Re: [FRIAM] Mind-Body (was: The Psychology Of Yogurt)

Tue, 20 Sep 2011 09:57:09 -0700

Good Fellow Friamers, Nick, Jochen, Glen, Eric, and everyone who ever ate Joghurt/Yogurt/Kefir (spoilt milk by any other name) -
I am perhaps too lazy to go back and reread this entire thread carefully to see precisely what has been asked and answered, what has been swept under the carpet, and what has been tossed over the fence into the neighbor's yard to deal with and what has been waxed up eloquently for a totally tubular ride inside the curl of the crashing wave of insight and understanding. 


BUT... the mind-body problem as I *experience* it is the subjective 
mystery (which if I were more spiritual/religious, might actually be a 
Mystery as well) of why my consciousness seems to disembodied, why it, 
at best, depending on my mood and circumstance seems to hover inside my 
head, just behind my eyes, a little above and usually to the right?  
Other times it expands and fills the general region I am inhabiting 
physically, often floating about my head, but sometime centered more 
near my chest, my heart I suspect... or other times my spleen or large 
colon (after ingesting spoilt milk).



But most of this (if not simple rhetoric and imagry to dazzle my  
faithful readers (all three of you)) is some kind of metaphorical 
projection.   The head-centering thing might be about my primary sensory 
organs being located there, the heart centering might be about the 
center of my more autonomic systems (heartbeat breathing, digestion, 
elimination) and a cultural metaphor or metonym (heart for the entire 
collection of viscera), the more expansive thing (filling the room, the 
glade, the entire mountainside or valley)  as some kind of projection of 
self onto all that I apprehend directly in the moment.  And perhaps when 
I unroll a map or pick up a globe (bwahahaha!) in my hands, this also 
accounts for my feeling of grandiosity that almost always rolls in (bwaha!).



I would say that by no means is the mind-body problem solved.  It is at 
best well ignored or well sublimated or well explained-away.  I think 
the logical-positivists (of which there appear to be no small number 
here) cannot even apprehend the question, much less the possibility of 
an answer in our lifetimes?



If there is ANY /Mystery/ in the world (for me), it is the collective 
/mysteries/ of emergent phenomena.   At least for me.  And among the 
mysteries of human experience, the mind-body problem is one of the 
fundamental ones for me. That I am not given much to invoking Mystery, 
could be my deep sense of rational athiestic humanism that I am 
blessed/cursed/saddled/riddled with.



I take task with Nick for his use of /emergent/ to describe the 
properties of 3 sticks fastened well at their corners and their 
/triangleness/.  I agree/understand that a qualitatively *new* property 
exists in the triangle that did not exist in the individual sticks... 
and perhaps it is mere semantics that separates the /emergent nature/ of 
vortex from the water molecules and the (I won't call it /emergent/) 
*collective* nature of triangle from sticks.



Perhaps it is my training/experience in the Proto-Artificial Life work 
of the early/mid 80's.   I think I need to reserve the world /emergent/ 
for systems which are not merely qualitatively different in the whole 
than they are in the parts, but which achieve this through some 
self-organizing process.   Autocatalytic networks, sand dunes, gliders 
and guns for gliders in ConwayLife, etc.   I suppose if Nick were to 
throw 1000 sticks  and 1000 blobs of glue into a hopper and stir them 
about for a few 1000 seconds and then shake them out onto the ground 
noticing that *some* of the sticks managed to connect up with blobs of 
glue end to end such that they formed various arrangements of linear 
chains, and some of them  were to form various n-gons, and even perhaps 
that statistically the triangle pattern was more common than the 
n-length chain or the n-gons where n > 3, then I'd be inclined to say 
/emergence!/   The glueballs "stickiness" might be calibrated such that 
they only adhere to "ends" (and not eachother), and the minimum angles 
might preclude sticks lining up in parallel and the agitation might be 
just great enough to shake off appendages from n-gons with extra 
'whiskers'...   Triangles (and tetrahedra) would be the most likely  
structures to be "accidentally" created and the most stable (fewest 
remaining degrees of freedom once joined up).   By explaining it this 
way, I may undermine the mystery in the emergence (and thereby the 
emergence itself?)



I know I'm like returning to 2008 when Nick was leading a study group on 
/emergence/ and this may all be quite remedial, but I'd say along with 
the mind-body question, the emergence question has not been answered.   
One may be a special case of the other?



