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Warring Darwinians for Glen, Steve

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Frank Wimberly-2

Re: Warring Darwinians for Glen, Steve

Acceleration can be a changing, non-constant function of time. The change is necessarily continuous. Want to go for a ride?

On Thu, Apr 30, 2020 at 3:06 PM <[hidden email]> wrote:

Glen, and all,

This is very good, so good that I am in danger of getting lost in thought and never giving it any reply.

So let me attempt a short reply.

Following Holt, I am going to take the metaphor (if you will) of point of view. Let's say we are all blindfolded philosophers palpating an extremely patient elephant. Even without introducing the qualia problem, there is an odd sense in which we all feel the same thing and an equally odd sense in which we each feel a different thing. And to know what you are feeling, I have to question you (and ask you to use metaphors) to convey what you are feeling to me. Here there is no question of qualia. If I were standing where you are and feeling the same part of the elephant that you feel, then I would feel the same thing (ex hypothesi).

One of the challenges here, of course, is how we come to the conclusion that we are all palpating the SAME thing. We could all behave as some of my "qualitative" colleagues at Clark wanted to behave, and simply "share our experiences"--. "I am having a scaley experience; I am having a fuzzy experience." "I am having a mucussy experience" "Ugh! Something just wacked me over the head." -- and then walk away. There has to be the possibility of classes of objects for us to appeal to before we can begin to integrate the various information that each of us is gathering. And there is philosophical difficulty enough here to concern us without introducing the problem of whether each of us experiences fuzziness, say, in the same way that each of the others do.

Now if we were determined to study THAT problem, we could take a group of extremely standardized objects ... a perfect steel sphere, a perfect cylinder, etc., say, and ask each of us to report on what we feel as we feel them. We might notice, from this research, that one of us focusses on weight, another on surface texture, another on warmth and coldness, etc. And across objects we might find individual differences in how each of us describes the objects. That might get at our individual uniqueness in how we approach the touching of objects. And just as we could agree, after a time that we were surrounding an elephant, we could agree, after a time and a discussion, that you approach objects in one way and I approach them in an other. We could, with the diligent application of metaphors, come to see the world approximately from one another's point of view

To me, the mystery of consciousness is no greater than the fact that we never stand in exactly the same place when we look at something. But as steve Guerin has pointed out, just as we can work out where the fire is by all of us pointing our differently located cameras at it, we can as easily work out the location of each of the cameras from the same information. This is no accident because Steve is a student of Gibson and Gibson was a student of Holt, and Holt's metaphor of consciousness is a point of view metaphor.

I note with particular interest this paragraph in Glen's letter:

The hard problem of consciousness is that any given creature/object/thing/situation has a qualitative experience, a *comprehension* of the situation/state/condition that creature finds itself it at any given time, any given place, or any given trajectory through time and space. The hard problem is one of uniqueness. The uniqueness of that experience.

I just don’t think “experience” is that sort of thing. Experience is always a step from one thing to another. A “unique experience” is like acceleration an instant. A fiction that is useful for some purposes. We know how to study the elephant; and we know how to study the uniqueness of the observers of the elephant. But those are distinct objects of study.

Not short. Ugh. Glen, you are allowed to say I begged your question.

Nick

Nicholas Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology
Clark University
[hidden email]
https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

-----Original Message-----
From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of u?l? ?
Sent: Thursday, April 30, 2020 9:44 AM
To: FriAM <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Warring Darwinians for Glen, Steve

OK. Here's the setup:

Nick says 1: Metaphorical thinker maps their experience onto another's experience, modeling that other's experience with their own.

Nick says 2: I don't understand the hard problem of consciousness.

Glen says: Expressions 1 and 2 are contradictory.

I suppose it's on me to show that they're contradictory. The idea that abduction is an inference from the unique to a class might be helpful. But I think it's a jargonal distraction. So, here goes.

