

Frank,

 

Will you look at my last post to russ and comment (on line, if possible) on the plausibility of my mathematical interpretation?

 

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: Saturday, February 27, 2016 12:25 PM

To: 'The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group' <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Subjectivity and intimacy (lost in the weeks?)

 

Russ,

 

In 1967 I took a course in cognitive processes at Carnegie Mellon.  One aspect of that course could be called “what’s wrong with behaviorism?”  At one point it was said, “When behaviorists talk about ‘sub-vocal speech’ you have won the argument.”

 

The “hard problem” is hard.

 

Nick and I have been arguing (in a friendly way) about these issues for years.  There’s the “rabbit hole”.

 

In my opinion and for what it’s worth.

 

Frank

 

 

Frank C. Wimberly

140 Calle Ojo Feliz

Santa Fe, NM 87505

 

[hidden email]     [hidden email]

Phone:  [phone]      Cell:  [phone]

 

From: Friam [[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Eric Charles
Sent: Saturday, February 27, 2016 11:58 AM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Subjectivity and intimacy (lost in the weeks?)

 

"I meant counting silently"

Whatever the relationship is between counting very loudly and counting in a whisper, I would posit the same as the relationship between counting in a whisper and counting with no discernible physical motion.

Instructing a child in how to "count in your head" is a process of instructing a child in how to count without their mouth-flap moving so much. After you are done with the instructions you have a child who does whatever they did before, but without their mouth-flap moving so much.

Theories of learning are, of course, quite interesting in their own right, but no other magic required.

I presume at this point you are going to assert that I have still not answered your question, because by "counting silently" you mean more than simply "counting silently." I certainly have not, with my answer above, solved the "hard problem." All I could say, once again, is that I don't think there is a hard problem to be solved. 

 

(P.S. Sorry to all if I am being any odder than usual in my answers. I am preparing a talk on these topics for next week, and so I am in "professional stickler" mode as a result.)

 

 

 

 

 

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

 

On Sat, Feb 27, 2016 at 1:35 PM, Russ Abbott <[hidden email]> wrote:

I meant counting silently and without and discernable physical motion. Same things for visualizing.  

 

On Sat, Feb 27, 2016 at 9:26 AM Eric Charles <[hidden email]> wrote:

"What about counting backwards from100 by 7's: 100, 93, 86, ... How do you describe those sorts of activities in your terms?"

I describe it just like that. "Counting backwards from 100 by 7's." To confirm this, I asked my daughter to do that, and she did. Her mouth opened and closed, her throat vibrated, and I heard numbers just as you described. I thought the description was apt.

"what about...visualizing someone's face?"

Well, that is going to be a bit trickier, and various answers have been offered that would avoid your posited problem. 

I would point out, first, that we all, at least occasionally "see" that someone is doing this. You are around someone you are very familiar with, something happens, they get a particular contemplative look, and we see that they are remembering someone from their past. "You're thinking about her again, aren't you. I can tell." "Yes, how did you know?" "I've known you long enough. Like I said, I can tell."

Second, I would say (following the work of François Tonneau) that the best way to describe such events is as a continued response to a thing that is not currently present. Just as we no longer think there is any particular mystery about how people behaving towards objects at a spatial distance, we need not posit any particular mystery about how people behave towards objects at a temporal distance.

The brain is certainly a crucial part in such processes, but so is the rest of the body and the surrounding environment. A brain in a vat may present a mystery, but the same questions could be asked about a stomach in a vat. https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/fixing-psychology/201412/deep-thoughts-the-stomach-in-jar-problem

The "hard problem" is a conceptual confusion, not a real problem to be solved.

 

 

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

 

On Sat, Feb 27, 2016 at 2:02 AM, Russ Abbott <[hidden email]> wrote:

Rather than wanting, which is somewhat nebulous, what about doing arithmetic or visualizing someone's face? What about counting backwards from100 by 7's: 100, 93, 86, ... How do you describe those sorts of activities in your terms?

 

 

On Fri, Feb 26, 2016 at 9:42 PM Nick Thompson <[hidden email]> wrote:

Hi, Russ,

 

Ok, so now we are out of the Weeds of Pragmatism thread, I am, FWIW, free to speak me own “mind” – i.e., give you the basis to make accurate predictions of my behavior in this sort of situation in the future. 

 

I think the short answer is that largely Eric and I  don’t.  And when we do, we think we are talking about behavior patterns.  Some of those behavior patterns may be meta meta ……. Etc. and have to be experienced over long reaches of time before they can be recognized.   Although I perhaps know too little math to use this metaphor, I like to think of mental states such as “wanting” as analogous to as derivatives of functions – measurements we speak of occurring as an instant, but actually  ways of describing events longer in duration that can only be known by multiple measurements collected over time. So when in ordinary language we speak of wanting “a hot fudge sundae”, we speak as if we are talking about an instantaneous state in some internal space called the mind, when we actually characterizing information concerning our behavior with respect to ice-cream, nuts, whipped cream, and chocolate sauce that would constitute evidence for a directedness towards those things as an end. 

 

You probably know too much math to get much pleasure out of my use of that metaphor.   John will no doubt correct me.

 

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 26, 2016 7:50 PM

To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Subjectivity and intimacy (lost in the weeks?)

 

What I still don't understand (and would like to understand) is how Eric and Nick talk about mental activities. For example if I ask you to add 15 and 43, what do you say you are doing? If I ask you to think about what the other looks like, does some image come to mind? What do you say is happening as you hold that image in your mind? 

 

In none of my posts have I put a position forward. (Nevertheless you have often replied as if I have.) My first post asked how you describe intimacy -- or if that term means anything at all to you. This is similar. I want to know how you describe the sorts of mental activities that we (and even you presumably) find familiar.

 

On Fri, Feb 26, 2016 at 4:35 PM Eric Charles <[hidden email]> wrote:

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.

 

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

 

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" target="_blank">[phone]   fax: <a href="tel:%28202%29%20885-1190" 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" target="_blank">[phone]   fax: <a href="tel:%28202%29%20885-1190" 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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[Russ Abbott]

P.S. Frank, Thanks for the support.

On Sat, Feb 27, 2016 at 11:48 AM Russ Abbott <[hidden email]> wrote:

I don't think the mathematical analogy is relevant. It doesn't seem to me to apply to remembering a face.

Nick said about someone doing arithmetic silently: Her face goes blank, for a few seconds, and then she gives us an answer.  What we have is the question, the answer, and the moment of blankness.

I still want to know what you say is going on during the moment of silence -- and especially how you talk about the "visions" in her mind that accompany the arithmetic work she is doing. Do you deny there are "visions of some sort" as she works out the answer?  What's going on in your mind as you count backwards (silently)? How do you talk about that stuff?

BTY I don't deny that physical activity is taking place. There are certainly neurons firing, blood flowing, ATP being converted to ADP with the released energy being used for something, etc. 

On Sat, Feb 27, 2016 at 11:29 AM Nick Thompson <[hidden email]> wrote:

Frank,

 

Will you look at my last post to russ and comment (on line, if possible) on the plausibility of my mathematical interpretation?

 

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: Saturday, February 27, 2016 12:25 PM

To: 'The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group' <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Subjectivity and intimacy (lost in the weeks?)

 

Russ,

 

In 1967 I took a course in cognitive processes at Carnegie Mellon.  One aspect of that course could be called “what’s wrong with behaviorism?”  At one point it was said, “When behaviorists talk about ‘sub-vocal speech’ you have won the argument.”

 

The “hard problem” is hard.

 

Nick and I have been arguing (in a friendly way) about these issues for years.  There’s the “rabbit hole”.

 

In my opinion and for what it’s worth.

 

Frank

 

 

Frank C. Wimberly

140 Calle Ojo Feliz

Santa Fe, NM 87505

 

[hidden email]     [hidden email]

Phone:  [phone]      Cell:  [phone]

 

From: Friam [[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Eric Charles
Sent: Saturday, February 27, 2016 11:58 AM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Subjectivity and intimacy (lost in the weeks?)

 

"I meant counting silently"

Whatever the relationship is between counting very loudly and counting in a whisper, I would posit the same as the relationship between counting in a whisper and counting with no discernible physical motion.

Instructing a child in how to "count in your head" is a process of instructing a child in how to count without their mouth-flap moving so much. After you are done with the instructions you have a child who does whatever they did before, but without their mouth-flap moving so much.

Theories of learning are, of course, quite interesting in their own right, but no other magic required.

I presume at this point you are going to assert that I have still not answered your question, because by "counting silently" you mean more than simply "counting silently." I certainly have not, with my answer above, solved the "hard problem." All I could say, once again, is that I don't think there is a hard problem to be solved. 

 

(P.S. Sorry to all if I am being any odder than usual in my answers. I am preparing a talk on these topics for next week, and so I am in "professional stickler" mode as a result.)

 

 

 

 

 

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

 

On Sat, Feb 27, 2016 at 1:35 PM, Russ Abbott <[hidden email]> wrote:

I meant counting silently and without and discernable physical motion. Same things for visualizing.  

 

On Sat, Feb 27, 2016 at 9:26 AM Eric Charles <[hidden email]> wrote:

"What about counting backwards from100 by 7's: 100, 93, 86, ... How do you describe those sorts of activities in your terms?"

I describe it just like that. "Counting backwards from 100 by 7's." To confirm this, I asked my daughter to do that, and she did. Her mouth opened and closed, her throat vibrated, and I heard numbers just as you described. I thought the description was apt.

