-- rec --
On Sun, Aug 24, 2014 at 10:29 AM, Steve Smith <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
Hey, wait a minute, guys! You have lost me. What is this
"consciousness"
of which you speak. I am not sure I have one and I need you
to describe it
to me in a way that I can recognize it.
No you don't... and if you don't know that, then you are not a
truly conscious being, but rather a clever simulacrum of one.
N
Nicholas S. Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology
Clark University
http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/
<http://home.earthlink.net/%7Enickthompson/naturaldesigns/>
-----Original Message-----
From: Friam [mailto:[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>] On Behalf Of John Kennison
Sent: Sunday, August 24, 2014 11:50 AM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] BBC News - Ant colony 'personalities'
shaped by
environment
Eric,
As I understand it, Dennett's position and Chalmers' are not only
incompatible, their difference is more extreme than one simply
being the
denial of the other.
Dennett says that a zombie is simply impossible. If we tried
to create a
computer that could think like a human, it would be conscious
--perhaps even
if it just did a good job of analyzing things the way humans
did --even
without loving pets, etc. (I say perhaps, because I'm not sure
what Dennett
actually means.)
Chalmers says (I think) that even if we created a physically
object that was
identical to a human, it wouldn't necessarily be conscious
--which I find
too extreme. When I said I favored Chalmers, I meant that it
seems plausible
that consciousness might not simply emerge if a system behaves
in a
sufficiently sophisticated way. --the way the system is
constructed could
make a difference. But these are only top of my head guesses.
--John
________________________________________
From: Friam [[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>] on behalf of Eric Charles
[[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>]
Sent: Sunday, August 24, 2014 10:04 AM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] BBC News - Ant colony 'personalities'
shaped by
environment
John,
So, in a "snapshot" I think "A conscious system and a non
conscious one
could be physically identical", however, I think it would be
disingenuous to
say that we could not tell them apart through interaction over
time. This
issue is not whether or not it is easy, but merely whether it
is possible.
I guess the question boils down to how you respond to
challenges about
philosophical zombies. These discussions normally begin with
someone
asserting "You can imagine things that behave exactly like you
and I in all
ways, but not conscious." The presenter then goes on to lay
out a series of
riddles these creatures lead to. However, I am not sure I buy
the premise. I
would assert that you CANNOT imagine such creatures. Can you
really imagine
a creature that acts exactly like you without consciousness?
Perhaps you can
imagine a creature that appears to act lovingly towards your
dog (if you
have a dog) without feeling the love that you feel. But can
you imagine a
creature that appears to act lovingly towards your dog with
being aware of
your dog?!?
It seems like the type of claim we allow people to get away
with at the
start of a philosophical discussion, because it is a pretty
normal seeming
premise, and we all like to play such games... but if we
really stopped to
consider the premise, we would not let it pass.
(Obviously, this need not be read as a question to you, it is
a challenge to
Chalmers and others who hold those views.)
Eric
-----------
Eric P. Charles, Ph.D.
Lab Manager
Center for Teaching, Research, and Learning American
University, Hurst Hall
Room 203A
4400 Massachusetts Avenue, N.W.
Washington, DC 20016
phone: (202) 885-3867 <tel:%28202%29%20885-3867> fax: (202)
885-1190 <tel:%28202%29%20885-1190>
email: [email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]><mailto:[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>>
On Fri, Aug 22, 2014 at 1:16 PM, John Kennison
<[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]><mailto:[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>>> wrote:
Thanks Nick,
I found a few statements I would revise in what I wrote.
Perhaps, I should have said that my argument seems valid
rather correct.
I was careless in describing Chalmers' view (He said something
like: A
conscious system and a non conscious one could be physically
identical).
And I was being presumptuous in describing Dennett as giving
a great tour
of the issues --I don't know that much about the issues.
