Dear Russell 1
Russell 2 has always been with us. In fact, he is in Australia, where you are
about to go!
The People are going to be Really Angry with us: I can't find anything to
disagree with about what you said. So I, too, have been worrying about the
homunculus.... or the mindunculus.
If we have been agreeing all along, they will KILL us. We better find
something to disagree about quick.
Surely you disagree with this: I see the world; part of what falls within my
field of view is my own body and its actions. From what I see, I construct (in
childhood, with the help of my hypocritical parents) the distinction between an
inner and an outer world, a world in which I can "be" good, while "doing" ill.
This subdivision is enormously convenient to my body's survival in a society,
so it endures, and may even have evolved. .
Nick
Nicholas S. Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology,
Clark University ([email protected])
http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/
----- Original Message -----
From: Russ Abbott
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Sent: 6/19/2009 12:08:48 PM
Subject: [FRIAM] Fwd: (Subjective) experience
I'll admit that I'm now getting lost in all the words. (It's also distressing
that yet another Russell has shown up.)
Here's a bit of an exchange Nick and I had privately. He suggested (and I
fully agree) that we should continue it on the list. Nick asked me to respond
to his earlier comment about Unicorns. So I said,
Regarding unicorns, you raise an interesting issue. You said, I understand what
you mean when you talk of unicorns; that doesn't make me a sneaky believer in
unicorns, does it?
I'm not so sure that works with first person statements (subjective experience,
qualia). How could anyone know what qualia are without experiencing them? It's
like saying I know what you mean by the taste of chocolate even though I've
never tasted it and don't even believe that there is taste such as what you
call chocolate. In that case, how could you possibly claim to understand what I
mean by the taste of chocolate.
You've probably heard the famous thought experiment of Mary the color-blind
scientist.She knew all there is to know about color; she could predict what
anyone would say about color by examining the patterns of photons that entered
their eyes (and perhaps the firings in their brains as those photon hits were
processed). But she herself saw the world in black and white. Then
miraculously, she gained color vision. She has (let's assume) no new knowledge
as a result of her new color vision -- since she knew all there was to know
about color and color vision already. All she has are new experiences of color
-- subjective experiences of color. Has anything changed for her? My answer is
"yes." Is yours "no"?
Nick responded.
She doesn't have a new experience Of COLOR. She sees a colored world. The
world is now from her point of view a colored world. My mary is seeing the
colored world directly; your mary is seeing a color experience. It's the
intrusion of the cartesian theatre that I find distressing. At least. CF
Wittgenstein.
My response.
I'm not promoting a Cartesian Theater perspective since I take a Cartesian
Theater to imply a homunculus, i.e., an internal being (construct) that is
standing back from the "performance/exhibit" ongoing in the Cartesian Theater
and observing it. That clearly leads to an infinite regress: How does the
homunculus itself work? Does it have it's own Cartesian Theater? Etc.
I would also say that it's MY Mary that is seeing the world directly, that she
has an immediate subjective experience of the world, which is what I mean by
subjective experience. If there were a homunculus, it would be seeing a color
presentation being presented in the Cartesian Theater.
Perhaps this has just been a big misunderstanding. When my Mary sees a colored
world, I feel perfectly comfortable saying that she is having an experience of
color and that (tautologically) she didn't have that experience prior to being
able to experience color. You seem to want to reject putting it in those terms.
I don't understand your objection to that way of speaking.
Also, to get back to my question about Mary. I say that something has changed
for her (and I would refer to what has changed as (part of) her subjective
experience). I gather that you agree that something has changed. How would you
characterize the change that's occurred. And recall, we are stipulating that
there is no behavioral difference between Mary before and after she gained the
ability to see a colored world.
I'm now answering my own question and thinking that you will ask whether there
is a neuronal difference. I'll agree that there is and that her way of
processing color has changed. If we took brain scans her brain would be
functioning differently. So from that perspective you could argue (and I would
agree) that there is an externally observable difference. This brings us to the
notion of supervenience. We both agree that there are neuronal differences. I
claim that subjective experience supervenes over neuronal phenomena. You say
that neuronal phenomena are all there are(?). If that's your position (and
perhaps it isn't since I seem to be putting words in your mouth by trying to
answer the question from what I take to be your position), it's very much a
reductionist perspective. You are denying the reality of higher level
constructs because you can reduce them to lower level phenomena. I say (and
that's what my "Reductionist blind spot" was about) that the ability to reduce
things to lower level phenomena doesn't eliminate the reality of the higher
level phenomena. In a word processor, words as entities are real even though
there is nothing in the computer except bits.
But I want to bring this back to ethics. We would agree that pain has
neurologically observable features. But it seems to me that such observations
cannot lead to ethical imperatives unless one associates them with the
(subjective) experience of pain. But I've probably put too much into this
post already.
-- Russ
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