"what about...visualizing someone's face?"

Well, that is going to be a bit trickier, and various answers have been offered that would avoid your posited problem. 

I would point out, first, that we all, at least occasionally "see" that someone is doing this. You are around someone you are very familiar with, something happens, they get a particular contemplative look, and we see that they are remembering someone from their past. "You're thinking about her again, aren't you. I can tell." "Yes, how did you know?" "I've known you long enough. Like I said, I can tell."

Second, I would say (following the work of François Tonneau) that the best way to describe such events is as a continued response to a thing that is not currently present. Just as we no longer think there is any particular mystery about how people behaving towards objects at a spatial distance, we need not posit any particular mystery about how people behave towards objects at a temporal distance.

The brain is certainly a crucial part in such processes, but so is the rest of the body and the surrounding environment. A brain in a vat may present a mystery, but the same questions could be asked about a stomach in a vat. https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/fixing-psychology/201412/deep-thoughts-the-stomach-in-jar-problem

The "hard problem" is a conceptual confusion, not a real problem to be solved.

 

 

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

 

On Sat, Feb 27, 2016 at 2:02 AM, Russ Abbott <[hidden email]> wrote:

Rather than wanting, which is somewhat nebulous, what about doing arithmetic or visualizing someone's face? What about counting backwards from100 by 7's: 100, 93, 86, ... How do you describe those sorts of activities in your terms?

 

 

On Fri, Feb 26, 2016 at 9:42 PM Nick Thompson <[hidden email]> wrote:

Hi, Russ,

 

Ok, so now we are out of the Weeds of Pragmatism thread, I am, FWIW, free to speak me own “mind” – i.e., give you the basis to make accurate predictions of my behavior in this sort of situation in the future. 

 

I think the short answer is that largely Eric and I  don’t.  And when we do, we think we are talking about behavior patterns.  Some of those behavior patterns may be meta meta ……. Etc. and have to be experienced over long reaches of time before they can be recognized.   Although I perhaps know too little math to use this metaphor, I like to think of mental states such as “wanting” as analogous to as derivatives of functions – measurements we speak of occurring as an instant, but actually  ways of describing events longer in duration that can only be known by multiple measurements collected over time. So when in ordinary language we speak of wanting “a hot fudge sundae”, we speak as if we are talking about an instantaneous state in some internal space called the mind, when we actually characterizing information concerning our behavior with respect to ice-cream, nuts, whipped cream, and chocolate sauce that would constitute evidence for a directedness towards those things as an end. 

 

You probably know too much math to get much pleasure out of my use of that metaphor.   John will no doubt correct me.

 

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 26, 2016 7:50 PM

To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Subjectivity and intimacy (lost in the weeks?)

 

What I still don't understand (and would like to understand) is how Eric and Nick talk about mental activities. For example if I ask you to add 15 and 43, what do you say you are doing? If I ask you to think about what the other looks like, does some image come to mind? What do you say is happening as you hold that image in your mind? 

 

In none of my posts have I put a position forward. (Nevertheless you have often replied as if I have.) My first post asked how you describe intimacy -- or if that term means anything at all to you. This is similar. I want to know how you describe the sorts of mental activities that we (and even you presumably) find familiar.

 

On Fri, Feb 26, 2016 at 4:35 PM Eric Charles <[hidden email]> wrote:

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.

 

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

 

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" target="_blank">[phone]   fax: <a href="tel:%28202%29%20885-1190" 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" target="_blank">[phone]   fax: <a href="tel:%28202%29%20885-1190" 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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[Nick Thompson]

Hi Russ

 

I still want to know what you say is going on during the moment of silence -- and especially how you talk about the "visions" in her mind that accompany the arithmetic work she is doing. Do you deny there are "visions of some sort" as she works out the answer?  What's going on in your mind as you count backwards (silently)? How do you talk about that stuff?

 

I think the short answer is that for me, and perhaps forEric, there is no “place” or “process” that intercedes between the physiology and the behavior.  Nothing “going on” and no “place” for it to “go on in.”

 

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: Saturday, February 27, 2016 12:48 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Subjectivity and intimacy (lost in the weeks?)

 

I don't think the mathematical analogy is relevant. It doesn't seem to me to apply to remembering a face.

 

Nick said about someone doing arithmetic silently: Her face goes blank, for a few seconds, and then she gives us an answer.  What we have is the question, the answer, and the moment of blankness.

 

I still want to know what you say is going on during the moment of silence -- and especially how you talk about the "visions" in her mind that accompany the arithmetic work she is doing. Do you deny there are "visions of some sort" as she works out the answer?  What's going on in your mind as you count backwards (silently)? How do you talk about that stuff?

 

BTY I don't deny that physical activity is taking place. There are certainly neurons firing, blood flowing, ATP being converted to ADP with the released energy being used for something, etc. 

 

On Sat, Feb 27, 2016 at 11:29 AM Nick Thompson <[hidden email]> wrote:

Frank,

 

Will you look at my last post to russ and comment (on line, if possible) on the plausibility of my mathematical interpretation?

 

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: Saturday, February 27, 2016 12:25 PM

To: 'The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group' <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Subjectivity and intimacy (lost in the weeks?)

 

Russ,

 

In 1967 I took a course in cognitive processes at Carnegie Mellon.  One aspect of that course could be called “what’s wrong with behaviorism?”  At one point it was said, “When behaviorists talk about ‘sub-vocal speech’ you have won the argument.”

 

The “hard problem” is hard.

 

Nick and I have been arguing (in a friendly way) about these issues for years.  There’s the “rabbit hole”.

 

In my opinion and for what it’s worth.

 

Frank

 

 

Frank C. Wimberly

140 Calle Ojo Feliz

Santa Fe, NM 87505

 

[hidden email]     [hidden email]

Phone:  [phone]      Cell:  [phone]

 

From: Friam [[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Eric Charles
Sent: Saturday, February 27, 2016 11:58 AM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Subjectivity and intimacy (lost in the weeks?)

 

"I meant counting silently"

Whatever the relationship is between counting very loudly and counting in a whisper, I would posit the same as the relationship between counting in a whisper and counting with no discernible physical motion.

Instructing a child in how to "count in your head" is a process of instructing a child in how to count without their mouth-flap moving so much. After you are done with the instructions you have a child who does whatever they did before, but without their mouth-flap moving so much.

Theories of learning are, of course, quite interesting in their own right, but no other magic required.

I presume at this point you are going to assert that I have still not answered your question, because by "counting silently" you mean more than simply "counting silently." I certainly have not, with my answer above, solved the "hard problem." All I could say, once again, is that I don't think there is a hard problem to be solved. 

 

(P.S. Sorry to all if I am being any odder than usual in my answers. I am preparing a talk on these topics for next week, and so I am in "professional stickler" mode as a result.)

 

 

 

 

 

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

 

On Sat, Feb 27, 2016 at 1:35 PM, Russ Abbott <[hidden email]> wrote:

I meant counting silently and without and discernable physical motion. Same things for visualizing.  

 

On Sat, Feb 27, 2016 at 9:26 AM Eric Charles <[hidden email]> wrote:

"What about counting backwards from100 by 7's: 100, 93, 86, ... How do you describe those sorts of activities in your terms?"

I describe it just like that. "Counting backwards from 100 by 7's." To confirm this, I asked my daughter to do that, and she did. Her mouth opened and closed, her throat vibrated, and I heard numbers just as you described. I thought the description was apt.

"what about...visualizing someone's face?"

Well, that is going to be a bit trickier, and various answers have been offered that would avoid your posited problem. 

I would point out, first, that we all, at least occasionally "see" that someone is doing this. You are around someone you are very familiar with, something happens, they get a particular contemplative look, and we see that they are remembering someone from their past. "You're thinking about her again, aren't you. I can tell." "Yes, how did you know?" "I've known you long enough. Like I said, I can tell."

Second, I would say (following the work of François Tonneau) that the best way to describe such events is as a continued response to a thing that is not currently present. Just as we no longer think there is any particular mystery about how people behaving towards objects at a spatial distance, we need not posit any particular mystery about how people behave towards objects at a temporal distance.

The brain is certainly a crucial part in such processes, but so is the rest of the body and the surrounding environment. A brain in a vat may present a mystery, but the same questions could be asked about a stomach in a vat. https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/fixing-psychology/201412/deep-thoughts-the-stomach-in-jar-problem

The "hard problem" is a conceptual confusion, not a real problem to be solved.

 

 

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

 

On Sat, Feb 27, 2016 at 2:02 AM, Russ Abbott <[hidden email]> wrote:

Rather than wanting, which is somewhat nebulous, what about doing arithmetic or visualizing someone's face? What about counting backwards from100 by 7's: 100, 93, 86, ... How do you describe those sorts of activities in your terms?

 

 

On Fri, Feb 26, 2016 at 9:42 PM Nick Thompson <[hidden email]> wrote:

Hi, Russ,

 

Ok, so now we are out of the Weeds of Pragmatism thread, I am, FWIW, free to speak me own “mind” – i.e., give you the basis to make accurate predictions of my behavior in this sort of situation in the future. 

