Subjectivity, intimacy, experience
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Subjectivity, intimacy, experience
 
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The other thread was getting bogged down in other things, so I'm starting a new one to try to answer Russ's question about some of the terms Nick and I are using, in particular "experience" and whether I deny "subjectivity". The latter is easier. Re subjectivity: I do not deny that the knowledge relationship has two elements (knower and known) and the relationship between them that we refer to as "knowing." But that leaves open the question of what type of relationship that is. If you are merely pointing out that there are "subjects" who look out into the world, then I have no objection. If you are pointing out that those subjects see the world from a particular point of view (in a literal and metaphorical sense), I still have no objection. What I don't accept, however, is the that the notion that all experience is some how "inescapably subjective" in the sense that A) we can never really know what someone else is experiencing, or B) that we are never really experiencing anything but "our own subjective worlds." The latter, if taken seriously, has lead emminent philosophers to feel like intellectual giants if they channel their inner The Big Lebowski and reply to any claim about the world with, "Yeah, well, you know, that's just, like, uh, your opinion, man." I'm not sure what would satisfy you re experience. I will try quoting some Dewey to see if that helps: Immediate empiricism postulates that things- anything, everything, in the ordinary or nontechnical use of the term " thing "- are what they are experienced as. Hence, if one wishes to describe anything truly, his task is to tell what it is experienced as being. If it is a horse that is to be described, or the equus that is to be defined, then must the horse-trader, or the jockey, or the timid family man who wants a " safe driver," or the zoologist or the paleontologist tell us what the horse is which is experienced. If these accounts turn out different in some respects, as well as congruous in others, this is no reason for assuming the content of one to be exclusively " real," and that of others to be " phenomenal"; for each account of what is experienced will manifest that it is the account o f the horse-dealer, or of the zoologist, and hence will give the conditions requisite for understanding the differences as well as the agreements of the various accounts. And the principle varies not a whit if we bring in the psychologist's horse, the logician's horse, or the metaphysician's horse. In each case, the nub of the question is, what sort of experience is denoted or indicated: a concrete and determinate experience, varying, when it varies, in specific real elements, and agreeing, when it agrees, in specific real elements, so that we have a contrast, not between a Reality, and various approximations to, or phenomenal representations of Reality, but between different reals of experience. And the reader is begged to bear in mind that from this standpoint, when " an experience " or " some sort of experience " is referred to, " some thing " or " some sort of thing " is always meant.... ----------- Eric P. Charles, Ph.D. Lab Manager Center for Teaching, Research, and Learning American University, Hurst Hall Room 203A 4400 Massachusetts Avenue, N.W. Washington, DC 20016 phone: <a href="tel:%28202%29%20885-3867" value="+12028853867" target="_blank">(202) 885-3867 fax: <a href="tel:%28202%29%20885-1190" value="+12028851190" target="_blank">(202) 885-1190 email: [hidden email] On Mon, Feb 29, 2016 at 11:20 PM, Russ Abbott <[hidden email]> wrote:
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Re: Subjectivity, intimacy, experience
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I'm afraid I'm not satisfied.
