Fwd: Complejidad en economía

[Russ Abbott]

Eric: 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?

Russ: When I use terms like "experiencing" or "visual experience" you seem to say that my language lacks meaning. You just used those terms. What do you mean by them?

On Sun, Feb 28, 2016 at 3:44 PM Eric Charles <[hidden email]> wrote:

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

 

-----------
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 2:24 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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[John Kennison]

Hi, Russ, Eric, Nick, et al,

I hope you will humor me and carry out my request to help me get a clearer sense of your exchanges. Below, I present a series of observations about a man who is driving a car followed by a conclusion that one might draw. I am asking each of you whether the conclusion might be considered a scientific conclusion. Moreover, which of the statements in the "series of observations" are:
(1) Scientifically meaningful.
(2) Might be scientifically meaningful if some of the terms were further defined.
(3) Are not scientifically meaningful.
I would also like each of you to explain the basis for your answers.

Then I would ask each of you whether there is a valid non-scientific way of reaching the same conclusion and to discuss this briefly.

Observations
Suppose it is reported that a person driving a car looks tense and frustrated. His blood pressure is well above what is normal for him. He has driven along the same stretch of road three times in the last 10 minutes. He pulls over and consults a map. Then he calms down. His blood pressure returns to a normal level. He drives on and, over the next two hours, he does not drive along that stretch of road again.

Conclusions
Based on this information, it is concluded that it is likely that there was a destination point he was trying to reach. He was frustrated because he was not making progress in reaching the destination. By consulting the map, he was able to find his way to the desired point. Moreover, he retained a visual image of the map and this image helped him find his way.


________________________________________
From: Friam [[hidden email]] on behalf of Russ Abbott [[hidden email]]
Sent: Sunday, February 28, 2016 10:42 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Subjectivity and intimacy (lost in the weeks?)

Eric: 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?

Russ: When I use terms like "experiencing" or "visual experience" you seem to say that my language lacks meaning. You just used those terms. What do you mean by them?

On Sun, Feb 28, 2016 at 3:44 PM Eric Charles <[hidden email]<mailto:[hidden email]>> wrote:
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




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

On Sat, Feb 27, 2016 at 2:24 PM, Frank Wimberly <[hidden email]<mailto:[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]<mailto:[hidden email]>     [hidden email]<mailto:[hidden email]>
Phone:  [phone]<tel:%28505%29%20995-8715>      Cell:  [phone]<tel:%28505%29%20670-9918>

From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]<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]<tel:%28202%29%20885-3867>   fax: [phone]<tel:%28202%29%20885-1190>
email: [hidden email]<mailto:[hidden email]>

On Sat, Feb 27, 2016 at 1:35 PM, Russ Abbott <[hidden email]<mailto:[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]<mailto:[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]<tel:%28202%29%20885-3867>   fax: [phone]<tel:%28202%29%20885-1190>
email: [hidden email]<mailto:[hidden email]>

On Sat, Feb 27, 2016 at 2:02 AM, Russ Abbott <[hidden email]<mailto:[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]<mailto:[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]<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]<mailto:[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]<mailto:[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]<tel:%28202%29%20885-3867>   fax: [phone]<tel:%28202%29%20885-1190>
email: [hidden email]<mailto:[hidden email]>

On Thu, Feb 25, 2016 at 11:10 PM, Russ Abbott <[hidden email]<mailto:[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]<mailto:[hidden email]>> wrote:
Russ,
I mulled over replying a few times, but wasn't sure what to say. However, by restating your genuine interest in my response, I now feel like a jack ass for not responding earilier, so here it goes. Some of these answers might not be at all satisfying, but I will do my best so long as you accept the caveat that I am uncertain if some of it will really answer your questions.


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

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

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

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

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

"I don't expect a breakthrough that will suddenly crack "the hard problem of consciousness. More likely we will be able to say more and more accurately what sort of subjective experience someone is having by looking at what their brain is doing."
This is probably the difficult part of your comment to respond to. I simply don't believe there is a "hard problem." To the extent that I even understand what you are talking about there, I think the brain is one part of a much larger system that we would need to examine. That is not to say that examining the brain adds nothing, but to say that an exclusive focus on the brain misrepresents the phenomena of interest.
To elaborate a bit: Traditional philosophy has addressed been largely oriented towards "internalizing" psychological processes. The Cartesian claim (an extension of the Platonic claim) was that we only experience the world that plays out in the theater of our ghost-souls. "Why do I experience the grass as green?" you ask. "Because the greenness is present in the theater of your soul," is the answer. This, of course, doesn't solve anything. Saying that we only experience the world that plays out in the theater of brains has almost all of the same problems, and should be rejected. At the least, it adds nothing.

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







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

On Thu, Feb 25, 2016 at 1:29 AM, Nick Thompson <[hidden email]<mailto:[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]<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]<mailto:[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]<mailto:[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]<mailto:[hidden email]>> wrote:
Russ said: "Eric's point that the world must be a certain way if we are to do science doesn't make sense to me. If Schrodinger, Heisenberg, etc. thought like that they would have denied the two-slit experiments, and quantum mechanics wouldn't exist. Science (as you all know) is fundamentally empirical. You can't demand that the world be a certain way so that it's easier to do science."
Exactly! Let me try another tact.
1) We could imagine (with various levels of clarity) any number of worlds in which things worked differently from each other.
2) "Doing science" is largely a process of trying to figure out which of those worlds we live in, by searching for the best way to divide up empirical evidence, so that it is reliable and can be agreed up. (Peirce was particularly fascinated with the advances made in 18th century chemistry.) Scientists search for more and more stable ways to view the world, i.e., ways which stand up to more and more empirical scrutiny. (Early attempts at the periodic table, though imperfect, serve as an excellent example of this, leading to countless confirmatory experiments, including the correct prediction of the properties of yet-to-be-isolated elements.)

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

4) Many important big-name people have declared that a science of psychology is impossible, because the stuff under discussion in that context simply cannot be investigated empirically. Kant, is a prime example. Those big-names declared that another person's mind was not the type of thing that you could examine empirically, because the province of the soul did not yield itself to earthly poking and prodding. If those big-names are correct, and minds cannot be investigated, by their very nature, we would expect efforts in that direction to fail-to-produce the convergence-of-ideas characteristic of successful science.
5) We can imagine a world in which those big-names are correct. We can imagine a world in which many types of things can be investigated empirically, but not minds, and in which all attempts to produce a science of the mind would fail pathetically.
6) The above view has had a virtual strangle hold on Western thinking for centuries. However, in the late 1800's a few serious scholars started thinking that "science of psychology" might be given a go, to see how it went. They were widely dismissed, not allowed to hold their heads high in either scientific circles or philosophical ones.
7) And that's where we find ourselves. If a science of psychology is possible, then de facto the subject matter of psychology is some swath of empirically investigatable happenings, about which a community of investigators would eventually reach a consensus as the scientific process takes its course. We might not live in such a world, but we won't know without trying it. A science of ether winds never worked out. The attempted science of medieval humours was a bust. A science of studying bumps-on-people's-heads has been roundly rejected. All sorts of attempted sciences have not worked out over the years. But the science of the mind seems to be doing reasonably well. Either that progress is an illusion, and empirical-psychologists will soon go the way of the phrenologists, or that progress is evidence that the big-names who thought of "mind" as inherently uninvestigatable were wrong on a very fundamental level.
If you are to study a romantic partner's mind in order to become intimate with her, then her mind must be something that can be studied. If I am to study your feeling of intimacy, then your feeling-of-intimacy must be something that can be studied. And so on, and so forth. Whatever methods and categories that leads us two, such is the stuff of the science of psychology, whether it matches any of our preconceptions, or not.
Best,
Eric











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

On Mon, Feb 22, 2016 at 7:13 PM, Russ Abbott <[hidden email]<mailto:[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<https://www.researchgate.net/publication/281409844_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]<mailto:[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]<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]<mailto:[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<https://www.researchgate.net/publication/281409844_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]<mailto:[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]

Oooooh, I like this game!

