Response to Rikus: edited version.

[Nick Thompson]

Here is a cleaned up version.  Not worth a second read, if you have suffered through a first,  but will save you some gear (and tooth) grinding, if you haven't. 

 

Sorry to try your patience. 

 

N

 

 

 

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: 6/25/2009 10:25:17 AM

Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Direct conversation - 1st vs 3rd person

Dear Rikus, and all,

 

I think one of the hardest things about having been an academic is that while we are paid to have ideas, nobody else is paid to respond to them.  And so, academic writing is like dropping coins down an infinitely deep wishing well and listening for any evidence at all that the coin ever dropped. 

 

I think it is safe to say that NEVER in my 30 to 40 years of developing these ideas have they received as much careful attention as they have in the last two weeks.  There is no greater kindness  -- no rarer kindness -- a colleague can do for an academic.  I am deeply in your collective debt.  I am humbled by it, actually.

 

Rikus's questions are particularly well posed, and I will do my best with them below.

 

Nick

 

 

 

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology,

Clark University ([hidden email])

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

 

 

 

I wish I could say that the new realist perspective dissolves the idiographic mystery.. the fact that people are so DAMNED individual.  But it doesn’t;  it merely recasts it.  From the point of view of the folk psychological account, the mystery is that an indivdiual’s mind is locked away inside a vault that can never be accessed;  from the NR perspective, the mystery arises from the fact that an individual’s mind is a point of view from a place that one can never stand.  I would argue that of the two perspectives, the NR is the more heuristic because the slope leading up to the goal is more gradual.  One is led, on the New Realist  view, to try to approximate another’s point of view;  in the Folk Psychological view one is led to try and break into a vault.  And one is never sure whether the Vault one is breaking into is the vault that contains the treasure that one is trying to discover. 

 

 

Eric (and Nick),

 

I'm still pursuing clarity. 

 

nst ---> As well you might!

 

 Kindly consider the following:

Person A, a high-school student, is asked by a teacher (B) to solve a maths problem on the board in front of the class.  Among the other students is person C, a close friend of A.  A is taking an unusually long time to solve the problem, frequently erasing partial calculations, now and then pausing to stare at the board with a frown.

 

B is a new teacher and has only interacted with A a few times.  It appears to him that the problem is simply too much for A, and starts forming an idea about A's math skills.

 

C knows that A is good at maths and that the problem on the board should really not be difficult for him.  He also knows A well enough to recognise that the frown A exhibits means something is bothering him.  Things between A and his girlfriend are a bit shaky lately and he wonders if it took a turn for the worse.

 

A has a really bad headache.  He very rarely gets headaches, but woke up this morning with a monster.  He hates giving up on math problems, though, and is sure he should be able to solve this one.  Also, he suspects the new teacher thinks he isn't very good at maths and he wants to correct that impression.  And he just realised he forgot to do biology homework and is trying to recall which period biology is.

 

nst --->  OK.  Great hypothetical.  As a "New Realist" [the philosophical perspective from which this all arises], I am committed to using the metaphor of "point of view" rather than the metaphor of "private space".  So, A, B, and C have different "points of view" on A's behavior.   We, also, have a point of view on the situation, call it "D".  All of these points of view are dynamic, and constantly being updated.  So, for instance, from the point of view with the least information about A, the Teacher's, [B], it appears that a brief review of A's academic records would show that he had never done well at Maths.  Once that prediction is disconfirmed, B's point of view on A would be different.   

Can you please comment:

 

1. I understand you to say that A is an observer of A in much the same way as B and C.  You're *not* saying A is not having an experience of A, only that A's experience is not *privileged* compared to B and C. 

 

nst ---> Yes.  Good.  Thank you. 

 

 Does that mean you consider A's experience to be qualitatively indistinguishable from that of B and C, or only that the difference in the quality of A's experience, compared to that of B and C, is not of consequence?

 

nst ---> I am sorry to say I don't have a good grip on what is meant by "quality" here.  I would strive to make a distinction between sources of information and the manner in which those sources are integrated into a view of the situation.  And I certainly believe that some sources of information are better (will prove out when the frame is widened) than others.  Even B, whose viewpoint the hypothetical invites us to disparage, might have information the others might profit from.  True, she has been called into the situation as a substitute teacher at the last moment and doesn't know these students well, but she has been teaching Maths for 30 years and has vast knowledge of the range of skills that students present and of their behavior under the stress situation of an exam. 