So often when I ask what appears to be a relatively straightforward question I get drowned in words that dance around the subject in ways I don't understand. For example, Eric wrote, "What I don't accept, however, is the that the notion that all experience is some how "inescapably subjective" in the sense that ... " I had asked what you mean by the term experience. None of this tells me. Mainly you attribute a position to me (or imply that I hold it) and then attack it. This seems to happen all the time. I ask you a question and your response is to say that my position (or some position that you apparently associate with me) is wrong. How about just answering the question. What do you mean when you use the word "experience?" On Tue, Mar 1, 2016 at 8:24 AM Eric Charles <[hidden email]> wrote:
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Re: Subjectivity, intimacy, experience
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Russ, you asked about both "subjective" and "experience". I did my best to answer about both. What I mean by "experience" is probably best answered by my quote from Dewey. I fancy myself a very good writer... but not better than Dewey. I mean an actual, in the moment, experiencing of a thing. In the most general and non-technical sense of the word "thing." Beyond that, I think that when we analyze the "experience" relationship, we find that it consists of what could properly be labeled "behavior" (or, perhaps, a physiological orientation towards certain behavior, although I'm not as comfortable with that). That is, to "experience something" is to be reacting to it, with a few caveats thrown in to make it clear than not all reactions count. ----------- Eric P. Charles, Ph.D. Lab Manager Center for Teaching, Research, and Learning American University, Hurst Hall Room 203A 4400 Massachusetts Avenue, N.W. Washington, DC 20016 phone: (202) 885-3867 fax: (202) 885-1190 email: [hidden email] On Tue, Mar 1, 2016 at 5:01 PM, Russ Abbott <[hidden email]> wrote:
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Re: Subjectivity, intimacy, experience
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The end of the Dewey extract reads as follows: "when " an experience " or " some sort of experience " is referred to, " some thing " or " some sort of thing " is always meant". That raises the obvious (at least to me) question of what "thing" is associated with hunger, pain, anxiety, etc. In your (behavioural) terms, hunger is what one does when one is hungry(?); pain is what one does when one feels pain(?); etc.? I think we're been around this curve before with Nick saying that he would grant that a robot feels pain if it acts as if it does convincingly enough. (I hope that's not a misrepresentation of what Nick said.) Based on what you just said I assume agree. Would the same go for a cartoon character? By drawing convincing enough pain-like behavior has one created pain? On Tue, Mar 1, 2016 at 2:12 PM Eric Charles <[hidden email]> wrote:
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Re: Subjectivity, intimacy, experience
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“I think we're been around this curve before with Nick saying that he would grant that a robot feels pain if it acts as if it does convincingly enough.” A cybernetic organism based on a human might feel pain like humans do. But with different hardware one should expect different sorts of experiences. Sensors and nerves will have different dynamic ranges,
and more or less compute resources could be placed on processing these signals. A robot could have diagnostics to ignore or forget traumas, while humans or cyborgs might not be able to disentangle wanted memories from unwanted ones, just given the way neurons
work. It seems to me subjectivity in humans is a high-order effect where the representation changes with experience. Experience builds on objective events, and physical
laws, and people share those experiences. So for that reason it is not unreasonable to expect that experiences are in some sense the same – even their physical manifestation stored as proteins. Cells of the visual cortex work more or less the same way
across humans, as do the signal processing mechanisms involved in detecting an audio source. There may not (or may?) be similar structures in encoded memories and high level skills. Maybe learning is possible in the Matrix way? I Know Kung Fu!
Marcus ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com |
Re: Subjectivity, intimacy, experience
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That raises the obvious (at least to me) question of what "thing" is associated with hunger, pain, anxiety, etc. Yes! Yes it does. But that was already a question, right? It is not a question only for this way of thinking. I am happy to elaborate what I think the form of the answer would be within the system I have been presenting. However, I want to be clear that this is one of the possible answers within the larger system being presented. Caveat accepted? Ok. That set up has the benefit, among other things, of making the question you raise a clearly scientifically tractable issue. There should be no difference in how we go about trying to answer the question "what is iron" or "what is gorilla" or "what is the rate of sea level rise" and how we go about answering the question "what is hunger." Point to the thing in the real world, and we will do our best to try to figure out what you are pointing at. We answer by observing the labeled phenomenon, and by poking and prodding it in various systematic ways. The detailed form of the answer to "what is hunger" might be quite complex, and might take quite a while to work out, but that often happens in science, and so should be no deterrence. Working it out might even entail an overt rejection of the folk categories in play (e.g., determining that the label "hunger" is routinely applied to several experimentally separable things, or that "hunger" is experimentally indistinguishable from things our plain-language labeled differently), but that also often happens in science, and so should be no deterrence. ----------- Eric P. Charles, Ph.D. Lab Manager Center for Teaching, Research, and Learning American University, Hurst Hall Room 203A 4400 Massachusetts Avenue, N.W. Washington, DC 20016 phone: (202) 885-3867 fax: (202) 885-1190 email: [hidden email] On Tue, Mar 1, 2016 at 6:08 PM, Marcus Daniels <[hidden email]> wrote:
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Re: Subjectivity, intimacy, experience
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“That set up has the benefit, among other things, of making the question you raise a clearly scientifically tractable issue. There should be no difference in how we go about trying
to answer the question "what is iron" or "what is gorilla" or "what is the rate of sea level rise" and how we go about answering the question "what is hunger."