I admit all of the observations, though I might rephrase some of it a bit if I were being really anal. Most obviously, instead of saying the man "looks tense and frustrated" I might say something about his "frustration being easily discernible." That would imply that his frustration was out there in the world, to be observed by anyone who took the time and knew what to look for.

As for the conclusions, the only part that I would take issue with would be the totally unnecessary speculation that he "retained a visual image of the map." I might say instead that his behavior had "become a reliable function of the lines on the map." If asked to elaborate I would point out that there are many ways in which that could happen. One could, for example, imagine designing a computer program that visually analyzed a map, retained the inputs from that "vision" and stored them, so that at a later time it could consult the map as if it were consulting the original vision. One could also, presumably, imagine a computer program that visually analyzed the map and created a set of rules that could be followed to arrive at destination with no retention of anything at all that was visual about the map. Presumably one could imagine several things in between. With that in mind, I would assert that, at best, "retention of a visual image" is a hypothesized explanation for the observed events, not an observed event in its own right. I might also add that I suspect any scientific implications of that hypothesized explanation would not hold. And finally I would point out that it is, more likely, "retention of a visual image" is porting in a lot of unscientific dualism.

I think that covered all the questions, though it did not do it in a neatly numbered manner.

Please let me know if more is needed to continue this experiment.

Best,

Eric

On Mon, Feb 29, 2016 at 4:44 AM, John Kennison <[hidden email]> wrote:

Hi, Russ, Eric, Nick, et al,

I hope you will humor me and carry out my request to help me get a clearer sense of your exchanges. Below, I present a series of observations about a man who is driving a car followed by a conclusion that one might draw. I am asking each of you whether the conclusion might be considered a scientific conclusion. Moreover, which of the statements in the "series of observations" are:
(1) Scientifically meaningful.
(2) Might be scientifically meaningful if some of the terms were further defined.
(3) Are not scientifically meaningful.
I would also like each of you to explain the basis for your answers.

Then I would ask each of you whether there is a valid non-scientific way of reaching the same conclusion and to discuss this briefly.

Observations
Suppose it is reported that a person driving a car looks tense and frustrated. His blood pressure is well above what is normal for him. He has driven along the same stretch of road three times in the last 10 minutes. He pulls over and consults a map. Then he calms down. His blood pressure returns to a normal level. He drives on and, over the next two hours, he does not drive along that stretch of road again.

Conclusions
Based on this information, it is concluded that it is likely that there was a destination point he was trying to reach. He was frustrated because he was not making progress in reaching the destination. By consulting the map, he was able to find his way to the desired point. Moreover, he retained a visual image of the map and this image helped him find his way.


________________________________________
From: Friam [[hidden email]] on behalf of Russ Abbott [[hidden email]]
Sent: Sunday, February 28, 2016 10:42 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Subjectivity and intimacy (lost in the weeks?)

Eric: 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?

Russ: When I use terms like "experiencing" or "visual experience" you seem to say that my language lacks meaning. You just used those terms. What do you mean by them?

On Sun, Feb 28, 2016 at 3:44 PM Eric Charles <[hidden email]<mailto:[hidden email]>> wrote:
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




-----------
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]">[phone]   fax: <a href="tel:%28202%29%20885-1190" value="[phone]">[phone]
email: [hidden email]<mailto:[hidden email]>

On Sat, Feb 27, 2016 at 2:24 PM, Frank Wimberly <[hidden email]<mailto:[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]<mailto:[hidden email]>     [hidden email]<mailto:[hidden email]>
Phone:  <a href="tel:%28505%29%20995-8715" value="[phone]">[phone]<tel:%28505%29%20995-8715>      Cell:  <a href="tel:%28505%29%20670-9918" value="[phone]">[phone]<tel:%28505%29%20670-9918>

From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]<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]">[phone]<tel:%28202%29%20885-3867>   fax: <a href="tel:%28202%29%20885-1190" value="[phone]">[phone]<tel:%28202%29%20885-1190>
email: [hidden email]<mailto:[hidden email]>

On Sat, Feb 27, 2016 at 1:35 PM, Russ Abbott <[hidden email]<mailto:[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]<mailto:[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]">[phone]<tel:%28202%29%20885-3867>   fax: <a href="tel:%28202%29%20885-1190" value="[phone]">[phone]<tel:%28202%29%20885-1190>
email: [hidden email]<mailto:[hidden email]>

On Sat, Feb 27, 2016 at 2:02 AM, Russ Abbott <[hidden email]<mailto:[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]<mailto:[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]<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]<mailto:[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]<mailto:[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]">[phone]<tel:%28202%29%20885-3867>   fax: <a href="tel:%28202%29%20885-1190" value="[phone]">[phone]<tel:%28202%29%20885-1190>
email: [hidden email]<mailto:[hidden email]>

On Thu, Feb 25, 2016 at 11:10 PM, Russ Abbott <[hidden email]<mailto:[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]<mailto:[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]">[phone]<tel:%28202%29%20885-3867>   fax: <a href="tel:%28202%29%20885-1190" value="[phone]">[phone]<tel:%28202%29%20885-1190>
email: [hidden email]<mailto:[hidden email]>

On Thu, Feb 25, 2016 at 1:29 AM, Nick Thompson <[hidden email]<mailto:[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]<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]<mailto:[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]<mailto:[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]<mailto:[hidden email]>> wrote:
Russ said: "Eric's point that the world must be a certain way if we are to do science doesn't make sense to me. If Schrodinger, Heisenberg, etc. thought like that they would have denied the two-slit experiments, and quantum mechanics wouldn't exist. Science (as you all know) is fundamentally empirical. You can't demand that the world be a certain way so that it's easier to do science."
Exactly! Let me try another tact.
1) We could imagine (with various levels of clarity) any number of worlds in which things worked differently from each other.
2) "Doing science" is largely a process of trying to figure out which of those worlds we live in, by searching for the best way to divide up empirical evidence, so that it is reliable and can be agreed up. (Peirce was particularly fascinated with the advances made in 18th century chemistry.) Scientists search for more and more stable ways to view the world, i.e., ways which stand up to more and more empirical scrutiny. (Early attempts at the periodic table, though imperfect, serve as an excellent example of this, leading to countless confirmatory experiments, including the correct prediction of the properties of yet-to-be-isolated elements.)