 

I think the short answer is that largely Eric and I  don’t.  And when we do, we think we are talking about behavior patterns.  Some of those behavior patterns may be meta meta ……. Etc. and have to be experienced over long reaches of time before they can be recognized.   Although I perhaps know too little math to use this metaphor, I like to think of mental states such as “wanting” as analogous to as derivatives of functions – measurements we speak of occurring as an instant, but actually  ways of describing events longer in duration that can only be known by multiple measurements collected over time. So when in ordinary language we speak of wanting “a hot fudge sundae”, we speak as if we are talking about an instantaneous state in some internal space called the mind, when we actually characterizing information concerning our behavior with respect to ice-cream, nuts, whipped cream, and chocolate sauce that would constitute evidence for a directedness towards those things as an end. 

 

You probably know too much math to get much pleasure out of my use of that metaphor.   John will no doubt correct me.

 

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 26, 2016 7:50 PM

To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Subjectivity and intimacy (lost in the weeks?)

 

What I still don't understand (and would like to understand) is how Eric and Nick talk about mental activities. For example if I ask you to add 15 and 43, what do you say you are doing? If I ask you to think about what the other looks like, does some image come to mind? What do you say is happening as you hold that image in your mind? 

 

In none of my posts have I put a position forward. (Nevertheless you have often replied as if I have.) My first post asked how you describe intimacy -- or if that term means anything at all to you. This is similar. I want to know how you describe the sorts of mental activities that we (and even you presumably) find familiar.

 

On Fri, Feb 26, 2016 at 4:35 PM Eric Charles <[hidden email]> wrote:

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.

 

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

 

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" target="_blank">[phone]   fax: <a href="tel:%28202%29%20885-1190" 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" target="_blank">[phone]   fax: <a href="tel:%28202%29%20885-1190" 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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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

============================================================
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,

 

I don't think the mathematical analogy is relevant. It doesn't seem to me to apply to remembering a face.

 

Oh, I think the mathematical analogy works FINE for mental imagery.  Let’s talk about “mental rotations” experiments.  Is this three dimensional figure the same as this other one?  If you had the figure in front of you, what you do?  You would rotate it in your hands.  Or if you had it only as a two dimensional illustration, you would trace the movements of parts out with your fingers.   I don’t think that it’s blatantly absurd to assert that “mental rotations” are the limit of such explorations where all behavior stops. 

 

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: Saturday, February 27, 2016 12:49 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Subjectivity and intimacy (lost in the weeks?)

 

P.S. Frank, Thanks for the support.

 

On Sat, Feb 27, 2016 at 11:48 AM Russ Abbott <[hidden email]> wrote:

I don't think the mathematical analogy is relevant. It doesn't seem to me to apply to remembering a face.

 

Nick said about someone doing arithmetic silently: Her face goes blank, for a few seconds, and then she gives us an answer.  What we have is the question, the answer, and the moment of blankness.

 

I still want to know what you say is going on during the moment of silence -- and especially how you talk about the "visions" in her mind that accompany the arithmetic work she is doing. Do you deny there are "visions of some sort" as she works out the answer?  What's going on in your mind as you count backwards (silently)? How do you talk about that stuff?

 

BTY I don't deny that physical activity is taking place. There are certainly neurons firing, blood flowing, ATP being converted to ADP with the released energy being used for something, etc. 

 

On Sat, Feb 27, 2016 at 11:29 AM Nick Thompson <[hidden email]> wrote:

Frank,

 

Will you look at my last post to russ and comment (on line, if possible) on the plausibility of my mathematical interpretation?

 

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: Saturday, February 27, 2016 12:25 PM

To: 'The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group' <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Subjectivity and intimacy (lost in the weeks?)

 

Russ,

 

In 1967 I took a course in cognitive processes at Carnegie Mellon.  One aspect of that course could be called “what’s wrong with behaviorism?”  At one point it was said, “When behaviorists talk about ‘sub-vocal speech’ you have won the argument.”

 

The “hard problem” is hard.

 

Nick and I have been arguing (in a friendly way) about these issues for years.  There’s the “rabbit hole”.

 

In my opinion and for what it’s worth.

 

Frank

 

 

Frank C. Wimberly

140 Calle Ojo Feliz

Santa Fe, NM 87505

 

[hidden email]     [hidden email]

Phone:  [phone]      Cell:  [phone]

 

From: Friam [[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Eric Charles
Sent: Saturday, February 27, 2016 11:58 AM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Subjectivity and intimacy (lost in the weeks?)

 

"I meant counting silently"

Whatever the relationship is between counting very loudly and counting in a whisper, I would posit the same as the relationship between counting in a whisper and counting with no discernible physical motion.

Instructing a child in how to "count in your head" is a process of instructing a child in how to count without their mouth-flap moving so much. After you are done with the instructions you have a child who does whatever they did before, but without their mouth-flap moving so much.

Theories of learning are, of course, quite interesting in their own right, but no other magic required.

I presume at this point you are going to assert that I have still not answered your question, because by "counting silently" you mean more than simply "counting silently." I certainly have not, with my answer above, solved the "hard problem." All I could say, once again, is that I don't think there is a hard problem to be solved. 

 

(P.S. Sorry to all if I am being any odder than usual in my answers. I am preparing a talk on these topics for next week, and so I am in "professional stickler" mode as a result.)

 

 

 

 

 

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

 

On Sat, Feb 27, 2016 at 1:35 PM, Russ Abbott <[hidden email]> wrote:

I meant counting silently and without and discernable physical motion. Same things for visualizing.  

 

On Sat, Feb 27, 2016 at 9:26 AM Eric Charles <[hidden email]> wrote:

"What about counting backwards from100 by 7's: 100, 93, 86, ... How do you describe those sorts of activities in your terms?"

I describe it just like that. "Counting backwards from 100 by 7's." To confirm this, I asked my daughter to do that, and she did. Her mouth opened and closed, her throat vibrated, and I heard numbers just as you described. I thought the description was apt.

"what about...visualizing someone's face?"

Well, that is going to be a bit trickier, and various answers have been offered that would avoid your posited problem. 

I would point out, first, that we all, at least occasionally "see" that someone is doing this. You are around someone you are very familiar with, something happens, they get a particular contemplative look, and we see that they are remembering someone from their past. "You're thinking about her again, aren't you. I can tell." "Yes, how did you know?" "I've known you long enough. Like I said, I can tell."

Second, I would say (following the work of François Tonneau) that the best way to describe such events is as a continued response to a thing that is not currently present. Just as we no longer think there is any particular mystery about how people behaving towards objects at a spatial distance, we need not posit any particular mystery about how people behave towards objects at a temporal distance.

The brain is certainly a crucial part in such processes, but so is the rest of the body and the surrounding environment. A brain in a vat may present a mystery, but the same questions could be asked about a stomach in a vat. https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/fixing-psychology/201412/deep-thoughts-the-stomach-in-jar-problem

The "hard problem" is a conceptual confusion, not a real problem to be solved.

 

 

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

 

On Sat, Feb 27, 2016 at 2:02 AM, Russ Abbott <[hidden email]> wrote:

Rather than wanting, which is somewhat nebulous, what about doing arithmetic or visualizing someone's face? What about counting backwards from100 by 7's: 100, 93, 86, ... How do you describe those sorts of activities in your terms?

 

 

On Fri, Feb 26, 2016 at 9:42 PM Nick Thompson <[hidden email]> wrote:

Hi, Russ,

 

Ok, so now we are out of the Weeds of Pragmatism thread, I am, FWIW, free to speak me own “mind” – i.e., give you the basis to make accurate predictions of my behavior in this sort of situation in the future. 

 

I think the short answer is that largely Eric and I  don’t.  And when we do, we think we are talking about behavior patterns.  Some of those behavior patterns may be meta meta ……. Etc. and have to be experienced over long reaches of time before they can be recognized.   Although I perhaps know too little math to use this metaphor, I like to think of mental states such as “wanting” as analogous to as derivatives of functions – measurements we speak of occurring as an instant, but actually  ways of describing events longer in duration that can only be known by multiple measurements collected over time. So when in ordinary language we speak of wanting “a hot fudge sundae”, we speak as if we are talking about an instantaneous state in some internal space called the mind, when we actually characterizing information concerning our behavior with respect to ice-cream, nuts, whipped cream, and chocolate sauce that would constitute evidence for a directedness towards those things as an end. 

 

You probably know too much math to get much pleasure out of my use of that metaphor.   John will no doubt correct me.

 

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 26, 2016 7:50 PM

To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Subjectivity and intimacy (lost in the weeks?)

 

What I still don't understand (and would like to understand) is how Eric and Nick talk about mental activities. For example if I ask you to add 15 and 43, what do you say you are doing? If I ask you to think about what the other looks like, does some image come to mind? What do you say is happening as you hold that image in your mind? 

 

In none of my posts have I put a position forward. (Nevertheless you have often replied as if I have.) My first post asked how you describe intimacy -- or if that term means anything at all to you. This is similar. I want to know how you describe the sorts of mental activities that we (and even you presumably) find familiar.

 

On Fri, Feb 26, 2016 at 4:35 PM Eric Charles <[hidden email]> wrote:

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.

 

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

 

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" target="_blank">[phone]   fax: <a href="tel:%28202%29%20885-1190" 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" target="_blank">[phone]   fax: <a href="tel:%28202%29%20885-1190" 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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[Russ Abbott]

Nick: for me, and perhaps for Eric, there is no “place” or “process” that intercedes between the physiology and the behavior.