 

2. Obvious A can think a great many things that B and C can't know anything about.  He can access memory about himself that B and C cannot.  He has access to interoceptive sensory information that B and C does not.  He has the experience of directly influencing the mathematical symbols in his working memory, outside the perception or direct influence of B and C.  On the other hand, B and C has access to some exteroceptive sensory information about A that A lacks.  Do you consider these various kinds of information and experiences to be entirely interchangeable?

 

nst --->  Exactly.  You said it better than I did above. 

 

3. Do you distinguish between "experience" and "have information about"?

 

nst ---> Oh what a good question!   The field of psychology was influenced by the New Realists by two distinct routes.  One was through the "cognitive" psychologist, E. C. Tolman; the other was through the perceptual psychologist, JJ Gibson.  Eric and I are from these different traditions and he and I have often wrestled over this point. Eric will no doubt contradict me at this point.  

 

 I see my challenge here to be to come up with a way of talking that is as internally consistent as possible. I think I would say that "information" is "potential experience". It involves imagining a kind of universal point of view that "sees" everything that all observers have ever or might possibly see.   All the stuff about A's headache is information that some observers have and others do not; as such it is part of the potential experience or information available in the situation.   So, to "have information" means the same thing as to "experience".  If the information is "in" one's "field of view", one is experiencing it. 

 

4. When you say that A's point of view is not privileged, do you consider anything beyond the ability to identify motives and intent, gauge current emotional state, and identify habitual patterns of behaviour?

 

nst --->  Well, I would have to evaluate each claim of privilege, case by case.  If we are talking about what is written on your side of the cup that sits on the table between us, I would be inclined, on theoretical grounds, to grant you privilege;  if, however, you are blindfolded, and I put the cup before you a moment ago, I would ret     ain that privilege for myself, on the same sorts of theoretical grounds.  Spouses are often pretty equally privileged with respect to one anothers' emotional states, which is why marriage is such an interesting human relation.    

 

5. We can extend the example and allow A to spontaneously start hallucinating a swarm of hand-sized pterodactyls that are attacking him.  His body and mind responds to the perceived threat like it would to a real one.  In some sense he really is having the experience, yet, B and C would deny that it is taking place.  What exactly does it mean to be "wrong" about one's own experience?

 

nst --->  The New Realists spent a lot of time talking about hallucination and what they wrote didn't help me much.  My answer would be something like this.  Our own point of view on the situation ... point of view D ... evolves as we listen to the conversation between A and the others...."Sure looks like a swarm of pterodactyls there"  "Pterodactyls?" "Yep.  They're attacking me from all sides!" "I don't see no damned pterodactyls!"  ETC.   Now, a fifth observer, E, watching and listening to all of this, might begin to see the degree to which the D point of view is shaped by D's experience of A, B, and C's point of view.  So E might say, "From where I stand, D sees A is  wrong and B as right."

 

Thanks again.  I feel like my mind is a flock of sheep being moved around by some very good sheep dogs. 

 

By the way, I think Eric is correct to try and anchor our discussion of First/third person to grammar.  Speech about the self is first person speech; speech about others is third person speech.  Our position could then be distilled into the statement that there is nothing special about the perceptual processes that lie behind first person speech. 

 

Nick

 

Regards,

Rikus

 

From: [hidden email]

Sent: Wednesday, June 24, 2009 8:57 PM

To: [hidden email]

Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Direct conversation - 1st vs 3rd person

My understanding is that the terms 1st and 3rd person arose as ways of talking about literary styles - and our use of them is metaphorical. An essential part of the metaphor is that authors writing in 1st person are typically granted privileged license to write about the mind of "I". In contrast, people writing in (a non-omniscient) 3rd person, are typically not granted as much license to write about the minds. This is not entirely true, as people writing in 3rd person write about minds all the time, but their writings are considered more vulnerable to dispute. For example, if Obama wrote an account of his inauguration and said "I was terrified", it would be considered less vulnerable to dispute than if I wrote an account of his inauguration and said "He was terrified". If these linguistic conventions become reified then we can start taking the "I" not merely to denote the speaker/viewer, but to denote an entity in possession of unique powers that justify the privileges commonly granted to the linguistic device. This is suggested as my understanding of the history, independent of any value judgment regarding the reification.

