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Re: Nick and dishonest behavior

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Russ Abbott

Re: Nick and dishonest behavior

Nick wrote:

To call a man "dishonest" (my word, I admit, but you have embraced it) is very harsh in my world, and seems (to me) to require a level of certainty about another person's motives that I just don't know how you could come by from your limited experience with me. ...

You are insisting on the correctness of your view of my mind based on inferences from my behavior.

Yes, I'm doing exactly that, judging you on the basis of your behavior -- in this conversation. (The past 40 years aren't relevant to that.) Your position in this discussion seems to be that your behavior is all there is. So why are you objecting that I'm doing it?

Furthermore, your objection seems to be that I don't know what your "motives" are. I'm not sure what you mean by motives in this case. I'm not assuming any particular motive. In fact I'm confused about what your motives might be and why you are acting so dishonestly. Yet you are acting dishonestly.

To review: a good example of your dishonest behavior was your answer to my question about nausea. Your provided a very nice first person description of what it means to feel nauseous.

If you say that you are "feeling nauseous" i will understand that your world seems like it is churning around but that your visual cues do not confirm (i.e., you are dizzy) and that your stomach feels the way it does when on previous occasions you have thrown up.

Note your use of the first person words seems and feels. But then you refused to answer whether that description would ever apply to a robot. Instead you offered a 3rd person description of what it looks like to feel nauseous and said that of course a robot could fit that description. I call that dishonest. You know what a first person description means because you used it yourself. But then you refused to answer the question whether such a first person description could apply to a robot. Furthermore, you refused to acknowledge that this is what you were doing. I see that as dishonest. But I don't know what your motives for acting this way might be.

Besides, why are you so concerned about my characterizing your behavior as dishonest? Why is that a very harsh term? It's simply a description of your behavior.

Are you upset because you are taking my use of the term dishonest to apply more broadly than to your behavior? In the second passage of yours quoted above, you talked about my view of your mind. Are you unhappy that I seem to be implying that your mind is dishonest? I thought your position was that there is no mind for me to have a view of. I thought your position was that behavior was all that mattered. It should not matter to you what "my view of your mind" is if it doesn't mean anything to talk about minds.

-- Russ

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
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Steve Smith

Re: Nick and dishonest behavior

I think we've started recursion here.

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
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John Kennison

Re: Nick and dishonest behavior

In reply to this post by Russ Abbott

Nick and I are on opposite sides of the consciousness debate. I think there is an inner mind and that I experience it. Nick rejects statements not made from the third person perspective. Perhaps the debate suffers from a feeling that if we take Nick's third person view, we are not allowed to use metaphorical statements that suggest an inner mind. But clearly we can say "The computer had an illusion" or a "breakdown" etc. to describe behavior. (e.g. The behavior was as we imagined it would be if the computer had a inner mind which suffered a breakdown.) Moreover, not only can these metaphorical statements about behavior be defined rigorously, but we can formulate and test rules about how they are related. We don't have to believe in inner minds to say that a person accused of dishonesty behaves as if deeply hurt. That is why we should not casually make such accusations nor assume they will be without negative consequences even if there is no inner mind.

________________________________________
From: [hidden email] [[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Russ Abbott [[hidden email]]
Sent: Thursday, June 18, 2009 11:07 PM
To: [hidden email]
Cc: [hidden email]; [hidden email]
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Nick and dishonest behavior

Nick wrote:

To call a man "dishonest" (my word, I admit, but you have embraced it) is very harsh in my world, and seems (to me) to require a level of certainty about another person's motives that I just don't know how you could come by from your limited experience with me. ...

You are insisting on the correctness of your view of my mind based on inferences from my behavior.

Yes, I'm doing exactly that, judging you on the basis of your behavior -- in this conversation. (The past 40 years aren't relevant to that.) Your position in this discussion seems to be that your behavior is all there is. So why are you objecting that I'm doing it?

Furthermore, your objection seems to be that I don't know what your "motives" are. I'm not sure what you mean by motives in this case. I'm not assuming any particular motive. In fact I'm confused about what your motives might be and why you are acting so dishonestly. Yet you are acting dishonestly.

To review: a good example of your dishonest behavior was your answer to my question about nausea. Your provided a very nice first person description of what it means to feel nauseous.

If you say that you are "feeling nauseous" i will understand that your world seems like it is churning around but that your visual cues do not confirm (i.e., you are dizzy) and that your stomach feels the way it does when on previous occasions you have thrown up.

Note your use of the first person words seems and feels. But then you refused to answer whether that description would ever apply to a robot. Instead you offered a 3rd person description of what it looks like to feel nauseous and said that of course a robot could fit that description. I call that dishonest. You know what a first person description means because you used it yourself. But then you refused to answer the question whether such a first person description could apply to a robot. Furthermore, you refused to acknowledge that this is what you were doing. I see that as dishonest. But I don't know what your motives for acting this way might be.

Besides, why are you so concerned about my characterizing your behavior as dishonest? Why is that a very harsh term? It's simply a description of your behavior.

Are you upset because you are taking my use of the term dishonest to apply more broadly than to your behavior? In the second passage of yours quoted above, you talked about my view of your mind. Are you unhappy that I seem to be implying that your mind is dishonest? I thought your position was that there is no mind for me to have a view of. I thought your position was that behavior was all that mattered. It should not matter to you what "my view of your mind" is if it doesn't mean anything to talk about minds.

-- Russ

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

Russ Abbott

Re: Nick and dishonest behavior

As I wrote to Nick directly, I think Nick is gracious and kind and a man of great integrity.

But this doesn't make sense to me: "We don't have to believe in inner minds to say that a person accused of dishonesty behaves as if deeply hurt." What could it possibly mean to say that a person is deeply hurt if there is no such thing as first person experience? And if there is no such thing as being deeply hurt in a first person way, what could it possibly mean to say that someone is behaving as if deeply hurt?

This suggests that it is very dangerous to claim that there is no first person experience and that observable behavior is all there is. It would encourage "treating people as objects" because that's exactly the position it takes. An attitude of this sort would seem to discard millennia of progress in our understanding and acceptance of what ethical human-to-human interaction consists of.

-- Russ

On Fri, Jun 19, 2009 at 7:40 AM, John Kennison <[hidden email]> wrote:

Nick and I are on opposite sides of the consciousness debate. I think there is an inner mind and that I experience it. Nick rejects statements not made from the third person perspective. Perhaps the debate suffers from a feeling that if we take Nick's third person view, we are not allowed to use metaphorical statements that suggest an inner mind. But clearly we can say "The computer had an illusion" or a "breakdown" etc. to describe behavior. (e.g. The behavior was as we imagined it would be if the computer had a inner mind which suffered a breakdown.) Moreover, not only can these metaphorical statements about behavior be defined rigorously, but we can formulate and test rules about how they are related. We don't have to believe in inner minds to say that a person accused of dishonesty behaves as if deeply hurt. That is why we should not casually make such accusations nor assume they will be without negative consequences even if there is no inner mind.

________________________________________
From: [hidden email] [[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Russ Abbott [[hidden email]]
Sent: Thursday, June 18, 2009 11:07 PM
To: [hidden email]
Cc: [hidden email]; [hidden email]
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Nick and dishonest behavior

Nick wrote:

To call a man "dishonest" (my word, I admit, but you have embraced it) is very harsh in my world, and seems (to me) to require a level of certainty about another person's motives that I just don't know how you could come by from your limited experience with me. ...

You are insisting on the correctness of your view of my mind based on inferences from my behavior.

Yes, I'm doing exactly that, judging you on the basis of your behavior -- in this conversation. (The past 40 years aren't relevant to that.) Your position in this discussion seems to be that your behavior is all there is. So why are you objecting that I'm doing it?

Furthermore, your objection seems to be that I don't know what your "motives" are. I'm not sure what you mean by motives in this case. I'm not assuming any particular motive. In fact I'm confused about what your motives might be and why you are acting so dishonestly. Yet you are acting dishonestly.

To review: a good example of your dishonest behavior was your answer to my question about nausea. Your provided a very nice first person description of what it means to feel nauseous.

If you say that you are "feeling nauseous" i will understand that your world seems like it is churning around but that your visual cues do not confirm (i.e., you are dizzy) and that your stomach feels the way it does when on previous occasions you have thrown up.

Note your use of the first person words seems and feels. But then you refused to answer whether that description would ever apply to a robot. Instead you offered a 3rd person description of what it looks like to feel nauseous and said that of course a robot could fit that description. I call that dishonest. You know what a first person description means because you used it yourself. But then you refused to answer the question whether such a first person description could apply to a robot. Furthermore, you refused to acknowledge that this is what you were doing. I see that as dishonest. But I don't know what your motives for acting this way might be.

Besides, why are you so concerned about my characterizing your behavior as dishonest? Why is that a very harsh term? It's simply a description of your behavior.