Starve/feed an animal and watch what hormones are released and what axons fire.. A predictive model of detailed physiology that also predicts feeding/rest behavior
and that maintains energy balance and generalizes across the species explains hunger. Other outgoing connections from the hypothalamus to other areas are strings worth pulling, but if activity in those parts of the brain aren’t predictive of feeding behavior
they are a result of hunger and not hunger itself. Marcus ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com |
Re: Subjectivity, intimacy, experience
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Hi Marcus, Your answer is useful to me because it so exemplifies the paradox that Eric and I feel we are dealing with here. Please see larding, below. Nicholas S. Thompson Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology Clark University From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Marcus Daniels “That set up has the benefit, among other things, of making the question you raise a clearly scientifically tractable issue. There should be no difference in how we go about trying to answer the question "what is iron" or "what is gorilla" or "what is the rate of sea level rise" and how we go about answering the question "what is hunger." [NST==>So, I take what follows to be an answer to this question, right?<==nst] Starve/feed an animal and watch what hormones are released and what axons fire.. A predictive model of detailed physiology that also predicts feeding/rest behavior and that maintains energy balance and generalizes across the species explains hunger. Other outgoing connections from the hypothalamus to other areas are strings worth pulling, but if activity in those parts of the brain aren’t predictive of feeding behavior they are a result of hunger and not hunger itself. [NST==>So, I take it that from this last sentence, in red, you would define hunger as a pattern of activity in the brain that is predictive of feeding behavior, right. But not all feeding behavior, right? Only feeding behavior that is preceded by deprivation? What if you got feeding behavior that was not preceded by deprivation. What if you got deprivation, and the rat never ate: --it just wandered around the food filled cage looking restless and unhappy. What if all your variables didn’t cluster as the concept “hunger” seems to demand? This is I think what Eric is driving at. Before we begin research on the causes and correlates of “hunger”, we have a prior question of what hunger IS. By going to the physiological level immediately, we head that discussion off. Hunger is either, some sort of pattern of relation between food, food-related circumstances, etc., and food orientation, search, and consumption behavior, OR the cause of such a pattern. It can’t be both, on pain of circularity. If hunger is the pattern, than the physiology is the cause of the pattern. If the physiology is the cause, then we have to know of what systematic observation it is the effect. Until we have established what those relationships are, we have nothing to explain, do we, except a rather vague concept derived from our own cultural notions of “hunger”? There is a wonderful old example of hydra that consumes some other teensy creature for its nematocysts … little stinging cells that the hydra deploys on the outside of its body. The hydra behaves exactly like a creature that has a “hunger” for nematocysts. It attacks its nematocyst prey when it needs them, stops when it has “enough.” But the nematocysts play no role in the metabolism of the hydra. It captures other pray to feed in the ordinary sense. Is this a hunger? In many animals, the elements of prey orientation, search, chase, attack, immobilization, opening the prey, consumption and or storage, etc., don’t line up in the way that the vernacular concept of hunger demands. To return to humans, and self-perception, for a moment, one of the family of variables that would seem to need to cluster with deprivation, and food getting activity is what we behaviorists call “self-report” : in this case, the answer to the question, “Are you hungry?” But like many self-report variables, hunger self-report measures do not necessarily cluster all that well with other presumptively measures of “hunger”, whatever we might decide it to be. So, it becomes a real empirical question to ask what, in God’s name, the subject is speaking to when he answers the question, “Are you hungry?”. I am sorry if this answer is inadequate. It’s certainly inadequately proofread. I know I got myself into this, but everything else is suffering and I have to get myself out. So forgive me if I now let it slide for a while. All the best, Nick <==nst] Marcus ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com |
Re: Subjectivity, intimacy, experience
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[NST==>So, I take it that from this last sentence, in red, you would define hunger as a pattern of activity in the brain that is predictive of feeding behavior, right. But not all feeding behavior, right? Only feeding behavior that is preceded by deprivation? What if you got feeding behavior that was not preceded by deprivation. What if you got deprivation, and the rat never ate: --it just wandered around the food filled cage looking restless and unhappy. What if all your variables didn’t cluster as the concept “hunger” seems to demand?