Let's propose that there exist unique situations/objects ... things or points in time or whatever that are not, cannot be, exactly the same anywhere else or at any other time. They are absolutely, completely unique in the entire universe. Because they are unique, there's absolutely no way any *other* thing/situation can perfectly model them. E.g. no 2 electrons are in exactly the same state at exactly the same time in exactly the same place. There will always be something different about any 2 unique things. So analogies/metaphors/maps from 1 unique thing to another unique thing will always be slightly off.

Now, a metaphor/model/analogy/mapping thinker will accept an imperfect mapping and go ahead and model a unique thing with another unique thing. That's what a metaphorical thinker does, inaccurately models one thing with another thing.

The hard problem of consciousness is that any given creature/object/thing/situation has a qualitative experience, a *comprehension* of the situation/state/condition that creature finds itself it at any given time, any given place, or any given trajectory through time and space. The hard problem is one of uniqueness. The uniqueness of that experience.

The AI/ALife component of the hard problem asks how can we build a machine that will have these experiences. But that's not important to this conversation. The modeling/mapping/metaphorical component is how can any one thing (machine, rock, golfball, human) *understand* the experience of any other thing (car, elephant, galaxy, bacterium).

The answer is that one thing *models* the other thing imperfectly. The only reason anyone would be a "metaphorical thinker" is because they recognize the hard problem. If they don't recognize the hard problem, then there's no need to use metaphor. Sure, it might be convenient to use metaphor, but there's no NEED because there is no hard problem.

Therefore, Nick *does* understand the hard problem, even if only tacitly, and even if he doesn't *believe* in it. He states it and restates it every time he insists that thinking is metaphorical.

On 4/29/20 8:19 PM, [hidden email] wrote:
> I think the first was Glen, and I agree, I don’t see how a belief in
> the centrality of metaphor to thought commits one to a belief in the hardness of, or even the existence of, the hard problem.
>
>
>
> It was me that floated the thought that “all thinking is
> metaphorical”. (I was trying to draw Dave West in on my side of the argument, at the time.) I meant only to say that the application of any word (save perhaps grammatical operators or proper names) involves abduction, which I think we both believe, is a very close relative of metaphor. You and I have struggled over this for years, decades, almost, but I think we believe that abduction is an inference from the properties of an object to the class to which it belongs whereas a metaphor carries the process further in some way I have trouble defining. For instance, when Darwin said that evolution was caused by selection, it definitely was an abduction of sort. But as selection was understood at the time, it involved the intentional intervention of a breeder. So the metaphor not only abduces selection, it seems also rupture the original concept in some say.

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Frank Wimberly
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thompnickson2

Re: Warring Darwinians for Glen, Steve

Nice thought, but I would have to ride on the bumper.

What a time!

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

[hidden email]

https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of Frank Wimberly
Sent: Thursday, April 30, 2020 3:27 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Warring Darwinians for Glen, Steve

Acceleration can be a changing, non-constant function of time. The change is necessarily continuous. Want to go for a ride?

On Thu, Apr 30, 2020 at 3:06 PM <[hidden email]> wrote:

Glen, and all,

This is very good, so good that I am in danger of getting lost in thought and never giving it any reply.

So let me attempt a short reply.

Following Holt, I am going to take the metaphor (if you will) of point of view. Let's say we are all blindfolded philosophers palpating an extremely patient elephant. Even without introducing the qualia problem, there is an odd sense in which we all feel the same thing and an equally odd sense in which we each feel a different thing. And to know what you are feeling, I have to question you (and ask you to use metaphors) to convey what you are feeling to me. Here there is no question of qualia. If I were standing where you are and feeling the same part of the elephant that you feel, then I would feel the same thing (ex hypothesi).

One of the challenges here, of course, is how we come to the conclusion that we are all palpating the SAME thing. We could all behave as some of my "qualitative" colleagues at Clark wanted to behave, and simply "share our experiences"--. "I am having a scaley experience; I am having a fuzzy experience." "I am having a mucussy experience" "Ugh! Something just wacked me over the head." -- and then walk away. There has to be the possibility of classes of objects for us to appeal to before we can begin to integrate the various information that each of us is gathering. And there is philosophical difficulty enough here to concern us without introducing the problem of whether each of us experiences fuzziness, say, in the same way that each of the others do.

