Dear Friammers,
The subject line is the title of an article I am thinking about writing for the Annals of Geriatric Maundering, and I want your help. If you think that I am offering you an opportunity to waste your time, in service of advancing my career, you are, of course exactly correct. Some of you have accused me of starting a fight on FRIAM when a good scholar would actually check out large, heavy books from the library. That criticism is precise and apt. My excuse is I have two disabilities for true scholarship: my eyesight sucks, and I am lazy. So, here we go. To be a monist is first and foremost to be NOT a dualist. The most familiar form of dualism is the mind/body dualism, which is so embedded in our language that it is hard to speak without depending on it. According to this dualism, there are two kinds of stuff, mind and matter. Dualists like to talk about the interaction of these two kinds of stuff, and are delighted when they discover isomorphisms between events in consciousness and events in the brain. They like to discuss such topics as "information" and "representation". Dualists are fond of the subject object distinction, and are enthralled by the mysteries of "inner" states. They like to talk about inverted spectrums. They hail the Privacy of Mind. Most of you are closet dualists. You LIKE to think you are materialists, but if you were materialists you would have to be monists, and you wouldn't like that, as you will plainly see. I should confess that dualists, particularly closet dualists, drive me crazy. Just sayin'. And as I have assured you many times, I love you all anyway. In fact, probably would have died years ago, if you had not kept me active. Dualists are flanked on one side by pluralists and on the other by monists. Pluralists are plainly crazy, and, besides, I don't know any, so we won't bother with pluralism. Monism is clearly the way to go. There are two familiar kinds of monism: idealism and materialism. An idealist insists that everything real consists of ideas and relations between ideas; a materialist insists that everything real consists of matter and its relations. If you ask an idealist about matter and s/he will say, "What is this "matter" of which you speak? All we have is ideas about matter. If you ask a materialist about ideas, he will say, "What are these "ideas" of which you speak? Ideas are just arrangements of matter" Of the two, I prefer materialism. It is easier for me to reduce ideas to relations amongst matter than it is to reduce matter to relations among ideas. But neither of these forms of monism seem quite honest to me, because each implies the other. To put it bluntly, realists and materials are all closet dualists. The remaining option is "neutral" monism. Being a neutral monist is very hard because people demand that you answer the question, "Of what does everything real consist?" It is VERY hard to answer that question without becoming a closet dualist. The answer requires some sort of noun (or gerund) and therefore, any response implies its opposite or absence, and thus relapses into closet dualism. One possibility I have considered is "event monism" . Everything real consists of events and their relations. I like the concept of event because it does not conjure up its opposite or absence quite so relentlessly. What is a non-event or the absence of an event, really? It's an event in itself, right? We speak of days when nothing happened, but we don't really mean it. Something DID happen; it just wasn't very interesting. On the other hand, it does not accommodate "relations" talk very well. A extreme solution is to take a kind of mathematical notational approach and just go for the relations: "Everything that is real consists of [ ] and its relations"; i.e., everything real consists of [[[[[[[[[ ].]..]..] etc. ad infinitum. In words, "Everything real consists of relations and their relations. Neither of these solutions is very satisfying and both are rhetorically ungainly. By default, have started to call myself as an "Experience Monist". When people look at me slyly and ask, "Experience of what?" I say, "Of other experiences". And when they inevitably ask, "What was the first experience of?", I ask them , "How many first experiences were there?" After they say, "One," I ask. "And how many subsequent experiences have there been?" And when they answer, "Oh, gosh, lots. Almost an infinite number." I say, "Well, then let's deal with the first one after we have dealt with all the others, mmmmm?" You call this cheap sophistry, but I think the line of argument is fair because our obsession with "origins" (or "oranges", for that matter) smacks of theology, and I am thoroughly fed up with theology. "Let's begin in the middle," I say, "And not spend so much time worrying about the beginning and the end." And now we get to the crazy bit, the part where I imagine that FRIAMmers might help out. This conception of The Real always reminds me of a Turing Machine. That I make this connection might seem odd to you. You might wonder what a flunked-out Harvard English major is doing with thoughts about a Turing Machine. Fair question. So how is it that I imagine a Turing Machine? A Turing Machine (in my imagination) is a device that is capable of only three operations, punching a tape, moving a tape, and reading a tape. Uh, oh, I need a 4th. I need it to be able to punch a tape and move a tape on the basis of what it finds on the tape. Oh, gosh, I need a 5th. I need there to be punches on the tape NOT punched by the machine itself. Oh, and a 6th: the survival of the machine needs to depend on anticipating patterns on the tape OH CRAP! I THINK I JUST BECAME A DUALIST! Has anybody written an article entitled, "What does the Turing Machine know?" Would a flunked-out Harvard English Major understand it? Could you give me the link? Nicholas S. Thompson Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology Clark University http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/
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