John said "Your apparent anti-subjectivism is not a scientific proposition
supposedly verified by experiments, but is, instead, your definition of
consciousness. The definition allows one to study consciousness
scientifically, while avoiding certain paradoxes."
YES, Yes! Or at least something very much along those lines. It is hard for
many people to make sense of William James's later works (published circa
1895-1908), and Nick's way of thinking grows out of that work. One way in
which I try to explain James's work of that period is that he was
attempting to create (what he saw as) the *necessary *philosophical
foundation for a science of psychology. If we define an other's
consciousness as something which we can never know anything about, then the
notion of having a science of psychology is just plain silly. Or, to
phrase it in the converse: The fact that we have managed to make advances
in the scientific study of psychology suggests that it is just plain silly
to define consciousness as something we can never know anything about.
Alas, psychology did not know what to do with James's work. As a result
most of what has come afterwards is heavily engaged in the second kind of
silliness, and many of psychology's critics are spot on when they question
the philosophical foundation of the field.
The above view of James's latter work is somewhat of a reconstruction, and
would not be agreed upon by all James scholars, but I don't think anything
about the interpretation is egregious. James's earlier works, and his
letters and journals from those earlier times, contain consistent
lamentations that he does not have the time to slow down and work out the
foundation he thinks the field desperately needs. Those lamentations ceases
as he offers his later works ("Radical Empiricism"), and it is clear that
several of his proteges in the early 1900s viewed his work as serving the
function I have described.
The question is: What *must *be true if we are to have a science of
psychology? And a crucial part of that answer is that minds *must *be akin,
in crucial ways, to any other investigatable aspect of the world.
P.S. I will be giving a talk in two weeks on an "embodied cognition"
podcast wherein this will be one of the main themes. I will post a link as
it approaches if anyone is interested in attending. Most of the talks are
research oriented, but mine will be mostly (if not all) history and
theory.
Eric
-----------
Eric P. Charles, Ph.D.
Lab Manager
Center for Teaching, Research, and Learning
American University, Hurst Hall Room 203A
4400 Massachusetts Avenue, N.W.
Washington, DC 20016
phone: (202) 885-3867 fax: (202) 885-1190
email: [email protected]
On Mon, Feb 22, 2016 at 4:38 PM, glen <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> I may as well chime in, too, since none of what's been said so far is
> meaningful to me. My concept of intimacy runs along M-W's 2nd entry:
>
> 2 : to communicate delicately and indirectly
>
> This is almost nothing to do with subjectivity and almost nothing to do
> with non-private knowledge (things others know). It has to do with
> "delicate" attention to detail and, perhaps, manipulation. A robot could
> easily be intimate with a human, and demonstrate such intimacy by catering
> to many of the tiny things the human prefers/enjoys, even if each and every
> tiny preference is publicly known. Similarly, 2 robots could be intimate
> by way of a _special_ inter-robot interface. But the specialness of the
> interface isn't its privacy or uniqueness. It's in its handling of
> whatever specific details are appropriate to those robots.
>
> Even if inter-subjectivity is merely the intertwining of experiences, it's
> still largely unrelated to intimacy. Two complete strangers can become
> intimate almost instantaneously, because/if their interfaces are
> pre-adapted for a specific coupling. There it wouldn't be
> inter-subjectivity, but a kind of similarity of type. And that might be
> mostly or entirely genetic rather than ontogenic.
>
> And I have to again be some sort of Morlockian champion for the
> irrelevance of thought. 2 strangers can be intimate and hold _radically_
> different understandings of the world(s) presented to them ... at least if
> we believe the tales told to us in countless novels. 8^)
>
>
> On 02/22/2016 12:40 AM, Jochen Fromm wrote:
>
>> Nice to see FRIAM is still alive!
>> I like this definition as well: "Intimacy is just being so close that you
>> see the same world from where you stand". In a family for example we are
>> being so close that we roughly see and experience the same world.
>>
>> I still believe that the solution to the hard problem lies in Hollywood:
>> cinemas are built like theaters. If we see a film about a person, it is
>> like sitting in his or her cartesian theater. We see what the person sees.
>> In a sense, we feel what the feels as well, especially the pain of loosing
>> someone.
>>
>
> --
> ⇔ glen
>
>
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