--John
________________________________________
From: Friam [[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]><mailto:[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>>] on
behalf of Nick Thompson
[[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]><mailto:[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>>]
Sent: Friday, August 22, 2014 12:37 PM
To: 'The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group'
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] BBC News - Ant colony
'personalities' shaped by environment
John,
Thanks for this. But now I have to read Dennett again. I am
afraid my copy
is in a box in Santa Fe, so may have to come over and borrow
yours for a few
days. But I am in somebody else's vacation cabin in NH for
the moment, so
it will be a while.
The following is from my shaky memory. Please don't flame
me, anybody;
just put your arm around my shoulders and lead me from error.
There appears to be a divide amongst philosophers of science
concerning how
much to be a rationalist. Thomas Kuhn is the classic
IRRATIONALIST An awful
lot of the philosophy of science that we were all taught in
graduate school
is irrationalist in this sense. Even Popper, who stressed
the logic of
deduction in his philosophy ("falsification") was
irrationalist in his
account of where good scientific ideas come from ("bold
conjectures"). The
hallmark of an irrationalist is a tendency to put logic words
in ironic
quotes, such as "proof" or "inference" or "truth" , or to use
persuasion
words ("intuition pumps") that avoid invoking logical
relations. So,
Dennett's failure to organize the book in the manner you
suggest is part and
parcel of his irrationalism, as is, by the way, your
observation that an
argument can be effective without being clear.
I want to pull back a bit my distinction between metaphysical
and factual.
I guess I REALLY think the distinction is relative to a
particular argument.
In any argument, there are the facts we argue from and the
facts we argue
about. There is a sense in which metaphysics consists in the
facts we
ALWAYS argue from. I hope I haven't shot my own high horse
out from under
me, here.
Nick
Nicholas S. Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology Clark University
http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/
<http://home.earthlink.net/%7Enickthompson/naturaldesigns/>
-----Original Message-----
From: Friam
[mailto:[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]><mailto:[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>>] On
Behalf Of John Kennison
Sent: Friday, August 22, 2014 8:35 AM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] BBC News - Ant colony 'personalities'
shaped by
environment
Nick:
I find your distinction between metaphysical questions and
factual questions
helpful because it clarifies the vague feeling I expressed
about making
"some sort of error" when I said that consciousness is "having
an inner
subjective life". I no longer feel it is an error but I should
categorize it
as a metaphysical position rather than a scientific fact. (I
prefer the term
``scientific fact`` to your term ``fact``.) It still seems
like a good
argument ("I know consciousness exists because I experience
it") even though
this cannot be a scientific argument.
Eric, Steve, et al:
Thanks for your very interesting comments. I would like to add
some further
comments about Dennett. I both enjoyed and was frustrated by
his book
"Consciousness Explained". I recommend it highly but with the
following
caveats:
(1) I wish the book were organized differently. I think it
should have
started with "The Challenge" (section 5 of chapter 2,
p.39-42). I paraphrase
this challenge as:
First, Dennett says he wants to explain
Consciousness in
scientific terms, without invoking anything beyond
contemporary science. I
take this to mean that he wants to show that we can analyze
and explain
human behavior entirely in scientific, materialistic terms
without appealing
to any 'mysterious' forces. (Therefore, to focus on the
behavior rather
than the motives, of conscious people, Dennett starts by
telling speculative
stories about the phenomenology of consciousness.)
Secondly, he doesn't want to be like behaviorists
who "pretend
they don't have the experiences we know darn well they share
they share with
us. If I [Dennett] wish to deny the existence of some
controversial feature
of consciousness, the burden falls on me to that it is somehow
illusory."
(p.40 of the book).
Thirdly he wants to do an honest job of
explaining the
empirical evidence.
This challenge intrigued me. The first and second goals seem
almost
contradictory. I wondered how he could possibly pull it off.
(2) As far as I remember, Dennett never summarizes how he met this
challenge. (I read this book over 15 years ago and I might
have forgotten
the summary. At any rate, as I go over the book now, I can't
find the kind
of summary I would like to see.) So here is my summary of how
Dennett did:
(a) After having read the book, I feel there is no theoretical
barrier to
explaining all of the behavior of apparently conscious beings
in purely
materialistic terms.