If one has a set of related questions and convincing answers, then one can talk about weaving them together into a concept. If a question is "Why does this type of animal feed?", there could be preceding observables that are predictive of that, especially physiological observables. Likewise for "Why does this particular of animal fail to feed and others of its type do when deprived of food?" If there are a lot of animals of the type that fail to feed, when a model that predicts they should, that would not be a very good model, and the second question would have to be investigated and incorporated into the model. The animal is a physical system, a sort of machine, so and it can be taken apart and studied in parts. A concept cannot be a cause separate from the machine or the environment of the machine, and so it serves no purpose but to constrain the kind of spatial or temporal patterns to anticipate.
It attacks its nematocyst prey when it needs them, stops when it has “enough.” But the nematocysts play no role in the metabolism of the hydra. It captures other pray to feed in the ordinary sense. Is this a hunger? In many animals, the elements of prey orientation, search, chase, attack, immobilization, opening the prey, consumption and or storage, etc., don’t line up in the way that the vernacular concept of hunger demands.
It is a process to be understood on its own. As an analogy, a robot control system designed by conventional software engineering techniques might have subroutines for identifying targets, chasing them, immobilizing them, and so on. These subroutines could be adopted for the purpose of securing energy resources, or for some other purpose. If it is for securing energy, then one should look for logic conditionals in the control system that check the battery voltage (say). Likewise in a biological system, there better be signaling techniques in the organism that plausibly arise from lower-level metabolic indicators.
To return to humans, and self-perception, for a moment, one of the family of variables that would seem to need to cluster with deprivation, and food getting activity is what we behaviorists call “self-report” : in this case, the answer to the question, “Are you hungry?” But like many self-report variables, hunger self-report measures do not necessarily cluster all that well with other presumptively measures of “hunger”, whatever we might decide it to be. So, it becomes a real empirical question to ask what, in God’s name, the subject is speaking to when he answers the question, “Are you hungry?”.
It seems to me to understand self-reports (higher brain function) one should get a reference point as to whether brain stem level processing of energy balance signals is really underway. They could be reporting "I'm anxious and eating reduces my anxiety" or some other convoluted thing, or they could be misrepresenting their feelings just for fun, etc.
Marcus
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Re: Subjectivity, intimacy, experience
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Russ, I'm going through past notes in relation to my talk tomorrow. I think this addresses your question: There have been many attempts to define Radical Behaviorism. Most attempts are in terms of inclusion and exclusion, i.e. what radical behaviorists talk about, and what they do not talk about. More often definitions focus on solely on exclusion, providing a negative definition in which behaviorists are defined based on what they don’t do, rather than on what they do. However, this minimizes the profoundness of the approach. A simple, positive definition is: Radical behaviorists claim that all questions about psychology are questions about behavior. One is tempted to say something like “all interesting questions about psychology”, but that is unnecessary, as the converse of the above claim is also made: All questions that are not about behavior are not about psychology. These claims are historic and inclusive; the behaviorist is not trying to redefine psychology, rather to point out what psychology has always been. Thus, behaviorists are not, as is commonly believed, trying to deny the existence of phenomenon typically handled by psychology. Quite to the contrary, they are trying to argue the traditional questions can only be answered through careful observation and analysis of behavior.
For example: You might ask: “At the dinner table, my child is really good at telling me what happened in school each day. How does he remember what happened earlier in the day?”