Directly responsive to Nick's challenge about the "problem" of mind-body 
vs vortex-water... I think it WAS stated but as a special case of 
"self-organizing system" style emergence...     In fact, I wonder if a 
minor stretch cannot caste the *air column/spiral*) inside the 
water-spiral as a spandrel, and in my example of sticks, glue balls, and 
n-chains and n-gons (and 2/3d meshes/n=hedra, etc), the properties *we* 
deem interesting of triangles (e.g. their strength under compression, 
tension, torque) are NOT properties of their natural selection in their 
natural environment (the vat where they were stirred by Nick's hairy 
knuckled paw<grin>) but rather properties suitable for survival in yet 
another environment (Nick sorting through the joined sticks and piling 
the triangles up high declaring "what a good form are these!").



Guerin invokes symmetry breaking, but is there not also symmetry 
establishing?   Is that not some of what makes a triangle a Triangle 
(3-gon having some properties we humans/engineers get all excited 
about)?  By joining the ends of the sticks with some degree of strength 
or stiffness, 3 at a time, we reduce the degrees of freedom of the 
system... the three sticks are suddenly locked in a plane and other than 
rotations around the axes of the sticks themselves and rotations and 
translations of the resulting triangles, there is no remaining degrees 
of freedom?  Is this not the mystery Nick first brought to our attention 
when he went swirly with us?  Asking us why would a system (vortex) 
*emerge* within a larger system (basin/drain/water/spinning 
earth/gravity/atmospheric pressure/etc.) when it actually reduces the 
rate of energy dissipation.  I think the original question was directed 
at Guerin and the rest of us dogpiled Nick in his absence (he was rather 
busy laying in the sun in San Diego if I recall) with a whole range of 
lame to serious, sympathetic to unsympathetic offerings.



In response to Doug's response to Nick's rememberance of the dogpile... 
I understand why Doug thought he (and others) were rightous in their 
dismissals of nick's questions, but I also understand why Nick heard it 
as pissiness.   Odd how there can be more than two sides to a given 
conversation!



I think I've exercised out all my need to ramble for the day... glad you 
(if you made it this far) enjoyed it, even if only through morbid 
fascination.


- Steve





Jochen,


This is starting to remind me of the vortex-drain-water discussion.  
You recall that I was castigated by experts on the list for 
trivializing fluid dynamics by asking a naïve question about 
wash-basin drainage.  Explaining vortices in washbasins was beyond my 
understanding.  The complexity was just too great.  The devil was in 
the details, and I was not well-trained enough to know them, let alone 
to build a theory of wash-basin drainage.



Critical as they were for my asking the question, NONE of them 
asserted that there was a vortex/water  problem in the same sense (I 
suspect) that some would like to assert that there is a mind/body 
problem.



Emergence can always seem mysterious, if one is the right frame of 
mind.  How mysterious are the structural properties of a triangle, as 
I hold in my hands three unconnected sticks of wood!  The British 
Emergentist Philosophers (Mill?) liked to say that we should approach 
any instance of emergence with /Natural Piety/.  Well, bugger that!


To channel Eric, here.  Yes there are mysteries, but there is no Mystery.

Best,

Nick


*From:*[email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] 
*On Behalf Of *Jochen Fromm

*Sent:* Tuesday, September 20, 2011 2:20 AM
*To:* [email protected]
*Subject:* Re: [FRIAM] Mind-Body (was: The Psychology Of Yogurt)


If the mind-body problem is solved, we can say how the mind emerges 
from the body, i.e. from the interactions of billions of neurons and 
joghurt cells. Can we?


-J.

Sent from Android




"ERIC P. CHARLES" <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:

Nick,

In his last paper, "William James as a Psychologist," Holt tells us 
that the William James was never one to shun contradictions, and that 
the one outstanding contradiction in psychology is: The mind seems 
dependent upon the body, while the mind also seems independent of the 
body.



Traditionally psychology and philosophy try to somehow divide up the 
turf, but James insisted the problems of the mind and of the body 
cannot be solved independent of each other. Another way to phrase this 
would be to say that the problems of knowledge are ultimately 
identical to the problems of physiological psychology.



I wager that you no longer understand the problem, because you are 
familiar with the century worth of work supporting James's position. A 
century of research showing that mind and body are not different in 
such a way as to allow for a 'mind-body' problem. People who don't 
know about this work still think it is mysterious.


Eric


P.S. My hunch is that all scientific fields have complaints about 
things that were solved long ago, but that people still insist are 
mysterious. Since there are lots of computer people on the list. 
Imagine that you were stuck in a room with people debating whether 
there were any problems that computers couldn't solve. You keep trying 
to convince them that there are well known classes of problems 
computers cannot solve, and much of the work on this problem was 
solved long ago, and that there is no 'can computers solve everything' 
mysterious. However, no matter how much you protest, they are so 
vested in the mysteriousness that they don't believe you.