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

4) Many important big-name people have declared that a science of psychology is impossible, because the stuff under discussion in that context simply cannot be investigated empirically. Kant, is a prime example. Those big-names declared that another person's mind was not the type of thing that you could examine empirically, because the province of the soul did not yield itself to earthly poking and prodding. If those big-names are correct, and minds cannot be investigated, by their very nature, we would expect efforts in that direction to fail-to-produce the convergence-of-ideas characteristic of successful science.
5) We can imagine a world in which those big-names are correct. We can imagine a world in which many types of things can be investigated empirically, but not minds, and in which all attempts to produce a science of the mind would fail pathetically.
6) The above view has had a virtual strangle hold on Western thinking for centuries. However, in the late 1800's a few serious scholars started thinking that "science of psychology" might be given a go, to see how it went. They were widely dismissed, not allowed to hold their heads high in either scientific circles or philosophical ones.
7) And that's where we find ourselves. If a science of psychology is possible, then de facto the subject matter of psychology is some swath of empirically investigatable happenings, about which a community of investigators would eventually reach a consensus as the scientific process takes its course. We might not live in such a world, but we won't know without trying it. A science of ether winds never worked out. The attempted science of medieval humours was a bust. A science of studying bumps-on-people's-heads has been roundly rejected. All sorts of attempted sciences have not worked out over the years. But the science of the mind seems to be doing reasonably well. Either that progress is an illusion, and empirical-psychologists will soon go the way of the phrenologists, or that progress is evidence that the big-names who thought of "mind" as inherently uninvestigatable were wrong on a very fundamental level.
If you are to study a romantic partner's mind in order to become intimate with her, then her mind must be something that can be studied. If I am to study your feeling of intimacy, then your feeling-of-intimacy must be something that can be studied. And so on, and so forth. Whatever methods and categories that leads us two, such is the stuff of the science of psychology, whether it matches any of our preconceptions, or not.
Best,
Eric











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

On Mon, Feb 22, 2016 at 7:13 PM, Russ Abbott <[hidden email]<mailto:[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<https://www.researchgate.net/publication/281409844_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]<mailto:[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]<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]<mailto:[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<https://www.researchgate.net/publication/281409844_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]<mailto:[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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[Roger Critchlow-2]

There's an article in this weekend's issue of the NYTimes Sunday Magazine about what Google has learned about how groups work and fail to work.  One of the test instruments used presents pictures of peoples' eyes and asks what the people are feeling.  Ah, the "Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test".

 -- rec --

On Mon, Feb 29, 2016 at 12:44 PM, Eric Charles <[hidden email]> wrote:

Oooooh, I like this game!

I admit all of the observations, though I might rephrase some of it a bit if I were being really anal. Most obviously, instead of saying the man "looks tense and frustrated" I might say something about his "frustration being easily discernible." That would imply that his frustration was out there in the world, to be observed by anyone who took the time and knew what to look for.

As for the conclusions, the only part that I would take issue with would be the totally unnecessary speculation that he "retained a visual image of the map." I might say instead that his behavior had "become a reliable function of the lines on the map." If asked to elaborate I would point out that there are many ways in which that could happen. One could, for example, imagine designing a computer program that visually analyzed a map, retained the inputs from that "vision" and stored them, so that at a later time it could consult the map as if it were consulting the original vision. One could also, presumably, imagine a computer program that visually analyzed the map and created a set of rules that could be followed to arrive at destination with no retention of anything at all that was visual about the map. Presumably one could imagine several things in between. With that in mind, I would assert that, at best, "retention of a visual image" is a hypothesized explanation for the observed events, not an observed event in its own right. I might also add that I suspect any scientific implications of that hypothesized explanation would not hold. And finally I would point out that it is, more likely, "retention of a visual image" is porting in a lot of unscientific dualism.

I think that covered all the questions, though it did not do it in a neatly numbered manner.

Please let me know if more is needed to continue this experiment.

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 29, 2016 at 4:44 AM, John Kennison <[hidden email]> wrote:

Hi, Russ, Eric, Nick, et al,

I hope you will humor me and carry out my request to help me get a clearer sense of your exchanges. Below, I present a series of observations about a man who is driving a car followed by a conclusion that one might draw. I am asking each of you whether the conclusion might be considered a scientific conclusion. Moreover, which of the statements in the "series of observations" are:
(1) Scientifically meaningful.
(2) Might be scientifically meaningful if some of the terms were further defined.
(3) Are not scientifically meaningful.
I would also like each of you to explain the basis for your answers.

Then I would ask each of you whether there is a valid non-scientific way of reaching the same conclusion and to discuss this briefly.

Observations
Suppose it is reported that a person driving a car looks tense and frustrated. His blood pressure is well above what is normal for him. He has driven along the same stretch of road three times in the last 10 minutes. He pulls over and consults a map. Then he calms down. His blood pressure returns to a normal level. He drives on and, over the next two hours, he does not drive along that stretch of road again.

Conclusions
Based on this information, it is concluded that it is likely that there was a destination point he was trying to reach. He was frustrated because he was not making progress in reaching the destination. By consulting the map, he was able to find his way to the desired point. Moreover, he retained a visual image of the map and this image helped him find his way.


________________________________________
From: Friam [[hidden email]] on behalf of Russ Abbott [[hidden email]]
Sent: Sunday, February 28, 2016 10:42 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Subjectivity and intimacy (lost in the weeks?)

Eric: 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?

Russ: When I use terms like "experiencing" or "visual experience" you seem to say that my language lacks meaning. You just used those terms. What do you mean by them?

On Sun, Feb 28, 2016 at 3:44 PM Eric Charles <[hidden email]<mailto:[hidden email]>> wrote:
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




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

On Sat, Feb 27, 2016 at 2:24 PM, Frank Wimberly <[hidden email]<mailto:[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]<mailto:[hidden email]>     [hidden email]<mailto:[hidden email]>
Phone:  <a href="tel:%28505%29%20995-8715" value="[phone]" target="_blank">[phone]<tel:%28505%29%20995-8715>      Cell:  <a href="tel:%28505%29%20670-9918" value="[phone]" target="_blank">[phone]<tel:%28505%29%20670-9918>

From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]<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]<tel:%28202%29%20885-3867>   fax: <a href="tel:%28202%29%20885-1190" value="[phone]" target="_blank">[phone]<tel:%28202%29%20885-1190>
email: [hidden email]<mailto:[hidden email]>

On Sat, Feb 27, 2016 at 1:35 PM, Russ Abbott <[hidden email]<mailto:[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]<mailto:[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]<tel:%28202%29%20885-3867>   fax: <a href="tel:%28202%29%20885-1190" value="[phone]" target="_blank">[phone]<tel:%28202%29%20885-1190>
email: [hidden email]<mailto:[hidden email]>

On Sat, Feb 27, 2016 at 2:02 AM, Russ Abbott <[hidden email]<mailto:[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]<mailto:[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]<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]<mailto:[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]<mailto:[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]<tel:%28202%29%20885-3867>   fax: <a href="tel:%28202%29%20885-1190" value="[phone]" target="_blank">[phone]<tel:%28202%29%20885-1190>
email: [hidden email]<mailto:[hidden email]>