Are you upset because you are taking my use of the term dishonest to apply more broadly than to your behavior? In the second passage of yours quoted above, you talked about my view of your mind. Are you unhappy that I seem to be implying that your mind is dishonest? I thought your position was that there is no mind for me to have a view of. I thought your position was that behavior was all that mattered. It should not matter to you what "my view of your mind" is if it doesn't mean anything to talk about minds.

-- Russ

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

Nick Thompson

Re: Nick and dishonest behavior

In reply to this post by Russ Abbott

Steve,

Please dont criticize; help. If we are circling, summarize the positions.
Locate points of agreement. Isolate remaining issues. Build!

Nick

Nicholas S. Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology,
Clark University ([hidden email])
http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

> [Original Message]
> From: Steve Smith <[hidden email]>
> To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
> Date: 6/18/2009 10:13:40 PM
> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Nick and dishonest behavior
>
> I think we've started recursion here.
>
> ============================================================
> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
> Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
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Douglas Roberts-2

Re: Nick and dishonest behavior

In reply to this post by Russ Abbott

I've watched this particular verbal volleyball match for over a week now, and I must confess: I don't have the faintest idea what the objective of the exercise is. What I have noticed, however, is repeated usage of words that apparently have deep, overloaded, special meanings to their author, but not to the audience.

"Experience" "conscious" "suffers from", for example.

Could someone please tell me what the fuss is all about? Succinctly? Why are you all apparently agonizing over whether a robot can "feel" "nauseous"?

TIA (which stands for Thanks, In Advance)

--Doug

--
Doug Roberts
[hidden email]
[hidden email]
505-455-7333 - Office
505-670-8195 - Cell

On Fri, Jun 19, 2009 at 8:57 AM, Russ Abbott <[hidden email]> wrote:

As I wrote to Nick directly, I think Nick is gracious and kind and a man of great integrity.

But this doesn't make sense to me: "We don't have to believe in inner minds to say that a person accused of dishonesty behaves as if deeply hurt." What could it possibly mean to say that a person is deeply hurt if there is no such thing as first person experience? And if there is no such thing as being deeply hurt in a first person way, what could it possibly mean to say that someone is behaving as if deeply hurt?

This suggests that it is very dangerous to claim that there is no first person experience and that observable behavior is all there is. It would encourage "treating people as objects" because that's exactly the position it takes. An attitude of this sort would seem to discard millennia of progress in our understanding and acceptance of what ethical human-to-human interaction consists of.

-- Russ

On Fri, Jun 19, 2009 at 7:40 AM, John Kennison <[hidden email]> wrote:

Nick and I are on opposite sides of the consciousness debate. I think there is an inner mind and that I experience it. Nick rejects statements not made from the third person perspective. Perhaps the debate suffers from a feeling that if we take Nick's third person view, we are not allowed to use metaphorical statements that suggest an inner mind. But clearly we can say "The computer had an illusion" or a "breakdown" etc. to describe behavior. (e.g. The behavior was as we imagined it would be if the computer had a inner mind which suffered a breakdown.) Moreover, not only can these metaphorical statements about behavior be defined rigorously, but we can formulate and test rules about how they are related. We don't have to believe in inner minds to say that a person accused of dishonesty behaves as if deeply hurt. That is why we should not casually make such accusations nor assume they will be without negative consequences even if there is no inner mind.

________________________________________
From: [hidden email] [[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Russ Abbott [[hidden email]]
Sent: Thursday, June 18, 2009 11:07 PM
To: [hidden email]
Cc: [hidden email]; [hidden email]
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Nick and dishonest behavior

Nick wrote:

To call a man "dishonest" (my word, I admit, but you have embraced it) is very harsh in my world, and seems (to me) to require a level of certainty about another person's motives that I just don't know how you could come by from your limited experience with me. ...

You are insisting on the correctness of your view of my mind based on inferences from my behavior.

Yes, I'm doing exactly that, judging you on the basis of your behavior -- in this conversation. (The past 40 years aren't relevant to that.) Your position in this discussion seems to be that your behavior is all there is. So why are you objecting that I'm doing it?

Furthermore, your objection seems to be that I don't know what your "motives" are. I'm not sure what you mean by motives in this case. I'm not assuming any particular motive. In fact I'm confused about what your motives might be and why you are acting so dishonestly. Yet you are acting dishonestly.

To review: a good example of your dishonest behavior was your answer to my question about nausea. Your provided a very nice first person description of what it means to feel nauseous.

If you say that you are "feeling nauseous" i will understand that your world seems like it is churning around but that your visual cues do not confirm (i.e., you are dizzy) and that your stomach feels the way it does when on previous occasions you have thrown up.

Note your use of the first person words seems and feels. But then you refused to answer whether that description would ever apply to a robot. Instead you offered a 3rd person description of what it looks like to feel nauseous and said that of course a robot could fit that description. I call that dishonest. You know what a first person description means because you used it yourself. But then you refused to answer the question whether such a first person description could apply to a robot. Furthermore, you refused to acknowledge that this is what you were doing. I see that as dishonest. But I don't know what your motives for acting this way might be.

Besides, why are you so concerned about my characterizing your behavior as dishonest? Why is that a very harsh term? It's simply a description of your behavior.

Are you upset because you are taking my use of the term dishonest to apply more broadly than to your behavior? In the second passage of yours quoted above, you talked about my view of your mind. Are you unhappy that I seem to be implying that your mind is dishonest? I thought your position was that there is no mind for me to have a view of. I thought your position was that behavior was all that mattered. It should not matter to you what "my view of your mind" is if it doesn't mean anything to talk about minds.

-- Russ

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

--
Doug Roberts
[hidden email]
[hidden email]
505-455-7333 - Office
505-670-8195 - Cell

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

Nick Thompson

Re: Nick and dishonest behavior

In reply to this post by Russ Abbott

John,

You may be in trouble,here, because I absolutely agree with what you are
saying.

In fact, I believe, that the first job of the child is to parse the "outer"
world into two subworlds, one that moves with me and one that moves with
respect to me. Immediately, parents start assigning names and meanings to
those two worlds, including the robust metaphysics of the inner and the
outer. ("Do as I say, not as I do"; "this hurts me more than it does you",
etc.) Out of such trivial hypocricies is built the "inner" world. So, by
the time we are 18, we have learned to say to our girlfriends, "But DEAR I
REALLY love YOU!" and other manipulative nonsense. The inner world is a
cognitive model designed to serve the interests of a unitary body.

You are quite right that seeing the world in this way has serious
consequences, and if you detect some moralizing lurking behind my position,
you are also right.

thanks,

Nick

> [Original Message]
> From: John Kennison <[hidden email]>
> To: [hidden email] <[hidden email]>; The Friday
MorningApplied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>;
[hidden email] <[hidden email]>
> Cc: [hidden email] <[hidden email]>
> Date: 6/19/2009 8:40:53 AM
> Subject: RE: [FRIAM] Nick and dishonest behavior
>
>
>
> Nick and I are on opposite sides of the consciousness debate. I think
there is an inner mind and that I experience it. Nick rejects statements
not made from the third person perspective. Perhaps the debate suffers from
a feeling that if we take Nick's third person view, we are not allowed to
use metaphorical statements that suggest an inner mind. But clearly we can
say "The computer had an illusion" or a "breakdown" etc. to describe
behavior. (e.g. The behavior was as we imagined it would be if the computer
had a inner mind which suffered a breakdown.) Moreover, not only can these
metaphorical statements about behavior be defined rigorously, but we can
formulate and test rules about how they are related. We don't have to
believe in inner minds to say that a person accused of dishonesty behaves
as if deeply hurt. That is why we should not casually make such accusations
nor assume they will be without negative consequences even if there is no
inner mind.
>
>
>
> ________________________________________
> From: [hidden email] [[hidden email]] On Behalf Of
Russ Abbott [[hidden email]]
> Sent: Thursday, June 18, 2009 11:07 PM
> To: [hidden email]
> Cc: [hidden email]; [hidden email]
> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Nick and dishonest behavior
>
> Nick wrote:
>
> To call a man "dishonest" (my word, I admit, but you have embraced it) is
very harsh in my world, and seems (to me) to require a level of certainty
about another person's motives that I just don't know how you could come by
from your limited experience with me. ...
>
> You are insisting on the correctness of your view of my mind based on
inferences from my behavior.
>
> Yes, I'm doing exactly that, judging you on the basis of your behavior --
in this conversation. (The past 40 years aren't relevant to that.) Your
position in this discussion seems to be that your behavior is all there is.
So why are you objecting that I'm doing it?
>
> Furthermore, your objection seems to be that I don't know what your
"motives" are. I'm not sure what you mean by motives in this case. I'm not
assuming any particular motive. In fact I'm confused about what your
motives might be and why you are acting so dishonestly. Yet you are acting
dishonestly.
>
> To review: a good example of your dishonest behavior was your answer to
my question about nausea. Your provided a very nice first person
description of what it means to feel nauseous.
>
> If you say that you are "feeling nauseous" i will understand that your
world seems like it is churning around but that your visual cues do not
confirm (i.e., you are dizzy) and that your stomach feels the way it does
when on previous occasions you have thrown up.
>
> Note your use of the first person words seems and feels. But then you
refused to answer whether that description would ever apply to a robot.
Instead you offered a 3rd person description of what it looks like to feel
nauseous and said that of course a robot could fit that description. I call
that dishonest. You know what a first person description means because you
used it yourself. But then you refused to answer the question whether such
a first person description could apply to a robot. Furthermore, you refused
to acknowledge that this is what you were doing. I see that as dishonest.
But I don't know what your motives for acting this way might be.
>
> Besides, why are you so concerned about my characterizing your behavior
as dishonest? Why is that a very harsh term? It's simply a description of
your behavior.
>
> Are you upset because you are taking my use of the term dishonest to
apply more broadly than to your behavior? In the second passage of yours
quoted above, you talked about my view of your mind. Are you unhappy that I
seem to be implying that your mind is dishonest? I thought your position
was that there is no mind for me to have a view of. I thought your position
was that behavior was all that mattered. It should not matter to you what
"my view of your mind" is if it doesn't mean anything to talk about minds.
>
>
> -- Russ