(b) My memory is that Dennett explains the feeling of being
conscious in
terms of the strong AI hypothesis, which says that any system
that carries
out a sufficiently complex task will automatically be
conscious. I am not
certain if I believe this, but it or something like it seems
necessary if we
take the first two goals seriously. Dennett apparently
believes that the
emergence of consciousness depends only on the behavior
exhibited. By
contrast, Chalmers argues that a conscious systems and a
non-conscious
system could exhibit the same type of behavior. I don't see
any reason to
favor either position, but I prefer Chalmers.
(3) On Dennett's style: This is what I find both frustrating
and intriguing.
He seems to discuss various ideas without fully arranging them
into an
argument, as I would tend to do. Dennett relies on this
tendency of the
reader to complete the argument. So Dennett spends less time on
argumentation and more on telling stories. Sometimes it works,
sometimes it
doesn't. As mentioned above, I came away with a strong feeling
about the
first part of the challenge. I also had a strong feeling that our
consciousness often fools us into thinking it is in control
when it isn't. I
liked Dennett's presentation of the Pandemonium model of
language (based on
work of Selfridge, Dawkins and others) and I feel it explains
a lot of
things that would otherwise be murky. On the other hand, I was
dissatisfied
with the chapter on "Qualia Disqualified". I even found myself
agreeing with
his students (and others) that he hasn't really explained
consciousness
--but I think he gave us a great tour of the issues. (If I had
written the
book, and arranged it more logically, the thread of the
arguments might have
been clearer, but it would have been a much less effective book.)
--John
________________________________________
From: Friam [[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]><mailto:[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>>] on
behalf of Eric Smith [[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]><mailto:[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>>]
Sent: Saturday, August 16, 2014 12:31 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] BBC News - Ant colony
'personalities'
shaped by environment
Hi Steve,
I am neither knowledgeable, nor do I have time to report even
my own
experiences, without making a mess of things. But perhaps I
can give some
titles of things people have pointed out to me.
There seem to be several schools of approach (meaning, groups
of people who
criticize each other a lot). I't hard even to know how to
break them down
into clusters, because there are several axes of variation.
There is a school who are mechanistic, and who think of
themselves as
mechanistic.
At one end within that school, one has Dan Dennett. Much of
what he says
seems to me like a lot of effort to beat the dead horse of
mysticism, and I
have no patience for that, because I find it tedious and
uninteresting.
Beyond that, it is not clear to me how much he has contributed
in real
ideas. One that seems okay, if I understand it from informal
conversations
that have involved him, is that it involves a kind of recursive
self-reference of thought. Meaning, that thought is a process
for handling
responses to events (or, in a very broad use of the noun,
"things"), and
part of what consciousness does is render the state of thought
as a "thing"
in its own right, having the same symbolic kind of
representation as the
mind gives to other "things", so that thought can then process a
representation formed about its own state. This seems like
part of the
common lore, expressed already in this thread, and not novel.
Dennett seems
to want to associate this ability specifical ly with
language, and seems
almost to want to treat it as an _application_ of linguistic
faculty. I
don't think that is a well-motivated position, but I am glad
Dennett does it
because it makes an important point. Language, in having
syntax, can
manipulate words within the syntactic system, much as it uses
words to
manipulate ideas within semantic systems. That is hard to
understand in
language, and making us aware of the fact that it is hard,
even though it
has been before our eyes for centuries, seems helpful in
expressing part of
what makes assigning clear meaning to statements about
consciousness hard.