Russ: Most people would say that they are thinking about something as they do arithmetic -- perhaps visualizing the numbers being operated upon and related numbers. What to you say about such statements? And I want to frame that question this way. We all observe the world. (I assume you accept that statement in some form or other.) When making the sort of self-report I'm talking about, I would classify that as observing oneself. So again, what do you say when someone, e.g., me, says that when I count down "in my head" from 100, I think about, i.e., visualize 100; then visualize 93; then visualize 87; etc. Of course more happens to get me from 100 to 93 and then to 87. But just talking about the visualization part, what do you say about my self report?

Nick: If you had the figure in front of you, what you do?  You would rotate it in your hands.

Russ: If the figure were in front of me and I rotate it, I also look at and observe it. Rotating it with my eyes closed or in the dark of while looking somewhere else doesn't do much for me. So what does seeing/observing it add to the rotating? And if you follow your reasoning to its limit, what for you is seeing/observing without rotating?

On Sat, Feb 27, 2016 at 12:47 PM Nick Thompson <[hidden email]> wrote:

Russ,

 

I don't think the mathematical analogy is relevant. It doesn't seem to me to apply to remembering a face.

 

Oh, I think the mathematical analogy works FINE for mental imagery.  Let’s talk about “mental rotations” experiments.  Is this three dimensional figure the same as this other one?  If you had the figure in front of you, what you do?  You would rotate it in your hands.  Or if you had it only as a two dimensional illustration, you would trace the movements of parts out with your fingers.   I don’t think that it’s blatantly absurd to assert that “mental rotations” are the limit of such explorations where all behavior stops. 

 

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: Saturday, February 27, 2016 12:49 PM

To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Subjectivity and intimacy (lost in the weeks?)

 

P.S. Frank, Thanks for the support.

 

On Sat, Feb 27, 2016 at 11:48 AM Russ Abbott <[hidden email]> wrote:

I don't think the mathematical analogy is relevant. It doesn't seem to me to apply to remembering a face.

 

Nick said about someone doing arithmetic silently: Her face goes blank, for a few seconds, and then she gives us an answer.  What we have is the question, the answer, and the moment of blankness.

 

I still want to know what you say is going on during the moment of silence -- and especially how you talk about the "visions" in her mind that accompany the arithmetic work she is doing. Do you deny there are "visions of some sort" as she works out the answer?  What's going on in your mind as you count backwards (silently)? How do you talk about that stuff?

 

BTY I don't deny that physical activity is taking place. There are certainly neurons firing, blood flowing, ATP being converted to ADP with the released energy being used for something, etc. 

 

On Sat, Feb 27, 2016 at 11:29 AM Nick Thompson <[hidden email]> wrote:

Frank,

 

Will you look at my last post to russ and comment (on line, if possible) on the plausibility of my mathematical interpretation?

 

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: Saturday, February 27, 2016 12:25 PM

To: 'The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group' <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Subjectivity and intimacy (lost in the weeks?)

 

Russ,

 

In 1967 I took a course in cognitive processes at Carnegie Mellon.  One aspect of that course could be called “what’s wrong with behaviorism?”  At one point it was said, “When behaviorists talk about ‘sub-vocal speech’ you have won the argument.”

 

The “hard problem” is hard.

 

Nick and I have been arguing (in a friendly way) about these issues for years.  There’s the “rabbit hole”.

 

In my opinion and for what it’s worth.

 

Frank

 

 

Frank C. Wimberly

140 Calle Ojo Feliz

Santa Fe, NM 87505

 

[hidden email]     [hidden email]

Phone:  [phone]      Cell:  [phone]

 

From: Friam [[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Eric Charles
Sent: Saturday, February 27, 2016 11:58 AM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Subjectivity and intimacy (lost in the weeks?)

 

"I meant counting silently"

Whatever the relationship is between counting very loudly and counting in a whisper, I would posit the same as the relationship between counting in a whisper and counting with no discernible physical motion.

Instructing a child in how to "count in your head" is a process of instructing a child in how to count without their mouth-flap moving so much. After you are done with the instructions you have a child who does whatever they did before, but without their mouth-flap moving so much.

Theories of learning are, of course, quite interesting in their own right, but no other magic required.

I presume at this point you are going to assert that I have still not answered your question, because by "counting silently" you mean more than simply "counting silently." I certainly have not, with my answer above, solved the "hard problem." All I could say, once again, is that I don't think there is a hard problem to be solved. 

 

(P.S. Sorry to all if I am being any odder than usual in my answers. I am preparing a talk on these topics for next week, and so I am in "professional stickler" mode as a result.)

 

 

 

 

 

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

 

On Sat, Feb 27, 2016 at 1:35 PM, Russ Abbott <[hidden email]> wrote:

I meant counting silently and without and discernable physical motion. Same things for visualizing.  

 

On Sat, Feb 27, 2016 at 9:26 AM Eric Charles <[hidden email]> wrote:

"What about counting backwards from100 by 7's: 100, 93, 86, ... How do you describe those sorts of activities in your terms?"

I describe it just like that. "Counting backwards from 100 by 7's." To confirm this, I asked my daughter to do that, and she did. Her mouth opened and closed, her throat vibrated, and I heard numbers just as you described. I thought the description was apt.

"what about...visualizing someone's face?"

Well, that is going to be a bit trickier, and various answers have been offered that would avoid your posited problem. 

I would point out, first, that we all, at least occasionally "see" that someone is doing this. You are around someone you are very familiar with, something happens, they get a particular contemplative look, and we see that they are remembering someone from their past. "You're thinking about her again, aren't you. I can tell." "Yes, how did you know?" "I've known you long enough. Like I said, I can tell."

Second, I would say (following the work of François Tonneau) that the best way to describe such events is as a continued response to a thing that is not currently present. Just as we no longer think there is any particular mystery about how people behaving towards objects at a spatial distance, we need not posit any particular mystery about how people behave towards objects at a temporal distance.

The brain is certainly a crucial part in such processes, but so is the rest of the body and the surrounding environment. A brain in a vat may present a mystery, but the same questions could be asked about a stomach in a vat. https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/fixing-psychology/201412/deep-thoughts-the-stomach-in-jar-problem

The "hard problem" is a conceptual confusion, not a real problem to be solved.

 

 

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

 

On Sat, Feb 27, 2016 at 2:02 AM, Russ Abbott <[hidden email]> wrote:

Rather than wanting, which is somewhat nebulous, what about doing arithmetic or visualizing someone's face? What about counting backwards from100 by 7's: 100, 93, 86, ... How do you describe those sorts of activities in your terms?

 

 

On Fri, Feb 26, 2016 at 9:42 PM Nick Thompson <[hidden email]> wrote:

Hi, Russ,

 

Ok, so now we are out of the Weeds of Pragmatism thread, I am, FWIW, free to speak me own “mind” – i.e., give you the basis to make accurate predictions of my behavior in this sort of situation in the future. 

 

I think the short answer is that largely Eric and I  don’t.  And when we do, we think we are talking about behavior patterns.  Some of those behavior patterns may be meta meta ……. Etc. and have to be experienced over long reaches of time before they can be recognized.   Although I perhaps know too little math to use this metaphor, I like to think of mental states such as “wanting” as analogous to as derivatives of functions – measurements we speak of occurring as an instant, but actually  ways of describing events longer in duration that can only be known by multiple measurements collected over time. So when in ordinary language we speak of wanting “a hot fudge sundae”, we speak as if we are talking about an instantaneous state in some internal space called the mind, when we actually characterizing information concerning our behavior with respect to ice-cream, nuts, whipped cream, and chocolate sauce that would constitute evidence for a directedness towards those things as an end. 

 

You probably know too much math to get much pleasure out of my use of that metaphor.   John will no doubt correct me.

 

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 26, 2016 7:50 PM

To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Subjectivity and intimacy (lost in the weeks?)

 

What I still don't understand (and would like to understand) is how Eric and Nick talk about mental activities. For example if I ask you to add 15 and 43, what do you say you are doing? If I ask you to think about what the other looks like, does some image come to mind? What do you say is happening as you hold that image in your mind? 

 

In none of my posts have I put a position forward. (Nevertheless you have often replied as if I have.) My first post asked how you describe intimacy -- or if that term means anything at all to you. This is similar. I want to know how you describe the sorts of mental activities that we (and even you presumably) find familiar.

 

On Fri, Feb 26, 2016 at 4:35 PM Eric Charles <[hidden email]> wrote:

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.

 

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

 

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" target="_blank">[phone]   fax: <a href="tel:%28202%29%20885-1190" 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" target="_blank">[phone]   fax: <a href="tel:%28202%29%20885-1190" 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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[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: Saturday, February 27, 2016 6:25 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Subjectivity and intimacy (lost in the weeks?)

 

Nick: for me, and perhaps for Eric, there is no “place” or “process” that intercedes between the physiology and the behavior.

 

Russ: Most people would say that they are thinking about something as they do arithmetic -- perhaps visualizing the numbers being operated upon and related numbers. What to you say about such statements? And I want to frame that question this way. We all observe the world. (I assume you accept that statement in some form or other.) When making the sort of self-report I'm talking about, I would classify that as observing oneself. So again, what do you say when someone, e.g., me, says that when I count down "in my head" from 100, I think about, i.e., visualize 100; then visualize 93; then visualize 87; etc. Of course more happens to get me from 100 to 93 and then to 87. But just talking about the visualization part, what do you say about my self report?