On Mon, Sep 19, 2011 08:19 PM, *"Nicholas Thompson" 
<[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>>* wrote:


Glen,

  
I realize that you didn't start this thread, so you may be as perplexed as I

am, but, what exactly IS the mind-body problem?

  
Also, not that it's essential, but could you DISAMBIGUATE? I, of course,

instantly assumed you were referring to number eleven.

  
     Flying Spaghetti Monster, the deity of Pastafarianism, a parody religion

     FIFA Soccer Manager, a video game about football management
     Fighting Spirit magazine, a professional wrestling periodical
     Film Score Monthly, a record label and online magazine
     Forgetting Sarah Marshall, a motion picture
     Free Software Magazine, a computing periodical/website
     Free software movement, a sociopolitical movement in computing
     Fiji School of Medicine, the central medical school of the University of
the South Pacific
     Fixed Survey Meter, an instrument used by the British Royal Observer
Corps during the Cold War to detect nuclear fallout
     Folded spectrum method, a Solver for Eigenvalue problems
     Free Speech Movement, at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1964
     Finite-state machine, a model of computation
     Field service management, optimization of the field operations of
technicians
     Fatih Sultan Mehmet (as Mehmed II), 7th sultan of the Ottoman
Empire
     Fabryka Samochodów Małolitrażowych Polish car factory
     Federated States of Micronesia, an Oceanic island nation
     Fort Smith Regional Airport (IATA code: FSM) in Arkansas, United
States
     Mauritian Solidarity Front, in French Front Solidarité Mauricien
(FSM)

  
THANKS,
  
Nick
  
-----Original Message-----

From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf
Of glen e. p. ropella
Sent: Monday, September 19, 2011 5:46 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Fwd: The Psychology Of Yogurt

  
glen e. p. ropella wrote circa 11-09-19 03:30 PM:

>  Nicholas Thompson wrote circa 11-09-19 01:07 PM:
>  You are talking to a man with an insulin pump.  I start to think VERY
>  BADLY if anything goes wrong with it.

>  
>  Yeah, I don't know either.  But part of my fascination with this topic

>  lies in the use of psychedelic drugs (not _my_ use of such, of course
>  ... the FSM knows I would never touch such stuff).  We (humans
and
>  some animals, it seems) purposefully make worse some specific body
>  processes in order to "think badly".

>  
>  It seems to me that a little "bad thinking" now and again can be

a
>  Good Thing(TM).

  
Oh, I forgot to mention that I think this issue (mind-body problem) is

intimately related to the old adage "the dose is the poison".
Whether an
alteration in a physiological process is "bad", "good",
"better", or
"worse", depends a very great deal on just how altered the process is.
It seems reasonable that a little of the poisonous ethanol on a regular
basis is "good" and a debilitating inhibition of dopamine production
is
"bad".  But there is a large swatch of gray in between where
"bad" and
"good" are too oversimplifying to be useful.

  
In any case, it's pretty easy for me to see a mind-body problem and to see

it as a fundamental, immediate, medical issue.  I've experimented quite a
bit with my own mind-body dichotomy by switching hands on various tasks.  I
recently switched _back_ to using my right hand to brush my teeth.  When I
switched to my left (something like 10 years ago), I could barely
finish the
job without tiring out my arm.  None of the muscles worked in any way that
might be called efficient, even though I felt like I was telling my body to
behave the same way it did when I'd use my right hand.  Well, I finally got
good at doing it with my left hand, although in a different way from what I
remember for my right hand.  I used my wrist much more with my right hand,
and my elbow much more with my left hand.  Well, when I switched just
recently, I seemed to be using my right arm like I learned to use my left
arm!  I.e.
very little give in the wrist and most movement in the elbow.  I'm now
trying to re-learn to use my wrist more with my right hand.  If I do, then
I'll switch again and try to do the same with my left.

  
Although this sort of thing may not _seem_ like a mind-body problem, it most

definitely is.  Despite our realization that the mind is embodied, there may
be some processes that can be swapped out, a perfect "impedance
match", with
another process (like an artificial eyeball, limb, or insulin pump).
And
yet, there may not be any such processes.
If every little mechanism in our body has a salient impact on our mind, then
the mind-body problem disappears.  But if not, then the mind-body problem
becomes one of requirements analysis, scaling, and the autonomy of various
components.

  
--

glen e. p. ropella, 971-222-9095,http://tempusdictum.com

  
  
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FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
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============================================================

FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps athttp://www.friam.org

  
  


Eric Charles

Professional Student and
Assistant Professor of Psychology
Penn State University
Altoona, PA 16601


============================================================
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



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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





















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