Now if we were determined to study THAT problem, we could take a group of extremely standardized objects ... a perfect steel sphere, a perfect cylinder, etc., say, and ask each of us to report on what we feel as we feel them. We might notice, from this research, that one of us focusses on weight, another on surface texture, another on warmth and coldness, etc. And across objects we might find individual differences in how each of us describes the objects. That might get at our individual uniqueness in how we approach the touching of objects. And just as we could agree, after a time that we were surrounding an elephant, we could agree, after a time and a discussion, that you approach objects in one way and I approach them in an other. We could, with the diligent application of metaphors, come to see the world approximately from one another's point of view

To me, the mystery of consciousness is no greater than the fact that we never stand in exactly the same place when we look at something. But as steve Guerin has pointed out, just as we can work out where the fire is by all of us pointing our differently located cameras at it, we can as easily work out the location of each of the cameras from the same information. This is no accident because Steve is a student of Gibson and Gibson was a student of Holt, and Holt's metaphor of consciousness is a point of view metaphor.

I note with particular interest this paragraph in Glen's letter:

The hard problem of consciousness is that any given creature/object/thing/situation has a qualitative experience, a *comprehension* of the situation/state/condition that creature finds itself it at any given time, any given place, or any given trajectory through time and space. The hard problem is one of uniqueness. The uniqueness of that experience.

I just don’t think “experience” is that sort of thing. Experience is always a step from one thing to another. A “unique experience” is like acceleration an instant. A fiction that is useful for some purposes. We know how to study the elephant; and we know how to study the uniqueness of the observers of the elephant. But those are distinct objects of study.

Not short. Ugh. Glen, you are allowed to say I begged your question.

Nick

Nicholas Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology
Clark University
[hidden email]
https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

-----Original Message-----
From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of u?l? ?
Sent: Thursday, April 30, 2020 9:44 AM
To: FriAM <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Warring Darwinians for Glen, Steve

OK. Here's the setup:

Nick says 1: Metaphorical thinker maps their experience onto another's experience, modeling that other's experience with their own.

Nick says 2: I don't understand the hard problem of consciousness.

Glen says: Expressions 1 and 2 are contradictory.

I suppose it's on me to show that they're contradictory. The idea that abduction is an inference from the unique to a class might be helpful. But I think it's a jargonal distraction. So, here goes.

Let's propose that there exist unique situations/objects ... things or points in time or whatever that are not, cannot be, exactly the same anywhere else or at any other time. They are absolutely, completely unique in the entire universe. Because they are unique, there's absolutely no way any *other* thing/situation can perfectly model them. E.g. no 2 electrons are in exactly the same state at exactly the same time in exactly the same place. There will always be something different about any 2 unique things. So analogies/metaphors/maps from 1 unique thing to another unique thing will always be slightly off.

Now, a metaphor/model/analogy/mapping thinker will accept an imperfect mapping and go ahead and model a unique thing with another unique thing. That's what a metaphorical thinker does, inaccurately models one thing with another thing.

The hard problem of consciousness is that any given creature/object/thing/situation has a qualitative experience, a *comprehension* of the situation/state/condition that creature finds itself it at any given time, any given place, or any given trajectory through time and space. The hard problem is one of uniqueness. The uniqueness of that experience.

The AI/ALife component of the hard problem asks how can we build a machine that will have these experiences. But that's not important to this conversation. The modeling/mapping/metaphorical component is how can any one thing (machine, rock, golfball, human) *understand* the experience of any other thing (car, elephant, galaxy, bacterium).

The answer is that one thing *models* the other thing imperfectly. The only reason anyone would be a "metaphorical thinker" is because they recognize the hard problem. If they don't recognize the hard problem, then there's no need to use metaphor. Sure, it might be convenient to use metaphor, but there's no NEED because there is no hard problem.

