Eric (and Nick),
I'm still pursuing clarity. Kindly consider the following:
Person A, a high-school student, is asked by a teacher (B) to solve a maths
problem on the board in front of the class. Among the other students is person
C, a close friend of A. A is taking an unusually long time to solve the
problem, frequently erasing partial calculations, now and then pausing to stare
at the board with a frown.
B is a new teacher and has only interacted with A a few times. It appears to
him that the problem is simply too much for A, and starts forming an idea about
A's math skills.
C knows that A is good at maths and that the problem on the board should
really not be difficult for him. He also knows A well enough to recognise that
the frown A exhibits means something is bothering him. Things between A and
his girlfriend are a bit shaky lately and he wonders if it took a turn for the
worse.
A has a really bad headache. He very rarely gets headaches, but woke up this
morning with a monster. He hates giving up on math problems, though, and is
sure he should be able to solve this one. Also, he suspects the new teacher
thinks he isn't very good at maths and he wants to correct that impression.
And he just realised he forgot to do biology homework and is trying to recall
which period biology is.
Can you please comment:
1. I understand you to say that A is an observer of A in much the same way as B
and C. You're *not* saying A is not having an experience of A, only that A's
experience is not *privileged* compared to B and C. Does that mean you
consider A's experience to be qualitatively indistinguishable from that of B
and C, or only that the difference in the quality of A's experience, compared
to that of B and C, is not of consequence?
2. Obvious A can think a great many things that B and C can't know anything
about. He can access memory about himself that B and C cannot. He has access
to interoceptive sensory information that B and C does not. He has the
experience of directly influencing the mathematical symbols in his working
memory, outside the perception or direct influence of B and C. On the other
hand, B and C has access to some exteroceptive sensory information about A that
A lacks. Do you consider these various kinds of information and experiences to
be entirely interchangeable?
3. Do you distinguish between "experience" and "have information about"?
4. When you say that A's point of view is not privileged, do you consider
anything beyond the ability to identify motives and intent, gauge current
emotional state, and identify habitual patterns of behaviour?
5. We can extend the example and allow A to spontaneously start hallucinating a
swarm of hand-sized pterodactyls that are attacking him. His body and mind
responds to the perceived threat like it would to a real one. In some sense he
really is having the experience, yet, B and C would deny that it is taking
place. What exactly does it mean to be "wrong" about one's own experience?
Regards,
Rikus
From: ERIC P. CHARLES
Sent: Wednesday, June 24, 2009 8:57 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Direct conversation - 1st vs 3rd person
My understanding is that the terms 1st and 3rd person arose as ways of
talking about literary styles - and our use of them is metaphorical. An
essential part of the metaphor is that authors writing in 1st person are
typically granted privileged license to write about the mind of "I". In
contrast, people writing in (a non-omniscient) 3rd person, are typically not
granted as much license to write about the minds. This is not entirely true, as
people writing in 3rd person write about minds all the time, but their writings
are considered more vulnerable to dispute. For example, if Obama wrote an
account of his inauguration and said "I was terrified", it would be considered
less vulnerable to dispute than if I wrote an account of his inauguration and
said "He was terrified". If these linguistic conventions become reified then we
can start taking the "I" not merely to denote the speaker/viewer, but to denote
an entity in possession of unique powers that justify the privileges commonly
granted to the linguistic device. This is suggested as my understanding of the
history, independent of any value judgment regarding the reification.
There is a lurking problem, however, as these conventions do not always seem
to hold in the real world. The most glairing probelm is that, at least
sometimes, "I" can be wrong about my own mind and "He" can be right. (The cause
of my error can range from simply not paying attention to what I am doing, to
intentional self-delusion, to forgetting - think Alzheimer's.) For some, these
problems lead to an urge to collapse categories, to see if the oddness cannot
be gotten rid of if we leave behind the notion of uniqueness that goes with
having distinct labels. I suppose that on some formal level, when a dichotomy
collapses into a monism, it might not be particularly important which category
label remains. However, one category may be preferred over another because it
originally contained properties that the author wishes to retain as implicit or
explicit in the monistic system that remains. These properties are ported along
with word into the monistic system, because the term retains sway as a
metaphor.
In this case, the historical bias has been to retain only the "I" position.
In this move, the "I" retains its unique insight about ourselves, and any
insight we think we have about others must be treated purely as insight about
ourselves, i.e. the mind that I know as "their mind" is really just a sub-part
of my mind. This leads to extreme forms of idealism (where all the world exists
merely as an idea), the two mind problem (is it ever possible for two minds to
know the some object?), etc., etc. These were huge turn of the 20th century
challenges for philosophy, having grown out of a tradition of pushing more and
more extreme the distinguished lineage of ideas flowing from Descartes, Kant,
Berkeley, etc. The problems, for the most part, remain. In the extreme form, at
least, this lineage leads to a heavy intellectual paralysis, as it is not
possible for any "I" to know any other "I", nor to know the "real world"
(should such a thing even exist).
The alternative (assuming we are to retain one of the original labels), is to
have a bias for the "He" position. This leads to extreme forms of realism, and
often (but not always) to behaviorism. In this move, the "I" has to get its
information about the mind in the same that "He" has to get information. That
is, if my brother knows my mind by observing my behavior, then I can only know
my mind by observing my behavior. (Note, that the assertion about observing
behavior is a secondary postulate, supplimenting the fundamental assertion that
the method of knowing must be the same.)
There are, presumably, things that the I-biased position handles well (I
don't know what they are, but there must be some). I know there are things the
He-biased position handles well. Among other things it allows us to better
understand perfectly normal and mundane conversations such as:
A) "You are angry"
B) "No I'm not"
A) "Yes you are dear. I've known you long enough to know when you're angry."
B) "I think I'd know when I was angry"
A) "You usually don't dear"
... several hours later
B) "Wow, you were right, I was angry. I didn't realize it at the time. I'm
sorry"
The I-biased position understands these conversations as very elaborate shell
games, where the first statement means something like: "The you that is in my
head is currently being modeled by me as having a first-person experience of
anger which is itself modeled after my unique first-person experience of
anger". Worse, the last sentence seems (to me) totally incoherent from the
I-biased position. The He-biased position much more simply believes that a
person's anger is visible to himself and others if the right things are
attended to, and hence the conversation requires no shell game. Person B simply
comes to attend aspects of the situation that A was attending from the start.
Now I will admit that the He-biased perspective has trouble in some
situations, but those can't really be discussed until the position is at least
understood in the situations it handles well.
Eric
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