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

Steve Smith

Re: Nick and dishonest behavior

In reply to this post by Russ Abbott

What is odd about this whole interchange is that I can't quite find the
point of view (all experience is 3rd person) Nick is promoting, but it
feels that it could very well be my own habit of experience and
language.

This is not to say that I "believe" the 3rd person thing is real or
literally true, but I do find it interesting and am surprised how hard
it is for me to think about it.

I can see how Russ might feel that Nick's (lack of?) response to the
discussion is disingenuous (I'm not quite as sure about dishonest) but
my knowledge of Nick does not support that as a likely mode of
relationship for him. My own use of "dishonest" includes an intention
to mislead which I do not believe Nick is engaging in.

I don't think Nick's description of 1st person experience as 3rd person
experience from a unique perspective denies the existence of the "self"
which is what I think Russ is getting at. It just changes how the
"self" is experienced by the "self" (if I understand this correctly).

- Steve

> As I wrote to Nick directly, I think Nick is gracious and kind and a
> man of great integrity.
>
> But this doesn't make sense to me: "We don't have to believe in inner
> minds to say that a person accused of dishonesty behaves as if deeply
> hurt." What could it possibly mean to say that a person is deeply hurt
> if there is no such thing as first person experience? And if there is
> no such thing as being deeply hurt in a first person way, what could
> it possibly mean to say that someone is behaving as if deeply hurt?
>
> This suggests that it is very dangerous to claim that there is no
> first person experience and that observable behavior is all there is.
> It would encourage "treating people as objects" because that's exactly
> the position it takes. An attitude of this sort would seem to discard
> millennia of progress in our understanding and acceptance of what
> ethical human-to-human interaction consists of.
>
> -- Russ
>
>
> On Fri, Jun 19, 2009 at 7:40 AM, John Kennison <[hidden email]
> <mailto:[hidden email]>> wrote:
>
>
>
> Nick and I are on opposite sides of the consciousness debate. I
> think there is an inner mind and that I experience it. Nick
> rejects statements not made from the third person perspective.
> Perhaps the debate suffers from a feeling that if we take Nick's
> third person view, we are not allowed to use metaphorical
> statements that suggest an inner mind. But clearly we can say "The
> computer had an illusion" or a "breakdown" etc. to describe
> behavior. (e.g. The behavior was as we imagined it would be if the
> computer had a inner mind which suffered a breakdown.) Moreover,
> not only can these metaphorical statements about behavior be
> defined rigorously, but we can formulate and test rules about how
> they are related. We don't have to believe in inner minds to say
> that a person accused of dishonesty behaves as if deeply hurt.
> That is why we should not casually make such accusations nor
> assume they will be without negative consequences even if there is
> no inner mind.
>
>
>
> ________________________________________
> From: [hidden email] <mailto:[hidden email]>
> [[hidden email] <mailto:[hidden email]>] On
> Behalf Of Russ Abbott [[hidden email]
> <mailto:[hidden email]>]
> Sent: Thursday, June 18, 2009 11:07 PM
> To: [hidden email] <mailto:[hidden email]>
> Cc: [hidden email] <mailto:[hidden email]>; [hidden email]
> <mailto:[hidden email]>
> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Nick and dishonest behavior
>
> Nick wrote:
>
> To call a man "dishonest" (my word, I admit, but you have embraced
> it) is very harsh in my world, and seems (to me) to require a
> level of certainty about another person's motives that I just
> don't know how you could come by from your limited experience with
> me. ...
>
> You are insisting on the correctness of your view of my mind based
> on inferences from my behavior.
>
> Yes, I'm doing exactly that, judging you on the basis of your
> behavior -- in this conversation. (The past 40 years aren't
> relevant to that.) Your position in this discussion seems to be
> that your behavior is all there is. So why are you objecting that
> I'm doing it?
>
> Furthermore, your objection seems to be that I don't know what
> your "motives" are. I'm not sure what you mean by motives in this
> case. I'm not assuming any particular motive. In fact I'm confused
> about what your motives might be and why you are acting so
> dishonestly. Yet you are acting dishonestly.
>
> To review: a good example of your dishonest behavior was your
> answer to my question about nausea. Your provided a very nice
> first person description of what it means to feel nauseous.
>
> If you say that you are "feeling nauseous" i will understand that
> your world seems like it is churning around but that your visual
> cues do not confirm (i.e., you are dizzy) and that your stomach
> feels the way it does when on previous occasions you have thrown up.
>
> Note your use of the first person words seems and feels. But then
> you refused to answer whether that description would ever apply to
> a robot. Instead you offered a 3rd person description of what it
> looks like to feel nauseous and said that of course a robot could
> fit that description. I call that dishonest. You know what a
> first person description means because you used it yourself. But
> then you refused to answer the question whether such a first
> person description could apply to a robot. Furthermore, you
> refused to acknowledge that this is what you were doing. I see
> that as dishonest. But I don't know what your motives for acting
> this way might be.
>
> Besides, why are you so concerned about my characterizing your
> behavior as dishonest? Why is that a very harsh term? It's simply
> a description of your behavior.
>
> Are you upset because you are taking my use of the term dishonest
> to apply more broadly than to your behavior? In the second passage
> of yours quoted above, you talked about my view of your mind. Are
> you unhappy that I seem to be implying that your mind is
> dishonest? I thought your position was that there is no mind for
> me to have a view of. I thought your position was that behavior
> was all that mattered. It should not matter to you what "my view
> of your mind" is if it doesn't mean anything to talk about minds.
>
>
> -- Russ
>
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> ============================================================
> 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

Russell Gonnering

Doug's observation on words

In reply to this post by Douglas Roberts-2

I have to admit, I do not understand what is going on here, either. Doug's comment on the words used caught my attention, though. While in most instances rhetoric is thought to flow FROM culture, there is a growing body that holds the opposite: we create our culture though our use of words and narrative. See:

Tribal Leadership--http://www.triballeadership.net/ Logan and co-authors explore organizational culture and productivity. To anyone who is familiar with their work, we have seen a classic Level 3 in action. The "we" and "they" observation of Nick is further amplification of the power of words. Logan's thesis is that one has to change the rhetoric and the relationships to change the ideas, not the other way around.
Cynefin Framework--http://www.cognitive-edge.com/ Dave Snowden has a more direct connection with complexity theory, through his description of cause/effect and order vs "unorder". He also describes narrative as a potent force for organizational action.

So what am I driving at? Isn't emergence part of changing the "I" into "We" and beyond into "All of Us"? Logan's work would indicate that the "emergence" formed in moving a culture from a Level 3 ("I'm great, and by the way, you aren't") through Level 4 ("We're great, and they are not") and to Level 5 ("Life is great") results in a non-linear jump in productivity.

Russ G.

Russell S. Gonnering, MD, FACS, MMM, CPHQ

[hidden email]

On Jun 19, 2009, at 10:14 AM, Douglas Roberts wrote:

I've watched this particular verbal volleyball match for over a week now, and I must confess: I don't have the faintest idea what the objective of the exercise is. What I have noticed, however, is repeated usage of words that apparently have deep, overloaded, special meanings to their author, but not to the audience.

"Experience" "conscious" "suffers from", for example.

Could someone please tell me what the fuss is all about? Succinctly? Why are you all apparently agonizing over whether a robot can "feel" "nauseous"?

TIA (which stands for Thanks, In Advance)

--Doug

--
Doug Roberts
[hidden email]
[hidden email]
505-455-7333 - Office
505-670-8195 - Cell

On Fri, Jun 19, 2009 at 8:57 AM, Russ Abbott <[hidden email]> wrote:
As I wrote to Nick directly, I think Nick is gracious and kind and a man of great integrity.

But this doesn't make sense to me: "We don't have to believe in inner minds to say that a person accused of dishonesty behaves as if deeply hurt." What could it possibly mean to say that a person is deeply hurt if there is no such thing as first person experience? And if there is no such thing as being deeply hurt in a first person way, what could it possibly mean to say that someone is behaving as if deeply hurt?