[NST==>I am tempted to say that you are just wrong.  If you were correct I should be able to ask the same questions of your “visualization” as I could ask you if you were doing the calculations on paper.  What color were the numbers? In What font?  Or were they written on paper with pencil.  Did you make any mistakes when you were imagining them, and have to erase?  Were bits of eraser left on the paper?  Etc.   But most philosophers would, I think castigate me for every joining in the “visualization language game” at all, given all I have said before.  After all, doesn’t “seeing” ineliminably involve the eyes?  I kind of like the idea you explore below of lowering the lights while I am engaged in calculations by hand.  Calculating in the mind is just the limit of calculating by hand as light goes to zero.  <==nst]

 

Nick: If you had the figure in front of you, what you do?  You would rotate it in your hands.

 

Russ: If the figure were in front of me and I rotate it, I also look at and observe it. Rotating it with my eyes closed or in the dark of while looking somewhere else doesn't do much for me. So what does seeing/observing it add to the rotating? And if you follow your reasoning to its limit, what for you is seeing/observing without rotating?

[NST==>I dunno, what is rotating without hands?  <==nst]

 

On Sat, Feb 27, 2016 at 12:47 PM Nick Thompson <[hidden email]> wrote:

Russ,

 

I don't think the mathematical analogy is relevant. It doesn't seem to me to apply to remembering a face.

 

Oh, I think the mathematical analogy works FINE for mental imagery.  Let’s talk about “mental rotations” experiments.  Is this three dimensional figure the same as this other one?  If you had the figure in front of you, what you do?  You would rotate it in your hands.  Or if you had it only as a two dimensional illustration, you would trace the movements of parts out with your fingers.   I don’t think that it’s blatantly absurd to assert that “mental rotations” are the limit of such explorations where all behavior stops. 

 

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: Saturday, February 27, 2016 12:49 PM

To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Subjectivity and intimacy (lost in the weeks?)

 

P.S. Frank, Thanks for the support.

 

On Sat, Feb 27, 2016 at 11:48 AM Russ Abbott <[hidden email]> wrote:

I don't think the mathematical analogy is relevant. It doesn't seem to me to apply to remembering a face.

 

Nick said about someone doing arithmetic silently: Her face goes blank, for a few seconds, and then she gives us an answer.  What we have is the question, the answer, and the moment of blankness.

 

I still want to know what you say is going on during the moment of silence -- and especially how you talk about the "visions" in her mind that accompany the arithmetic work she is doing. Do you deny there are "visions of some sort" as she works out the answer?  What's going on in your mind as you count backwards (silently)? How do you talk about that stuff?

 

BTY I don't deny that physical activity is taking place. There are certainly neurons firing, blood flowing, ATP being converted to ADP with the released energy being used for something, etc. 

 

On Sat, Feb 27, 2016 at 11:29 AM Nick Thompson <[hidden email]> wrote:

Frank,

 

Will you look at my last post to russ and comment (on line, if possible) on the plausibility of my mathematical interpretation?

 

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: Saturday, February 27, 2016 12:25 PM

To: 'The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group' <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Subjectivity and intimacy (lost in the weeks?)

 

Russ,

 

In 1967 I took a course in cognitive processes at Carnegie Mellon.  One aspect of that course could be called “what’s wrong with behaviorism?”  At one point it was said, “When behaviorists talk about ‘sub-vocal speech’ you have won the argument.”

 

The “hard problem” is hard.

 

Nick and I have been arguing (in a friendly way) about these issues for years.  There’s the “rabbit hole”.

 

In my opinion and for what it’s worth.

 

Frank

 

 

Frank C. Wimberly

140 Calle Ojo Feliz

Santa Fe, NM 87505

 

[hidden email]     [hidden email]

Phone:  [phone]      Cell:  [phone]

 

From: Friam [[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Eric Charles
Sent: Saturday, February 27, 2016 11:58 AM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Subjectivity and intimacy (lost in the weeks?)

 

"I meant counting silently"

Whatever the relationship is between counting very loudly and counting in a whisper, I would posit the same as the relationship between counting in a whisper and counting with no discernible physical motion.

Instructing a child in how to "count in your head" is a process of instructing a child in how to count without their mouth-flap moving so much. After you are done with the instructions you have a child who does whatever they did before, but without their mouth-flap moving so much.

Theories of learning are, of course, quite interesting in their own right, but no other magic required.

I presume at this point you are going to assert that I have still not answered your question, because by "counting silently" you mean more than simply "counting silently." I certainly have not, with my answer above, solved the "hard problem." All I could say, once again, is that I don't think there is a hard problem to be solved. 

 

(P.S. Sorry to all if I am being any odder than usual in my answers. I am preparing a talk on these topics for next week, and so I am in "professional stickler" mode as a result.)

 

 

 

 

 

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

 

On Sat, Feb 27, 2016 at 1:35 PM, Russ Abbott <[hidden email]> wrote:

I meant counting silently and without and discernable physical motion. Same things for visualizing.  

 

On Sat, Feb 27, 2016 at 9:26 AM Eric Charles <[hidden email]> wrote:

"What about counting backwards from100 by 7's: 100, 93, 86, ... How do you describe those sorts of activities in your terms?"

I describe it just like that. "Counting backwards from 100 by 7's." To confirm this, I asked my daughter to do that, and she did. Her mouth opened and closed, her throat vibrated, and I heard numbers just as you described. I thought the description was apt.

"what about...visualizing someone's face?"

Well, that is going to be a bit trickier, and various answers have been offered that would avoid your posited problem. 

I would point out, first, that we all, at least occasionally "see" that someone is doing this. You are around someone you are very familiar with, something happens, they get a particular contemplative look, and we see that they are remembering someone from their past. "You're thinking about her again, aren't you. I can tell." "Yes, how did you know?" "I've known you long enough. Like I said, I can tell."

Second, I would say (following the work of François Tonneau) that the best way to describe such events is as a continued response to a thing that is not currently present. Just as we no longer think there is any particular mystery about how people behaving towards objects at a spatial distance, we need not posit any particular mystery about how people behave towards objects at a temporal distance.

The brain is certainly a crucial part in such processes, but so is the rest of the body and the surrounding environment. A brain in a vat may present a mystery, but the same questions could be asked about a stomach in a vat. https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/fixing-psychology/201412/deep-thoughts-the-stomach-in-jar-problem

The "hard problem" is a conceptual confusion, not a real problem to be solved.

 

 

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

 

On Sat, Feb 27, 2016 at 2:02 AM, Russ Abbott <[hidden email]> wrote:

Rather than wanting, which is somewhat nebulous, what about doing arithmetic or visualizing someone's face? What about counting backwards from100 by 7's: 100, 93, 86, ... How do you describe those sorts of activities in your terms?

 

 

On Fri, Feb 26, 2016 at 9:42 PM Nick Thompson <[hidden email]> wrote:

Hi, Russ,

 

Ok, so now we are out of the Weeds of Pragmatism thread, I am, FWIW, free to speak me own “mind” – i.e., give you the basis to make accurate predictions of my behavior in this sort of situation in the future. 

 

I think the short answer is that largely Eric and I  don’t.  And when we do, we think we are talking about behavior patterns.  Some of those behavior patterns may be meta meta ……. Etc. and have to be experienced over long reaches of time before they can be recognized.   Although I perhaps know too little math to use this metaphor, I like to think of mental states such as “wanting” as analogous to as derivatives of functions – measurements we speak of occurring as an instant, but actually  ways of describing events longer in duration that can only be known by multiple measurements collected over time. So when in ordinary language we speak of wanting “a hot fudge sundae”, we speak as if we are talking about an instantaneous state in some internal space called the mind, when we actually characterizing information concerning our behavior with respect to ice-cream, nuts, whipped cream, and chocolate sauce that would constitute evidence for a directedness towards those things as an end. 

 

You probably know too much math to get much pleasure out of my use of that metaphor.   John will no doubt correct me.

 

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 26, 2016 7:50 PM

To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Subjectivity and intimacy (lost in the weeks?)

 

What I still don't understand (and would like to understand) is how Eric and Nick talk about mental activities. For example if I ask you to add 15 and 43, what do you say you are doing? If I ask you to think about what the other looks like, does some image come to mind? What do you say is happening as you hold that image in your mind? 

 

In none of my posts have I put a position forward. (Nevertheless you have often replied as if I have.) My first post asked how you describe intimacy -- or if that term means anything at all to you. This is similar. I want to know how you describe the sorts of mental activities that we (and even you presumably) find familiar.

 

On Fri, Feb 26, 2016 at 4:35 PM Eric Charles <[hidden email]> wrote:

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.

 

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

 

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" target="_blank">[phone]   fax: <a href="tel:%28202%29%20885-1190" 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" target="_blank">[phone]   fax: <a href="tel:%28202%29%20885-1190" 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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[Russ Abbott]

I still don't understand your answer. I (and most people) would say that they visualize the numbers as they calculate. You say (if I understand you correctly) that people who say that are wrong, that they don't visualize, that the experience they claim to be reporting on not only doesn't exist, they are not even imagining it since to imagine it would be just as impossible as to have the experience in the first place. So all you can say about these reports is that you don't know what to make of them, that the words the people are saying don't make any sense to you. Is that a fair statement of your position?

On Sat, Feb 27, 2016 at 8:16 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: Saturday, February 27, 2016 6:25 PM

To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Subjectivity and intimacy (lost in the weeks?)