On another extreme from Dennett but still materialist, we have
Giuglio
Tononi and his "Phi" measure. Basically, Tononi adopts
information theory
as a language, and within that language introduces a concrete
notion of what
it means for an information system to be irreducible, in a way
that I think
is analogous to the notion of irreducibility of
representations of groups,
in the theory of representations. The details are different
because
information theory is a different structure from algebra, but
the basic
notion of something's not being splittable into factors is the
same. I am
now a couple of years out of date wrt Tononi's publications,
but I think it
is fair to say that Tononi asserts that having a very large
irreducible
component of information is the _essence_ of consciousness,
and that all the
other things like self-reference (which I would argue are also
essential,
even if irreducibility is too) are merely other phenomena of
mind but not
the thing that distinguishe s conscious states. The Tononi
development has
the virtue of being an actual idea that is formalized and thus
unambiguously
exchangeable among people. It may also have a kernel of something
important. Many people who work in consciousness seem to
think it does.
For my taste, it is too non-embodied to likely be a very
comprehensive part
of the right answer. I think both the embodied dimensions of
the things
that contribute to conscious states, and some kind of
recursion, are
primitives that are essential. Tononi has a large book about
this, and I
think several shorter papers that are on the arXiv.
Somewhere in here is Christof Koch, who is also considered one
of the
important contributors, but I don't know what his ideas are.
I include him
because if you are asking who the thought leaders at the
moment seem to be,
my understanding is that he is one of them.
There is also Max Tegmark, who has a recent paper
"Consciousness as a state
of matter", available from the arxiv. This (which I have
read) seems to me
to be a smart mathematician's discussion of a generally nice
point, which
adds nothing of substance to where we are stuck. Tegmark is
making an
argument with which I agree, that most-everything we see in
nature that is
robust is a "state of matter", understood as modern physics
uses the term.
Hence, the distinctive and characteristic nature of
consciousness too. But
the only thing about consciousness in what Tegmark builds is
what he gets
from Tononi. The rest of it is more about the theory of
measurement in
quantum mechanics, than it is anything that distinguishes
consciousness from
other patterns of order to which we have given names and
phenomenologies.
Now, if I understand it at a distant second hand, Chalmers has
a criticism
of all of these kinds of positions, notwithstanding their
technical
differences, which is that he would claim they fail to
recognize what he
calls "the hard problem". I do not know exactly how Chalmers
uses language,
and I cannot speak for him, but to try to use my own language
to express
what I think he says, I would say he asserts that these mere
characterizations of mechanism are not "accounting for" what
we mean when we
report "the experience of" this or that. Here, the word
"qualia" is often
introduced, to refer to the antecedent of such reports.
I think Dennett thinks of (and perhaps calls) Chalmers the
worst sort of
Cartesian dualist, whereas Chalmers would say that Dennett is
claiming that
consciousness "doesn't really exist", or something morally
equivalent. I
believe both of them think of the axis on which they hold
opposite ends as
different and bigger than any of the axes that separate the
technical people
from one another. Chalmers seems (for good or ill) to
attract people who
do want to be dualists or mystics (or mysterians), so without
putting in a
lot of time with original material, it is hard to get a clear
picture of him
through the people who claim to render him.
Ih the middle of all this, helping us sort it all out, is John
Searl, who
has a short little book "The problem of consciousness". Searl
is at his
best when using pellucid common language to explain why
everyone else is
being silly. He is much less impressive when asked to
introduce an actual
new idea that moves the discussion forward. However, in
saying that, I do
not mean to diminish the value (or the enjoyment) of his
criticisms. He has
some language in there about various kinds of dualists, which
I find
mystifying, because it all exists within such self-referential
circles of
language that I wouldn't know how to link it to anything in
the rest of the
world. But, if you want to know about dualists, this is a
good place to
find them categorized.
I find reporting on a lot of this like I think I would feel if
sent to the
middle east to report on exactly why it is necessary for some
factions to
fight other factions. There seems to be a long way between
being humans,
and so exercising the individual and social behaviors that
constitute
bringing ourself to share or coordinate various internal
states that we
refer to with names for awareness or states of mind or
whatever, and finding
a language that, in symbolic form, makes a faithful
representation of what
it is that distinctively allows us to be what we are and do
what we do.
