Posted by
Rikus Combrinck on
URL: http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/Re-Direct-conversation-tp3137870p3153736.html
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Eric (and Nick),
I'm still pursuing clarity. Kindly
consider the following:
Person A, a high-school student, is
asked by a teacher (B) to solve a maths problem on the board in
front of the class. Among the other students is person C, a close friend
of A. A is taking an unusually
long time to solve the problem, frequently erasing partial calculations, now
and then pausing to stare at the board with a frown.
B is a new teacher and has only
interacted with A a few times. It appears to him that the problem is
simply too much for A, and starts forming an idea about A's math
skills.
C knows that A is good at
maths and that the problem on the board should really not be difficult for
him. He also knows A well enough to recognise that the frown A
exhibits means something is bothering him. Things between A and his
girlfriend are a bit shaky lately and he wonders if it took a turn for the
worse.
A has a really bad headache. He
very rarely gets headaches, but woke up this morning with a monster. He
hates giving up on math problems, though, and is sure he should be able to
solve this one. Also, he suspects the new teacher thinks he isn't very
good at maths and he wants to correct that impression. And he just
realised he forgot to do biology homework and is trying to recall which period
biology is.
Can you please
comment:
1. I understand you to say that A
is an observer of A in much the same way as B and C. You're *not* saying A
is not having an experience of A, only that A's experience is not *privileged*
compared to B and C. Does that mean you consider A's experience to be
qualitatively indistinguishable from that of B and C, or only that the
difference in the quality of A's experience, compared to that of B and
C, is not of consequence?
2. Obvious A can think a great many things
that B and C can't know anything about. He can access memory about
himself that B and C cannot. He has access to interoceptive sensory
information that B and C does not. He has the experience of directly
influencing the mathematical symbols in his working memory, outside the
perception or direct influence of B and C. On the other hand, B and C has
access to some exteroceptive sensory information about A that A lacks. Do
you consider these various kinds of information and experiences to be entirely
interchangeable?
3. Do you distinguish between "experience"
and "have information about"?
4. When you say that A's point of view is
not privileged, do you consider anything beyond the ability to identify motives
and intent, gauge current emotional state, and identify habitual
patterns of behaviour?
5. We can extend the example and allow A to spontaneously start
hallucinating a swarm of hand-sized pterodactyls that are attacking him.
His body and mind responds to the perceived threat like it would to a real
one. In some sense he really is having the experience, yet, B and C would
deny that it is taking place. What exactly does it mean to be "wrong"
about one's own experience?
Regards,
Rikus
Sent: Wednesday, June 24, 2009 8:57 PM
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Direct conversation - 1st vs 3rd
person
My understanding is that the terms 1st and 3rd person arose as ways of
talking about literary styles - and our use of them is metaphorical. An
essential part of the metaphor is that authors writing in 1st person are
typically granted privileged license to write about the mind of "I". In
contrast, people writing in (a non-omniscient) 3rd person, are typically not
granted as much license to write about the minds. This is not entirely true,
as people writing in 3rd person write about minds all the time, but their
writings are considered more vulnerable to dispute. For example, if Obama
wrote an account of his inauguration and said "I was terrified", it would be
considered less vulnerable to dispute than if I wrote an account of his
inauguration and said "He was terrified". If these linguistic conventions
become reified then we can start taking the "I" not merely to denote the
speaker/viewer, but to denote an entity in possession of unique powers that
justify the privileges commonly granted to the linguistic device. This is
suggested as my understanding of the history, independent of any value
judgment regarding the reification.
There is a lurking problem, however, as these conventions do not
always seem to hold in the real world. The most glairing probelm is that, at
least sometimes, "I" can be wrong about my own mind and "He" can be right.
(The cause of my error can range from simply not paying attention to what I am
doing, to intentional self-delusion, to forgetting - think Alzheimer's.) For
some, these problems lead to an urge to collapse categories, to see if the
oddness cannot be gotten rid of if we leave behind the notion of uniqueness
that goes with having distinct labels. I suppose that on some formal level,
when a dichotomy collapses into a monism, it might not be particularly
important which category label remains. However, one category may be preferred
over another because it originally contained properties that the author wishes
to retain as implicit or explicit in the monistic system that remains. These
properties are ported along with word into the monistic system, because the
term retains sway as a metaphor.
In this case, the historical bias has
been to retain only the "I" position. In this move, the "I" retains its unique
insight about ourselves, and any insight we think we have about others must be
treated purely as insight about ourselves, i.e. the mind that I know as "their
mind" is really just a sub-part of my mind. This leads to extreme forms of
idealism (where all the world exists merely as an idea), the two mind problem
(is it ever possible for two minds to know the some object?), etc., etc. These
were huge turn of the 20th century challenges for philosophy, having grown out
of a tradition of pushing more and more extreme the distinguished lineage of
ideas flowing from Descartes, Kant, Berkeley, etc. The problems, for the most
part, remain. In the extreme form, at least, this lineage leads to a heavy
intellectual paralysis, as it is not possible for any "I" to know any other
"I", nor to know the "real world" (should such a thing even exist).
The alternative (assuming we are to retain one of the original
labels), is to have a bias for the "He" position. This leads to extreme forms
of realism, and often (but not always) to behaviorism. In this move, the "I"
has to get its information about the mind in the same that "He" has to get
information. That is, if my brother knows my mind by observing my behavior,
then I can only know my mind by observing my behavior. (Note, that the
assertion about observing behavior is a secondary postulate, supplimenting the
fundamental assertion that the method of knowing must be the same.)
There are, presumably, things that the I-biased position handles well
(I don't know what they are, but there must be some). I know there are things
the He-biased position handles well. Among other things it allows us to better
understand perfectly normal and mundane conversations such as:
A) "You
are angry"
B) "No I'm not"
A) "Yes you are dear. I've known you long
enough to know when you're angry."
B) "I think I'd know when I was
angry"
A) "You usually don't dear"
... several hours later
B) "Wow,
you were right, I was angry. I didn't realize it at the time. I'm
sorry"
The I-biased position understands these conversations as very
elaborate shell games, where the first statement means something like: "The
you that is in my head is currently being modeled by me as having a
first-person experience of anger which is itself modeled after my unique
first-person experience of anger". Worse, the last sentence seems (to me)
totally incoherent from the I-biased position. The He-biased position much
more simply believes that a person's anger is visible to himself and others if
the right things are attended to, and hence the conversation requires no shell
game. Person B simply comes to attend aspects of the situation that A was
attending from the start.
Now I will admit that the He-biased
perspective has trouble in some situations, but those can't really be
discussed until the position is at least understood in the situations it
handles well.
Eric
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