Therefore, Nick *does* understand the hard problem, even if only tacitly, and even if he doesn't *believe* in it. He states it and restates it every time he insists that thinking is metaphorical.

On 4/29/20 8:19 PM, [hidden email] wrote:
> I think the first was Glen, and I agree, I don’t see how a belief in
> the centrality of metaphor to thought commits one to a belief in the hardness of, or even the existence of, the hard problem.
>
>
>
> It was me that floated the thought that “all thinking is
> metaphorical”. (I was trying to draw Dave West in on my side of the argument, at the time.) I meant only to say that the application of any word (save perhaps grammatical operators or proper names) involves abduction, which I think we both believe, is a very close relative of metaphor. You and I have struggled over this for years, decades, almost, but I think we believe that abduction is an inference from the properties of an object to the class to which it belongs whereas a metaphor carries the process further in some way I have trouble defining. For instance, when Darwin said that evolution was caused by selection, it definitely was an abduction of sort. But as selection was understood at the time, it involved the intentional intervention of a breeder. So the metaphor not only abduces selection, it seems also rupture the original concept in some say.

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Frank Wimberly
140 Calle Ojo Feliz
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505 670-9918

Steve Smith

Re: Warring Darwinians for Glen, Steve

In reply to this post by Frank Wimberly-2

> Acceleration can be a changing, non-constant function of time. The
> change is necessarily continuous. Want to go for a ride?

Quick, before anyone else inserts the bad pun... "what a jerk!"

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Steve Smith

Re: Warring Darwinians for Glen, Steve

In reply to this post by thompnickson2

Nick -

Nice thought, but I would have to ride on the bumper.

What a time!

FWIW... you have referenced your own choice of clique-formation as a "pod" which I believe exclusively? describes the second level of whale (at least Orca) social organization. (matriline -> pod -> clan -> community). Other whales (and porpoises?) also form pods I think, but I'm not so sure if we ascribe (or recognize) larger clans for them?

I'm wondering if from an evolutionary psychologist point of view if there is a "natural" way ( evidenced in ethnographic/anthropological precedent) for us to form multi-scale clique structures which can dissociate quickly as-needed during times such as this pandemic. Terrorist or deep-cover spy cell-networks seem to have this sorted fairly well?

It seems natural (obviously) for a family group living under one roof to form such a first order grouping... and in your case if I read your circumstance right, you have formed a 3 generation "pod" with one of your children and spouse, and a grandchild who you may or may not live under the same roof, but have chosen to "share the risk"?

I've seen any number of opportunities *lost* to form such larger pods (my sister's family separating into one couple and 3 singletons who do not mix)... but I suspect that there are plenty of examples along the lines of extended families... where for example, a group of siblings choose to maintain contact and support/allow contact among their children (first cousins) in groups therefore of 5 or 10 or even as large as 30 or 40, with some group-pressure to remain isolated *outside* of that group... possibly even assign as small of a number as 2 or 3 who are trusted to go out in the world and forage at the grocery or hardware... possibly those with the best discipline around social distance, PPE, etc.

I don't know how close the "clan structure" of Orcas is to that of various (usually matrilineal?) first-nations clans, and if there is any kind of useful parallel. From my limited anthropology background, I seem to remember that clan-structures provide a kind of formula for how to "weave a community" of individuals without too much risk of creating bad-blood (socially as well as genetically)?

This is perhaps thinner ice, but my own experience within my social circles is that "the decider" (regarding style and level of isolation) in most "pods" I know of is a woman... not always the eldest, but one who has significant dominance outside of such a pandemic... a thought leader in nuclear or extended family or perhaps neighborhood.