This suggests that it is very dangerous to claim that there is no first person experience and that observable behavior is all there is. It would encourage "treating people as objects" because that's exactly the position it takes. An attitude of this sort would seem to discard millennia of progress in our understanding and acceptance of what ethical human-to-human interaction consists of.

-- Russ

On Fri, Jun 19, 2009 at 7:40 AM, John Kennison <[hidden email]> wrote:

Nick and I are on opposite sides of the consciousness debate. I think there is an inner mind and that I experience it. Nick rejects statements not made from the third person perspective. Perhaps the debate suffers from a feeling that if we take Nick's third person view, we are not allowed to use metaphorical statements that suggest an inner mind. But clearly we can say "The computer had an illusion" or a "breakdown" etc. to describe behavior. (e.g. The behavior was as we imagined it would be if the computer had a inner mind which suffered a breakdown.) Moreover, not only can these metaphorical statements about behavior be defined rigorously, but we can formulate and test rules about how they are related. We don't have to believe in inner minds to say that a person accused of dishonesty behaves as if deeply hurt. That is why we should not casually make such accusations nor assume they will be without negative consequences even if there is no inner mind.

________________________________________
From: [hidden email] [[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Russ Abbott [[hidden email]]
Sent: Thursday, June 18, 2009 11:07 PM
To: [hidden email]
Cc: [hidden email]; [hidden email]
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Nick and dishonest behavior

Nick wrote:

To call a man "dishonest" (my word, I admit, but you have embraced it) is very harsh in my world, and seems (to me) to require a level of certainty about another person's motives that I just don't know how you could come by from your limited experience with me. ...

You are insisting on the correctness of your view of my mind based on inferences from my behavior.

Yes, I'm doing exactly that, judging you on the basis of your behavior -- in this conversation. (The past 40 years aren't relevant to that.) Your position in this discussion seems to be that your behavior is all there is. So why are you objecting that I'm doing it?

Furthermore, your objection seems to be that I don't know what your "motives" are. I'm not sure what you mean by motives in this case. I'm not assuming any particular motive. In fact I'm confused about what your motives might be and why you are acting so dishonestly. Yet you are acting dishonestly.

To review: a good example of your dishonest behavior was your answer to my question about nausea. Your provided a very nice first person description of what it means to feel nauseous.

If you say that you are "feeling nauseous" i will understand that your world seems like it is churning around but that your visual cues do not confirm (i.e., you are dizzy) and that your stomach feels the way it does when on previous occasions you have thrown up.

Note your use of the first person words seems and feels. But then you refused to answer whether that description would ever apply to a robot. Instead you offered a 3rd person description of what it looks like to feel nauseous and said that of course a robot could fit that description. I call that dishonest. You know what a first person description means because you used it yourself. But then you refused to answer the question whether such a first person description could apply to a robot. Furthermore, you refused to acknowledge that this is what you were doing. I see that as dishonest. But I don't know what your motives for acting this way might be.

Besides, why are you so concerned about my characterizing your behavior as dishonest? Why is that a very harsh term? It's simply a description of your behavior.

Are you upset because you are taking my use of the term dishonest to apply more broadly than to your behavior? In the second passage of yours quoted above, you talked about my view of your mind. Are you unhappy that I seem to be implying that your mind is dishonest? I thought your position was that there is no mind for me to have a view of. I thought your position was that behavior was all that mattered. It should not matter to you what "my view of your mind" is if it doesn't mean anything to talk about minds.

-- Russ

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

--
Doug Roberts
[hidden email]
[hidden email]
505-455-7333 - Office
505-670-8195 - Cell
============================================================
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

James Steiner

Re: Nick and dishonest behavior

In reply to this post by Steve Smith

On Fri, Jun 19, 2009 at 11:53 AM, Steve Smith <[hidden email]> wrote:

What is odd about this whole interchange is that I can't quite find the point of view (all experience is 3rd person) Nick is promoting, but it feels that it could very well be my own habit of experience and language.

What if everything Nick was saying was true (about the absense of true 1st person) , but only for Nick, and other's like him for whom behaviorist ideas make sense? What if, for Nick, there really is no there, there (or a "me" here), but the idea doesn't make sense to others, because there is a "me" there... (I'm sure this idea has been stated before, and it's distracting nonsense, but I don't have much else to contribute, and I didn't think it'd be right to just post, "mumble, mumble" so I could pretend I was participating)

~~James.

Nick Thompson

Re: Nick and dishonest behavior

In reply to this post by Russ Abbott

Dear Doug and "List",

I hope it is clear to everybody by now that "Nick" is a philosophical example. He was borrowed for this purpose because the best discussions are reflexive ... i.e, they become examples of themselves. Doug and Nick (the real one, this time) fell into a paradox. He is arguing that I falsify my own mind when I say that I dont understand expressions like "I feel nauseous". I am arguing that he doesnt know what he is saying when he uses them. Notice the paradox: if "Nick" is right, then Russ is right; if "Russ" is right, then Nick is right. You are correct to demand that we call a truce on this discussion for long enough to clarify why anybody should give a damn.

Part of the purported importance has just become clear in Russ's most recent message. He feels that ethical behavior necessitates our respecting the sanctity of the inner life of others. To respect the inner life of others one must first embrace one's own, and so my statement that I dont "have" an inner life begins to feel like an attack on the most central of moral principles. As one of my graduate students used to [cheerfully] say, "but Nick, if you don't have an inner life, it's ok to kill you, right?"

Now, my wisest response to this line of argument would be to go all technocratic and to deny that I have any ethical dog in this fight at all. One can, after all, be a moral naturalist and assert that reasoning and argument only come into play when people are trying to violate their ethical impulses and that, on the whole, people are designed by nature so that they dont kill each other. Just as I dont think it makes any difference whether you believe in evolution or creation whether you are a good person, I dont think it makes any difference to being a good person whether you believe others have an inner life or not. Thus, I escape the argument by asserting that it has no MORAL consequences. I reassure Russ that my absense of an inner life does not make me dangerous, and, once he takes that reassurance seriously, he doesnt have to kill me. Peace is re-established.

But we behaviorists are fierce (if covert) moralists. Just read Skinner's Walden II. We deplore the metaphysics of the inner life because we think of it as a way of thinking that encourages people to act badly while claiming good intentions. Now it will become clear to you why I have tolerated the conversation about my "honesty", or, more accurately "Nick's" honesty : because I am holding a similar judgment behind my back like a mailed fist. The function of the inner life view (in evolutionary history) has been to promote dishonesty!

Animal behaviorists from time to time have tried to serve as expert witnesses in the societal debate concerning who you can kill (or enslave, or whatever). I regard my colleagues participation in this argument as akin to that of the psychologists who consulted in the CIA torture techniques. One of my best collegial friends -- bless his heart -- wrote an essay entitled "Does octopus suffer ?" and came to the conclusion that well, perhaps, yes, but nothing LESS than octopus could possibly feel pain. Therefore you can dissect a cockroach with impunity, right? Well, anybody who has stuck a needle in a cockroach knows they dont like it. So, any attempt to draw a line between creatures that suffer and those that dont strikes me as casuistry of the worst sort. And people who object to clubbing a cow over the head but who will happily eat a salmon that has suffocated in the hold of a boat under a pile of his own kind seems to me to be ... well, kidding himself.

In short, I Russ thinks people would be better if they believed in the inner life; I think people would be better people if they didnt.

This is probably where the argument should stop, because I dont see any way to resolve it. I am overjoyed if The People have come to understand that The Inner Life is a way to think, not the way things are. Russ will have to speak for himself, but I guess he will be more or less satisfied if we understand that The Inner Life is fundamental to what we are as humans. We will just have to hold those contradictory thoughts in our minds and move on to issues we can resolve.

Two places where I would like to see this discussion go from here are as follows:

(1) What about "self-awareness" in computers? Now, that discussion got off to a strange start because I expected the experts on the list to treat as trivial the proposition that computers ... in some loose sense at least ... collect information about themselves. That assertion seemed to be already controversial, and I would really like to understand why. Modern automobiles gather all sorts of information about themselves. What exactly is going on when they do this. I see this as a detailed, matter-of-fact, discussion of self-reference in control systems.

(2) What about "emergence"? Discussions concerning emergence always stray into discussions about consciousness because, for many, the origin's of consciousness in the brain is the only truly interesting example of emergence. But I think the most interesting examples of emergence are the most prosaic ones. I would like to see us get back to the emergent properties of ... triangles. I would like to see us build an error-free language for talking about simple forms of emergence ... triangles, gliders, etc. -- so that we can have some confidence and discipline the next time we get together to talk complexity babble face to face.

Nick

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology,

Clark University ([hidden email])

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

----- Original Message -----

From: [hidden email]

To: [hidden email]
Cc: [hidden email]; [hidden email]; [hidden email]

Sent: 6/19/2009 8:58:14 AM

Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Nick and dishonest behavior

As I wrote to Nick directly, I think Nick is gracious and kind and a man of great integrity.

