Eric, Great to hear from you.
I am wondering about what you make of my distinction between a metaphysical and a factual question and my concern for the perils of trying to answer a question of one type with an answer of the other. Is it a well founded distinction? If so, one would expect that Dennett of all people, would start by making it, but so far as I know he doesn't. So, given my [grudging] respect for Dennett, I am worried. Remember that I, too, am not a philosopher. 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 Eric Smith Sent: Saturday, August 16, 2014 12:32 PM To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group Subject: Re: [FRIAM] BBC News - Ant colony 'personalities' shaped by environment Hi Steve, I am neither knowledgeable, nor do I have time to report even my own experiences, without making a mess of things. But perhaps I can give some titles of things people have pointed out to me. There seem to be several schools of approach (meaning, groups of people who criticize each other a lot). I't hard even to know how to break them down into clusters, because there are several axes of variation. There is a school who are mechanistic, and who think of themselves as mechanistic. At one end within that school, one has Dan Dennett. Much of what he says seems to me like a lot of effort to beat the dead horse of mysticism, and I have no patience for that, because I find it tedious and uninteresting. Beyond that, it is not clear to me how much he has contributed in real ideas. One that seems okay, if I understand it from informal conversations that have involved him, is that it involves a kind of recursive self-reference of thought. Meaning, that thought is a process for handling responses to events (or, in a very broad use of the noun, "things"), and part of what consciousness does is render the state of thought as a "thing" in its own right, having the same symbolic kind of representation as the mind gives to other "things", so that thought can then process a representation formed about its own state. This seems like part of the common lore, expressed already in this thread, and not novel. Dennett seems to want to associate this ability specifically with language, and seems almost to want to treat it as an _application_ of linguistic faculty. I don't think that is a well-motivated position, but I am glad Dennett does it because it makes an important point. Language, in having syntax, can manipulate words within the syntactic system, much as it uses words to manipulate ideas within semantic systems. That is hard to understand in language, and making us aware of the fact that it is hard, even though it has been before our eyes for centuries, seems helpful in expressing part of what makes assigning clear meaning to statements about consciousness hard. On another extreme from Dennett but still materialist, we have Giuglio Tononi and his "Phi" measure. Basically, Tononi adopts information theory as a language, and within that language introduces a concrete notion of what it means for an information system to be irreducible, in a way that I think is analogous to the notion of irreducibility of representations of groups, in the theory of representations. The details are different because information theory is a different structure from algebra, but the basic notion of something's not being splittable into factors is the same. I am now a couple of years out of date wrt Tononi's publications, but I think it is fair to say that Tononi asserts that having a very large irreducible component of information is the _essence_ of consciousness, and that all the other things like self-reference (which I would argue are also essential, even if irreducibility is too) are merely other phenomena of mind but not the thing that distinguishes conscious states. The Tononi development has the virtue of being an actual idea that is formalized and thus unambiguously exchangeable among people. It may also have a kernel of something important. Many people who work in consciousness seem to think it does. For my taste, it is too non-embodied to likely be a very comprehensive part of the right answer. I think both the embodied dimensions of the things that contribute to conscious states, and some kind of recursion, are primitives that are essential. Tononi has a large book about this, and I think several shorter papers that are on the arXiv. Somewhere in here is Christof Koch, who is also considered one of the important contributors, but I don't know what his ideas are. I include him because if you are asking who the thought leaders at the moment seem to be, my understanding is that he is one of them. There is also Max Tegmark, who has a recent paper "Consciousness as a state of matter", available from the arxiv. This (which I have read) seems to me to be a smart mathematician's discussion of a generally nice point, which adds nothing of substance to where we are stuck. Tegmark is making an argument with which I agree, that most-everything we see in nature that is robust is a "state of matter", understood as modern physics uses the term. Hence, the distinctive and characteristic nature of consciousness too. But the only thing about consciousness in what Tegmark builds is what he gets from Tononi. The rest of it is more about the theory of measurement in quantum mechanics, than it is anything that distinguishes consciousness from other patterns of order to which we have given names and phenomenologies. Now, if I understand it at a distant second hand, Chalmers has a criticism of all of these kinds of positions, notwithstanding their technical differences, which is that he would claim they fail to recognize what he calls "the hard problem". I do not know exactly how Chalmers uses language, and I cannot speak for him, but to try to use my own language to express what I think he says, I would say he asserts that these mere characterizations of mechanism are not "accounting for" what we mean when we report "the experience of" this or that. Here, the word "qualia" is often introduced, to refer to the antecedent of such reports. I think Dennett thinks of (and perhaps calls) Chalmers the worst sort of Cartesian dualist, whereas Chalmers would say that Dennett is claiming that consciousness "doesn't really exist", or something morally equivalent. I believe both of them think of the axis on which they hold opposite ends as different and bigger than any of the axes that separate the technical people from one another. Chalmers seems (for good or ill) to attract people who do want to be dualists or mystics (or mysterians), so without putting in a lot of time with original material, it is hard to get a clear picture of him through the people who claim to render him. Ih the middle of all this, helping us sort it all out, is John Searl, who has a short little book "The problem of consciousness". Searl is at his best when using pellucid common language to explain why everyone else is being silly. He is much less impressive when asked to introduce an actual new idea that moves the discussion forward. However, in saying that, I do not mean to diminish the value (or the enjoyment) of his criticisms. He has some language in there about various kinds of dualists, which I find mystifying, because it all exists within such self-referential circles of language that I wouldn't know how to link it to anything in the rest of the world. But, if you want to know about dualists, this is a good place to find them categorized. I find reporting on a lot of this like I think I would feel if sent to the middle east to report on exactly why it is necessary for some factions to fight other factions. There seems to be a long way between being humans, and so exercising the individual and social behaviors that constitute bringing ourself to share or coordinate various internal states that we refer to with names for awareness or states of mind or whatever, and finding a language that, in symbolic form, makes a faithful representation of what it is that distinctively allows us to be what we are and do what we do. Each of these guys seems to bring attention to the absence of such language in one or another way. What I can't understand is why they think there is anything more than "a hard problem" of inventing a valid language to faithfully reflect the structure of a natural phenomenon, and their main difference is in how much each thinks he has captured and the others have not. But I think they would argue there is more to their positions than that. Of course, I have no expert knowledge, and haven't put that much time even into reading their literatures as an outsider and tourist. So it is to be expected that a lot of it will pass over me. Several of these guys have either TED talks, or lectures that stream on the web, which are shorter than reading their papers, but even more unsatisfying. Oops. Too much text. All best, Eric On Aug 16, 2014, at 11:04 AM, Steve Smith wrote: > 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 ============================================================ 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
