Steve, Thanks for getting into this for real.
I keep starting to feel I have irresponsibly bent this thread, but then I remind myself that, to me anyway, the question of whether ant colonies have personalities is the same kind of question as the question of whether computers are conscious. How it gets answered depends on the kind of question one takes it to be. It could be a question of fact, in which case the answer must begin with some sort of straight-forward definition of what would constitute a personality or a consciousness: how we would recognize a personality or a consciousness if we met it on a dark street in the middle of the night. Or it could be a question of metaphysics, in which case the answer concerns the most central, and closely held presumptions of the answerer's thought. My sense is that you and John and Frank WANT the question to be of the first type, but that it is, for you truly, a question of the second type. You START with the notion that at the core of every human being is an inner, private space from which she or he speaks, and without that presumption, all thought must stop. Thus, my claim about you-all is, that you are asking for a factual answer to a metaphysical question, and that, of course, nobody can ever provide. My claim about myself is that I am just treating the question as the factual question that, and answering it in the way that factual questions are answered. "Is there a unicorn in the room?" "Oh, you mean, a horsey sort of thing with a narwhale horn in the middle of its forehead? No, I don't think so." So, the template for such a conversation would be a question, "Is X conscious or does X have a personality?", followed by an agreement on some sort of a procedure by which consciousness or personality is to be recognized, followed by an attempt to relate the behavior of X to those criteria. So, I have some questions for you. First, do you accept my characterization of the template for a factual discussion? If so, can you explain to me what on God's green earth you think MRI images have to do with providing a factual answer to the question of whether X is conscious or has a personality? That's an honest question. I honestly cannot see the relevance. Well, I can see SOME relevance, but only if I adopt the metaphysical stance I am identifying with your position. In other words, I think introduction of MRI "evidence" for consciousness (or personality) begs the question of the nature of consciousness. You are safe from running into me in the street in Santa Fe until October. N Nicholas S. Thompson Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology Clark University http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/ -----Original Message----- From: Friam [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Steve Smith Sent: Saturday, August 16, 2014 11:04 AM To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group Subject: Re: [FRIAM] BBC News - Ant colony 'personalities' shaped by environment Gentlemen, I am also interested in both the nature of consciousness and the nature of knowledge regarding what appear to be entirely subjective phenonomena (arising from the fact of consciousness?). The last time I attended a Cognitive Neuroscience conference (6 years ago?) I was impressed with how far things had come with regard to correlating brain imaging and *reported* subjective experiences. I realize that sometimes more data and even higher quality data doesn't necessarily improve a model qualitatively, but I have been hoping that there would be some conceptual breakthroughs from this work. Unfortunately, as the popular media and the population in general (which is chicken, which is egg?) have taken a stronger interest in science (or has come to fetishize the artifacts of science?) there is a lot more "noise" to sort through to find signal. The number of articles or even entire issues of magazines and the number of books on the topic has risen dramatically in the past 10 years or so, but I rarely see what looks like new insight into the nature of consciousness. I'm hoping someone here with more direct experience or more patience with the literature (BTW, the "hard literature" on the topic is generally too opaque for me, so I'm lost in a middle-ground limbo between the popular accounts and the actual work-product of scientists) knows of new insights or new twists on the old models to share. Does anyone have a short list of recent publications which reframe the question in a new way? - Steve > Hi Nick, > > One of the problems in discussing consciousness is that it seems very hard to break it down into simpler concepts. There are what might be called "high-level" words such as "inner life", "awareness", "apprehension", which suggest consciousness but only to someone who already ha a sense of what consciousness is. Whereas low level words, which refer to things that can be readily measured do not seem adequate to get at the real meaning of consciousness. So we are left with metaphors. When I use words such as "access" and "inner life" they suggest a container but they are not necessarily used to denote an actual container but to describe a situation which has some of the properties of a container. > > However, there does seem to be a real container that describes the information I have access to. I get raw information from my body. This is not to say that my consciousness is located in my body, but that what I know about the outside world starts with how my body senses the outside world. These senses are then processed or contemplated somehow and this results in what I think I know about the world. There is no way that "I can see exactly what you see" because what you see comes from your body and what I see comes from my body. If we literally mean "see" then what you see is what enters your eyes and what I see is what enters my eyes. You might tell me about what you see, but that is not the same as seeing what you see because what you have seen has been processed by you then reformulated in terms of speech, which is then processed by me. Even if we witnessed the same event, we would have slightly different viewpoints, and our eyes are different, and, in any case, we wou! > ld start interpreting the incoming rays of light as soon as they started to enter our respective eyes. > > You also gave examples in which I might infer what you saw. This seems to presuppose I have a theory of what Nick is all about or some means of making inferences. (I don't have a well-articulated theory of Nick, but I do arrive at conclusions about what to make of you. I'm not certain how I do this, but I am certain that I do it all the time, quite effortlessly and almost automatically.) At any rate this drawing of inferences does not seem to be seeing exactly what you see, but a way (not necessarily very accurate) of getting a rough approximation of what you saw. > > --John > ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
