|
|
Rikus and all,
My response to your sober questions -- which I had thought was so brilliant when I wrote it that I read it to my wife over dinner -- turns out to be riddled with stupid errors, mostly mixing up my A and my B and failing to follow closely the details of your hypothetical. A forgiving reader could decode it., but readers shouldnt have to be forgiving.
For you unforgiving ones, I will try and get a cleaned up version in a couple of hours.
Please dont give up on the argument because of my garbled response. The questions you raise are just TOO good.
Nick
Nicholas S. Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology,
----- Original Message -----
Sent: 6/25/2009 2:08:08 AM
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Direct conversation - 1st vs 3rd person
Eric (and Nick),
I'm still pursuing clarity. Kindly consider the following:
Person A, a high-school student, is asked by a teacher (B) to solve a maths problem on the board in front of the class. Among the other students is person C, a close friend of A. A is taking an unusually long time to solve the problem, frequently erasing partial calculations, now and then pausing to stare at the board with a frown.
B is a new teacher and has only interacted with A a few times. It appears to him that the problem is simply too much for A, and starts forming an idea about A's math skills.
C knows that A is good at maths and that the problem on the board should really not be difficult for him. He also knows A well enough to recognise that the frown A exhibits means something is bothering him. Things between A and his girlfriend are a bit shaky lately and he wonders if it took a turn for the worse.
A has a really bad headache. He very rarely gets headaches, but woke up this morning with a monster. He hates giving up on math problems, though, and is sure he should be able to solve this one. Also, he suspects the new teacher thinks he isn't very good at maths and he wants to correct that impression. And he just realised he forgot to do biology homework and is trying to recall which period biology is.
Can you please comment:
1. I understand you to say that A is an observer of A in much the same way as B and C. You're *not* saying A is not having an experience of A, only that A's experience is not *privileged* compared to B and C. Does that mean you consider A's experience to be qualitatively indistinguishable from that of B and C, or only that the difference in the quality of A's experience, compared to that of B and C, is not of consequence?
2. Obvious A can think a great many things that B and C can't know anything about. He can access memory about himself that B and C cannot. He has access to interoceptive sensory information that B and C does not. He has the experience of directly influencing the mathematical symbols in his working memory, outside the perception or direct influence of B and C. On the other hand, B and C has access to some exteroceptive sensory information about A that A lacks. Do you consider these various kinds of information and experiences to be entirely interchangeable?
3. Do you distinguish between "experience" and "have information about"?
4. When you say that A's point of view is not privileged, do you consider anything beyond the ability to identify motives and intent, gauge current emotional state, and identify habitual patterns of behaviour?
5. We can extend the example and allow A to spontaneously start hallucinating a swarm of hand-sized pterodactyls that are attacking him. His body and mind responds to the perceived threat like it would to a real one. In some sense he really is having the experience, yet, B and C would deny that it is taking place. What exactly does it mean to be "wrong" about one's own experience?
Regards,
Rikus
Sent: Wednesday, June 24, 2009 8:57 PM
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Direct conversation - 1st vs 3rd person
My understanding is that the terms 1st and 3rd person arose as ways of talking about literary styles - and our use of them is metaphorical. An essential part of the metaphor is that authors writing in 1st person are typically granted privileged license to write about the mind of "I". In contrast, people writing in (a non-omniscient) 3rd person, are typically not granted as much license to write about the minds. This is not entirely true, as people writing in 3rd person write about minds all the time, but their writings are considered more vulnerable to dispute. For example, if Obama wrote an account of his inauguration and said "I was terrified", it would be considered less vulnerable to dispute than if I wrote an account of his inauguration and said "He was terrified". If these linguistic conventions become reified then we can start taking the "I" not merely to denote the speaker/viewer, but to denote an entity in possession of unique powers that justify the privileges commonly granted to the linguistic device. This is suggested as my understanding of the history, independent of any value judgment regarding the reification.
There is a lurking problem, however, as these conventions do not always seem to hold in the real world. The most glairing probelm is that, at least sometimes, "I" can be wrong about my own mind and "He" can be right. (The cause of my error can range from simply not paying attention to what I am doing, to intentional self-delusion, to forgetting - think Alzheimer's.) For some, these problems lead to an urge to collapse categories, to see if the oddness cannot be gotten rid of if we leave behind the notion of uniqueness that goes with having distinct labels. I suppose that on some formal level, when a dichotomy collapses into a monism, it might not be particularly important which category label remains. However, one category may be preferred over another because it originally contained properties that the author wishes to retain as implicit or explicit in the monistic system that remains. These properties are ported along with word into the monistic system, because the term retains sway as a metaphor.
In this case, the historical bias has been to retain only the "I" position. In this move, the "I" retains its unique insight about ourselves, and any insight we think we have about others must be treated purely as insight about ourselves, i.e. the mind that I know as "their mind" is really just a sub-part of my mind. This leads to extreme forms of idealism (where all the world exists merely as an idea), the two mind problem (is it ever possible for two minds to know the some object?), etc., etc. These were huge turn of the 20th century challenges for philosophy, having grown out of a tradition of pushing more and more extreme the distinguished lineage of ideas flowing from Descartes, Kant, Berkeley, etc. The problems, for the most part, remain. In the extreme form, at least, this lineage leads to a heavy intellectual paralysis, as it is not possible for any "I" to know any other "I", nor to know the "real world" (should such a thing even exist).
The alternative (assuming we are to retain one of the original labels), is to have a bias for the "He" position. This leads to extreme forms of realism, and often (but not always) to behaviorism. In this move, the "I" has to get its information about the mind in the same that "He" has to get information. That is, if my brother knows my mind by observing my behavior, then I can only know my mind by observing my behavior. (Note, that the assertion about observing behavior is a secondary postulate, supplimenting the fundamental assertion that the method of knowing must be the same.)
There are, presumably, things that the I-biased position handles well (I don't know what they are, but there must be some). I know there are things the He-biased position handles well. Among other things it allows us to better understand perfectly normal and mundane conversations such as:
A) "You are angry"
B) "No I'm not"
A) "Yes you are dear. I've known you long enough to know when you're angry."
B) "I think I'd know when I was angry"
A) "You usually don't dear"
... several hours later
B) "Wow, you were right, I was angry. I didn't realize it at the time. I'm sorry"
The I-biased position understands these conversations as very elaborate shell games, where the first statement means something like: "The you that is in my head is currently being modeled by me as having a first-person experience of anger which is itself modeled after my unique first-person experience of anger". Worse, the last sentence seems (to me) totally incoherent from the I-biased position. The He-biased position much more simply believes that a person's anger is visible to himself and others if the right things are attended to, and hence the conversation requires no shell game. Person B simply comes to attend aspects of the situation that A was attending from the start.
Now I will admit that the He-biased perspective has trouble in some situations, but those can't really be discussed until the position is at least understood in the situations it handles well.
Eric
============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
|
Locked