The behaviorist asserts that your question can be answered completely, and without remainder, by explaining how your child’s behavior becomes a function of things that happened in the past. In particular, it sounds like you are interested in how his verbal behavior comes to be a function of what happened earlier. That is, to see how a child develops the ability to remember, we must (at a minimum) start with a child whose behavior is not a function of the past events, and observe them until their behavior is a function of the past events. If we determine what changed, we will know how he “remembers”.
You might protest: “But that doesn’t really answer the question. A child could correctly report what happened earlier without remembering! They could be responding to cues you gave them, making lucky guesses, or remembering the homework they just finished rather than the class lesson from hours ago.”
True enough. You have correctly identified one way in which the behaviorist’s version of the question is difficult to answer, but the term “function of” does not merely mean that the events correspond in any particular case. It is not enough to know that the verbal behavior matches a particular past event, the verbal behavior must be a function of those past events. To know that the child remembers the past event, we must demonstrate not merely that the two events correspond, but that the latter event changes as a function of the specific earlier events in question, rather than as a function of alternative past or present factors. [1]
It is likely that determining whether or not a given pattern of verbal answers is a function of earlier events will require us to observe many situations that have not yet been observed, and perhaps even situations that would not occur naturally, i.e. we may need to manipulate variables in an experiment. Yes, the empirical burden is difficult to meet; however, the fact remains that once I answer the question of how behavior becomes a function of past events, I will have answered the question of how children come to “remember things.” [1] This is just as it is not enough for physicists to show that a single object happened to fall towards the center of the earth, they demonstrated that objects move as a function of the center of mass of other objects – move the center of mass, and the movements of nearby objects changes accordingly. ----------- Eric P. Charles, Ph.D. Lab Manager Center for Teaching, Research, and Learning American University, Hurst Hall Room 203A 4400 Massachusetts Avenue, N.W. Washington, DC 20016 phone: (202) 885-3867 fax: (202) 885-1190 email: [hidden email] On Wed, Mar 2, 2016 at 7:47 AM, Marcus Daniels <[hidden email]> wrote:
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It seems fairly clear to me that we have 2 competing ways to estimate future behavior: 1) track and collate past inputs and outputs of the person, versus 2) represent the state machine of the person. The state of the person is a function of its past inputs (and outputs, assuming cycles). So, in essence, representing the state and state transitions does just enough of (1) to solve the problem. The question ensues which of (1) or (2) is the more difficult task. Russ is asking about (2). Eric is answering with (1). On 03/02/2016 10:55 AM, Eric Charles wrote: > The behaviorist asserts that your question can be answered completely, and > without remainder, by explaining how your child’s behavior becomes a > function of things that happened in the past. -- ⇔ glen ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
uǝʃƃ ⊥ glen
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Re: Subjectivity, intimacy, experience
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Thanks Glen. For me even the state machine isn't quite enough. A state machine version wouldn't even in principle distinguish between a robot/zombie and a living being. One might argue that there is no difference, but I'm not ready to go there. Also, I liked my square-root-of-2 analogy. I hope someone comments on it. I also liked my question about whether a convincing drawing of a cartoon character in pain creates pain. I hope someone comments on that one also. On Wed, Mar 2, 2016 at 11:36 AM glen <[hidden email]> wrote:
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On 03/02/2016 12:07 PM, Russ Abbott wrote:
> Thanks Glen. For me even the state machine isn't quite enough. A state > machine version wouldn't even in principle distinguish between a > robot/zombie and a living being. I don't understand why you think state machines are inadequate for making the distinction[*]. The path is alluded to in my comments below. > Also, I liked my square-root-of-2 analogy. I hope someone comments on it. I > also liked my question about whether a convincing drawing of a cartoon > character in pain creates pain. I hope someone comments on that one also. I missed the √ analogy. But it seems clear to me that we could argue that the expression(s) of pain in a cartoon is expression of the pain experienced by the artist(s) who drew the drawing(s). So, while a cartoon may not experience pain, it is an expression or representation of such an experience. This is also true of a robot's face. It's expressions (of pain) are of the experiences of its programmer(s). The information behind (or inside) is (holographically) encoded onto the interface. And if we go down this rhetorical path, we end up in a causa prima (or singularity) argument, for which we can invoke any solution to that problem we want. [*] Yes, I know what the hard problem is. But my preconvictions toward it don't exist. I believe I could argue for or against it, remaining agnostic. -- ⇔ glen ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
