Re: Subjectivity and cartoons

Posted by Eric Charles-2 on
URL: http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/Subjectivity-intimacy-experience-tp7587205p7587231.html

I'm not sure what to make of the cartoon comment either. Let's say we all agree that a person in front of us is in pain. Let's say we video tape that person and show it to someone else.

We ask our viewer afterwards "Did you see pain in that video?"

And he say "Yes."

Then we say, "Wait, you mean to tell me that those flat, pixilated colors on the screen were in pain?"

"No, no," they insist, "the person you video taped was in pain, the image itself wasn't!"

"But we asked you about the video," we assert confidently, "we want to know if there is pain in the video."

"Well, look... this is getting weird," he replies, "I'm leaving."

I kind of feel like we would end up in the same place if we tried to have a serious discussion about cartoons.

It is not, in Nick's position, an issue of a "sufficiently convincing performance." Certainly one can be fooled by people through various means, so we don't even need robots for that discussion. When we say, of a person that they gave a "convincing performance" what we mean is something like "When you look at a wider swath of that guy's behavior, you find that the chunk of behavior you originally studied is part of a very different pattern than you had originally assumed."

For example, a person who looks terribly dejected on a street corner holding a sign that speaks of their woes, but if you watch when they leave their post, they travel back to a perfectly middle-class house, change into nice clean clothes, and go about a normal life. That would be a "convincing performance." Note that we can speculate about whether it is a performance based on much less than that. Ultimately, however, we become certain it was "a performance" only by observing a larger swath of the world.

On Fri, Mar 4, 2016 at 1:49 AM, Nick Thompson <[hidden email]> wrote:

Russ,

 

I am torn between judging your cartoon comment as silly or profound. 

 

I have said that if a robot could be devised that was embedded in a social network of other robots, that systematically avoided injurious events and stimuli, that engaged in some communicative behavior when injured to which other robots responded by coming to its rescue, then I would have to entertain the notion that these robots experience pain.  To me, pain is all of that.  Hard to imagine a cartoon doing that.  Hence my first judgment that the idea is frivolous.  (But probably not a lot more frivolous than my idea that motivation is like the first derivative of behavior.)   I think perhaps the comment confuses the map with the territory, as Bateson used to say.

 

So, now I am stuck with trying to figure out why I might possibly think it profound.  But let’s make the example as favorable to your case as we can.  Let it be the case that you experience me being horrible tortured by the CIA.  Do you experience pain.  If you are not a psychopath, probably yes.  Do you experience MY pain.  No, because my pain occurs against an entirely different history of experiences, including, by the way, the occlusion of my airway by the wet washcloth and the poured water. . 

 

Something like that.

 

Nick

 

 

 

 

 

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

 

From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Russ Abbott
Sent: Thursday, March 03, 2016 10:12 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: [FRIAM] Subjectivity and cartoons

 

Nick (and I think Eric) said that a sufficiently convincing performance of pain behavior by a robot is pain. I asked whether a sufficiently convincing animated depiction of pain behavior via a cartoon is also pain? In other words, can a cartoonist create pain by drawing it? 

 

In asking that I don't mean the cartoonists own pain or pain in the viewer, but pain in the world in the same way that some third party has pain whether or not someone sees his pain behavior.

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