cues and self awareness

[Nick Thompson]

All --

A couple of people have asked me what the hell my question was and I am inclined to my usual defense in such cases, which is to say, "If I knew what my question was I wouldnt have asked it"

This all comes from a long difficulty I have had with the notion of introspection which arises from the fact that spection of any kind requires distance between the thing spected and the thing doing the specting.  So, spection can never be intro.  However, it is of course possible for me to speak of myself just as it is possible for me to speak of you,but there still is nothing intro about that in the sense that I am using the same sort of computing power to say what I think as I am using to say what you think.  

Any time one examines spection, one finds that the specting system is making use of cues to make a hypothesis about the spected system.  So, for instance when we look at an object and try to judge its color, our retina actually does a fancy calculation to exclude ambient light as a factor and our reading of object color is the result of the cues used in that fancy calculation: roughly speaking the ratio of the brightness of the object to the brightness of its surround.  

Similar, in ethology, it is often observed that what is a robin to a fellow robin is not what is a robin to us.  For a territorial robin, it is sufficient to see a red tuft of feathers on a brown wire to elicit a territorial defense.  So here we have the thorny issue of intension (with an S).  To know what something spects  like, we have to identify the organismic point of view from which it is being spected.  

What I didnt know, and still am curious about is whether the intensionality of the cue-object relation is logically necessary, or something to do with organisms.  My intuition is that it is logically necessary ... that when ever something measures something else it is subject to the limitations imposed by the cues it is using.  Now perhaps this just a trivial implication of the uncertainty principle and, like most quanta phenomena,  not of much interest for the macro world in which we live.  ,So I was expecting to learn, for instance, that my cpu monitor is counting the number of miniacts in a microzot but when we think about that, it is not quite what we mean by the productivity of a CPU, or whatever, and because of the logic of the cue relation, CAN NEVER BE.  

Any there it is.  Shall I take another pill?

NIck

http://www.clarku.edu/faculty/nthompson/1-websitestuff/texts/Intentionality_is_the_Mark_of_the_Vital.pdf



Nicholas Thompson
nickthompson at earthlink.net
http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson
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