But this doesn't make sense to me: "We don't have to believe in inner minds to say that a person accused of dishonesty behaves as if deeply hurt." What could it possibly mean to say that a person is deeply hurt if there is no such thing as first person experience? And if there is no such thing as being deeply hurt in a first person way, what could it possibly mean to say that someone is behaving as if deeply hurt?

This suggests that it is very dangerous to claim that there is no first person experience and that observable behavior is all there is. It would encourage "treating people as objects" because that's exactly the position it takes. An attitude of this sort would seem to discard millennia of progress in our understanding and acceptance of what ethical human-to-human interaction consists of.

-- Russ

On Fri, Jun 19, 2009 at 7:40 AM, John Kennison <[hidden email]> wrote:

Nick and I are on opposite sides of the consciousness debate. I think there is an inner mind and that I experience it. Nick rejects statements not made from the third person perspective. Perhaps the debate suffers from a feeling that if we take Nick's third person view, we are not allowed to use metaphorical statements that suggest an inner mind. But clearly we can say "The computer had an illusion" or a "breakdown" etc. to describe behavior. (e.g. The behavior was as we imagined it would be if the computer had a inner mind which suffered a breakdown.) Moreover, not only can these metaphorical statements about behavior be defined rigorously, but we can formulate and test rules about how they are related. We don't have to believe in inner minds to say that a person accused of dishonesty behaves as if deeply hurt. That is why we should not casually make such accusations nor assume they will be without negative consequences even if there is no inner mind.

________________________________________
From: [hidden email] [[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Russ Abbott [[hidden email]]
Sent: Thursday, June 18, 2009 11:07 PM
To: [hidden email]
Cc: [hidden email]; [hidden email]
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Nick and dishonest behavior

Nick wrote:

To call a man "dishonest" (my word, I admit, but you have embraced it) is very harsh in my world, and seems (to me) to require a level of certainty about another person's motives that I just don't know how you could come by from your limited experience with me. ...

You are insisting on the correctness of your view of my mind based on inferences from my behavior.

Yes, I'm doing exactly that, judging you on the basis of your behavior -- in this conversation. (The past 40 years aren't relevant to that.) Your position in this discussion seems to be that your behavior is all there is. So why are you objecting that I'm doing it?

Furthermore, your objection seems to be that I don't know what your "motives" are. I'm not sure what you mean by motives in this case. I'm not assuming any particular motive. In fact I'm confused about what your motives might be and why you are acting so dishonestly. Yet you are acting dishonestly.

To review: a good example of your dishonest behavior was your answer to my question about nausea. Your provided a very nice first person description of what it means to feel nauseous.

If you say that you are "feeling nauseous" i will understand that your world seems like it is churning around but that your visual cues do not confirm (i.e., you are dizzy) and that your stomach feels the way it does when on previous occasions you have thrown up.

Note your use of the first person words seems and feels. But then you refused to answer whether that description would ever apply to a robot. Instead you offered a 3rd person description of what it looks like to feel nauseous and said that of course a robot could fit that description. I call that dishonest. You know what a first person description means because you used it yourself. But then you refused to answer the question whether such a first person description could apply to a robot. Furthermore, you refused to acknowledge that this is what you were doing. I see that as dishonest. But I don't know what your motives for acting this way might be.

Besides, why are you so concerned about my characterizing your behavior as dishonest? Why is that a very harsh term? It's simply a description of your behavior.

Are you upset because you are taking my use of the term dishonest to apply more broadly than to your behavior? In the second passage of yours quoted above, you talked about my view of your mind. Are you unhappy that I seem to be implying that your mind is dishonest? I thought your position was that there is no mind for me to have a view of. I thought your position was that behavior was all that mattered. It should not matter to you what "my view of your mind" is if it doesn't mean anything to talk about minds.

-- Russ

Douglas Roberts-2

Re: Nick and dishonest behavior

Well, that certainly cleared things up!

;-} ;-{

On Fri, Jun 19, 2009 at 11:33 AM, Nicholas Thompson <[hidden email]> wrote:

Dear Doug and "List",

I hope it is clear to everybody by now that "Nick" is a philosophical example. He was borrowed for this purpose because the best discussions are reflexive ... i.e, they become examples of themselves. Doug and Nick (the real one, this time) fell into a paradox. He is arguing that I falsify my own mind when I say that I dont understand expressions like "I feel nauseous". I am arguing that he doesnt know what he is saying when he uses them. Notice the paradox: if "Nick" is right, then Russ is right; if "Russ" is right, then Nick is right. You are correct to demand that we call a truce on this discussion for long enough to clarify why anybody should give a damn.

Part of the purported importance has just become clear in Russ's most recent message. He feels that ethical behavior necessitates our respecting the sanctity of the inner life of others. To respect the inner life of others one must first embrace one's own, and so my statement that I dont "have" an inner life begins to feel like an attack on the most central of moral principles. As one of my graduate students used to [cheerfully] say, "but Nick, if you don't have an inner life, it's ok to kill you, right?"

Now, my wisest response to this line of argument would be to go all technocratic and to deny that I have any ethical dog in this fight at all.   One can, after all, be a moral naturalist and assert that reasoning and argument only come into play when people are trying to violate their ethical impulses and that, on the whole, people are designed by nature so that they dont kill each other. Just as I dont think it makes any difference whether you believe in evolution or creation whether you are a good person, I dont think it makes any difference to being a good person whether you believe others have an inner life or not. Thus, I escape the argument by asserting that it has no MORAL consequences. I reassure Russ that my absense of an inner life does not make me dangerous, and, once he takes that reassurance seriously, he doesnt have to kill me. Peace is re-established.

But we behaviorists are fierce (if covert) moralists.   Just read Skinner's Walden II. We deplore the metaphysics of the inner life because we think of it as a way of thinking that encourages people to act badly while claiming good intentions.   Now it will become clear to you why I have tolerated the conversation about my "honesty", or, more accurately "Nick's" honesty : because I am holding a similar judgment behind my back like a mailed fist. The function of the inner life view (in evolutionary history) has been to promote dishonesty!

Animal behaviorists from time to time have tried to serve as expert witnesses in the societal debate concerning who you can kill (or enslave, or whatever). I regard my colleagues participation in this argument as akin to that of the psychologists who consulted in the CIA torture techniques. One of my best collegial friends -- bless his heart -- wrote an essay entitled "Does octopus suffer ?" and came to the conclusion that well, perhaps, yes, but nothing LESS than octopus could possibly feel pain. Therefore you can dissect a cockroach with impunity, right? Well, anybody who has stuck a needle in a cockroach knows they dont like it. So, any attempt to draw a line between creatures that suffer and those that dont strikes me as casuistry of the worst sort.    And people who object to clubbing a cow over the head but who will happily eat a salmon that has suffocated in the hold of a boat under a pile of his own kind seems to me to be ... well, kidding himself.

In short, I Russ thinks people would be better if they believed in the inner life; I think people would be better people if they didnt.

This is probably where the argument should stop, because I dont see any way to resolve it. I am overjoyed if The People have come to understand that The Inner Life is a way to think, not the way things are. Russ will have to speak for himself, but I guess he will be more or less satisfied if we understand that The Inner Life is fundamental to what we are as humans. We will just have to hold those contradictory thoughts in our minds and move on to issues we can resolve.

Two places where I would like to see this discussion go from here are as follows:

(1) What about "self-awareness" in computers? Now, that discussion got off to a strange start because I expected the experts on the list to treat as trivial the proposition that computers ... in some loose sense at least ... collect information about themselves. That assertion seemed to be already controversial, and I would really like to understand why. Modern automobiles gather all sorts of information about themselves. What exactly is going on when they do this. I see this as a detailed, matter-of-fact, discussion of self-reference in control systems.

(2) What about "emergence"? Discussions concerning emergence always stray into discussions about consciousness because, for many, the origin's of consciousness in the brain is the only truly interesting example of emergence. But I think the most interesting examples of emergence are the most prosaic ones. I would like to see us get back to the emergent properties of ... triangles. I would like to see us build an error-free language for talking about simple forms of emergence ... triangles, gliders, etc. -- so that we can have some confidence and discipline the next time we get together to talk complexity babble face to face.

Nick

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology,

Clark University ([hidden email])

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

----- Original Message -----

From: [hidden email]

To: [hidden email]
Cc: [hidden email]; [hidden email]; [hidden email]

Sent: 6/19/2009 8:58:14 AM

Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Nick and dishonest behavior

As I wrote to Nick directly, I think Nick is gracious and kind and a man of great integrity.

But this doesn't make sense to me: "We don't have to believe in inner minds to say that a person accused of dishonesty behaves as if deeply hurt." What could it possibly mean to say that a person is deeply hurt if there is no such thing as first person experience? And if there is no such thing as being deeply hurt in a first person way, what could it possibly mean to say that someone is behaving as if deeply hurt?