One of my social-circle groups consists of a modestly isolated "country-lane" of about 6 households of retirees and empty nesters. So roughly 12 individuals with roughly 3 in the high-age-risk (>80) category and 1 > 70 with acute preexisting conditions. The 3 high-risk are men, and are supported in self-isolation by their (younger) partners (2 women, one man), and there are two significantly dominant women in the group who alternatively trigger social events among this larger pod normally but have taken on a "policing" role amongst their neighbors, making sure everyone has what they need but also shaming anyone who considers what they believe to be "risky behaviour". A less assertive woman is also a practicing (semi-retired) nurse who seems to decline to try to "manage" the rest of the lane even though she seems to be more technically competent in this context. One couple are Native American (Picuris/Dine) and they have mostly left the pod/lane to rejoin the Dine family-pod which I believe needs their influence/help in these times. They remain friendly but non-contacting with the lane when they are there ( a few days ever week or two). We are normally considered part of their "clan" but have declined virtually all in-person contact, allowing for a few socially-distanced meetups in the backyard with one of the couples (BYOEverything). The "lane" has a good dozen other orbiters/clan-members like us who seem to have the same relationship to that "pod"...

Another of my extended social circle is an organic farm-complex that consisted of 2 women in their early 60s, each with their own home/aspect-of-farming and a full time tenant in a casita and a rotating medley of temporary farm-help who either live for weeks or months *on* the farm, or are CSA-trade workers who come in for a few hours here and there to help with acute things like harvest/clean for market-day. The primary *farmer* recently took on a young couple (30ish) to whom she is sharecropping... giving them her house and the fields she has built over the last 10 years to "make what they will" of it with fresh ideas and energy. They were on their way here from Michigan when the pandemic got hot... they had "day jobs" on two other organic farms in the area but after arriving self-isolated on the farm rather than risk bringing something with them... once past the two weeks (which was a good time to start the farm-hand-off) they began to go to their respective farms 5 days a week, social distancing/etc. while there, but mixing it up more than the two women who own the farm. The tenant is a CNA who has only one (elderly woman) client. What they have formed is something of an Orca-like Pod it seems... with two matrilines, one being much larger than the other. The martiarch of the smaller matriline is a retired nurse and is acutely careful about mixing... she is effectively isolated *within* the larger pod as a unit of one. The more prolific matriarch has visited us a few times (to bring farm produce/plantings and share a little socially distant palaver and a sanitized beer while sitting >6 feet away in the sunlight.

My own daughters live far enough away (Portland OR, Denver) that I have not opportunity to "pod up" with them, but would very likely do precisely that if they were closer. Forming a pod of about 13 with 3 matrilines... though it would get tricky if Mary's family (3 children and spouses and grandchildren) were closer as she/they would expect/want the same... and perhaps true to form, her sons might polyp off to join their wives pod/clan?

- Steve

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gepr

Re: Warring Darwinians for Glen, Steve

In reply to this post by Prof David West

I've disagreed with this point before. So, I won't lay the whole thing out again. But I think we can and do model things we don't understand with other things we don't understand. We do this all the time. There are 2 main things that allow us to do this: 1) we understand, or imagine we understand, every thing just a little bit and 2) what little we understand about any one thing differs slightly from what little we understand about any other thing.

E.g. if a child uses, say, styrofoam balls to model the solar system. We can't claim she fully understands styrofoam or the solar system. But what she knows about the model is slightly different from what she knows about the solar system and planets. And it's that difference in what she does (and does not) know about each that makes it an interesting model.

I can do this even with formalism. Mathematicians are called "Platonic" precisely because they don't (fully) understand the formalisms they define and use.

On 4/30/20 12:41 PM, Prof David West wrote:
> We cannot use another (perhaps our internal awareness of being conscious) instance of consciousness because we do not know/understand it either.
>
> If we had a computer that was incontrovertibly conscious, then maybe.
>
> We certainly have no formalism we can use to think about and come to understand consciousness.

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uǝʃƃ ⊥ glen

gepr

Re: Warring Darwinians for Glen, Steve

In reply to this post by thompnickson2

I described experience as a comprehension. Then you say it's not that sort of thing. Then you go on to describe experience as a comprehension. 8^) I guess the problem is that I'm relying too much on that jargon? You describe 2 types of comprehension: O∞) the object versus On) the observers of the object.