On Thu, Feb 25, 2016 at 11:10 PM, Russ Abbott <[hidden email]<mailto:[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]<mailto:[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]<tel:%28202%29%20885-3867>   fax: <a href="tel:%28202%29%20885-1190" value="[phone]" target="_blank">[phone]<tel:%28202%29%20885-1190>
email: [hidden email]<mailto:[hidden email]>

On Thu, Feb 25, 2016 at 1:29 AM, Nick Thompson <[hidden email]<mailto:[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]<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]<mailto:[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]<mailto:[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]<mailto:[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]<tel:%28202%29%20885-3867>   fax: <a href="tel:%28202%29%20885-1190" value="[phone]" target="_blank">[phone]<tel:%28202%29%20885-1190>
email: [hidden email]<mailto:[hidden email]>

On Mon, Feb 22, 2016 at 7:13 PM, Russ Abbott <[hidden email]<mailto:[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<https://www.researchgate.net/publication/281409844_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]<mailto:[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]<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]<mailto:[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<https://www.researchgate.net/publication/281409844_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]<mailto:[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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[Marcus G. Daniels]

Why should less productive individuals enjoy “psychological safety” if they aren’t essential to getting the job done?    Perhaps so when they are let go, they will be so surprised and disoriented they won’t act in an organized aggressive fashion towards those that are essential and to management?  Something a little creepy about that article..

 

From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Roger Critchlow
Sent: Monday, February 29, 2016 11:06 AM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Subjectivity and intimacy (lost in the weeks?)

 

There's an article in this weekend's issue of the NYTimes Sunday Magazine about what Google has learned about how groups work and fail to work.  One of the test instruments used presents pictures of peoples' eyes and asks what the people are feeling.  Ah, the "Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test".

 

 -- rec --

 

On Mon, Feb 29, 2016 at 12:44 PM, Eric Charles <[hidden email]> wrote:

Oooooh, I like this game!

I admit all of the observations, though I might rephrase some of it a bit if I were being really anal. Most obviously, instead of saying the man "looks tense and frustrated" I might say something about his "frustration being easily discernible." That would imply that his frustration was out there in the world, to be observed by anyone who took the time and knew what to look for.

As for the conclusions, the only part that I would take issue with would be the totally unnecessary speculation that he "retained a visual image of the map." I might say instead that his behavior had "become a reliable function of the lines on the map." If asked to elaborate I would point out that there are many ways in which that could happen. One could, for example, imagine designing a computer program that visually analyzed a map, retained the inputs from that "vision" and stored them, so that at a later time it could consult the map as if it were consulting the original vision. One could also, presumably, imagine a computer program that visually analyzed the map and created a set of rules that could be followed to arrive at destination with no retention of anything at all that was visual about the map. Presumably one could imagine several things in between. With that in mind, I would assert that, at best, "retention of a visual image" is a hypothesized explanation for the observed events, not an observed event in its own right. I might also add that I suspect any scientific implications of that hypothesized explanation would not hold. And finally I would point out that it is, more likely, "retention of a visual image" is porting in a lot of unscientific dualism.

I think that covered all the questions, though it did not do it in a neatly numbered manner.

Please let me know if more is needed to continue this experiment.

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 29, 2016 at 4:44 AM, John Kennison <[hidden email]> wrote:

Hi, Russ, Eric, Nick, et al,

I hope you will humor me and carry out my request to help me get a clearer sense of your exchanges. Below, I present a series of observations about a man who is driving a car followed by a conclusion that one might draw. I am asking each of you whether the conclusion might be considered a scientific conclusion. Moreover, which of the statements in the "series of observations" are:
(1) Scientifically meaningful.
(2) Might be scientifically meaningful if some of the terms were further defined.
(3) Are not scientifically meaningful.
I would also like each of you to explain the basis for your answers.

Then I would ask each of you whether there is a valid non-scientific way of reaching the same conclusion and to discuss this briefly.

Observations
Suppose it is reported that a person driving a car looks tense and frustrated. His blood pressure is well above what is normal for him. He has driven along the same stretch of road three times in the last 10 minutes. He pulls over and consults a map. Then he calms down. His blood pressure returns to a normal level. He drives on and, over the next two hours, he does not drive along that stretch of road again.

Conclusions
Based on this information, it is concluded that it is likely that there was a destination point he was trying to reach. He was frustrated because he was not making progress in reaching the destination. By consulting the map, he was able to find his way to the desired point. Moreover, he retained a visual image of the map and this image helped him find his way.


________________________________________
From: Friam [[hidden email]] on behalf of Russ Abbott [[hidden email]]
Sent: Sunday, February 28, 2016 10:42 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Subjectivity and intimacy (lost in the weeks?)

Eric: 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?

Russ: When I use terms like "experiencing" or "visual experience" you seem to say that my language lacks meaning. You just used those terms. What do you mean by them?

On Sun, Feb 28, 2016 at 3:44 PM Eric Charles <[hidden email]<mailto:[hidden email]>> wrote:
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




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

On Sat, Feb 27, 2016 at 2:24 PM, Frank Wimberly <[hidden email]<mailto:[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]<mailto:[hidden email]>     [hidden email]<mailto:[hidden email]>
Phone:  <a href="tel:%28505%29%20995-8715" target="_blank">[phone]<<a href="tel:%28505%29%20995-8715">tel:%28505%29%20995-8715>      Cell:  <a href="tel:%28505%29%20670-9918" target="_blank">[phone]<<a href="tel:%28505%29%20670-9918">tel:%28505%29%20670-9918>

From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]<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" target="_blank">[phone]<<a href="tel:%28202%29%20885-3867">tel:%28202%29%20885-3867>   fax: <a href="tel:%28202%29%20885-1190" target="_blank">[phone]<<a href="tel:%28202%29%20885-1190">tel:%28202%29%20885-1190>
email: [hidden email]<mailto:[hidden email]>

On Sat, Feb 27, 2016 at 1:35 PM, Russ Abbott <[hidden email]<mailto:[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]<mailto:[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]<<a href="tel:%28202%29%20885-3867">tel:%28202%29%20885-3867>   fax: <a href="tel:%28202%29%20885-1190" target="_blank">[phone]<<a href="tel:%28202%29%20885-1190">tel:%28202%29%20885-1190>
email: [hidden email]<mailto:[hidden email]>

On Sat, Feb 27, 2016 at 2:02 AM, Russ Abbott <[hidden email]<mailto:[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]<mailto:[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]<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]<mailto:[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]<mailto:[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]<<a href="tel:%28202%29%20885-3867">tel:%28202%29%20885-3867>   fax: <a href="tel:%28202%29%20885-1190" target="_blank">[phone]<<a href="tel:%28202%29%20885-1190">tel:%28202%29%20885-1190>
email: [hidden email]<mailto:[hidden email]>

On Thu, Feb 25, 2016 at 11:10 PM, Russ Abbott <[hidden email]<mailto:[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]<mailto:[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]<<a href="tel:%28202%29%20885-3867">tel:%28202%29%20885-3867>   fax: <a href="tel:%28202%29%20885-1190" target="_blank">[phone]<<a href="tel:%28202%29%20885-1190">tel:%28202%29%20885-1190>
email: [hidden email]<mailto:[hidden email]>