This suggests that it is very dangerous to claim that there is no first person experience and that observable behavior is all there is. It would encourage "treating people as objects" because that's exactly the position it takes. An attitude of this sort would seem to discard millennia of progress in our understanding and acceptance of what ethical human-to-human interaction consists of.

-- Russ

On Fri, Jun 19, 2009 at 7:40 AM, John Kennison <[hidden email]> wrote:

Nick and I are on opposite sides of the consciousness debate. I think there is an inner mind and that I experience it. Nick rejects statements not made from the third person perspective. Perhaps the debate suffers from a feeling that if we take Nick's third person view, we are not allowed to use metaphorical statements that suggest an inner mind. But clearly we can say "The computer had an illusion" or a "breakdown" etc. to describe behavior. (e.g. The behavior was as we imagined it would be if the computer had a inner mind which suffered a breakdown.) Moreover, not only can these metaphorical statements about behavior be defined rigorously, but we can formulate and test rules about how they are related. We don't have to believe in inner minds to say that a person accused of dishonesty behaves as if deeply hurt. That is why we should not casually make such accusations nor assume they will be without negative consequences even if there is no inner mind.

________________________________________
From: [hidden email] [[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Russ Abbott [[hidden email]]

Sent: Thursday, June 18, 2009 11:07 PM
To: [hidden email]
Cc: [hidden email]; [hidden email]

Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Nick and dishonest behavior

Nick wrote:

To call a man "dishonest" (my word, I admit, but you have embraced it) is very harsh in my world, and seems (to me) to require a level of certainty about another person's motives that I just don't know how you could come by from your limited experience with me. ...

You are insisting on the correctness of your view of my mind based on inferences from my behavior.

Yes, I'm doing exactly that, judging you on the basis of your behavior -- in this conversation. (The past 40 years aren't relevant to that.) Your position in this discussion seems to be that your behavior is all there is. So why are you objecting that I'm doing it?

Furthermore, your objection seems to be that I don't know what your "motives" are. I'm not sure what you mean by motives in this case. I'm not assuming any particular motive. In fact I'm confused about what your motives might be and why you are acting so dishonestly. Yet you are acting dishonestly.

To review: a good example of your dishonest behavior was your answer to my question about nausea. Your provided a very nice first person description of what it means to feel nauseous.

If you say that you are "feeling nauseous" i will understand that your world seems like it is churning around but that your visual cues do not confirm (i.e., you are dizzy) and that your stomach feels the way it does when on previous occasions you have thrown up.

Note your use of the first person words seems and feels. But then you refused to answer whether that description would ever apply to a robot. Instead you offered a 3rd person description of what it looks like to feel nauseous and said that of course a robot could fit that description. I call that dishonest. You know what a first person description means because you used it yourself. But then you refused to answer the question whether such a first person description could apply to a robot. Furthermore, you refused to acknowledge that this is what you were doing. I see that as dishonest. But I don't know what your motives for acting this way might be.

Besides, why are you so concerned about my characterizing your behavior as dishonest? Why is that a very harsh term? It's simply a description of your behavior.

Are you upset because you are taking my use of the term dishonest to apply more broadly than to your behavior? In the second passage of yours quoted above, you talked about my view of your mind. Are you unhappy that I seem to be implying that your mind is dishonest? I thought your position was that there is no mind for me to have a view of. I thought your position was that behavior was all that mattered. It should not matter to you what "my view of your mind" is if it doesn't mean anything to talk about minds.

-- Russ

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

Nick Thompson

Re: Nick and dishonest behavior

In reply to this post by Russ Abbott

James,

thanks for your input.

You are correct that I have only claimed so far that it is true of me, but Russ is right that as soon as I have gotten Le Monde to claim that it is true of me, that it is true of EVERYBODY, even you.

So, IF his ethical premises are correct, his concern for my humanity is well founded.

Nick

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology,

Clark University ([hidden email])

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

----- Original Message -----

From: [hidden email]

To: [hidden email]

Sent: 6/19/2009 11:04:45 AM

Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Nick and dishonest behavior

On Fri, Jun 19, 2009 at 11:53 AM, Steve Smith <[hidden email]> wrote:

What is odd about this whole interchange is that I can't quite find the point of view (all experience is 3rd person) Nick is promoting, but it feels that it could very well be my own habit of experience and language.

What if everything Nick was saying was true (about the absense of true 1st person) , but only for Nick, and other's like him for whom behaviorist ideas make sense? What if, for Nick, there really is no there, there (or a "me" here), but the idea doesn't make sense to others, because there is a "me" there... (I'm sure this idea has been stated before, and it's distracting nonsense, but I don't have much else to contribute, and I didn't think it'd be right to just post, "mumble, mumble" so I could pretend I was participating)
~~James.

Nick Thompson

Re: Nick and dishonest behavior

In reply to this post by Russ Abbott

For some reason, I am assuming that those were ironic squiggles.

Nick

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology,

Clark University ([hidden email])

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

----- Original Message -----

From: [hidden email]

To: [hidden email];[hidden email]
Cc: [hidden email]; [hidden email]; [hidden email]

Sent: 6/19/2009 11:46:47 AM

Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Nick and dishonest behavior

Well, that certainly cleared things up!

;-} ;-{

On Fri, Jun 19, 2009 at 11:33 AM, Nicholas Thompson <[hidden email]> wrote:

Dear Doug and "List",

I hope it is clear to everybody by now that "Nick" is a philosophical example. He was borrowed for this purpose because the best discussions are reflexive ... i.e, they become examples of themselves. Doug and Nick (the real one, this time) fell into a paradox. He is arguing that I falsify my own mind when I say that I dont understand expressions like "I feel nauseous". I am arguing that he doesnt know what he is saying when he uses them. Notice the paradox: if "Nick" is right, then Russ is right; if "Russ" is right, then Nick is right. You are correct to demand that we call a truce on this discussion for long enough to clarify why anybody should give a damn.

Part of the purported importance has just become clear in Russ's most recent message. He feels that ethical behavior necessitates our respecting the sanctity of the inner life of others. To respect the inner life of others one must first embrace one's own, and so my statement that I dont "have" an inner life begins to feel like an attack on the most central of moral principles. As one of my graduate students used to [cheerfully] say, "but Nick, if you don't have an inner life, it's ok to kill you, right?"

Now, my wisest response to this line of argument would be to go all technocratic and to deny that I have any ethical dog in this fight at all.   One can, after all, be a moral naturalist and assert that reasoning and argument only come into play when people are trying to violate their ethical impulses and that, on the whole, people are designed by nature so that they dont kill each other. Just as I dont think it makes any difference whether you believe in evolution or creation whether you are a good person, I dont think it makes any difference to being a good person whether you believe others have an inner life or not. Thus, I escape the argument by asserting that it has no MORAL consequences. I reassure Russ that my absense of an inner life does not make me dangerous, and, once he takes that reassurance seriously, he doesnt have to kill me. Peace is re-established.

But we behaviorists are fierce (if covert) moralists.   Just read Skinner's Walden II. We deplore the metaphysics of the inner life because we think of it as a way of thinking that encourages people to act badly while claiming good intentions.   Now it will become clear to you why I have tolerated the conversation about my "honesty", or, more accurately "Nick's" honesty : because I am holding a similar judgment behind my back like a mailed fist. The function of the inner life view (in evolutionary history) has been to promote dishonesty!

Animal behaviorists from time to time have tried to serve as expert witnesses in the societal debate concerning who you can kill (or enslave, or whatever). I regard my colleagues participation in this argument as akin to that of the psychologists who consulted in the CIA torture techniques. One of my best collegial friends -- bless his heart -- wrote an essay entitled "Does octopus suffer ?" and came to the conclusion that well, perhaps, yes, but nothing LESS than octopus could possibly feel pain. Therefore you can dissect a cockroach with impunity, right? Well, anybody who has stuck a needle in a cockroach knows they dont like it. So, any attempt to draw a line between creatures that suffer and those that dont strikes me as casuistry of the worst sort.    And people who object to clubbing a cow over the head but who will happily eat a salmon that has suffocated in the hold of a boat under a pile of his own kind seems to me to be ... well, kidding himself.

In short, I Russ thinks people would be better if they believed in the inner life; I think people would be better people if they didnt.

This is probably where the argument should stop, because I dont see any way to resolve it. I am overjoyed if The People have come to understand that The Inner Life is a way to think, not the way things are. Russ will have to speak for himself, but I guess he will be more or less satisfied if we understand that The Inner Life is fundamental to what we are as humans. We will just have to hold those contradictory thoughts in our minds and move on to issues we can resolve.

Two places where I would like to see this discussion go from here are as follows:

(1) What about "self-awareness" in computers? Now, that discussion got off to a strange start because I expected the experts on the list to treat as trivial the proposition that computers ... in some loose sense at least ... collect information about themselves. That assertion seemed to be already controversial, and I would really like to understand why. Modern automobiles gather all sorts of information about themselves. What exactly is going on when they do this. I see this as a detailed, matter-of-fact, discussion of self-reference in control systems.