I know this is pedestrian, but to see that these are both comprehensions, the wikipedia disambiguation page might help: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comprehension

To me, these 6 different things reduce to 2 different categories: {logical, the axiom, lists} versus {language, ideas}. The two things you identify O∞ and On fall into the 1st category. An experience is the act of slicing up and bundling together a new thing from what we find laying around in the ambient muck. O∞ -- the unified, total object, the elephant -- slices/rebundles in one way and On -- the super-set comprised of the subsets sliced/rebundled by each observer -- does it in another way. O∞ is stunted/approximated, as von Neumann tried to point out when claiming that the description of an object is an order higher than the object itself. Or, as Robert Rosen tried to point out by claiming "there is no largest model of a complex thing". The On comprehension isn't stunted like O∞. But it's a collective thing, which can't be sliced/rebundled by any one of us. And that means no _one_ of us can really grok it.

On 4/30/20 2:05 PM, [hidden email] wrote:
> I just don’t think “experience” is that sort of thing. Experience is always a step from one thing to another. A “unique experience” is like acceleration an instant. A fiction that is useful for some purposes. We know how to study the elephant; and we know how to study the uniqueness of the observers of the elephant. But those are distinct objects of study.

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uǝʃƃ ⊥ glen

Eric Charles-2

Re: Warring Darwinians for Glen, Steve

In reply to this post by gepr

Glen said: " I've disagreed with this point before... I think we can and do model things we don't understand with other things we don't understand... E.g. if a child uses, say, styrofoam balls to model the solar system..."

I think this might be some sort of linguistic slippage here. Do you agree with the following?

* When a child tells you that her conglomeration of styrofoam ball, paint, and metal wire is "a model" of the solar system, the child is claiming that the styrofoam-balls-model has shares some properties with the solar system.

* For example, the child might understands that the balls are "round", and intends that aspect to be shared with the planets, i.e., the model leads to understanding the planets as round objects, rather than points of light in the sky.

If you agree with that, I think you agree with all that Nick or David/Quine is getting at. Nick isn't asserting than anyone understands anything better than people actually understand things in practice: People TRY to use things they THINK they understand, to gain insights into things the THINK they understand less. And that attempt works only and exactly as well as it works, with no pretending otherwise.

-----------

Eric P. Charles, Ph.D.
Department of Justice - Personnel Psychologist

American University - Adjunct Instructor

[hidden email]

On Fri, May 1, 2020 at 9:22 AM uǝlƃ ☣ <[hidden email]> wrote:

I've disagreed with this point before. So, I won't lay the whole thing out again. But I think we can and do model things we don't understand with other things we don't understand. We do this all the time. There are 2 main things that allow us to do this: 1) we understand, or imagine we understand, every thing just a little bit and 2) what little we understand about any one thing differs slightly from what little we understand about any other thing.

E.g. if a child uses, say, styrofoam balls to model the solar system. We can't claim she fully understands styrofoam or the solar system. But what she knows about the model is slightly different from what she knows about the solar system and planets. And it's that difference in what she does (and does not) know about each that makes it an interesting model.

I can do this even with formalism. Mathematicians are called "Platonic" precisely because they don't (fully) understand the formalisms they define and use.

On 4/30/20 12:41 PM, Prof David West wrote:
> We cannot use another (perhaps our internal awareness of being conscious) instance of consciousness because we do not know/understand it either.
>
> If we had a computer that was incontrovertibly conscious, then maybe.
>
> We certainly have no formalism we can use to think about and come to understand consciousness.