 

Nick: for me, and perhaps for Eric, there is no “place” or “process” that intercedes between the physiology and the behavior.

 

Russ: Most people would say that they are thinking about something as they do arithmetic -- perhaps visualizing the numbers being operated upon and related numbers. What to you say about such statements? And I want to frame that question this way. We all observe the world. (I assume you accept that statement in some form or other.) When making the sort of self-report I'm talking about, I would classify that as observing oneself. So again, what do you say when someone, e.g., me, says that when I count down "in my head" from 100, I think about, i.e., visualize 100; then visualize 93; then visualize 87; etc. Of course more happens to get me from 100 to 93 and then to 87. But just talking about the visualization part, what do you say about my self report?

[NST==>I am tempted to say that you are just wrong.  If you were correct I should be able to ask the same questions of your “visualization” as I could ask you if you were doing the calculations on paper.  What color were the numbers? In What font?  Or were they written on paper with pencil.  Did you make any mistakes when you were imagining them, and have to erase?  Were bits of eraser left on the paper?  Etc.   But most philosophers would, I think castigate me for every joining in the “visualization language game” at all, given all I have said before.  After all, doesn’t “seeing” ineliminably involve the eyes?  I kind of like the idea you explore below of lowering the lights while I am engaged in calculations by hand.  Calculating in the mind is just the limit of calculating by hand as light goes to zero.  <==nst]

 

Nick: If you had the figure in front of you, what you do?  You would rotate it in your hands.

 

Russ: If the figure were in front of me and I rotate it, I also look at and observe it. Rotating it with my eyes closed or in the dark of while looking somewhere else doesn't do much for me. So what does seeing/observing it add to the rotating? And if you follow your reasoning to its limit, what for you is seeing/observing without rotating?

[NST==>I dunno, what is rotating without hands?  <==nst]

 

On Sat, Feb 27, 2016 at 12:47 PM Nick Thompson <[hidden email]> wrote:

Russ,

 

I don't think the mathematical analogy is relevant. It doesn't seem to me to apply to remembering a face.

 

Oh, I think the mathematical analogy works FINE for mental imagery.  Let’s talk about “mental rotations” experiments.  Is this three dimensional figure the same as this other one?  If you had the figure in front of you, what you do?  You would rotate it in your hands.  Or if you had it only as a two dimensional illustration, you would trace the movements of parts out with your fingers.   I don’t think that it’s blatantly absurd to assert that “mental rotations” are the limit of such explorations where all behavior stops. 

 

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: Saturday, February 27, 2016 12:49 PM

To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Subjectivity and intimacy (lost in the weeks?)

 

P.S. Frank, Thanks for the support.

 

On Sat, Feb 27, 2016 at 11:48 AM Russ Abbott <[hidden email]> wrote:

I don't think the mathematical analogy is relevant. It doesn't seem to me to apply to remembering a face.

 

Nick said about someone doing arithmetic silently: Her face goes blank, for a few seconds, and then she gives us an answer.  What we have is the question, the answer, and the moment of blankness.

 

I still want to know what you say is going on during the moment of silence -- and especially how you talk about the "visions" in her mind that accompany the arithmetic work she is doing. Do you deny there are "visions of some sort" as she works out the answer?  What's going on in your mind as you count backwards (silently)? How do you talk about that stuff?

 

BTY I don't deny that physical activity is taking place. There are certainly neurons firing, blood flowing, ATP being converted to ADP with the released energy being used for something, etc. 

 

On Sat, Feb 27, 2016 at 11:29 AM Nick Thompson <[hidden email]> wrote:

Frank,

 

Will you look at my last post to russ and comment (on line, if possible) on the plausibility of my mathematical interpretation?

 

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: Saturday, February 27, 2016 12:25 PM

To: 'The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group' <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Subjectivity and intimacy (lost in the weeks?)

 

Russ,

 

In 1967 I took a course in cognitive processes at Carnegie Mellon.  One aspect of that course could be called “what’s wrong with behaviorism?”  At one point it was said, “When behaviorists talk about ‘sub-vocal speech’ you have won the argument.”

 

The “hard problem” is hard.

 

Nick and I have been arguing (in a friendly way) about these issues for years.  There’s the “rabbit hole”.

 

In my opinion and for what it’s worth.

 

Frank

 

 

Frank C. Wimberly

140 Calle Ojo Feliz

Santa Fe, NM 87505

 

[hidden email]     [hidden email]

Phone:  [phone]      Cell:  [phone]

 

From: Friam [[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Eric Charles
Sent: Saturday, February 27, 2016 11:58 AM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Subjectivity and intimacy (lost in the weeks?)

 

"I meant counting silently"

Whatever the relationship is between counting very loudly and counting in a whisper, I would posit the same as the relationship between counting in a whisper and counting with no discernible physical motion.

Instructing a child in how to "count in your head" is a process of instructing a child in how to count without their mouth-flap moving so much. After you are done with the instructions you have a child who does whatever they did before, but without their mouth-flap moving so much.

Theories of learning are, of course, quite interesting in their own right, but no other magic required.

I presume at this point you are going to assert that I have still not answered your question, because by "counting silently" you mean more than simply "counting silently." I certainly have not, with my answer above, solved the "hard problem." All I could say, once again, is that I don't think there is a hard problem to be solved. 

 

(P.S. Sorry to all if I am being any odder than usual in my answers. I am preparing a talk on these topics for next week, and so I am in "professional stickler" mode as a result.)

 

 

 

 

 

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

 

On Sat, Feb 27, 2016 at 1:35 PM, Russ Abbott <[hidden email]> wrote:

I meant counting silently and without and discernable physical motion. Same things for visualizing.  

 

On Sat, Feb 27, 2016 at 9:26 AM Eric Charles <[hidden email]> wrote:

"What about counting backwards from100 by 7's: 100, 93, 86, ... How do you describe those sorts of activities in your terms?"

I describe it just like that. "Counting backwards from 100 by 7's." To confirm this, I asked my daughter to do that, and she did. Her mouth opened and closed, her throat vibrated, and I heard numbers just as you described. I thought the description was apt.

"what about...visualizing someone's face?"

Well, that is going to be a bit trickier, and various answers have been offered that would avoid your posited problem. 

I would point out, first, that we all, at least occasionally "see" that someone is doing this. You are around someone you are very familiar with, something happens, they get a particular contemplative look, and we see that they are remembering someone from their past. "You're thinking about her again, aren't you. I can tell." "Yes, how did you know?" "I've known you long enough. Like I said, I can tell."

Second, I would say (following the work of François Tonneau) that the best way to describe such events is as a continued response to a thing that is not currently present. Just as we no longer think there is any particular mystery about how people behaving towards objects at a spatial distance, we need not posit any particular mystery about how people behave towards objects at a temporal distance.

The brain is certainly a crucial part in such processes, but so is the rest of the body and the surrounding environment. A brain in a vat may present a mystery, but the same questions could be asked about a stomach in a vat. https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/fixing-psychology/201412/deep-thoughts-the-stomach-in-jar-problem

The "hard problem" is a conceptual confusion, not a real problem to be solved.

 

 

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

 

On Sat, Feb 27, 2016 at 2:02 AM, Russ Abbott <[hidden email]> wrote:

Rather than wanting, which is somewhat nebulous, what about doing arithmetic or visualizing someone's face? What about counting backwards from100 by 7's: 100, 93, 86, ... How do you describe those sorts of activities in your terms?

 

 

On Fri, Feb 26, 2016 at 9:42 PM Nick Thompson <[hidden email]> wrote:

Hi, Russ,

 

Ok, so now we are out of the Weeds of Pragmatism thread, I am, FWIW, free to speak me own “mind” – i.e., give you the basis to make accurate predictions of my behavior in this sort of situation in the future. 

 

I think the short answer is that largely Eric and I  don’t.  And when we do, we think we are talking about behavior patterns.  Some of those behavior patterns may be meta meta ……. Etc. and have to be experienced over long reaches of time before they can be recognized.   Although I perhaps know too little math to use this metaphor, I like to think of mental states such as “wanting” as analogous to as derivatives of functions – measurements we speak of occurring as an instant, but actually  ways of describing events longer in duration that can only be known by multiple measurements collected over time. So when in ordinary language we speak of wanting “a hot fudge sundae”, we speak as if we are talking about an instantaneous state in some internal space called the mind, when we actually characterizing information concerning our behavior with respect to ice-cream, nuts, whipped cream, and chocolate sauce that would constitute evidence for a directedness towards those things as an end. 

 

You probably know too much math to get much pleasure out of my use of that metaphor.   John will no doubt correct me.

 

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 26, 2016 7:50 PM

To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Subjectivity and intimacy (lost in the weeks?)

 

What I still don't understand (and would like to understand) is how Eric and Nick talk about mental activities. For example if I ask you to add 15 and 43, what do you say you are doing? If I ask you to think about what the other looks like, does some image come to mind? What do you say is happening as you hold that image in your mind? 

 

In none of my posts have I put a position forward. (Nevertheless you have often replied as if I have.) My first post asked how you describe intimacy -- or if that term means anything at all to you. This is similar. I want to know how you describe the sorts of mental activities that we (and even you presumably) find familiar.

 

On Fri, Feb 26, 2016 at 4:35 PM Eric Charles <[hidden email]> wrote:

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.

