Re: (Subjective) experience
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When "experience" is used as a verb, we don't add the word "subjective." We add it when "experience" is used as a noun to refer to first person experience. The broader word "experience" isn't that precise.
But more to the point I'm still confused what you mean bv "I don't deny that I, or the cat, or even the robot, experience (when all three obey the rules of "experiencing"). What rules are you talking about? Furthermore, I don't agree that robots have the same sort of first person experience that we and cats do. Is that really your position, that robots "experience" the world the same way you do? If so, doesn't it follow that we should be kind to robots in the same way we should be kind to people and cats, that robots deserve humane treatment, etc.? -- Russ Abbott _____________________________________________ Professor, Computer Science California State University, Los Angeles Cell phone: 310-621-3805 o Check out my blog at http://bluecatblog.wordpress.com/ On Mon, Jun 15, 2009 at 7:09 PM, Nicholas Thompson <[hidden email]> wrote:
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See comments in Navy Blue below.
Nicholas S. Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology,
Clark University ([hidden email])
Nick ============================================================ 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 |
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See below.
-- Russ Abbott _____________________________________________ Professor, Computer Science California State University, Los Angeles Cell phone: 310-621-3805 o Check out my blog at http://bluecatblog.wordpress.com/ On Mon, Jun 15, 2009 at 8:53 PM, Nicholas Thompson <[hidden email]> wrote:
Didn't I already respond to that? No point in doing it again.
I don't believe I operate according to rules. So again, I don't know what rules you are talking about. But more importantly, I'm more interested in a sentence like "I was aware of the mouse." You keep changing the subject to an observation of something else. The issue is what does it mean to say that I am having an experience, e.g., "I feel nauseous." Does it mean anything to you? I still don't know. Also, I still don't know whether you would understand a robot that said "I feel nauseous" to mean the same sort of thing that you mean by that sentence.
You are not answering the question. If a robot feeling nauseous means to you the same thing as a human feeling nauseous, do you grant it the same sorts of "rights" that we grant each other. I'd like to know your answer. For example, would it be torture to waterboard a robot?
I'm beginning to feel irritated. It seems to me you aren't engaging in an honest dialog since you aren't responding to the questions I asked. I took some time to construct questions that would help me understand your position. But if you won't answer them I'm wasting my time, which I find frustrating, not interesting.
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P.S. Nick, Do you believe that robots are capable of feeling frustrated and irritated?
-- Russ On Mon, Jun 15, 2009 at 9:54 PM, Russ Abbott <[hidden email]> wrote: See below. ============================================================ 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 |
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P.P.S. Do you think you could get a robot to provide information it "didn't want" to provide (whatever you think that means) by waterboarding it?
-- Russ On Mon, Jun 15, 2009 at 11:36 PM, Russ Abbott <[hidden email]> wrote: P.S. Nick, Do you believe that robots are capable of feeling frustrated and irritated? ============================================================ 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 |
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In reply to this post by Russ Abbott
Russ and Steve,
Seeing Drs in Boston today, so out of this wonderful loop for a day.
About "feeling nauseous". If a robot can DO nauseous, it can feel nauseous, would be my first response. But notice what a strain on grammar is put by the notion of "feeling nauseous". "feeling" is a metaphor, akin to touching with the fingertips. How do I palpate "nauseous"? Something VERY STRANGE GOING ON HERE.
Look, I stipulate that privileging a third person view (as opposed to the more traditional practice of privileging a first person view) is not going to rescue me (or us) from talking silly. But it will change the kind of silly talk we do.
The tough one is dreaming. Do robots dream? Does Nick dream? One can either launch into reams of inter psychic babble or one can "just say no"! It's a different kind of silliness.
Anyway, this has been written in great haste and is probably of lower quality than usual.
Do good, today.
N
Nicholas S. Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology,
Clark University ([hidden email])
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Again you didn't answer the question. "Feel" has multiple meanings, only one of which has to do with palpating.
Furthermore "feel" as referring to a subjective state is no more a metaphor than any other language.If, when you get stuck for a reply you retreat to calling language a metaphor, you will never deal with the issue. All referential language is metaphor: "an expression used to refer to something that it does not literally denote." where "denote" means "to be a sign or indication of." All referential language is intentional. It is never the thing to which it refers. Some language, such as exclamations, e.g., of joy, pain, etc. are often an aspect of the thing itself. But this is a tangent. I want you to deal with the issue of experience. In your message you completely ignored my other questions. Please go back to my previous message and reply to the questions in it as they are intended. Or here's a list that will do.