There is a lurking problem, however, as these conventions do not always seem to hold in the real world. The most glairing probelm is that, at least sometimes, "I" can be wrong about my own mind and "He" can be right. (The cause of my error can range from simply not paying attention to what I am doing, to intentional self-delusion, to forgetting - think Alzheimer's.) For some, these problems lead to an urge to collapse categories, to see if the oddness cannot be gotten rid of if we leave behind the notion of uniqueness that goes with having distinct labels. I suppose that on some formal level, when a dichotomy collapses into a monism, it might not be particularly important which category label remains. However, one category may be preferred over another because it originally contained properties that the author wishes to retain as implicit or explicit in the monistic system that remains. These properties are ported along with word into the monistic system, because the term retains sway as a metaphor.

In this case, the historical bias has been to retain only the "I" position. In this move, the "I" retains its unique insight about ourselves, and any insight we think we have about others must be treated purely as insight about ourselves, i.e. the mind that I know as "their mind" is really just a sub-part of my mind. This leads to extreme forms of idealism (where all the world exists merely as an idea), the two mind problem (is it ever possible for two minds to know the some object?), etc., etc. These were huge turn of the 20th century challenges for philosophy, having grown out of a tradition of pushing more and more extreme the distinguished lineage of ideas flowing from Descartes, Kant, Berkeley, etc. The problems, for the most part, remain. In the extreme form, at least, this lineage leads to a heavy intellectual paralysis, as it is not possible for any "I" to know any other "I", nor to know the "real world" (should such a thing even exist).

The alternative (assuming we are to retain one of the original labels), is to have a bias for the "He" position. This leads to extreme forms of realism, and often (but not always) to behaviorism. In this move, the "I" has to get its information about the mind in the same that "He" has to get information. That is, if my brother knows my mind by observing my behavior, then I can only know my mind by observing my behavior. (Note, that the assertion about observing behavior is a secondary postulate, supplimenting the fundamental assertion that the method of knowing must be the same.)

There are, presumably, things that the I-biased position handles well (I don't know what they are, but there must be some). I know there are things the He-biased position handles well. Among other things it allows us to better understand perfectly normal and mundane conversations such as:

A) "You are angry"
B) "No I'm not"
A) "Yes you are dear. I've known you long enough to know when you're angry."
B) "I think I'd know when I was angry"
A) "You usually don't dear"
... several hours later
B) "Wow, you were right, I was angry. I didn't realize it at the time. I'm sorry"

The I-biased position understands these conversations as very elaborate shell games, where the first statement means something like: "The you that is in my head is currently being modeled by me as having a first-person experience of anger which is itself modeled after my unique first-person experience of anger". Worse, the last sentence seems (to me) totally incoherent from the I-biased position. The He-biased position much more simply believes that a person's anger is visible to himself and others if the right things are attended to, and hence the conversation requires no shell game. Person B simply comes to attend aspects of the situation that A was attending from the start.

Now I will admit that the He-biased perspective has trouble in some situations, but those can't really be discussed until the position is at least understood in the situations it handles well.

Eric

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FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
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[Rikus Combrinck]

Nick,

 

Thanks for the answers and the effort.  I appreciate it.  (The preamble and A/B viewpoint edits in the updated version were useful.)

 

I think the outlines of the New Realist position are gradually pulling into focus for me, thanks to you and Eric.  The crux of the difficulty that remains for me, lies here:

 

All the stuff about A's headache is information that some observers have and others do not; as such it is part of the potential experience or information available in the situation.   So, to "have information" means the same thing as to "experience".  If the information is "in" one's "field of view", one is experiencing it.

 

I'm looking for a word -- which you will be comfortable with -- that conveys the compelling, immersive nature/ quality/ texture of first person experience, the sense of immediacy, richness, and embeddedness-in-the-body that colours my perception of *my* headache, as opposed to awareness of the distilled, abstracted fact that *he* has a headache.  (I believe this is what Russ is after, as well.)