 

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

 

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" target="_blank">[phone]   fax: <a href="tel:%28202%29%20885-1190" 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" target="_blank">[phone]   fax: <a href="tel:%28202%29%20885-1190" 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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[David Eric Smith]

<base href="x-msg://451/">

Larding also

Nick: If you had the figure in front of you, what you do?  You would rotate it in your hands.

 

Russ: If the figure were in front of me and I rotate it, I also look at and observe it. Rotating it with my eyes closed or in the dark of while looking somewhere else doesn't do much for me. So what does seeing/observing it add to the rotating? And if you follow your reasoning to its limit, what for you is seeing/observing without rotating?

[NST==>I dunno, what is rotating without hands?  <==nst]

I though this was what Michael Posner and Marcus Raichle were trying to give an operationalization to in Images of Mind, here:

https://books.google.co.jp/books/about/Images_of_Mind.html?id=yFPBMUjU_xYC&redir_esc=y

in one of the later summary chapters.

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[Eric Charles-2]

Russ,

You seem to think Nick is dismissing your claims, but I think the problem is quite the opposite. I think Nick is getting hung up by, among other things, trying to take your language seriously. You say you "visualize", but it doesn't involve vision, and you say you "imagine", but want to disown the implication that there is, somewhere, an image. It is a bit confusing if you take it seriously.

Please believe me, at least, when I make the historic claim that those terms are common in our vocabulary because people one intended the terms to refer to exactly what it sounds like they refer to. The terms gained this usage because philosophers wanted to talk about images being viewed in a Cartesian theater, by your ethereal ghost-soul homunculus. If you (Russ) are absolutely certain that you don't mean any of those things, then it is unclear what implications of those terms you do mean.

Now, whatever you are experiencing, you are experiencing it as somehow akin to a visual experience or, presumably, you wouldn't be using such terms, right? This leads Nick to inquire about the ways your referenced experience is like seeing something, and the ways in which it is different. Because that is what Nick likes to do when he senses a metaphor gone amuck. And without figuring out what we are talking about, there is every possibility that we are on a multi-century long snipe hunt. 

On Sun, Feb 28, 2016 at 12:11 AM, Russ Abbott <[hidden email]> wrote:

I still don't understand your answer. I (and most people) would say that they visualize the numbers as they calculate. You say (if I understand you correctly) that people who say that are wrong, that they don't visualize, that the experience they claim to be reporting on not only doesn't exist, they are not even imagining it since to imagine it would be just as impossible as to have the experience in the first place. So all you can say about these reports is that you don't know what to make of them, that the words the people are saying don't make any sense to you. Is that a fair statement of your position?

On Sat, Feb 27, 2016 at 8:16 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: Saturday, February 27, 2016 6:25 PM

To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Subjectivity and intimacy (lost in the weeks?)

 

Nick: for me, and perhaps for Eric, there is no “place” or “process” that intercedes between the physiology and the behavior.

 

Russ: Most people would say that they are thinking about something as they do arithmetic -- perhaps visualizing the numbers being operated upon and related numbers. What to you say about such statements? And I want to frame that question this way. We all observe the world. (I assume you accept that statement in some form or other.) When making the sort of self-report I'm talking about, I would classify that as observing oneself. So again, what do you say when someone, e.g., me, says that when I count down "in my head" from 100, I think about, i.e., visualize 100; then visualize 93; then visualize 87; etc. Of course more happens to get me from 100 to 93 and then to 87. But just talking about the visualization part, what do you say about my self report?

[NST==>I am tempted to say that you are just wrong.  If you were correct I should be able to ask the same questions of your “visualization” as I could ask you if you were doing the calculations on paper.  What color were the numbers? In What font?  Or were they written on paper with pencil.  Did you make any mistakes when you were imagining them, and have to erase?  Were bits of eraser left on the paper?  Etc.   But most philosophers would, I think castigate me for every joining in the “visualization language game” at all, given all I have said before.  After all, doesn’t “seeing” ineliminably involve the eyes?  I kind of like the idea you explore below of lowering the lights while I am engaged in calculations by hand.  Calculating in the mind is just the limit of calculating by hand as light goes to zero.  <==nst]

 

Nick: If you had the figure in front of you, what you do?  You would rotate it in your hands.

 

Russ: If the figure were in front of me and I rotate it, I also look at and observe it. Rotating it with my eyes closed or in the dark of while looking somewhere else doesn't do much for me. So what does seeing/observing it add to the rotating? And if you follow your reasoning to its limit, what for you is seeing/observing without rotating?

[NST==>I dunno, what is rotating without hands?  <==nst]

 

On Sat, Feb 27, 2016 at 12:47 PM Nick Thompson <[hidden email]> wrote:

Russ,

 

I don't think the mathematical analogy is relevant. It doesn't seem to me to apply to remembering a face.

 

Oh, I think the mathematical analogy works FINE for mental imagery.  Let’s talk about “mental rotations” experiments.  Is this three dimensional figure the same as this other one?  If you had the figure in front of you, what you do?  You would rotate it in your hands.  Or if you had it only as a two dimensional illustration, you would trace the movements of parts out with your fingers.   I don’t think that it’s blatantly absurd to assert that “mental rotations” are the limit of such explorations where all behavior stops. 

 

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: Saturday, February 27, 2016 12:49 PM

To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Subjectivity and intimacy (lost in the weeks?)

 

P.S. Frank, Thanks for the support.

 

On Sat, Feb 27, 2016 at 11:48 AM Russ Abbott <[hidden email]> wrote:

I don't think the mathematical analogy is relevant. It doesn't seem to me to apply to remembering a face.

 

Nick said about someone doing arithmetic silently: Her face goes blank, for a few seconds, and then she gives us an answer.  What we have is the question, the answer, and the moment of blankness.

 

I still want to know what you say is going on during the moment of silence -- and especially how you talk about the "visions" in her mind that accompany the arithmetic work she is doing. Do you deny there are "visions of some sort" as she works out the answer?  What's going on in your mind as you count backwards (silently)? How do you talk about that stuff?

 

BTY I don't deny that physical activity is taking place. There are certainly neurons firing, blood flowing, ATP being converted to ADP with the released energy being used for something, etc. 

 

On Sat, Feb 27, 2016 at 11:29 AM Nick Thompson <[hidden email]> wrote:

Frank,

 

Will you look at my last post to russ and comment (on line, if possible) on the plausibility of my mathematical interpretation?

 

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: Saturday, February 27, 2016 12:25 PM

To: 'The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group' <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Subjectivity and intimacy (lost in the weeks?)

 

Russ,

 

In 1967 I took a course in cognitive processes at Carnegie Mellon.  One aspect of that course could be called “what’s wrong with behaviorism?”  At one point it was said, “When behaviorists talk about ‘sub-vocal speech’ you have won the argument.”

 

The “hard problem” is hard.

 

Nick and I have been arguing (in a friendly way) about these issues for years.  There’s the “rabbit hole”.

 

In my opinion and for what it’s worth.

 

Frank

 

 

Frank C. Wimberly

140 Calle Ojo Feliz

Santa Fe, NM 87505

 

[hidden email]     [hidden email]

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

 

From: Friam [[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Eric Charles
Sent: Saturday, February 27, 2016 11:58 AM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Subjectivity and intimacy (lost in the weeks?)

 

"I meant counting silently"

Whatever the relationship is between counting very loudly and counting in a whisper, I would posit the same as the relationship between counting in a whisper and counting with no discernible physical motion.

Instructing a child in how to "count in your head" is a process of instructing a child in how to count without their mouth-flap moving so much. After you are done with the instructions you have a child who does whatever they did before, but without their mouth-flap moving so much.

Theories of learning are, of course, quite interesting in their own right, but no other magic required.

I presume at this point you are going to assert that I have still not answered your question, because by "counting silently" you mean more than simply "counting silently." I certainly have not, with my answer above, solved the "hard problem." All I could say, once again, is that I don't think there is a hard problem to be solved. 

 

(P.S. Sorry to all if I am being any odder than usual in my answers. I am preparing a talk on these topics for next week, and so I am in "professional stickler" mode as a result.)

 

 

 

 

 

-----------
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 Sat, Feb 27, 2016 at 1:35 PM, Russ Abbott <[hidden email]> wrote:

I meant counting silently and without and discernable physical motion. Same things for visualizing.  

 

On Sat, Feb 27, 2016 at 9:26 AM Eric Charles <[hidden email]> wrote:

"What about counting backwards from100 by 7's: 100, 93, 86, ... How do you describe those sorts of activities in your terms?"

I describe it just like that. "Counting backwards from 100 by 7's." To confirm this, I asked my daughter to do that, and she did. Her mouth opened and closed, her throat vibrated, and I heard numbers just as you described. I thought the description was apt.

"what about...visualizing someone's face?"

Well, that is going to be a bit trickier, and various answers have been offered that would avoid your posited problem. 

I would point out, first, that we all, at least occasionally "see" that someone is doing this. You are around someone you are very familiar with, something happens, they get a particular contemplative look, and we see that they are remembering someone from their past. "You're thinking about her again, aren't you. I can tell." "Yes, how did you know?" "I've known you long enough. Like I said, I can tell."

Second, I would say (following the work of François Tonneau) that the best way to describe such events is as a continued response to a thing that is not currently present. Just as we no longer think there is any particular mystery about how people behaving towards objects at a spatial distance, we need not posit any particular mystery about how people behave towards objects at a temporal distance.