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thompnickson2

Re: Warring Darwinians for Glen, Steve

In reply to this post by gepr

Hi, Glen,

I have swum (swam? Swimmed?) way out beyond my depth, but I have long wanted to explore this "experience" thing, so thank you. First, remember, a proper monist shouldn't talk about his "stuff",whatever it is, as if it is distinguishable from other "stuff", because that is dualism, full stop. So I really shouldn’t be doing this at all. But see larding below. On to FRIAM

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

[hidden email]

https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

-----Original Message-----
From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of u?l? ?
Sent: Friday, May 1, 2020 7:47 AM
To: FriAM <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Warring Darwinians for Glen, Steve

I described experience as a comprehension.

[NST===>I am happy with this so long as comprehension (= conception, a la Peirce) is taken as a relation not as an instantaneous event. By the way, there is a nasty typo in my original statement. I should have written, “A “unique experience” is like acceleration AT an instant.” i.e., a contradiction. I have always been fascinated by the fact that calculus is based on just such contradictions. <===nst]

Then you say it's not that sort of thing. Then you go on to describe experience as a comprehension. 8^) I guess the problem is that I'm relying too much on that jargon? You describe 2 types of comprehension: O∞) the object versus On) the observers of the object.

[NST===>I don't think we are struggling with jargon. I think we are struggling with the limits of language. Wittgenstein thought that such struggles were perhaps not worth the effort. "That of which we cannot speak should be passed over in silence" or something like that. But putting aside w’s warning for a moment, let me just say that I don’t think we have different kinds of comprehension here, but comprehensions of different types of objects. <===nst]

I know this is pedestrian, but to see that these are both comprehensions, the wikipedia disambiguation page might help: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comprehension

[NST===>I want to join friam so I will look at this later. Dopeslap me if I forget. <===nst]

To me, these 6 different things reduce to 2 different categories: {logical, the axiom, lists} versus {language, ideas}. The two things you identify O∞ and On fall into the 1st category. An experience is the act of slicing up and bundling together a new thing from what we find laying around in

the ambient muck. O∞ -- the unified, total object, the elephant -- slices/rebundles in one way and On -- the super-set comprised of the subsets sliced/rebundled by each observer -- does it in another way.

[NST===>Yes. I like this. Holt would like it. We are constantly doing Catscan's <===nst]

O∞ is stunted/approximated, as von Neumann tried to point out when claiming that the description of an object is an order higher than the object itself. Or, as Robert Rosen tried to point out by claiming "there is no largest model of a complex thing". The On comprehension isn't stunted like O∞. But it's a collective thing, which can't be sliced/rebundled by any one of us. And that means no _one_ of us can really grok it.

[NST===>Ok. ASAP, let's dig into this "stunted" thing. It is the case, taking the point of view metaphor seriously, that "our" view on you is perhaps more different from your view on you, than each of our views is on the elephant. But that would be true if we were talking about haircuts. It doesn't need to be about souls. I need to know why you think the appropriate word is “stunted”, rather than just “different”. Could you “work” the stunted metaphor a bit?

<===nst]

On 4/30/20 2:05 PM, [hidden email] wrote:

> I just don’t think “experience” is that sort of thing. Experience is

> always a step from one thing to another. A “unique experience” is like acceleration an instant. A fiction that is useful for some purposes. We know how to study the elephant; and we know how to study the uniqueness of the observers of the elephant. But those are distinct objects of study.

☣ uǝlƃ

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thompnickson2

Re: Warring Darwinians for Glen, Steve

In reply to this post by Eric Charles-2

Yeh. At some point, Eric, you and I are going to have to come to terms with this “formalism” thang that the others keep trotting out. Is it just the reductio of something that is familiar to you and me, or is it something completely different. But I am late for FRIAM.

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

[hidden email]

https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of Eric Charles
Sent: Friday, May 1, 2020 9:27 AM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Warring Darwinians for Glen, Steve

I think this might be some sort of linguistic slippage here. Do you agree with the following?

