Posted by
Nick Thompson on
URL: http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/In-the-theater-of-consciousness-tp3875347p3876773.html
Jochen,
I am touched that you should seek me out for an answer to this question. I
have to warn you that I am forgetting stuff faster than I am learning it
and that I never had a good memory, so please take what I say here with a
grain of salt.
The idea you describe here is familiar to me as the "cartesian theatre",
which I think arises from Daniel Dennet, Consciousness Explained??? It is
also represented, I think, in a book called the User Illusion, which I have
never read. It's a very tempting view because it is deeply imbedded in our
day-to-day conversations about behavior.
It is called the Cartesian Theatre because of Descartes's "brain in the
vat" argument that leads to the conclusion that all we can for sure is the
content of our own minds. On that basis, we start to think of experience
as something we sit and watch played out sort of screen on the inside of
our skulls, watched perhaps by the cyclopean eye of the pineal. As you
know, it is my view that this sort of cartesian skepticism leads further:--
to the conclusion that we cant know anything for sure. On my account, if
we cannot know about the world, we surely cannot know about our own minds.
The argument is as follows: Any knowledge requires a knowledge-gathering
mechanism that uses cues. If we doubt that there are more or less accurate
mechanisms for gathering information about the world, why would we be
confident that there are mechanisms for gtathering information about one's
own mind. This is how I arrive at my position, "O what the fuck, why not
just be realists and get the silliness over at the beginning."
Over the years I wrote several papers that touched on these issues. All
can be found on my website, cited at the bottom of this message. Here are
three of the most relevant.
http://www.clarku.edu/faculty/nthompson/1-websitestuff/Texts/1990-1994/The_many_perils_of_ejective_anthropomorphism.pdf. Attacks the idea that we can
use instrospection of our own mental states as a tool to understand the
behavior of animals. Argues that we understand animal's mental states as
directly as we understand our own ... i.e., not very directly.
http://www.clarku.edu/faculty/nthompson/1-websitestuff/Texts/2000-2005/Intentionality_is_the_mark_of_the_vital.pdf Argues that intentionality -- point
of view-ed-ness -- is a defining feature of any living thing.
http://www.clarku.edu/faculty/nthompson/1-websitestuff/Texts/2000-2005/perceiving_ones_own_emotions.pdf Argues that emotional self-knowledge is a
specialized cognitive capacity that makes use of the same sorts of
information we use when we gather knowledge of others.
Please let me know if any of the url's are incorrect.
Neuroscience and psychology must ultimately mesh, of course, in some sense,
although the mesh wont be achieved by importing folk psychology into the
brain, any more thhe mesh between development and biochemistry was achieved
by importing little pictures of the completed organism into the molecules
of the developing cell.
All the best,
Nick
Nicholas S. Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology,
Clark University (
[hidden email])
http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/> [Original Message]
> From: Jochen Fromm <
[hidden email]>
> To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <
[hidden email]>
> Date: 10/22/2009 8:18:05 PM
> Subject: [FRIAM] In the theater of consciousness
>
> Nick, what do you think as a Psychologist
> of Baars's "Global Workspace Theory" where
> he explores the "consciousness is a theater"
> metaphor? Is this a modern perspective
> suitable for a computational model to bridge
> the gap betwen Psychology and Neuroscience?
> Do you think there is a layer or mesh between
> both disciplines?
>
> Since 2003 there have been attempts from
> Baars and Franklin to produce somehow
> a common denominator. Franklin apparently
> wanted to program conscious agents, and
> Baars wanted to confirm his theory
> experimentally, but I have the impression
> that it never worked out well. Do you
> agree?
>
> -J.
>
>
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