The brain is certainly a crucial part in such processes, but so is the rest of the body and the surrounding environment. A brain in a vat may present a mystery, but the same questions could be asked about a stomach in a vat. https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/fixing-psychology/201412/deep-thoughts-the-stomach-in-jar-problem

The "hard problem" is a conceptual confusion, not a real problem to be solved.

 

 

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

 

On Sat, Feb 27, 2016 at 2:02 AM, Russ Abbott <[hidden email]> wrote:

Rather than wanting, which is somewhat nebulous, what about doing arithmetic or visualizing someone's face? What about counting backwards from100 by 7's: 100, 93, 86, ... How do you describe those sorts of activities in your terms?

 

 

On Fri, Feb 26, 2016 at 9:42 PM Nick Thompson <[hidden email]> wrote:

Hi, Russ,

 

Ok, so now we are out of the Weeds of Pragmatism thread, I am, FWIW, free to speak me own “mind” – i.e., give you the basis to make accurate predictions of my behavior in this sort of situation in the future. 

 

I think the short answer is that largely Eric and I  don’t.  And when we do, we think we are talking about behavior patterns.  Some of those behavior patterns may be meta meta ……. Etc. and have to be experienced over long reaches of time before they can be recognized.   Although I perhaps know too little math to use this metaphor, I like to think of mental states such as “wanting” as analogous to as derivatives of functions – measurements we speak of occurring as an instant, but actually  ways of describing events longer in duration that can only be known by multiple measurements collected over time. So when in ordinary language we speak of wanting “a hot fudge sundae”, we speak as if we are talking about an instantaneous state in some internal space called the mind, when we actually characterizing information concerning our behavior with respect to ice-cream, nuts, whipped cream, and chocolate sauce that would constitute evidence for a directedness towards those things as an end. 

 

You probably know too much math to get much pleasure out of my use of that metaphor.   John will no doubt correct me.

 

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 26, 2016 7:50 PM

To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Subjectivity and intimacy (lost in the weeks?)

 

What I still don't understand (and would like to understand) is how Eric and Nick talk about mental activities. For example if I ask you to add 15 and 43, what do you say you are doing? If I ask you to think about what the other looks like, does some image come to mind? What do you say is happening as you hold that image in your mind? 

 

In none of my posts have I put a position forward. (Nevertheless you have often replied as if I have.) My first post asked how you describe intimacy -- or if that term means anything at all to you. This is similar. I want to know how you describe the sorts of mental activities that we (and even you presumably) find familiar.

 

On Fri, Feb 26, 2016 at 4:35 PM Eric Charles <[hidden email]> wrote:

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.

 

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

 

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" target="_blank">[phone]   fax: <a href="tel:%28202%29%20885-1190" 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" target="_blank">[phone]   fax: <a href="tel:%28202%29%20885-1190" 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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[Eric Charles-2]

Frank,

When someone is exactly asking me about speaking without moving their lips, I'm not sure how it is a fatal flaw if I reply back that I would describe it as "speaking without moving you lips."

At any rate, like many Skinnerian descriptions, the claim is a developmental one. It is a claim about what you would see a kid learning if you started watching them when they only counted out loud, and kept watching until the counted "in their head." Having kids fairly close to that transition, it seemed like a pretty good description. They also learned to work things out "in their head" while looking at number lines they had previously needed to touch with their fingers. The developmental trajectory of ever-smaller bodily movements seemed to play out in that scenario as well. 

As many times as I have heard cognitivist poo poo that explanation, I have never heard an alternative developmental explanation offered. Do let me know if you have one to offer.
And no, some hand waving at what a 4 year old is capable of, then what a 5 year old is capable of, then what a 6 year old is capable of, is not a developmental explanation. The laying out of such a sequence is just a clever way to avoid saying what the actual process of development is. :- )

Best,

Eric

 

On Sat, Feb 27, 2016 at 2:24 PM, Frank Wimberly <[hidden email]> wrote:

Russ,

 

In 1967 I took a course in cognitive processes at Carnegie Mellon.  One aspect of that course could be called “what’s wrong with behaviorism?”  At one point it was said, “When behaviorists talk about ‘sub-vocal speech’ you have won the argument.”

 

The “hard problem” is hard.

 

Nick and I have been arguing (in a friendly way) about these issues for years.  There’s the “rabbit hole”.

 

In my opinion and for what it’s worth.

 

Frank

 

 

Frank C. Wimberly

140 Calle Ojo Feliz

Santa Fe, NM 87505

 

[hidden email]     [hidden email]

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

 

From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Eric Charles
Sent: Saturday, February 27, 2016 11:58 AM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group

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

 

"I meant counting silently"

Whatever the relationship is between counting very loudly and counting in a whisper, I would posit the same as the relationship between counting in a whisper and counting with no discernible physical motion.

Instructing a child in how to "count in your head" is a process of instructing a child in how to count without their mouth-flap moving so much. After you are done with the instructions you have a child who does whatever they did before, but without their mouth-flap moving so much.

Theories of learning are, of course, quite interesting in their own right, but no other magic required.

I presume at this point you are going to assert that I have still not answered your question, because by "counting silently" you mean more than simply "counting silently." I certainly have not, with my answer above, solved the "hard problem." All I could say, once again, is that I don't think there is a hard problem to be solved. 

 

(P.S. Sorry to all if I am being any odder than usual in my answers. I am preparing a talk on these topics for next week, and so I am in "professional stickler" mode as a result.)

 

 

 

 

 

-----------
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 Sat, Feb 27, 2016 at 1:35 PM, Russ Abbott <[hidden email]> wrote:

I meant counting silently and without and discernable physical motion. Same things for visualizing.  

 

On Sat, Feb 27, 2016 at 9:26 AM Eric Charles <[hidden email]> wrote:

"What about counting backwards from100 by 7's: 100, 93, 86, ... How do you describe those sorts of activities in your terms?"

I describe it just like that. "Counting backwards from 100 by 7's." To confirm this, I asked my daughter to do that, and she did. Her mouth opened and closed, her throat vibrated, and I heard numbers just as you described. I thought the description was apt.

"what about...visualizing someone's face?"

Well, that is going to be a bit trickier, and various answers have been offered that would avoid your posited problem. 

I would point out, first, that we all, at least occasionally "see" that someone is doing this. You are around someone you are very familiar with, something happens, they get a particular contemplative look, and we see that they are remembering someone from their past. "You're thinking about her again, aren't you. I can tell." "Yes, how did you know?" "I've known you long enough. Like I said, I can tell."

Second, I would say (following the work of François Tonneau) that the best way to describe such events is as a continued response to a thing that is not currently present. Just as we no longer think there is any particular mystery about how people behaving towards objects at a spatial distance, we need not posit any particular mystery about how people behave towards objects at a temporal distance.

The brain is certainly a crucial part in such processes, but so is the rest of the body and the surrounding environment. A brain in a vat may present a mystery, but the same questions could be asked about a stomach in a vat. https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/fixing-psychology/201412/deep-thoughts-the-stomach-in-jar-problem

The "hard problem" is a conceptual confusion, not a real problem to be solved.

 

 

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

 

On Sat, Feb 27, 2016 at 2:02 AM, Russ Abbott <[hidden email]> wrote:

Rather than wanting, which is somewhat nebulous, what about doing arithmetic or visualizing someone's face? What about counting backwards from100 by 7's: 100, 93, 86, ... How do you describe those sorts of activities in your terms?

 

 

On Fri, Feb 26, 2016 at 9:42 PM Nick Thompson <[hidden email]> wrote:

Hi, Russ,

 

Ok, so now we are out of the Weeds of Pragmatism thread, I am, FWIW, free to speak me own “mind” – i.e., give you the basis to make accurate predictions of my behavior in this sort of situation in the future. 

 

I think the short answer is that largely Eric and I  don’t.  And when we do, we think we are talking about behavior patterns.  Some of those behavior patterns may be meta meta ……. Etc. and have to be experienced over long reaches of time before they can be recognized.   Although I perhaps know too little math to use this metaphor, I like to think of mental states such as “wanting” as analogous to as derivatives of functions – measurements we speak of occurring as an instant, but actually  ways of describing events longer in duration that can only be known by multiple measurements collected over time. So when in ordinary language we speak of wanting “a hot fudge sundae”, we speak as if we are talking about an instantaneous state in some internal space called the mind, when we actually characterizing information concerning our behavior with respect to ice-cream, nuts, whipped cream, and chocolate sauce that would constitute evidence for a directedness towards those things as an end. 

 

You probably know too much math to get much pleasure out of my use of that metaphor.   John will no doubt correct me.

 

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 26, 2016 7:50 PM

To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Subjectivity and intimacy (lost in the weeks?)

 

What I still don't understand (and would like to understand) is how Eric and Nick talk about mental activities. For example if I ask you to add 15 and 43, what do you say you are doing? If I ask you to think about what the other looks like, does some image come to mind? What do you say is happening as you hold that image in your mind? 

 

In none of my posts have I put a position forward. (Nevertheless you have often replied as if I have.) My first post asked how you describe intimacy -- or if that term means anything at all to you. This is similar. I want to know how you describe the sorts of mental activities that we (and even you presumably) find familiar.

 

On Fri, Feb 26, 2016 at 4:35 PM Eric Charles <[hidden email]> wrote:

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.

 

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

 

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" target="_blank">[phone]   fax: <a href="tel:%28202%29%20885-1190" 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" target="_blank">[phone]   fax: <a href="tel:%28202%29%20885-1190" 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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