On Thu, Feb 25, 2016 at 1:29 AM, Nick Thompson <[hidden email]<mailto:[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]<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]<mailto:[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]<mailto:[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]<mailto:[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]<<a href="tel:%28202%29%20885-3867">tel:%28202%29%20885-3867>   fax: <a href="tel:%28202%29%20885-1190" target="_blank">[phone]<<a href="tel:%28202%29%20885-1190">tel:%28202%29%20885-1190>
email: [hidden email]<mailto:[hidden email]>

On Mon, Feb 22, 2016 at 7:13 PM, Russ Abbott <[hidden email]<mailto:[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<https://www.researchgate.net/publication/281409844_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]<mailto:[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]<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]<mailto:[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<https://www.researchgate.net/publication/281409844_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]<mailto:[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]

John,

I don't think yours is a well formed question.  All observations are
scientific, if they are in principle repeatable.  Now, here we strike the
first problem because  in point of fact, no observation is repeatable.  (We
never step in the same stream twice, etc.)   So, the only way we can
actually approach a question scientifically is raise the question to a level
of abstraction where repeatability is a possibility.  So, if we are asking,
"What are humans doing when they lose their ways on country roads, consult
maps, and then find their ways again, .   What is going on?    Well, the
circumstances make it difficult to design an observational program (lurk by
detours in country roads with binoculars?) or an experiment (put people in
instrumented cars and then randomly switch the road signs around?).  

So, scientists abstract the problem the problem even further.  Let's give
large numbers of subjects drawings of many sets of three dimensional
objects.  The question is, are the two members of each set the same figure
in different rotations, or two different figures.  In other words, if one
were holding the objects in one's hands, could you manipulate object one
into a position that it would appear exactly the same as object two.  The
scientific question is, "what is the subject doing as he answers the
question?"    Russ would say, "he is doing rotations in his head".  And the
question before us is,  does that account add anything to a less
theory-laden account such as, "He is answering the question, 'if I had the
objects in my hands, could I manipulate one to look exactly like the other"
Russ, I think, will quickly point to research that shows that the visual
cortex is highly active when the subjects are answering such questions; and
I will quickly answer that I stipulate that the brain is involved and that
we should look at the brain to determine how the brain makes the necessary
calculations, but there is no a priori reason to believe that the brain's
methods are the same as the subjects methods would be if the subject had the
objects in his hands.   So, suddenly we hit on what might well be an
abstract scientific question concerning which repeatable data could be
collected:  What is the evidence for an isomorphism between the brain's
activity while "answering" is going on in the test situation and the
subject's activities when he actually has the objects in hand.  But notice
that this is a question about the brain's activities and the subject's
activities, and "the mind" has dropped out of the equation.  

I have to go.  Best I could do on short notice.  I think perhaps the most
interesting thing I have said here is, "No singular observation is ever
scientific; to be scientific, all observations have to be part of an
experimental program concerning an abstraction."  I wonder if I believe it.


Nick


 





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


-----Original Message-----
From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of John Kennison
Sent: Monday, February 29, 2016 2:45 AM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Subjectivity and intimacy (lost in the weeks?)

Hi, Russ, Eric, Nick, et al,

I hope you will humor me and carry out my request to help me get a clearer
sense of your exchanges. Below, I present a series of observations about a
man who is driving a car followed by a conclusion that one might draw. I am
asking each of you whether the conclusion might be considered a scientific
conclusion. Moreover, which of the statements in the "series of
observations" are:
(1) Scientifically meaningful.
(2) Might be scientifically meaningful if some of the terms were further
defined.
(3) Are not scientifically meaningful.
I would also like each of you to explain the basis for your answers.

Then I would ask each of you whether there is a valid non-scientific way of
reaching the same conclusion and to discuss this briefly.

Observations
Suppose it is reported that a person driving a car looks tense and
frustrated. His blood pressure is well above what is normal for him. He has
driven along the same stretch of road three times in the last 10 minutes. He
pulls over and consults a map. Then he calms down. His blood pressure
returns to a normal level. He drives on and, over the next two hours, he
does not drive along that stretch of road again.

Conclusions
Based on this information, it is concluded that it is likely that there was
a destination point he was trying to reach. He was frustrated because he was
not making progress in reaching the destination. By consulting the map, he
was able to find his way to the desired point. Moreover, he retained a
visual image of the map and this image helped him find his way.


________________________________________
From: Friam [[hidden email]] on behalf of Russ Abbott
[[hidden email]]
Sent: Sunday, February 28, 2016 10:42 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Subjectivity and intimacy (lost in the weeks?)

Eric: 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?

Russ: When I use terms like "experiencing" or "visual experience" you seem
to say that my language lacks meaning. You just used those terms. What do
you mean by them?

On Sun, Feb 28, 2016 at 3:44 PM Eric Charles
<[hidden email]<mailto:[hidden email]>>
wrote:
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




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

On Sat, Feb 27, 2016 at 2:24 PM, Frank Wimberly
<[hidden email]<mailto:[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]<mailto:[hidden email]>
[hidden email]<mailto:[hidden email]>
Phone:  [phone]<tel:%28505%29%20995-8715>      Cell:  (505)
670-9918<tel:%28505%29%20670-9918>

From: Friam
[mailto:[hidden email]<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]<tel:%28202%29%20885-3867>   fax: (202)
885-1190<tel:%28202%29%20885-1190>
email: [hidden email]<mailto:[hidden email]>

On Sat, Feb 27, 2016 at 1:35 PM, Russ Abbott
<[hidden email]<mailto:[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]<mailto:[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]<tel:%28202%29%20885-3867>   fax: (202)
885-1190<tel:%28202%29%20885-1190>
email: [hidden email]<mailto:[hidden email]>

On Sat, Feb 27, 2016 at 2:02 AM, Russ Abbott
<[hidden email]<mailto:[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]<mailto:[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]<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]<mailto:[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]<mailto:[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]<tel:%28202%29%20885-3867>   fax: (202)
885-1190<tel:%28202%29%20885-1190>
email: [hidden email]<mailto:[hidden email]>

On Thu, Feb 25, 2016 at 11:10 PM, Russ Abbott
<[hidden email]<mailto:[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]<mailto:[hidden email]>>
wrote:
Russ,
I mulled over replying a few times, but wasn't sure what to say. However, by
restating your genuine interest in my response, I now feel like a jack ass
for not responding earilier, so here it goes. Some of these answers might
not be at all satisfying, but I will do my best so long as you accept the
caveat that I am uncertain if some of it will really answer your questions.


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

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

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

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

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

"I don't expect a breakthrough that will suddenly crack "the hard problem of
consciousness. More likely we will be able to say more and more accurately
what sort of subjective experience someone is having by looking at what
their brain is doing."
This is probably the difficult part of your comment to respond to. I simply
don't believe there is a "hard problem." To the extent that I even
understand what you are talking about there, I think the brain is one part
of a much larger system that we would need to examine. That is not to say
that examining the brain adds nothing, but to say that an exclusive focus on
the brain misrepresents the phenomena of interest.
To elaborate a bit: Traditional philosophy has addressed been largely
oriented towards "internalizing" psychological processes. The Cartesian
claim (an extension of the Platonic claim) was that we only experience the
world that plays out in the theater of our ghost-souls. "Why do I experience
the grass as green?" you ask. "Because the greenness is present in the
theater of your soul," is the answer. This, of course, doesn't solve
anything. Saying that we only experience the world that plays out in the
theater of brains has almost all of the same problems, and should be
rejected. At the least, it adds nothing.