(2) What about "emergence"? Discussions concerning emergence always stray into discussions about consciousness because, for many, the origin's of consciousness in the brain is the only truly interesting example of emergence. But I think the most interesting examples of emergence are the most prosaic ones. I would like to see us get back to the emergent properties of ... triangles. I would like to see us build an error-free language for talking about simple forms of emergence ... triangles, gliders, etc. -- so that we can have some confidence and discipline the next time we get together to talk complexity babble face to face.

Nick

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology,

Clark University ([hidden email])

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

----- Original Message -----

From: [hidden email]

To: [hidden email]
Cc: [hidden email]; [hidden email]; [hidden email]

Sent: 6/19/2009 8:58:14 AM

Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Nick and dishonest behavior

As I wrote to Nick directly, I think Nick is gracious and kind and a man of great integrity.

But this doesn't make sense to me: "We don't have to believe in inner minds to say that a person accused of dishonesty behaves as if deeply hurt." What could it possibly mean to say that a person is deeply hurt if there is no such thing as first person experience? And if there is no such thing as being deeply hurt in a first person way, what could it possibly mean to say that someone is behaving as if deeply hurt?

This suggests that it is very dangerous to claim that there is no first person experience and that observable behavior is all there is. It would encourage "treating people as objects" because that's exactly the position it takes. An attitude of this sort would seem to discard millennia of progress in our understanding and acceptance of what ethical human-to-human interaction consists of.

-- Russ

On Fri, Jun 19, 2009 at 7:40 AM, John Kennison <[hidden email]> wrote:

Nick and I are on opposite sides of the consciousness debate. I think there is an inner mind and that I experience it. Nick rejects statements not made from the third person perspective. Perhaps the debate suffers from a feeling that if we take Nick's third person view, we are not allowed to use metaphorical statements that suggest an inner mind. But clearly we can say "The computer had an illusion" or a "breakdown" etc. to describe behavior. (e.g. The behavior was as we imagined it would be if the computer had a inner mind which suffered a breakdown.) Moreover, not only can these metaphorical statements about behavior be defined rigorously, but we can formulate and test rules about how they are related. We don't have to believe in inner minds to say that a person accused of dishonesty behaves as if deeply hurt. That is why we should not casually make such accusations nor assume they will be without negative consequences even if there is no inner mind.

________________________________________
From: [hidden email] [[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Russ Abbott [[hidden email]]

Sent: Thursday, June 18, 2009 11:07 PM
To: [hidden email]
Cc: [hidden email]; [hidden email]

Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Nick and dishonest behavior

Nick wrote:

To call a man "dishonest" (my word, I admit, but you have embraced it) is very harsh in my world, and seems (to me) to require a level of certainty about another person's motives that I just don't know how you could come by from your limited experience with me. ...

You are insisting on the correctness of your view of my mind based on inferences from my behavior.

Yes, I'm doing exactly that, judging you on the basis of your behavior -- in this conversation. (The past 40 years aren't relevant to that.) Your position in this discussion seems to be that your behavior is all there is. So why are you objecting that I'm doing it?

Furthermore, your objection seems to be that I don't know what your "motives" are. I'm not sure what you mean by motives in this case. I'm not assuming any particular motive. In fact I'm confused about what your motives might be and why you are acting so dishonestly. Yet you are acting dishonestly.

To review: a good example of your dishonest behavior was your answer to my question about nausea. Your provided a very nice first person description of what it means to feel nauseous.

If you say that you are "feeling nauseous" i will understand that your world seems like it is churning around but that your visual cues do not confirm (i.e., you are dizzy) and that your stomach feels the way it does when on previous occasions you have thrown up.

Note your use of the first person words seems and feels. But then you refused to answer whether that description would ever apply to a robot. Instead you offered a 3rd person description of what it looks like to feel nauseous and said that of course a robot could fit that description. I call that dishonest. You know what a first person description means because you used it yourself. But then you refused to answer the question whether such a first person description could apply to a robot. Furthermore, you refused to acknowledge that this is what you were doing. I see that as dishonest. But I don't know what your motives for acting this way might be.

Besides, why are you so concerned about my characterizing your behavior as dishonest? Why is that a very harsh term? It's simply a description of your behavior.

Are you upset because you are taking my use of the term dishonest to apply more broadly than to your behavior? In the second passage of yours quoted above, you talked about my view of your mind. Are you unhappy that I seem to be implying that your mind is dishonest? I thought your position was that there is no mind for me to have a view of. I thought your position was that behavior was all that mattered. It should not matter to you what "my view of your mind" is if it doesn't mean anything to talk about minds.

-- Russ

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

--
Doug Roberts
[hidden email]
[hidden email]
505-455-7333 - Office
505-670-8195 - Cell

Douglas Roberts-2

Re: Nick and dishonest behavior

Do you mean 'assuming', or "assuming"?

--Doug

On Fri, Jun 19, 2009 at 12:27 PM, Nicholas Thompson <[hidden email]> wrote:

For some reason, I am assuming that those were ironic squiggles.

Nick

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology,

Clark University ([hidden email])

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

----- Original Message -----

From: [hidden email]

To: [hidden email];[hidden email]
Cc: [hidden email]; [hidden email]; [hidden email]

Sent: 6/19/2009 11:46:47 AM

Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Nick and dishonest behavior

Well, that certainly cleared things up!

;-} ;-{

On Fri, Jun 19, 2009 at 11:33 AM, Nicholas Thompson <[hidden email]> wrote:

Dear Doug and "List",

I hope it is clear to everybody by now that "Nick" is a philosophical example. He was borrowed for this purpose because the best discussions are reflexive ... i.e, they become examples of themselves. Doug and Nick (the real one, this time) fell into a paradox. He is arguing that I falsify my own mind when I say that I dont understand expressions like "I feel nauseous". I am arguing that he doesnt know what he is saying when he uses them. Notice the paradox: if "Nick" is right, then Russ is right; if "Russ" is right, then Nick is right. You are correct to demand that we call a truce on this discussion for long enough to clarify why anybody should give a damn.

Part of the purported importance has just become clear in Russ's most recent message. He feels that ethical behavior necessitates our respecting the sanctity of the inner life of others. To respect the inner life of others one must first embrace one's own, and so my statement that I dont "have" an inner life begins to feel like an attack on the most central of moral principles. As one of my graduate students used to [cheerfully] say, "but Nick, if you don't have an inner life, it's ok to kill you, right?"

Now, my wisest response to this line of argument would be to go all technocratic and to deny that I have any ethical dog in this fight at all.   One can, after all, be a moral naturalist and assert that reasoning and argument only come into play when people are trying to violate their ethical impulses and that, on the whole, people are designed by nature so that they dont kill each other. Just as I dont think it makes any difference whether you believe in evolution or creation whether you are a good person, I dont think it makes any difference to being a good person whether you believe others have an inner life or not. Thus, I escape the argument by asserting that it has no MORAL consequences. I reassure Russ that my absense of an inner life does not make me dangerous, and, once he takes that reassurance seriously, he doesnt have to kill me. Peace is re-established.

But we behaviorists are fierce (if covert) moralists.   Just read Skinner's Walden II. We deplore the metaphysics of the inner life because we think of it as a way of thinking that encourages people to act badly while claiming good intentions.   Now it will become clear to you why I have tolerated the conversation about my "honesty", or, more accurately "Nick's" honesty : because I am holding a similar judgment behind my back like a mailed fist. The function of the inner life view (in evolutionary history) has been to promote dishonesty!

Animal behaviorists from time to time have tried to serve as expert witnesses in the societal debate concerning who you can kill (or enslave, or whatever). I regard my colleagues participation in this argument as akin to that of the psychologists who consulted in the CIA torture techniques. One of my best collegial friends -- bless his heart -- wrote an essay entitled "Does octopus suffer ?" and came to the conclusion that well, perhaps, yes, but nothing LESS than octopus could possibly feel pain. Therefore you can dissect a cockroach with impunity, right? Well, anybody who has stuck a needle in a cockroach knows they dont like it. So, any attempt to draw a line between creatures that suffer and those that dont strikes me as casuistry of the worst sort.    And people who object to clubbing a cow over the head but who will happily eat a salmon that has suffocated in the hold of a boat under a pile of his own kind seems to me to be ... well, kidding himself.

In short, I Russ thinks people would be better if they believed in the inner life; I think people would be better people if they didnt.

This is probably where the argument should stop, because I dont see any way to resolve it. I am overjoyed if The People have come to understand that The Inner Life is a way to think, not the way things are. Russ will have to speak for himself, but I guess he will be more or less satisfied if we understand that The Inner Life is fundamental to what we are as humans. We will just have to hold those contradictory thoughts in our minds and move on to issues we can resolve.