 

Hmmm.  Already I feel the New Realist propaganda seeping into my mind; it occurs to me that if someone very close to me suffers from a bad headache, and I deeply empathise with the person, it's not really fair to call the information/ experience distilled and abstracted.  It creeps much closer to the 1st person experience.  But there is to my mind still a little gap.

 

Is there any way of thinking about that little gap, any descriptive term that you can comfortably apply to denote the difference?  (I'm not concerned here with the accuracy, or realness of the experience.  I'm happy to call it an illusion -- I'm after the texture of the experience.)

 

Regards,

Rikus

 

PS.  Wherever did you find a wife that'll hold still for this sort of discussion over dinner?  And are there more of them?

 

 

From: [hidden email]

Sent: Friday, June 26, 2009 4:28 AM

To: [hidden email]

Subject: [FRIAM] Response to Rikus: edited version.

Here is a cleaned up version.  Not worth a second read, if you have suffered through a first,  but will save you some gear (and tooth) grinding, if you haven't. 

 

Sorry to try your patience. 

 

N

 

 

 

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: 6/25/2009 10:25:17 AM

Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Direct conversation - 1st vs 3rd person

Dear Rikus, and all,

 

I think one of the hardest things about having been an academic is that while we are paid to have ideas, nobody else is paid to respond to them.  And so, academic writing is like dropping coins down an infinitely deep wishing well and listening for any evidence at all that the coin ever dropped. 

 

I think it is safe to say that NEVER in my 30 to 40 years of developing these ideas have they received as much careful attention as they have in the last two weeks.  There is no greater kindness  -- no rarer kindness -- a colleague can do for an academic.  I am deeply in your collective debt.  I am humbled by it, actually.

 

Rikus's questions are particularly well posed, and I will do my best with them below.

 

Nick

 

 

 

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology,

Clark University ([hidden email])

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

 

 

 

I wish I could say that the new realist perspective dissolves the idiographic mystery.. the fact that people are so DAMNED individual.  But it doesn’t;  it merely recasts it.  From the point of view of the folk psychological account, the mystery is that an indivdiual’s mind is locked away inside a vault that can never be accessed;  from the NR perspective, the mystery arises from the fact that an individual’s mind is a point of view from a place that one can never stand.  I would argue that of the two perspectives, the NR is the more heuristic because the slope leading up to the goal is more gradual.  One is led, on the New Realist  view, to try to approximate another’s point of view;  in the Folk Psychological view one is led to try and break into a vault.  And one is never sure whether the Vault one is breaking into is the vault that contains the treasure that one is trying to discover. 

 

 

Eric (and Nick),

 

I'm still pursuing clarity. 

 

nst ---> As well you might!

 

 Kindly consider the following:

Person A, a high-school student, is asked by a teacher (B) to solve a maths problem on the board in front of the class.  Among the other students is person C, a close friend of A.  A is taking an unusually long time to solve the problem, frequently erasing partial calculations, now and then pausing to stare at the board with a frown.

 

B is a new teacher and has only interacted with A a few times.  It appears to him that the problem is simply too much for A, and starts forming an idea about A's math skills.

 

C knows that A is good at maths and that the problem on the board should really not be difficult for him.  He also knows A well enough to recognise that the frown A exhibits means something is bothering him.  Things between A and his girlfriend are a bit shaky lately and he wonders if it took a turn for the worse.

 

A has a really bad headache.  He very rarely gets headaches, but woke up this morning with a monster.  He hates giving up on math problems, though, and is sure he should be able to solve this one.  Also, he suspects the new teacher thinks he isn't very good at maths and he wants to correct that impression.  And he just realised he forgot to do biology homework and is trying to recall which period biology is.

 

nst --->  OK.  Great hypothetical.  As a "New Realist" [the philosophical perspective from which this all arises], I am committed to using the metaphor of "point of view" rather than the metaphor of "private space".  So, A, B, and C have different "points of view" on A's behavior.   We, also, have a point of view on the situation, call it "D".  All of these points of view are dynamic, and constantly being updated.  So, for instance, from the point of view with the least information about A, the Teacher's, [B], it appears that a brief review of A's academic records would show that he had never done well at Maths.  Once that prediction is disconfirmed, B's point of view on A would be different.   