uǝʃƃ ⊥ glen
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Re: Subjectivity and square roots
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Since Glen missed the square root analogy, I'd like to repeat it. Nick and Eric seem to be saying that there is no such thing as subjective experience since only things that can be seen and touched are real. I said that such a position seems to deny the existence of the square root of two. One can see and touch increasingly accurate approximations to it, but one can never see and touch the square root of two itself -- at least not as a concrete number. One can also see and touch Newton's algorithm for computing the square root of two. But again, not the number itself. So does that mean from Eric' and Nick's perspective there is no such thing as the square root of 2? ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com |
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In reply to this post by gepr
Nick (and I think Eric) said that a sufficiently convincing performance of pain behavior by a robot is pain. I asked whether a sufficiently convincing animated depiction of pain behavior via a cartoon is also pain? In other words, can a cartoonist create pain by drawing it? In asking that I don't mean the cartoonists own pain or pain in the viewer, but pain in the world in the same way that some third party has pain whether or not someone sees his pain behavior. ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com |
Re: Subjectivity and square roots
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In reply to this post by Russ Abbott
Well, Russ, now, I think you might be ready to see (be the only one to see?) the force of my making an analogy between the first derivative of a function and the motivation of a behavior. One can see and touch increasingly accurate approximations to it, but one can never see and touch the square root of two itself -- at least not as a concrete number. Funny I wonder what the mathematicians on this list will say about this statement. It seems to be that the problem of the square root of two is the reverse of how you have it. You can touch it any time. Just lay out a unit isosceles right triangle and touch the hypotenuse. The problem is that you cannot measure it using a unit ruler. The square root of two is concrete; it’s just the ruler that measures it is abstract. But I don’t think Eric and I are committed to the proposition that imaginary numbers aren’t real. They are signs that stand in a rigorous, systematic, and extensively confirmed way for a vast collection of mathematical relationships. If you could show me that the idea of subjective mind is embedded in a structure of experimental experience as rigorous as that which embraces the square root of two, I would concede the argument. Nick Nicholas S. Thompson Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology Clark University http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/ From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Russ Abbott Since Glen missed the square root analogy, I'd like to repeat it. Nick and Eric seem to be saying that there is no such thing as subjective experience since only things that can be seen and touched are real. I said that such a position seems to deny the existence of the square root of two. One can see and touch increasingly accurate approximations to it, but one can never see and touch the square root of two itself -- at least not as a concrete number. One can also see and touch Newton's algorithm for computing the square root of two. But again, not the number itself. So does that mean from Eric' and Nick's perspective there is no such thing as the square root of 2? ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com |
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In reply to this post by Russ Abbott
Russ, I am torn between judging your cartoon comment as silly or profound. I have said that if a robot could be devised that was embedded in a social network of other robots, that systematically avoided injurious events and stimuli, that engaged in some communicative behavior when injured to which other robots responded by coming to its rescue, then I would have to entertain the notion that these robots experience pain. To me, pain is all of that. Hard to imagine a cartoon doing that. Hence my first judgment that the idea is frivolous. (But probably not a lot more frivolous than my idea that motivation is like the first derivative of behavior.) I think perhaps the comment confuses the map with the territory, as Bateson used to say. So, now I am stuck with trying to figure out why I might possibly think it profound. But let’s make the example as favorable to your case as we can. Let it be the case that you experience me being horrible tortured by the CIA. Do you experience pain. If you