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These thoughts are not as well formed as I would like, but I am
headed to
a conference this weekend, so here it goes:
The rules of the dualistic game (or the idealist game) require us to believe that tasting salt involves something fundamentally beyond detecting a property of the salt. That additional thing, the thing that is not a property of the salt, but that is present "within us" when we taste salt, is labeled "qualia". I'm not sure if Nick would be fully on board with this, but I think the logical response to this line of thinking is denial of the problem: Tasting salt is nothing above and beyond detecting a property of the salt, and thus the entire category of phenomenon in question nonsensical. The only reasonable course of investigation into "saltyness" is to try to find out what specific property of salt was being detected when something tasted salty. With that information in hand, you then say that "tasting salt" IS being responsive to that aspect of a material. Again, if you don't like the behaviorist stuff, just say that "tasting salt" IS experiencing that aspect of the material. As for what seems to remain of the 1st person discussion... It must be admitted that knowing requires a knower. However, a "first principle" of New Realism is that no properties of the world get their essential nature from being part of the knowledge relationship. Mountains are not made by being known as mountains, a horse is exactly what it is whether or not someone knows it is a horse, etc. Those examples (hopefully) seem straightforward and unproblematic. However, in the same way, whatever it is to be angry, it is exactly what it is whether or not someone knows they are angry, etc. Thus, in line with the above argument, whatever it is to be salty, it must be something about the salty thing... or a perhaps more properly, a property of the thing in relation to the taster... but it is definitely not something uniquely about the "I" that is doing the tasting. Have a fun and productive weekend all. When I return I will try to get back to Rikus's questions. This is indeed an excellent and stimulating conversation. Thanks all, Eric On Fri, Jun 26, 2009 04:37 PM, Russ Abbott <[hidden email]> wrote:
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Eric, I mean. Typo.
Apologies.
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Rikus's question - Student Teacher Friend
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Returning at last to Rikus’s examples, the
essential elements of the challenge were as follows: Student is having trouble
doing a math problem on the board in front of the class. Teacher, who doesn’t
know the student well, and long-time Friend look on. Attending to various
aspects of the situation, each forms their own opinion as to why Student is
having trouble: Teacher sees Student as bad at math. Friend sees Student as
flustered by a recent breakup with a girlfriend, and Student sees Student as
suffering from a pounding headache, worried about his biology homework, and
worried that Teacher thinks he is bad at math. The questions: 1. I understand you to say that Student is an
observer of Student in much the same way as Friend and Teacher. You're *not* saying Student is not having an
experience of Student, only that Student’s experience is not *privileged*
compared to Friend and Teacher. Does
that mean you consider Student’s experience to be qualitatively indistinguishable
from that of Friend and Teacher, or only that the difference in the quality of
Student’s experience, compared to that of Friend and Teacher, is not of
consequence? Response: I think I might be saying both. I
strongly assert that any differences that there might be are not of consequence
to this conversation. I would also seriously suggest (or more timidly assert)
that there is no difference. Though I have never thought of it this way before,
I would experiment with the idea that “empathy” is just what we call it when we
(as 3rd persons) are seeing the world as he (the 1st
person) sees it. I don’t need to literally “see the world through his eyes” I
only need to “see the world that his eyes see”. Thus, if Teacher saw all the
girl-friend related events that Friend saw (as Friend saw them), then Teacher
and Friend would be “of the same mind”… Will you at least grant that student’s
problems could actually stem from
girl friend trouble, though Student himself does not realize it? Maybe in a
cheesy Freudian way he keeps getting stuck whenever the numbers add up to 16,
and his girlfriend’s sweet 16 party (that he now cannot attend) is this
weekend; maybe he always and only gets bad migraines when his relationships are
going bad, but he has not noticed the pattern yet; maybe he has noticed the
pattern, but never thinks of it in the moment because the migraines are so bad;
maybe, without realizing it, he can’t look at the chalkboard for five seconds
without looking away at her empty seat and fidgeting with the bracelet she gave
him; etc. It could be that, while all
Student “knows” is that he has a headache and can’t concentrate, Friend can see
that the headache and the fluster are not at all random. ------------- 2. Obvious Student can think a great many things
that Friend and Teacher can't know anything about. He can access
memory about himself that Friend and Teacher cannot. He has access to
interoceptive sensory information that Friend and Teacher does not. He
has the experience of directly influencing the mathematical symbols in his
working memory, outside the perception or direct influence of Friend and
Teacher. On the other hand, Friend and
Teacher has access to some exteroceptive sensory information about Student that
Student lacks. Do you consider these various kinds of information and
experiences to be entirely interchangeable? Response: All parties can think of a great many
things the other parties cannot know about, Student included. Some of Students
self-observations are in practice unobservable by the others; though in
principle they are public (heart rate is observable, etc.). Some of Friend and
Teacher’s observations may be beyond students ability because of their vantage
point and past experience (e.g., Teacher knows that pupils who have a problem
at point X need to work on concept Y, which Student could not possibly know.