-----------

Eric P. Charles, Ph.D.
Department of Justice - Personnel Psychologist

American University - Adjunct Instructor

On Fri, May 1, 2020 at 9:22 AM uǝlƃ ☣ <[hidden email]> wrote:

I've disagreed with this point before. So, I won't lay the whole thing out again. But I think we can and do model things we don't understand with other things we don't understand. We do this all the time. There are 2 main things that allow us to do this: 1) we understand, or imagine we understand, every thing just a little bit and 2) what little we understand about any one thing differs slightly from what little we understand about any other thing.

E.g. if a child uses, say, styrofoam balls to model the solar system. We can't claim she fully understands styrofoam or the solar system. But what she knows about the model is slightly different from what she knows about the solar system and planets. And it's that difference in what she does (and does not) know about each that makes it an interesting model.

I can do this even with formalism. Mathematicians are called "Platonic" precisely because they don't (fully) understand the formalisms they define and use.

On 4/30/20 12:41 PM, Prof David West wrote:
> We cannot use another (perhaps our internal awareness of being conscious) instance of consciousness because we do not know/understand it either.
>
> If we had a computer that was incontrovertibly conscious, then maybe.
>
> We certainly have no formalism we can use to think about and come to understand consciousness.

--
☣ uǝlƃ

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gepr

Re: Warring Darwinians for Glen, Steve

In reply to this post by Eric Charles-2

I (kindasorta) agree with the /that/ below. But I disagree with Dave's explicit statement, which was:

On 4/30/20 12:41 PM, Prof David West wrote:
> We cannot use another (perhaps our internal awareness of being conscious) instance of consciousness because we do not know/understand it either.

I disagree with that. So I can't agree with all that Dave is saying. There may be *other* reasons we can't use one to model the other. But it's not because we don't "know/understand" it.

On 5/1/20 8:27 AM, Eric Charles wrote:
> * When a child tells you that her conglomeration of styrofoam ball, paint, and metal wire is "a model" of the solar system, the child is claiming that the styrofoam-balls-model has shares some properties with the solar system.
> * For example, the child might understands that the balls are "round", and intends that aspect to be shared with the planets, i.e., the model leads to understanding the planets as round objects, rather than points of light in the sky.
>
> If you agree with /that/, I think you agree with all that Nick or David/Quine is getting at. Nick isn't asserting than anyone understands anything better than people actually understand things in practice: People TRY to use things they THINK they understand, to gain insights into things the THINK they understand less. And that attempt works only and exactly as well as it works, with no pretending otherwise.

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uǝʃƃ ⊥ glen

gepr

Re: Warring Darwinians for Glen, Steve

In reply to this post by thompnickson2

Devil’s advocate: On your account, nonsocial animals don’t feel pain?

Well, not the same sort of pain. Any creature that struggles when you do something to it is “paining” in some sense. But animals that have the potential to summon help seem to pain in a different way.

I apologize for constantly citing that paper. But how could I possibly know what I believe if I don’t know what I have written.

By the way, back before Methuselah, there was a lovely psychological literature demystifying hypnosis. The basic set up was you have a bunch of “judges” on one side of a one-way glass window and subjects on the other side. Two conditions: the subjects are hypnotized to do all the things they do OR the subjects are simply asked to do those things. Judges could not distinguish the two kinds of subjects.

Nick

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

[hidden email]

https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

-----Original Message-----
From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of u?l? ?
Sent: Friday, May 1, 2020 3:56 PM
To: FriAM <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Warring Darwinians for Glen, Steve

(Full disclosure: I'm a strong-AI person. But I'm also pretty practical in my understanding of AI and the achievement of it exists far beyond at least one inflection point. And we'll probably all go extinct before it happens.)

On 5/1/20 2:50 PM, [hidden email] wrote:

> Perhaps I misspoke. I certainly agree that working out an entity's point of view is a problem. I just don't see why it's a hard problem. In otherwords, when Chalmers asserts that there is a Hard Problem of consciousness, him implies that he is pointing to some problem unique in its hardness. I think I am only denying there is not such uniquely hard problem, not that there is not a problem of working out what is from different points of view or a problem of working out some entity's point of view from what is.

☣ uǝlƃ

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