are not a psychopath, probably yes. Do you experience MY pain. No, because my pain occurs against an entirely different history of experiences, including, by the way, the occlusion of my airway by the wet washcloth and the poured water. . Something like that. Nick Nicholas S. Thompson Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology Clark University http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/ From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Russ Abbott Nick (and I think Eric) said that a sufficiently convincing performance of pain behavior by a robot is pain. I asked whether a sufficiently convincing animated depiction of pain behavior via a cartoon is also pain? In other words, can a cartoonist create pain by drawing it? In asking that I don't mean the cartoonists own pain or pain in the viewer, but pain in the world in the same way that some third party has pain whether or not someone sees his pain behavior. ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com |
Re: Subjectivity and square roots
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In reply to this post by Nick Thompson
Great, Nick. Hadn't thought of the triangle. Neat way of getting at it. So the relation is real but not yet as a concrete number. The triangle example says that the ration of the hypotenuse to the side is sqrt(2) :: 1, but it doesn't give us an actual number as a "real" thing. (I hesitate to use "real" since I'm not about to define what that means. I'm certainly not pushing a Platonic view of mathematical entities.) You wrote: I don’t think Eric and I are committed to the proposition that imaginary numbers aren’t real. They are signs that stand in a rigorous, systematic, and extensively confirmed way for a vast collection of mathematical relationships. If you could show me that the idea of subjective mind is embedded in a structure of experimental experience as rigorous as that which embraces the square root of two, I would concede the argument. (I'm assuming you meant irrational numbers, but imaginary numbers raise a similar problem) I find myself confused about what you mean when you say they are "signs that stand in a rigorous, systematic, and extensively confirmed way to ... mathematical relationships". A sign is not (in your view) a thing (other than itself) is it? I would have thought that a sign it's a reference to a thing. The thing itself is only brought to mind (in the mind) when looking at and thinking about the sign. And mathematics itself is only confirmed by what people say. It's a very conceptual discipline. It's not an empirical discipline. So let's say we take a paint color strip and ask people to select from a list of five color words (along with non-of-these as an option) the best match to the color experience they have when looking at the strip. Let's say there is essentially universal agreement. Is that good enough to confirm that they all have the same color experience? That sounds more empirical than mathematics and should satisfy your requirement for an experimental experience -- although I'm not sure what you mean by "experimental experience". On Thu, Mar 3, 2016 at 10:33 PM Nick Thompson <[hidden email]> wrote:
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In reply to this post by Nick Thompson
I'm not sure what to make of the cartoon comment either. Let's say we all agree that a person in front of us is in pain. Let's say we video tape that person and show it to someone else. "No, no," they insist, "the person you video taped was in pain, the image itself wasn't!" We ask our viewer afterwards "Did you see pain in that video?" And he say "Yes." Then we say, "Wait, you mean to tell me that those flat, pixilated colors on the screen were in pain?" I kind of feel like we would end up in the same place if we tried to have a serious discussion about cartoons. It is not, in Nick's position, an issue of a "sufficiently convincing performance." Certainly one can be fooled by people through various means, so we don't even need robots for that discussion. When we say, of a person that they gave a "convincing performance" what we mean is something like "When you look at a wider swath of that guy's behavior, you find that the chunk of behavior you originally studied is part of a very different pattern than you had originally assumed." For example, a person who looks terribly dejected on a street corner holding a sign that speaks of their woes, but if you watch when they leave their post, they travel back to a perfectly middle-class house, change into nice clean clothes, and go about a normal life. That would be a "convincing performance." Note that we can speculate about whether it is a performance based on much less than that. Ultimately, however, we become certain it was "a performance" only by observing a larger swath of the world. ----------- Eric P. Charles, Ph.D. Lab Manager Center for Teaching, Research, and Learning American University, Hurst Hall Room 203A 4400 Massachusetts Avenue, N.W. Washington, DC 20016 phone: (202) 885-3867 fax: (202) 885-1190 email: [hidden email] On Fri, Mar 4, 2016 at 1:49 AM, Nick Thompson <[hidden email]> wrote:
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Eric,