Friend knows how to tell when Students blood sugar is low, even if Student has
trouble with that.). --- The part about privileged experience of manipulating
symbols is more problematic for me. On principle, I think I must insist that
such is also publicly observable, though surely this is a point where I will be
suspected of dishonesty. I think that consistency requires me to argue that if
you knew Student well enough, you could see the symbols being manipulated as well
as he could see them. While I do not know anyone well enough to observe all of
this, I have helped people through math problems where I could watch their face
and tell them “Yup, that’s it” when they had solved the problem. The problem
was indeed solved “in their heads” but had not been verbally reported yet. The
symbol question indeed reveals one of the points at which this position seems
most tenuous to me, but I suspect Nick might honestly wonder why I am being
timid. --------- 3. Do you distinguish between
"experience" and "have information about"? Response: Here we will run into linguistic
problems, so I will introduce the metaphor of a horse race. In meaning option
one, I admit that my reading in the report in the news paper stating which horse
won a race (information about) and my witnessing the final moments of the race
(experience), are quite distinct. In meaning option two, common made arguments
claim that because I can only see light, I can only “have information about”
the winner, even when I am present in the final moments. Through this arguement,
philosophers seek to convince people that I can never “experience” the race
directly. I do deny that distinction: I insist that when I am there, I
experience the race and the win itself. There is a third sense, in which
information means “statistically predictive cue”, and this is the heart of
“information theory”. In this case, I would insist on direct experience of the
cue, but not direct experience of the thing it is supposed to be a cue for. So,
for example, I may have information about who won the race if I see that it is
a brown horse, but am too far away to read the horse’s number. Of course the
brownness is experienced, and by virtue of that the race and the win has been
experienced, but those experiences only serve as probabilistic “information”
relative to other questions of interest. -------- 4. When you say that Student’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? Response: I think the answer is “All sorts of
other things, but probably none that are particularly relevant to this
discussion.” By “not privileged” I mean that there is nothing Student can see (feel/experience/respond
to) that another individual could not in principle also see. --------- 5. We can extend the example and allow
Student 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, Friend and Teacher would deny that it is taking place.
What exactly does it mean to be "wrong" about one's own experience? Response: The problem of illusory or erroneous experience is the historic nemesis of realist positions (of which this position is a variant). The conversation becomes very convoluted, and my in-progress book chapter on the topic is already 18 single-spaced pages. That said, I think we can bypass the issue for at least this example. All that is required to maintain our position, in light of this new turn of events, is for an outsider to be theoretically able to see that Student is hallucinating pterodactyls. While this example makes such an ability seem dramatic, it is relatively common to see someone flinch in a very particular way that allows you to say “you thought you saw something move, didn’t you?” In this case, you-have-seen that they-have-seen something move, and all without seeing the moving thing itself. Returning to our poor pupil: Can we at least imagine that Student’s reaction to pterodactyls is visibly distinct from his reaction to hallucinated snakes, or monkeys? Could it be that if someone knew him and his behavioral tendencies well enough, they could even see a difference between his reaction to pterodactyls and his reaction to bats or eagles? ---------- Hmmmm… I got through that without saying some of the things I feared I would have to say. I feared I would have to talk about how some of the participants in the initial story were making disingenuous descriptions of the situation, or about how they were all seeing something accurately. I even got through the answer to question 3 without really revealing that this position is nigh-incompatible with traditional information theory ways of thinking. Whew! Glad I didn’t have to do any of that. Eric ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org |
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