Steve,
You have identified a regress that I find troubling. What is in the view of
the Viewpoint that is me. Are my toes? Well yes. Fingers? yes? Skin between
my shoulder blades? Well, yes, in the extended meaning of viewpoint? Are my
joints and muscles? Is my hypothalamus? This regress bothers me because I
want to make a distinction between physiology and psychology and I want the
brain to be the mediator of psychological facts, not one of them.
In trying to work this out I am inclined to look for systems that are dedicated
to information gathering -- eyes and ears, etc. -- and include within the
Viewpoint the results of that information gathering. I wonder what I would
say if you could demonstrate some sort of specialized center in the cortex that
is connected to specialized sensors in the lower brain that monitor activity
there. I would have to include the lower brain in the world that I am looking
at. Notice that this is stronger than the claim that the lower brain effects
the cortex. That is undeniable. A can be affected by B without B sensing a.
Here, I admit, it all starts to get crazy. What would have to be shown is
that the higher brain PERCEIVES the lower brain. Frankly, these are the things
I would rather not talk about, preferring to focus on all that lovely data from
self-attribution theorists that demonstrates that it is easy as pie to get you
to change your reported view of yourself either by asking you to do things or
putting you in situations that are in conflict with your stated views . these
studies seem to demonstrate dramatically that is that your view on yourself is
determined by things the rest of us can see just as well as you can.
Nick
Nicholas S. Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology,
Clark University ([email protected])
http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/
----- Original Message -----
From: Steve Smith
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Sent: 6/22/2009 10:25:21 PM
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Direct conversation
Rikus -
I'll start from Nick's model. My brain has learned to turn back it's
third-person perception and modelling functionality on a subset of the
environment that is always present, i.e. self.
This is a fairly clear (to me) description of how I interpret Nick's point...
I'm not as clear that this is _the way things are_ but I can hold it along with
the other 5 impossibleish things I had for breakfast with the Red Queen.
Semi-aside: there is something added in the case of self -- richer sensory data
that is not available on other people: touch, pressure, pain, temperature from
skin, breathing and heart rate, proprioception, stress and pain in joints,
vestibular sense, stretch receptors in the gastrointestinal tract, etc.
This seems somewhat contrived, but without using up another one of my 6
impossibles over breakfast, I accept this as well.
I do think all of this enriches the model of self to the point where the
experience might be qualitatively different from the models of other people.
I agree that if "all is Third Person" then this is a reasonable explanation why
the "First Person Illusion" is so compelling.
But more significant is the fact that I can create an abstracted model of
myself (i.e. imagine myself) and that the model can be made to interact with a
model of the environment, other people, and even internally created models with
no counterpart in direct experience. Consider that usually this model's
usefulness is in projecting it into the future (and, I think, into the past,
when we reconstruct events from memory).
And I contend that it is unique compared to say my "abstracted model of other
people interacting with a model of the environment ...." because *I* can run
experiments directly on myself which are somewhere between difficult and
impossible with others. Learning our environment (when we first see our own
hand in front of our face as a baby, or when we first leave home and face the
vagaries of living in the world as an independent adult) appears to be a
continuous series of hypothesis generation and testing with that ability to
intentionally do "this and that".
Now, what happens when that model is dragged back into real-time, and held
right next to the more direct perceptual awareness of self? It seems like one
might end up with two selves, and I'm wondering if that experience might not
account for that elusive experience that Russ is referring to.
Interesting. Having experimented with my 1st person experience a lot in my
life, I do have a related experience. It renders in my life as a sense of
multiple-personalities. I have multiple models of myself based on how I
imagine/believe I am perceived by various individuals or groups. This is more
of a past-tense experience (I experience it as remembering being different
people in different circumstances) more than a present-tense one (returning
from a predictive model of self to an immediate experience of self).
- Steve
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