-- Russ On Tue, Jun 16, 2009 at 6:11 AM, Nicholas Thompson <[hidden email]> wrote:
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Nick takes Metaphorazine was: (Subjective) experience
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Russ Abbott wrote:
Again you didn't answer the question. "Feel" has multiple meanings, only one of which has to do with palpating.I feel for you Russ. I share your frustration with Nick's responses, yet I'm pretty sure he is trying to get at something completely different which might be why he is being so difficult about these questions... Furthermore "feel" as referring to a subjective state is no more a metaphor than any other language.If, when you get stuck for a reply you retreat to calling language a metaphor, you will never deal with the issue. All referential language is metaphor: "an expression used to refer to something that it does not literally denote." where "denote" means "to be a sign or indication of." All referential language is intentional. It is never the thing to which it refers. Some language, such as exclamations, e.g., of joy, pain, etc. are often an aspect of the thing itself. But this is a tangent. I want you to deal with the issue of experience.I suspect that all language is figurative. Many of our intellectualizations are based on understanding by analogy and therefore rooted in metaphor (did I just say "based on"? and then "rooted"? - *what* must I be talking "about"? Can't I just be "direct" and quit "beating around the bush" and using "oblique" and "tangential" references to things?). I do suspect Nick might have been dipping into his Metaphorazine... fortunately he's stayed out of his stash of Onamatopiates (so far) and you don't want to be there when he jacks up on Alliterene and Hyberbolehyde! Did he say he was just off to the Docs' for a fresh set of scrips? MetaphorazineFor the full poem, click the link above. I doubt that I can add any clarity with my own stirring here, but I feel compelled. Or perhaps there is an observation of compellingness which is uniquely situated in the metaphorical location which does not change when movement happens. This reminds me (way too much) of the implications (I think) of David Bohm's Rheomode. I sometimes suspect that David Bohm drank Simileum like Absynthe. Or perhaps it is just an occupational hazard of trying to understand and explain Quantum Theory. I believe that Nick's point is that among those who experience "I"ness (the experience of being in the first person?), that this is really the experience of observing from a unique perspective. That qualitatively, whatever observers might exist, they are inherently 3rd person, observing a world. What "we" (those illusory beings who feel first-personish) observe when we think we are observing ourselves is really an illusion or a consequence of the uniqueness of that observation being embodied, and nothing more (as if that is not enough?). This is a subtle thing, and I'm not sure I really get it, but I do feel that I have a hint of what he is trying to describe. I'm not sure that the question of whether Robots (or computers, or smart phones, or hand-calculators, or abacii, or quipu) have experiences is relevant to this topic. That might be partially why Nick keeps ignoring it. I think it is nevertheless an interesting (and important?) question, but I think it is not germane to the point he is making. I suppose Nick could speak for himself, but I'm having such a grand time trying him on (after an extra heavy dose of Metaphorazine) that I can't help it! Woof Woof, Squeek Squeek, Chirp Chirp, Blah Blah, - Sieve PS. Yes, I am perhaps, having waaay too much fun! ============================================================ 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 |
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In reply to this post by Russ Abbott
Thanks for the backup here.
Help me to see what questions I am not answering, here.
I MEAN to be answering Russ's questions, so given that he feels I am not, we are near to being reduced to name calling and finger pointing.
Later this evening I will have a chance to work on this.
Nick
Nicholas S. Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology,
Clark University ([hidden email])
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Steve, I appreciate your empathy and help.
Nick, Here are some questions. How about taking a shot at them directly.
-- Russ Abbott _____________________________________________ Professor, Computer Science California State University, Los Angeles Cell phone: 310-621-3805 o Check out my blog at http://bluecatblog.wordpress.com/ On Tue, Jun 16, 2009 at 3:54 PM, Nicholas Thompson <[hidden email]> wrote:
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P.S. For "Do robots feel" you might want to substitute "Can robots experience a feeling of" if that helps.