Why would you ask about the pain IN the video? Shouldn't the person reply. "I don't believe in pain IN anything because, for me, pain is not internal it is external." Nick, That was a neat way of touching there square root of 2. If we changed it to the cube root of 2, we have a classic unsolved problem of Ancient Geek geometry --Duplicating the Cube: "To construct, with ruler and compasses, the length of the side of a cube which has twice the volume of a given cube". It has been proven (to the satisfaction of mathematicians) that this is impossible. Nick, How can a person learn when he is hungry by observing other people? Perhaps he can recognize socially induced hunger (as in "at a party, we expect food") but do people usually detect low blood sugar in themselves by observing the behavior of others? ________________________________________ From: Friam [[hidden email]] on behalf of Eric Charles [[hidden email]] Sent: Friday, March 04, 2016 9:23 AM To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Subjectivity and cartoons I'm not sure what to make of the cartoon comment either. Let's say we all agree that a person in front of us is in pain. Let's say we video tape that person and show it to someone else. We ask our viewer afterwards "Did you see pain in that video?" And he say "Yes." Then we say, "Wait, you mean to tell me that those flat, pixilated colors on the screen were in pain?" "No, no," they insist, "the person you video taped was in pain, the image itself wasn't!" "But we asked you about the video," we assert confidently, "we want to know if there is pain in the video." "Well, look... this is getting weird," he replies, "I'm leaving." I kind of feel like we would end up in the same place if we tried to have a serious discussion about cartoons. It is not, in Nick's position, an issue of a "sufficiently convincing performance." Certainly one can be fooled by people through various means, so we don't even need robots for that discussion. When we say, of a person that they gave a "convincing performance" what we mean is something like "When you look at a wider swath of that guy's behavior, you find that the chunk of behavior you originally studied is part of a very different pattern than you had originally assumed." For example, a person who looks terribly dejected on a street corner holding a sign that speaks of their woes, but if you watch when they leave their post, they travel back to a perfectly middle-class house, change into nice clean clothes, and go about a normal life. That would be a "convincing performance." Note that we can speculate about whether it is a performance based on much less than that. Ultimately, however, we become certain it was "a performance" only by observing a larger swath of the world. ----------- Eric P. Charles, Ph.D. Lab Manager Center for Teaching, Research, and Learning American University, Hurst Hall Room 203A 4400 Massachusetts Avenue, N.W. Washington, DC 20016 phone: (202) 885-3867 fax: (202) 885-1190 email: [hidden email]<mailto:[hidden email]> On Fri, Mar 4, 2016 at 1:49 AM, Nick Thompson <[hidden email]<mailto:[hidden email]>> wrote: Russ, I am torn between judging your cartoon comment as silly or profound. I have said that if a robot could be devised that was embedded in a social network of other robots, that systematically avoided injurious events and stimuli, that engaged in some communicative behavior when injured to which other robots responded by coming to its rescue, then I would have to entertain the notion that these robots experience pain. To me, pain is all of that. Hard to imagine a cartoon doing that. Hence my first judgment that the idea is frivolous. (But probably not a lot more frivolous than my idea that motivation is like the first derivative of behavior.) I think perhaps the comment confuses the map with the territory, as Bateson used to say. So, now I am stuck with trying to figure out why I might possibly think it profound. But let’s make the example as favorable to your case as we can. Let it be the case that you experience me being horrible tortured by the CIA. Do you experience pain. If you are not a psychopath, probably yes. Do you experience MY pain. No, because my pain occurs against an entirely different history of experiences, including, by the way, the occlusion of my airway by the wet washcloth and the poured water. . Something like that. Nick Nicholas S. Thompson Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology Clark University http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/ From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]<mailto:[hidden email]>] On Behalf Of Russ Abbott Sent: Thursday, March 03, 2016 10:12 PM To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]<mailto:[hidden email]>> Subject: [FRIAM] Subjectivity and cartoons Nick (and I think Eric) said that a sufficiently convincing performance of pain behavior by a robot is pain. I asked whether a sufficiently convincing animated depiction of pain behavior via a cartoon is also pain? In other words, can a cartoonist create pain by drawing it? In asking that I don't mean the cartoonists own pain or pain in the viewer, but pain in the world in the same way that some third party has pain whether or not someone sees his pain behavior. ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com |
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