Two places where I would like to see this discussion go from here are as follows:

(1) What about "self-awareness" in computers? Now, that discussion got off to a strange start because I expected the experts on the list to treat as trivial the proposition that computers ... in some loose sense at least ... collect information about themselves. That assertion seemed to be already controversial, and I would really like to understand why. Modern automobiles gather all sorts of information about themselves. What exactly is going on when they do this. I see this as a detailed, matter-of-fact, discussion of self-reference in control systems.

(2) What about "emergence"? Discussions concerning emergence always stray into discussions about consciousness because, for many, the origin's of consciousness in the brain is the only truly interesting example of emergence. But I think the most interesting examples of emergence are the most prosaic ones. I would like to see us get back to the emergent properties of ... triangles. I would like to see us build an error-free language for talking about simple forms of emergence ... triangles, gliders, etc. -- so that we can have some confidence and discipline the next time we get together to talk complexity babble face to face.

Nick

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology,

Clark University ([hidden email])

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

----- Original Message -----

From: [hidden email]

To: [hidden email]
Cc: [hidden email]; [hidden email]; [hidden email]

Sent: 6/19/2009 8:58:14 AM

Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Nick and dishonest behavior

As I wrote to Nick directly, I think Nick is gracious and kind and a man of great integrity.

But this doesn't make sense to me: "We don't have to believe in inner minds to say that a person accused of dishonesty behaves as if deeply hurt." What could it possibly mean to say that a person is deeply hurt if there is no such thing as first person experience? And if there is no such thing as being deeply hurt in a first person way, what could it possibly mean to say that someone is behaving as if deeply hurt?

This suggests that it is very dangerous to claim that there is no first person experience and that observable behavior is all there is. It would encourage "treating people as objects" because that's exactly the position it takes. An attitude of this sort would seem to discard millennia of progress in our understanding and acceptance of what ethical human-to-human interaction consists of.

-- Russ

On Fri, Jun 19, 2009 at 7:40 AM, John Kennison <[hidden email]> wrote:

Nick and I are on opposite sides of the consciousness debate. I think there is an inner mind and that I experience it. Nick rejects statements not made from the third person perspective. Perhaps the debate suffers from a feeling that if we take Nick's third person view, we are not allowed to use metaphorical statements that suggest an inner mind. But clearly we can say "The computer had an illusion" or a "breakdown" etc. to describe behavior. (e.g. The behavior was as we imagined it would be if the computer had a inner mind which suffered a breakdown.) Moreover, not only can these metaphorical statements about behavior be defined rigorously, but we can formulate and test rules about how they are related. We don't have to believe in inner minds to say that a person accused of dishonesty behaves as if deeply hurt. That is why we should not casually make such accusations nor assume they will be without negative consequences even if there is no inner mind.

________________________________________
From: [hidden email] [[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Russ Abbott [[hidden email]]

Sent: Thursday, June 18, 2009 11:07 PM
To: [hidden email]
Cc: [hidden email]; [hidden email]

Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Nick and dishonest behavior

Nick wrote:

To call a man "dishonest" (my word, I admit, but you have embraced it) is very harsh in my world, and seems (to me) to require a level of certainty about another person's motives that I just don't know how you could come by from your limited experience with me. ...

You are insisting on the correctness of your view of my mind based on inferences from my behavior.

Yes, I'm doing exactly that, judging you on the basis of your behavior -- in this conversation. (The past 40 years aren't relevant to that.) Your position in this discussion seems to be that your behavior is all there is. So why are you objecting that I'm doing it?

Furthermore, your objection seems to be that I don't know what your "motives" are. I'm not sure what you mean by motives in this case. I'm not assuming any particular motive. In fact I'm confused about what your motives might be and why you are acting so dishonestly. Yet you are acting dishonestly.

To review: a good example of your dishonest behavior was your answer to my question about nausea. Your provided a very nice first person description of what it means to feel nauseous.

If you say that you are "feeling nauseous" i will understand that your world seems like it is churning around but that your visual cues do not confirm (i.e., you are dizzy) and that your stomach feels the way it does when on previous occasions you have thrown up.

Note your use of the first person words seems and feels. But then you refused to answer whether that description would ever apply to a robot. Instead you offered a 3rd person description of what it looks like to feel nauseous and said that of course a robot could fit that description. I call that dishonest. You know what a first person description means because you used it yourself. But then you refused to answer the question whether such a first person description could apply to a robot. Furthermore, you refused to acknowledge that this is what you were doing. I see that as dishonest. But I don't know what your motives for acting this way might be.

Besides, why are you so concerned about my characterizing your behavior as dishonest? Why is that a very harsh term? It's simply a description of your behavior.

Are you upset because you are taking my use of the term dishonest to apply more broadly than to your behavior? In the second passage of yours quoted above, you talked about my view of your mind. Are you unhappy that I seem to be implying that your mind is dishonest? I thought your position was that there is no mind for me to have a view of. I thought your position was that behavior was all that mattered. It should not matter to you what "my view of your mind" is if it doesn't mean anything to talk about minds.

-- Russ

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

--
Doug Roberts
[hidden email]
[hidden email]
505-455-7333 - Office
505-670-8195 - Cell

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

Steve Smith

Re: Nick and dishonest behavior

In reply to this post by Nick Thompson

Damn fine treatise Nick. Too much I agree with to line out... it
would be the choir singing to itself.

I still need a lot more "self" introspection on this one, "whomever" "I"
might be.

- Steve

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Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
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Steve Smith

Re: Nick and dishonest behavior

In reply to this post by Douglas Roberts-2

Douglas Roberts wrote:
> Well, that certainly cleared things up!
And the most fascinating thing (for the benefit for those who know
neither I nor Doug personally) is that this was a wonderful illumination
for me. Nothing conclusive, but nicely expansive (for me)...

I think it is time for Doug and I (and our spouses) to break bread,
share libations, and maybe even some fresh-roast, fresh ground coffee
late into the night! ( I love/hate being a wide-awake drunk for 2 days
straight thanks to Doug's killer Scotch followed by excellent
Fresh-Fresh-Fresh Espresso)

- Steve

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
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Steve Smith

Re: Nick and dishonest behavior

In reply to this post by James Steiner

James Steiner wrote:

On Fri, Jun 19, 2009 at 11:53 AM, Steve Smith <[hidden email]> wrote:

What is odd about this whole interchange is that I can't quite find the point of view (all experience is 3rd person) Nick is promoting, but it feels that it could very well be my own habit of experience and language.

What if everything Nick was saying was true (about the absense of true 1st person) , but only for Nick, and other's like him for whom behaviorist ideas make sense? What if, for Nick, there really is no there, there (or a "me" here), but the idea doesn't make sense to others, because there is a "me" there... (I'm sure this idea has been stated before, and it's distracting nonsense, but I don't have much else to contribute, and I didn't think it'd be right to just post, "mumble, mumble" so I could pretend I was participating)
~~James.

All I can think to say about now is "mumble, mumble"! <grin>

- Steve

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Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
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Steve Smith

Re: Nick and dishonest behavior

In reply to this post by Nick Thompson

Sorry, it was not a criticism.   It was an observation which "ever so slightly"
illuminates the topic (for me, anyway).

As Russ's observations move from the abstract and general (along with the rest of ours)
to the specific (your intentions), I feel a type of recursion in my own observation of
the situation.

Recursion is not always bad... especially if/when it bottoms out.   I'm hoping that in
this discussion, there are only 2 levels of recursion... considering 1st/3rd person behavior
in the abstract/general and considering in the personal.

In the abstract, your description is very "reasonable" to me, in the personal, it is hard to
accept, yet remains compelling.

- Steve

Steve, 

Please dont criticize; help.  If we are circling, summarize the positions. 
Locate points of agreement.  Isolate remaining issues.  Build!

Nick

Nicholas S. Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology, 
Clark University ([hidden email])
http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

[Original Message]
From: Steve Smith [hidden email]
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group [hidden email]
Date: 6/18/2009 10:13:40 PM
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Nick and dishonest behavior

I think we've started recursion here.

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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




============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
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Nick Thompson

Re: Nick and dishonest behavior

In reply to this post by Russ Abbott

I have long felt that the Santa Fe group should find a way to gnash
families.

Let's do it.

N

Nicholas S. Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology,
Clark University ([hidden email])
http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

> [Original Message]
> From: Steve Smith <[hidden email]>
> To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
> Date: 6/19/2009 11:11:50 PM
> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Nick and dishonest behavior
>
> Douglas Roberts wrote:
> > Well, that certainly cleared things up!
> And the most fascinating thing (for the benefit for those who know
> neither I nor Doug personally) is that this was a wonderful illumination
> for me. Nothing conclusive, but nicely expansive (for me)...
>
> I think it is time for Doug and I (and our spouses) to break bread,
> share libations, and maybe even some fresh-roast, fresh ground coffee
> late into the night! ( I love/hate being a wide-awake drunk for 2 days
> straight thanks to Doug's killer Scotch followed by excellent
> Fresh-Fresh-Fresh Espresso)
>
>
> - Steve
>
> ============================================================
> 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