I hope the answer isn't something like: Robots can be programmed to claim a feeling of <whatever> in the same circumstances in which humans would experience such a feeling. I don't take that as answering the question. If that's the best one can do with robots, then the answer to the original question is "no." If you take that tactic are you also going to claim that this is the best that humans do also, i.e., claim a feeling of <whatever> under certain circumstances? Even if that were true and even if we could precisely specify the conditions under which humans would claim to experience certain feelings, that still doesn't speak to the question of the experience itself. And even if you call the experience itself an illusion, that only raises the question of what is being fooled. What does the notion of illusion mean without an experiencer to experience the illusion? On the other hand, if you weren't going down this route, I'd be interested in your own answers to the original questions. -- Russ On Tue, Jun 16, 2009 at 5:00 PM, Russ Abbott <[hidden email]> wrote: Steve, I appreciate your empathy and help. ============================================================ 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 |
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In reply to this post by Russ Abbott
Russ,
I am doing the best I can. Often, your questions don't make the kind of sense to me that they make to you, and the framework that you employ to ask them, while familiar to me, is baffling. So please, please, don't read my inability to meet you on your own terms as stubbornness... blindness, perhaps,but not stubbornness. You may need to draw the question out a little bit, tell me the ways in which you find the answers un satisfying, etc. What we are doing here is not easy and much harder than what usually happens on this list, which usually amounts to neighboring gardeners throwing a few old turnips over the garden wall and then going on with their gardening. We are truly trying to grow a crop together.
Anyway, I will go through and answer the ones in the latest message simply and directly.
Look for blue text.
Nick
Nicholas S. Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology,
Clark University ([hidden email])
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In reply to this post by Russ Abbott
Russ,
I don't think I took the route you specified. One of problems is that the question of who has what just doesn't seem very important to me. Comparative psychology is beset with that question and i became an ethologist to avoid having to spend all my time talking about it, because it just seemed that we could sort that question out when we had a better understanding of what animals can do. I think it is an ethical, not a scientific question. People want reasons that it's ok or not ok to kill other things. With Quine, I don't think the answers to that question come from any from of utilitarian logic. By the way, I just watched a horrific movie that plays with that problem: In Bruge.
Ethologists work on the assumption that the experience of an organism is an open book to an observer who is willing to read it carefully. Birds characteristically don't even understand individuality the way we do, responding to each other as if each individual is a set of unrelated and disembodied cues that elicit various different functional responses from their partners.
Actually, the dualism of "experience a feeling of" turns the question from a difficult one to an impossible one, for me. So far as my understanding is concerned, one might as well say "feeling a feeling".
Nick
Nicholas S. Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology,
Clark University ([hidden email])
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In reply to this post by Russ Abbott
Well, Nick, I guess we're stuck. You say you want to talk about metaphors and models, and I want to talk about experience. To take just the first of your comments,
So
the question is, what model [scientific metaphor] does the word feeling
invoke? Is that image clear, or confused? Does it invoke different
images in different people? I think "feel" invokes only one model,
which is then more or less abused in our language: to explore with the
fingertips; the others are attempts to extend that image and some work
well, some work ok, and some work horribly. "I feel nauseous" is one
of the latter. I'm not asking what model the word "feeling" invokes (evokes?). For most people, "I feel nauseous" is used to express an experiential state that we have come to refer to as nausea. The state and the experience exist before the label for it was invented. And people who use the term had the experience before they learned how to label it. The only model your saying "I feel nauseous" invokes in me is my own memory of what that state was like for me. It's not a mental model; it's more a memory of an experiential state. It's certainly not a metaphor for something else. But if "I feel nauseous" works horribly for you (by which I assume you mean that it has no meaning(?)), I don't know what to say. Most people (including me) are perfectly comfortable with statements like "I feel nauseous." "I feel angry." "My toe hurts." "I'm hungry." ... If communicating on that level doesn't work for you, where can we go? Of course I know that they do work for you. You are too charming in your writing not to understand this sort of talk. So I guess I just don't get what you are going for when you say that they "work horribly" for you. -- Russ Abbott _____________________________________________ Professor, Computer Science California State University, Los Angeles Cell phone: 310-621-3805 o Check out my blog at http://bluecatblog.wordpress.com/ On Tue, Jun 16, 2009 at 9:05 PM, Nicholas Thompson <[hidden email]> wrote:
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In reply to this post by Russ Abbott
OK. Here is your longer response with my comments. My concern is that it's getting to long to read
I'm afraid that I do see you as being dishonest in your answers. I believe that you know what I'm talking about and deliberately avoiding responding to my meaning. It may be your way of making your point. But I think it is an impolite way of making it. This is similar to the situation in which if I were talking about Santa Clause you pretended that you had no idea what I was talking about because there is no Santa Clause. But you clarified somewhat in the next paragraph.