Can you please comment:

 

1. I understand you to say that A is an observer of A in much the same way as B and C.  You're *not* saying A is not having an experience of A, only that A's experience is not *privileged* compared to B and C. 

 

nst ---> Yes.  Good.  Thank you. 

 

 Does that mean you consider A's experience to be qualitatively indistinguishable from that of B and C, or only that the difference in the quality of A's experience, compared to that of B and C, is not of consequence?

 

nst ---> I am sorry to say I don't have a good grip on what is meant by "quality" here.  I would strive to make a distinction between sources of information and the manner in which those sources are integrated into a view of the situation.  And I certainly believe that some sources of information are better (will prove out when the frame is widened) than others.  Even B, whose viewpoint the hypothetical invites us to disparage, might have information the others might profit from.  True, she has been called into the situation as a substitute teacher at the last moment and doesn't know these students well, but she has been teaching Maths for 30 years and has vast knowledge of the range of skills that students present and of their behavior under the stress situation of an exam. 

 

2. Obvious A can think a great many things that B and C can't know anything about.  He can access memory about himself that B and C cannot.  He has access to interoceptive sensory information that B and C does not.  He has the experience of directly influencing the mathematical symbols in his working memory, outside the perception or direct influence of B and C.  On the other hand, B and C has access to some exteroceptive sensory information about A that A lacks.  Do you consider these various kinds of information and experiences to be entirely interchangeable?

 

nst --->  Exactly.  You said it better than I did above. 

 

3. Do you distinguish between "experience" and "have information about"?

 

nst ---> Oh what a good question!   The field of psychology was influenced by the New Realists by two distinct routes.  One was through the "cognitive" psychologist, E. C. Tolman; the other was through the perceptual psychologist, JJ Gibson.  Eric and I are from these different traditions and he and I have often wrestled over this point. Eric will no doubt contradict me at this point.  

 

 I see my challenge here to be to come up with a way of talking that is as internally consistent as possible. I think I would say that "information" is "potential experience". It involves imagining a kind of universal point of view that "sees" everything that all observers have ever or might possibly see.   All the stuff about A's headache is information that some observers have and others do not; as such it is part of the potential experience or information available in the situation.   So, to "have information" means the same thing as to "experience".  If the information is "in" one's "field of view", one is experiencing it. 

 

4. When you say that A's point of view is not privileged, do you consider anything beyond the ability to identify motives and intent, gauge current emotional state, and identify habitual patterns of behaviour?

 

nst --->  Well, I would have to evaluate each claim of privilege, case by case.  If we are talking about what is written on your side of the cup that sits on the table between us, I would be inclined, on theoretical grounds, to grant you privilege;  if, however, you are blindfolded, and I put the cup before you a moment ago, I would ret     ain that privilege for myself, on the same sorts of theoretical grounds.  Spouses are often pretty equally privileged with respect to one anothers' emotional states, which is why marriage is such an interesting human relation.    

 

5. We can extend the example and allow A to spontaneously start hallucinating a swarm of hand-sized pterodactyls that are attacking him.  His body and mind responds to the perceived threat like it would to a real one.  In some sense he really is having the experience, yet, B and C would deny that it is taking place.  What exactly does it mean to be "wrong" about one's own experience?

 

nst --->  The New Realists spent a lot of time talking about hallucination and what they wrote didn't help me much.  My answer would be something like this.  Our own point of view on the situation ... point of view D ... evolves as we listen to the conversation between A and the others...."Sure looks like a swarm of pterodactyls there"  "Pterodactyls?" "Yep.  They're attacking me from all sides!" "I don't see no damned pterodactyls!"  ETC.   Now, a fifth observer, E, watching and listening to all of this, might begin to see the degree to which the D point of view is shaped by D's experience of A, B, and C's point of view.  So E might say, "From where I stand, D sees A is  wrong and B as right."

 

Thanks again.  I feel like my mind is a flock of sheep being moved around by some very good sheep dogs. 

 

By the way, I think Eric is correct to try and anchor our discussion of First/third person to grammar.  Speech about the self is first person speech; speech about others is third person speech.  Our position could then be distilled into the statement that there is nothing special about the perceptual processes that lie behind first person speech. 

 

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