Hmmm... my first post as an offical list member... The variety of behaviorism to which Nick ascribes is not that far from William James's Radical Empiricism, which was entirely focused on "experience" proper. If you mean to say that color-blind Mary did not experienced the colors of the world out there, but the miracle-enhanced Mary did experience the colors of the world, then there should be general agreement. Nick would prefer you to more simply say that color-blind Mary did not respond to the colors of the world, while miracle-enhanced Mary did respond to them. The difference, while profound in some conversations is startlingly mundane in most conversations. In either case, it is nonsensical to say that there is no behavioral difference between the two Marys, as it is exactly a behavioral difference that is drawing our interests. Mary woke up one morning and found herself responding to new things! I am completely willing to allow that there might be "no other" behavioral difference, but if you are trying to argue that it is possible to experience colors as different without responding differently to them (in any sense of the word "respond"), then you are saying something strange and dualistic.
For a more common, but equally miraculous example: If you listen to a foreign language long enough, you will start to "experience" sounds differently - by which I mean that you will start to be sensitive to nuances you were not previously sensitive to - by which I mean you will respond differently to things you previously treated as the same. The only additional caveat that Nick's position requires is that self-knowledge be generated in the same manner that my knowledge-of-others is generated. This is the step that really makes Nick's position behaviorist. If I am learning a foreign language you already understand, then may say "You are experiencing sounds differently" when you see me respond to things I did not previously respond to. You can see that my experience is different than it used to be. Similarly, I know that "I am experiencing sounds differently" when I see myself responding more adeptly in situations in which I previously struggled. The "I" (or the "you") merely designates the thing experiencing sounds differently. The "I" does not in any way indicate that something other than the sounds and the responses are happening. By recursion, self-consciousness is then merely a word for meta-behavior, behavior that is directed at (in response to) other behavior. It is a second-intention experience, as "becoming conscious of" your experience means nothing more than developing actions towards your experience. When seeking for meta-behavior, it is easiest to fall back onto language, i.e. saying "I am getting better at this". However, any meta-behavior will do, i.e., selecting a more difficult language lessons, stepping forward to act as a translator, etc. Thus, the reason that it is interesting to Nick that computers routinely self-report. The position may be wrong, but it is much more sensible and coherent (and has a closer relation to the normal meaning of words) than it is being given credit for. Eric P.S. Beyond this are many messy discussions about description vs. explanation, emergence, etc., that I am sure are also floating around this list-serve. It is all made more complicated by the fact that Nick is the only non-reductive materialist I have ever met, and a non-reductive behaviorist at that. I'm not sure how it's possible, but it is. In fact, far from being reductionist, it often seems that he thinks things are more (not less) than other people do. P.P.S. I think the deficiency in Russ's professed moral stance is that it is non-developmental. There cannot be anything ethical in "relying on" people to act in certain ways, because it is easy to get people to act in a variety of different ways... Zing-Yang Kuo, a developmental psycho-biologist once famously stated "I will grant you that it is instinctive for cats to hate mice, if you will grant me that it is instinctive for cats to love mice." This while sitting in front of his cages in which cats and mice were living quite peacefully... "Do unto others what you would have them do unto you" is equally strange, as what I want done to me is certainly not what others would typically want done unto them... We don't even have to get into anything kinky for an obvious example: I don't want people giving me birthday presents, but others seem to get angry when I treat them the way I want to be treated - I like people to salt my food heavily, but my in-laws would prefer I didn't do that for them, etc., etc... Nick's ethical stance would be based on treating things that act in certain ways as equal to all other things that act in certain ways, and it wouldn't get much more prescriptive than that. The acts he would be interested in would be very sophisticated actions, or combination of actions - such as "contributing to the conversation". This may seem strange, but again, it is really, really, really, not that different from a stance that treats all things that "experience in a certain way" as equal.
============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