I only grant rights to people who show up at my meetings and take on responsibilities.
Once again, an apparent deliberate non-answer.
I think I could so design a robot. Are you saying that you could design a robot for which waterboarding would be torture? I find that to be a very interesting answer. Would you elaborate. Would you describe such a robot in more detail. How would it be designed? How would it function? How would it experience the pain of torture?
There
is some difference of opinion on that point, of course. But you can
predict my answers to any of these questions, by using the
"quacks-like-a-duck" test. Given that I was surprised by your previous answer, I have no idea what your answer to this question would be. My guess is that you are saying that you could build a robot that would look like it was withholding information but then give up that information if waterboarded. Is that what you mean? If so, that's not what I was asking -- although I'll grant that this isn't a very good question. So I'll pass.
The
easiest thing to say would be no, I dont dream. In fact, I dream only
very rarely. That would leave you with the work of proving that I
do. To do that work, you would have to reveal that you dont trust my
verbal reports... you simply dont privilege the first person view in
the way that your position implies. Nobody does. You would have to
bring EVIDENCE to bear, and that evidence would inevitably be of the
third person type. And then you would be out sliding around on my
miserable slippery slope with me. And misery loves company. But
such an argument would not be quite honest. So, I have to say
something like the following. Some things that I have experienced
appear, on sober reflection, and gathering of all relevant evidence,
not to have happened at all. Often these happen while I am in bed. Or perhaps, I could say that dreaming is a tough case and I dont know what to do with it. Was there an answer to the question somewhere in there?
Now I have a question for you. What does subjective add to the phrase subjective experience? "Subjective experience" is the noun phrase that refers to what "experience" identifies as a verb. As a noun "experience" on its own has many more and much broader meanings. So "subjective experience" is simply a way of identifying which sense of "experience" one intends. The remainder of your comments aren't about my questions, and I have no comment on them. -- Russ By the
way, I think that the extensionless dot is actually probably a wrong
view, one that will fail in the long run. I "just" think it is a
better place to start than the Cartesian theatre.
Because
I think it will fail, I am interested in what self knowledge means to a
computer engineer. Computers are full of systems that generate self
knowledge of various sorts ... if only the system manifest, and all of
that. Right? And gathering self knowledge, requires exploiting cues.
So it is never quite SELF knowledge ... it is not knowledge about the
self-knowledge gathering system itself. It must be knowledge gathered
ABOUT the larger system that surrounds it through the use of cues. The
list's response to this inquiry has been quite startling to me. Seems
to be of the form, "computers dont gather information about
themselves!" They are too dumb!
Frankly, I dont know what to make of that response. am I misreading it?
Nick On Tue, Jun 16, 2009 at 10:49 PM, Nicholas Thompson <[hidden email]> wrote:
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In reply to this post by Russ Abbott
DAMN!, Russ. This is HARD.
I keep trying to answer your questions in the terms that you ask them and keep missing the mark. Let me try again.
Watch for the Dark Red , this time.
Nick
Nicholas S. Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology,
Clark University ([hidden email])
Sorry. I may have mixed up two threads. ============================================================ 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 |
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I'm about to leave for the airport to get on a plane to NY -- before getting on a plane to Australia next Monday. So here's the answer to the easiest interchange: the last one. For three senses of "experience" as a noun, see : http://wordnetweb.princeton.edu/perl/webwn?s=experience
-- Russ Abbott _____________________________________________ Professor, Computer Science California State University, Los Angeles Cell phone: 310-621-3805 o Check out my blog at http://bluecatblog.wordpress.com/ On Wed, Jun 17, 2009 at 6:00 PM, Nicholas Thompson <[hidden email]> wrote:
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