Each of these guys seems to bring attention to the absence of
such language
in one or another way. What I can't understand is why they
think there is
anything more than "a hard problem" of inventing a valid
language to
faithfully reflect the structure of a natural phenomenon, and
their main
difference is in how much each thinks he has captured and the
others have
not. But I think they would argu e there is more to their
positions than
that.
Of course, I have no expert knowledge, and haven't put that
much time even
into reading their literatures as an outsider and tourist. So
it is to be
expected that a lot of it will pass over me.
Several of these guys have either TED talks, or lectures that
stream on the
web, which are shorter than reading their papers, but even more
unsatisfying.
Oops. Too much text.
All best,
Eric
On Aug 16, 2014, at 11:04 AM, Steve Smith wrote:
Gentlemen,
I am also interested in both the nature of consciousness
and the
nature of
knowledge regarding what appear to be entirely subjective
phenonomena
(arising from the fact of consciousness?).
The last time I attended a Cognitive Neuroscience
conference (6 years
ago?) I was impressed with how far things had come with regard to
correlating brain imaging and *reported* subjective
experiences. I
realize that sometimes more data and even higher quality data
doesn't
necessarily improve a model qualitatively, but I have been
hoping that there
would be some conceptual breakthroughs from this work.
Unfortunately, as the popular media and the population in
general
(which
is chicken, which is egg?) have taken a stronger interest in
science (or has
come to fetishize the artifacts of science?) there is a lot
more "noise" to
sort through to find signal. The number of articles or even
entire issues
of magazines and the number of books on the topic has risen
dramatically in
the past 10 years or so, but I rarely see what looks like new
insight into
the nature of consciousness.
I'm hoping someone here with more direct experience or
more patience
with
the literature (BTW, the "hard literature" on the topic is
generally too
opaque for me, so I'm lost in a middle-ground limbo between
the popular
accounts and the actual work-product of scientists) knows of
new insights or
new twists on the old models to share.
Does anyone have a short list of recent publications which
reframe the
question in a new way?
- Steve
Hi Nick,
One of the problems in discussing consciousness is
that it seems very
hard to break it down into simpler concepts. There are what
might be called
"high-level" words such as "inner life", "awareness",
"apprehension", which
suggest consciousness but only to someone who already ha a
sense of what
consciousness is. Whereas low level words, which refer to
things that can
be readily measured do not seem adequate to get at the real
meaning of
consciousness. So we are left with metaphors. When I use words
such as
"access" and "inner life" they suggest a container but they
are not
necessarily used to denote an actual container but to describe
a situation
which has some of the properties of a container.
However, there does seem to be a real container that
describes the
information I have access to. I get raw information
from my body.
This is not to say that my consciousness is located in
my body, but
that what I know about the outside world starts with
how my body
senses the outside world. These senses are then
processed or
contemplated somehow and this results in what I think
I know about
the world. There is no way that "I can see exactly
what you see"
because what you see comes from your body and what I
see comes from
my body. If we literally mean "see" then what you see
is what enters
your eyes and what I see is what enters my eyes. You
might tell me
about what you see, but that is not the same as seeing
what you see
because what you have seen has been processed by you then
reformulated in terms of speech, which is then
processed by me. Even
if we witnessed the same event, we would have slightly
different
viewpoints, and our eyes are different, and, in any
case, we w
ou!
ld start interpreting the incoming rays of light as
soon as they
started
to enter our respective eyes.
You also gave examples in which I might infer what you
saw. This
seems to
presuppose I have a theory of what Nick is all about or some
means of making
inferences. (I don't have a well-articulated theory of Nick,
but I do arrive
at conclusions about what to make of you. I'm not certain how
I do this, but
I am certain that I do it all the time, quite effortlessly and
almost
automatically.) At any rate this drawing of inferences does
not seem to be
seeing exactly what you see, but a way (not necessarily very
accurate) of
getting a rough approximation of what you saw.
--John
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