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







-----------
Eric P. Charles, Ph.D.
Lab Manager
Center for Teaching, Research, and Learning American University, Hurst Hall
Room 203A
4400 Massachusetts Avenue, N.W.
Washington, DC 20016
phone: [phone]<tel:%28202%29%20885-3867>   fax: (202)
885-1190<tel:%28202%29%20885-1190>
email: [hidden email]<mailto:[hidden email]>

On Thu, Feb 25, 2016 at 1:29 AM, Nick Thompson
<[hidden email]<mailto:[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]<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]<mailto:[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]<mailto:[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]<mailto:[hidden email]>>
wrote:
Russ said: "Eric's point that the world must be a certain way if we are to
do science doesn't make sense to me. If Schrodinger, Heisenberg, etc.
thought like that they would have denied the two-slit experiments, and
quantum mechanics wouldn't exist. Science (as you all know) is fundamentally
empirical. You can't demand that the world be a certain way so that it's
easier to do science."
Exactly! Let me try another tact.
1) We could imagine (with various levels of clarity) any number of worlds in
which things worked differently from each other.
2) "Doing science" is largely a process of trying to figure out which of
those worlds we live in, by searching for the best way to divide up
empirical evidence, so that it is reliable and can be agreed up. (Peirce was
particularly fascinated with the advances made in 18th century chemistry.)
Scientists search for more and more stable ways to view the world, i.e.,
ways which stand up to more and more empirical scrutiny. (Early attempts at
the periodic table, though imperfect, serve as an excellent example of this,
leading to countless confirmatory experiments, including the correct
prediction of the properties of yet-to-be-isolated elements.)

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

4) Many important big-name people have declared that a science of psychology
is impossible, because the stuff under discussion in that context simply
cannot be investigated empirically. Kant, is a prime example. Those
big-names declared that another person's mind was not the type of thing that
you could examine empirically, because the province of the soul did not
yield itself to earthly poking and prodding. If those big-names are correct,
and minds cannot be investigated, by their very nature, we would expect
efforts in that direction to fail-to-produce the convergence-of-ideas
characteristic of successful science.
5) We can imagine a world in which those big-names are correct. We can
imagine a world in which many types of things can be investigated
empirically, but not minds, and in which all attempts to produce a science
of the mind would fail pathetically.
6) The above view has had a virtual strangle hold on Western thinking for
centuries. However, in the late 1800's a few serious scholars started
thinking that "science of psychology" might be given a go, to see how it
went. They were widely dismissed, not allowed to hold their heads high in
either scientific circles or philosophical ones.
7) And that's where we find ourselves. If a science of psychology is
possible, then de facto the subject matter of psychology is some swath of
empirically investigatable happenings, about which a community of
investigators would eventually reach a consensus as the scientific process
takes its course. We might not live in such a world, but we won't know
without trying it. A science of ether winds never worked out. The attempted
science of medieval humours was a bust. A science of studying
bumps-on-people's-heads has been roundly rejected. All sorts of attempted
sciences have not worked out over the years. But the science of the mind
seems to be doing reasonably well. Either that progress is an illusion, and
empirical-psychologists will soon go the way of the phrenologists, or that
progress is evidence that the big-names who thought of "mind" as inherently
uninvestigatable were wrong on a very fundamental level.
If you are to study a romantic partner's mind in order to become intimate
with her, then her mind must be something that can be studied. If I am to
study your feeling of intimacy, then your feeling-of-intimacy must be
something that can be studied. And so on, and so forth. Whatever methods and
categories that leads us two, such is the stuff of the science of
psychology, whether it matches any of our preconceptions, or not.
Best,
Eric











-----------
Eric P. Charles, Ph.D.
Lab Manager
Center for Teaching, Research, and Learning American University, Hurst Hall
Room 203A
4400 Massachusetts Avenue, N.W.
Washington, DC 20016
phone: [phone]<tel:%28202%29%20885-3867>   fax: (202)
885-1190<tel:%28202%29%20885-1190>
email: [hidden email]<mailto:[hidden email]>

On Mon, Feb 22, 2016 at 7:13 PM, Russ Abbott
<[hidden email]<mailto:[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<https://www.researchgate.net/publication/281409844_Intentionality_is_t
he_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]<mailto:[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]<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]<mailto:[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<https://www.researchgate.net/publication/281409844_Intentionality_is_t
he_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]<mailto:[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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[gepr]

Great answer!  However, it passes the buck to a new question.  You seem to be implying that the only things that are "scientifically meaningful" are the things that _construct_ science.  John's game doesn't (necessarily) involve the construction of scientific meaning.  I read it purely as _applied science_ ... the usage of scientific knowledge previously constructed.  Hence, for me, all those observations are (1) scientifically meaningful.

To boot, if the system were instrumented, this new datum could be added to the siblings, making it a repetition of previous experiments.  So, had John laid that out explicitly, then this would be a candidate for the construction of scientific knowledge. (He did _imply_ it by mentioning things like blood pressure, which is difficult to judge without instrumentation.

The new question is: Is using scientific knowledge fundamentally distinct from building scientific knowledge?  But more related to Russ' intentions for the thread, the question becomes "How much intra-organism hysteresis can our scientific methods handle?"  Or, the dual question: To what extent can we deal with inter-individual variation?  It's this topic, as a whole, and this last question, in particular, that force me to argue that medicine is not science.  It's engineering ... aka applied science.

On 02/29/2016 10:44 AM, Nick Thompson wrote:

>
> I don't think yours is a well formed question.  All observations are
> scientific, if they are in principle repeatable.  Now, here we strike the
> first problem because  in point of fact, no observation is repeatable.  (We
> never step in the same stream twice, etc.)   So, the only way we can
> actually approach a question scientifically is raise the question to a level
> of abstraction where repeatability is a possibility.  So, if we are asking,
> "What are humans doing when they lose their ways on country roads, consult
> maps, and then find their ways again, .   What is going on?    Well, the
> circumstances make it difficult to design an observational program (lurk by
> detours in country roads with binoculars?) or an experiment (put people in
> instrumented cars and then randomly switch the road signs around?).
>
> So, scientists abstract the problem the problem even further.
>[...]
> subject's activities when he actually has the objects in hand.  But notice
> that this is a question about the brain's activities and the subject's
> activities, and "the mind" has dropped out of the equation.
>
> I have to go.  Best I could do on short notice.  I think perhaps the most
> interesting thing I have said here is, "No singular observation is ever
> scientific; to be scientific, all observations have to be part of an
> experimental program concerning an abstraction."  I wonder if I believe it.

--
⇔ glen

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[gepr]

I suppose REC didn't include the link so as to avoid implicitly encouraging others to read the article.  I have no such scruples:

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/28/magazine/what-google-learned-from-its-quest-to-build-the-perfect-team.html

On 02/29/2016 10:18 AM, Marcus Daniels wrote:
> Why should less productive individuals enjoy “psychological safety” if they aren’t essential to getting the job done?

I think the answer to this is because it's not a zero-sum game (or... they don't think it's zero sum).  What is lost by ensuring psychological safety for the less productive, or even the negative productive, is more than (not ≥, but >) compensated for by the benefits.  Individually, of course, we all have to decide how much we'll indulge our coworkers' prattling on about useless junk, damaging our individual sense of fulfillment.  What type of prospective employee would sacrifice personal measures of productivity for group measures?

--
⇔ glen

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[Nick Thompson]

Hi, Glen,

 

See larding below:

 

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

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

 

 

-----Original Message-----
From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of glen
Sent: Monday, February 29, 2016 2:15 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Subjectivity and intimacy (lost in the weeks?)

 

 

Great answer!  However, it passes the buck to a new question.  You seem to be implying that the only things that are "scientifically meaningful" are the things that _construct_ science.  John's game doesn't (necessarily) involve the construction of scientific meaning.  I read it purely as _applied science_ ... the usage of scientific knowledge previously constructed.  Hence, for me, all those observations are (1) scientifically meaningful.

[NST==>Glen.  I started to write a long cranky note, claiming to disagree with this, but then I realized that I didn’t understand it.  Unless, you are arguing … is this it? … that we can use a scientific abstraction to interpret an observation which we could not use to construct a scientific abstraction. <==nst]   I don’t think that is what John had in mind, but we will have to see.  I

 

 

To boot, if the system were instrumented, this new datum could be added to the siblings, making it a repetition of previous experiments.  So, had John laid that out explicitly, then this would be a candidate for the construction of scientific knowledge. (He did _imply_ it by mentioning things like blood pressure, which is difficult to judge without instrumentation.

[NST==>Well we would need experimental or observational “control”, right?  That’s how one observation becomes a sibling to another.  <==nst]

 

The new question is: Is using scientific knowledge fundamentally distinct from building scientific knowledge?

[NST==>Mmmmmmm!  That IS a question. <==nst]

 But more related to Russ' intentions for the thread, the question becomes "How much intra-organism hysteresis can our scientific methods handle?"  Or, the dual question: To what extent can we deal with inter-individual variation?  It's this topic, as a whole, and this last question, in particular, that force me to argue that medicine is not science.  It's engineering ... aka applied science.

 

On 02/29/2016 10:44 AM, Nick Thompson wrote:

> 

> I don't think yours is a well formed question.  All observations are

> scientific, if they are in principle repeatable.  Now, here we strike

> the first problem because  in point of fact, no observation is repeatable.  (We

> never step in the same stream twice, etc.)   So, the only way we can

> actually approach a question scientifically is raise the question to a

> level of abstraction where repeatability is a possibility.  So, if we

> are asking, "What are humans doing when they lose their ways on country roads, consult

> maps, and then find their ways again, .   What is going on?    Well, the

> circumstances make it difficult to design an observational program

> (lurk by detours in country roads with binoculars?) or an experiment

> (put people in instrumented cars and then randomly switch the road signs around?).

> 

> So, scientists abstract the problem the problem even further.

>[...]

> subject's activities when he actually has the objects in hand.  But

>notice  that this is a question about the brain's activities and the

>subject's  activities, and "the mind" has dropped out of the equation.

> 

> I have to go.  Best I could do on short notice.  I think perhaps the

> most interesting thing I have said here is, "No singular observation

> is ever scientific; to be scientific, all observations have to be part

> of an experimental program concerning an abstraction."  I wonder if I believe it.

 

--

⇔ glen

 

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[gepr]

On 02/29/2016 03:44 PM, Nick Thompson wrote:
> [NST==>Glen.  I started to write a long cranky note, claiming to disagree with this, but then I realized that I didn’t understand it.  Unless, you are arguing … is this it? … that we can use a scientific abstraction to interpret an observation which we could not use to construct a scientific abstraction. <==nst]   I don’t think that is what John had in mind, but we will have to see.  I

Not sure what happened with your "<==nst]" tag, there.

Yes, that is kindasorta what I meant, except tossing your phrase "scientific abstraction".  Someone who has been brainwa... had exposure to the science behind whatever processes that cause blood pressure increases, "tense" and "frustrated" facial expressions, etc. can process these particular one-off observations as members of a _class_.  That class (explicitly or implicitly established) is what you're calling scientific.  Hence, this particular observation has scientific meaning because it either fits into that class or it does not.

> [NST==>Well we would need experimental or observational “control”, right?  That’s how one observation becomes a sibling to another.  <==nst]

Maybe.  In general, I'd agree that the conditions would have to be well instrumented in order to determine whether it was a member of a unique class or not.  However, even with inadequate controls, you might be able to say that it falls close to _several_ classes.  This is poignant when it seems close to those classes, but doesn't quite fit.  And in that sense, it may well be the kernel that allows or triggers[*] you to form a testable hypothesis.

I think your definition of scientifically meaningful would be bizarre if you didn't include hypothesis formation.  If you're at all engaged in trying to formulate testable hypotheses, it seems reasonable to say your actions/thoughts are scientifically meaningful.  So even if the system weren't instrumented at all, one could still make the argument that it might be scientifically meaningful.

[*] "An abductive trigger is not just an occurrence of which an agent is conscious. It is an occurrence of a type that rises to a second grade of statistical abnormality. It is an event whose occurrence is not only noticed and attended to by the agent; its occurrence is, as we said above, uncharacteristic in some sense." -- Woods & Gabbay, "The Reach of Abduction"

--
⇔ glen

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[Roger Critchlow-2]

By all means, read the article, but it was the idea of reading feelings in pictures of eyes that seemed apropos to the ongoing discussion.

I thought it was clear that Google already knew how to hire productive individuals, the question was why they, reliably productive individuals, made such unpredictably productive teams, and the answer was that teams with people who can't read minds through the eyes become dysfunctional.

And if you google "reading the mind through the eyes" you'll find that the bibliographies are all about diagnosing autism and aspergers, but that's another article, one that probably gets even creepier.

-- rec --

On Mon, Feb 29, 2016 at 6:12 PM, glen <[hidden email]> wrote:

I suppose REC didn't include the link so as to avoid implicitly encouraging others to read the article.  I have no such scruples:

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/28/magazine/what-google-learned-from-its-quest-to-build-the-perfect-team.html

On 02/29/2016 10:18 AM, Marcus Daniels wrote:

Why should less productive individuals enjoy “psychological safety” if they aren’t essential to getting the job done?

I think the answer to this is because it's not a zero-sum game (or... they don't think it's zero sum).  What is lost by ensuring psychological safety for the less productive, or even the negative productive, is more than (not ≥, but >) compensated for by the benefits.  Individually, of course, we all have to decide how much we'll indulge our coworkers' prattling on about useless junk, damaging our individual sense of fulfillment.  What type of prospective employee would sacrifice personal measures of productivity for group measures?

--
⇔ glen

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[Marcus G. Daniels]

“What type of prospective employee would sacrifice personal measures of productivity for group measures?”

 

 

 

What I’m suggesting is that the group measures may not serve the group benefit.   By being sensitive to vulnerability and insensitive to competitive pressures, the whole ship may be put at risk.  Ok, not so much for Google (at least today) – they can burn through a lot of money to wait for teams to become productive.  Smaller organizations may not have that luxury.

 

Marcus

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[Russ Abbott]

This has moved so far beyond what I'm capable of thinking about that I'm lost. (Although I thank Nick for crediting me with pointing out the activity of the visual cortex. Good point -- even though it didn't occur to me to refer to it.)

I'm still way back at a much simpler question. What do Nick and Eric mean when they use the word experience as a noun and as a verb as Eric did in the following? 

whatever you are experiencing, you are experiencing it as somehow akin to a visual experience

Eric actually wrote the preceding not too long ago. 

Or to take a more recent example, Nick wrote, "I don’t think that is what John had in mind." What does Nick mean by "had in mind"?

The point is that both Eric and Nick seem to use subjective experience language fairly freely but at the same time claim that it doesn't mean anything. So my question continues to be what do they mean when they use it.

On Mon, Feb 29, 2016 at 4:49 PM Marcus Daniels <[hidden email]> wrote:

“What type of prospective employee would sacrifice personal measures of productivity for group measures?”

 

 

 

What I’m suggesting is that the group measures may not serve the group benefit.   By being sensitive to vulnerability and insensitive to competitive pressures, the whole ship may be put at risk.  Ok, not so much for Google (at least today) – they can burn through a lot of money to wait for teams to become productive.  Smaller organizations may not have that luxury.

 

Marcus

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[Nick Thompson]

REC ETC,

 

Hi Roger,

 

I see you floating on Boston Harbor, even though I know you aren’t there yet.  Let me know when you finally are, so I can feel less foolish.

 

Reading Minds through the eyes would be, in behavioral terms, just making good use of the behavior that follows when you give another person full eye contact to predict that person’s future behavior.

 

I was interested most in the following:

 

the question was why they, reliably productive individuals, made such unpredictably productive teams,

 

In Dave Wilson’s book, UNTO OTHERS, there is a wonderful story done by a poultry researcher on production in crated chickens.  The tradition way to get a good crate of chickens was to breed individual chickens for productivity.  That got you a crate of nine chickens that had to be debeaked to keep them from killing each other and, even so, were always at each other.  So the researchers decided to breed for crates, rather than for chickens.  Aggression backed off, the chickens didn’t need to debeaked, and crate production rose. 

 

I always thought MBA’s were like chickens.

 

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 Roger Critchlow
Sent: Monday, February 29, 2016 5:35 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Subjectivity and intimacy (lost in the weeks?)

 

By all means, read the article, but it was the idea of reading feelings in pictures of eyes that seemed apropos to the ongoing discussion.

 

I thought it was clear that Google already knew how to hire productive individuals, the question was why they, reliably productive individuals, made such unpredictably productive teams, and the answer was that teams with people who can't read minds through the eyes become dysfunctional.

 

And if you google "reading the mind through the eyes" you'll find that the bibliographies are all about diagnosing autism and aspergers, but that's another article, one that probably gets even creepier.

 

-- rec --

 

On Mon, Feb 29, 2016 at 6:12 PM, glen <[hidden email]> wrote:

I suppose REC didn't include the link so as to avoid implicitly encouraging others to read the article.  I have no such scruples:

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/28/magazine/what-google-learned-from-its-quest-to-build-the-perfect-team.html

On 02/29/2016 10:18 AM, Marcus Daniels wrote:

Why should less productive individuals enjoy “psychological safety” if they aren’t essential to getting the job done?

I think the answer to this is because it's not a zero-sum game (or... they don't think it's zero sum).  What is lost by ensuring psychological safety for the less productive, or even the negative productive, is more than (not ≥, but >) compensated for by the benefits.  Individually, of course, we all have to decide how much we'll indulge our coworkers' prattling on about useless junk, damaging our individual sense of fulfillment.  What type of prospective employee would sacrifice personal measures of productivity for group measures?

--
⇔ glen

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[Marcus G. Daniels]

One explanation is that some workers are faster when solitary.   They are working out of faster short term and long term memory.   Connections “off node”, if you will, are bottlenecks, especially if “mediated” by the MBA sort.   They may be faster than a whole team, given poorly calibrated members, and thus the team would be a relative failure.  (And with no pecking at all.)

 

From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Nick Thompson
Sent: Monday, February 29, 2016 11:53 PM
To: 'The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group' <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Subjectivity and intimacy (lost in the weeks?)

 

REC ETC,

 

Hi Roger,

 

I see you floating on Boston Harbor, even though I know you aren’t there yet.  Let me know when you finally are, so I can feel less foolish.

 

Reading Minds through the eyes would be, in behavioral terms, just making good use of the behavior that follows when you give another person full eye contact to predict that person’s future behavior.

 

I was interested most in the following:

 

the question was why they, reliably productive individuals, made such unpredictably productive teams,

 

In Dave Wilson’s book, UNTO OTHERS, there is a wonderful story done by a poultry researcher on production in crated chickens.  The tradition way to get a good crate of chickens was to breed individual chickens for productivity.  That got you a crate of nine chickens that had to be debeaked to keep them from killing each other and, even so, were always at each other.  So the researchers decided to breed for crates, rather than for chickens.  Aggression backed off, the chickens didn’t need to debeaked, and crate production rose. 

 

I always thought MBA’s were like chickens.

 

N

 

 

 

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

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

 

From: Friam [[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Roger Critchlow
Sent: Monday, February 29, 2016 5:35 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Subjectivity and intimacy (lost in the weeks?)

 

By all means, read the article, but it was the idea of reading feelings in pictures of eyes that seemed apropos to the ongoing discussion.

 

I thought it was clear that Google already knew how to hire productive individuals, the question was why they, reliably productive individuals, made such unpredictably productive teams, and the answer was that teams with people who can't read minds through the eyes become dysfunctional.

 

And if you google "reading the mind through the eyes" you'll find that the bibliographies are all about diagnosing autism and aspergers, but that's another article, one that probably gets even creepier.

 

-- rec --

 

On Mon, Feb 29, 2016 at 6:12 PM, glen <[hidden email]> wrote:

I suppose REC didn't include the link so as to avoid implicitly encouraging others to read the article.  I have no such scruples:

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/28/magazine/what-google-learned-from-its-quest-to-build-the-perfect-team.html

On 02/29/2016 10:18 AM, Marcus Daniels wrote:

Why should less productive individuals enjoy “psychological safety” if they aren’t essential to getting the job done?

I think the answer to this is because it's not a zero-sum game (or... they don't think it's zero sum).  What is lost by ensuring psychological safety for the less productive, or even the negative productive, is more than (not ≥, but >) compensated for by the benefits.  Individually, of course, we all have to decide how much we'll indulge our coworkers' prattling on about useless junk, damaging our individual sense of fulfillment.  What type of prospective employee would sacrifice personal measures of productivity for group measures?

--
⇔ glen

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

 

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