Nick, if you are looking for an adequate explanation of (self-)consciousness
then a simultaneous fascination and frustration might not be a completely
wrong. IMHO self-consciousness is marked by this strange combination of
opposites: a fascinating insight in a frustrating confusion. Fascinating
because it is a new insight and allows reasoning on a new level, frustrating
because it can not be resolved completely by common sense. Mathematically a
strange attractor would be the best way to describe this phenomenon. I don't
know if there are any any agent-based models which can be described by strange
attractors?Gilbert Ryle says in "The concept of mind" that the "self" belongs
to the things which remain confusing no matter how you look at it: "Should I,
or should I not, put my knowing self down on my list of the sorts of things
that I can have knowledge of? If I say ‘no’, it seems to reduce my knowing self
to a theoretically infertile mystery, yet if I say ‘yes’, it seems to reduce
the fishing-net to one of the fishes which it itself catches."I am sitting at
the beach at the moment having a drink and staring at the sea, which is
whirling and curling in never ending tiers of waves rolling towards the beach.
If we use stream metaphors then pain is like a sink, pleasure is like a source
and self-consciousness is something in between: a whirl, curl or vortex in the
stream of information. If we use the metaphor of the puppet theater then
self-consciousness is like an accident where the puppet becomes aware of the
strings and gets tangled up in them. The selfish genes created more and more
intelligent vehicles to survive until the vehicles became accidentally so smart
that they can cut off their own strings - only to invent new ones. Humans are
like puppets controlled by multiple strings from multiple sets of genes. The
biological genes, the religious genes or the genes from other groups. If there
are no genes that control us by pulling the strings we feel lost, because life
seems to have no meaning then.CheersJochen
-------- Original message --------From: Nick Thompson
<[email protected]> Date: 5/6/19 07:53 (GMT+01:00) To: 'The Friday
Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group' <[email protected]> Subject: Re:
[FRIAM] words RE: words David, I am only frustrated because I think FRIAMMERS
hold the keys to the universe won't explicate them in metaphors that I can
understand. So, imagine yourself talking to a group of boy (girl-) scouts.
You have just demonstrated to them the phenomenon of Cellular Automaton #30 (or
whatever) bursting into seething dog vomit at iteration 10,601 (or whatever)
(or bursting out of seething dog vomit into grand pyramids of pyramids, ad
infinitum, whatEVER!). One of the scouts asks, “Professor Dave, why did that
happen then?” And once you have explained that to them, please explain to them
how that explanation is not an adequate explanation of consciousness. The last
time I pressed this question on the list, Lee answered with the following Kaon
God:creation::fish:water which I took to mean, that you are all Gods who do not
know (and therefore cannot explicate) your own powers. I.e.,
God:creation::fish:water:computer_scientists::emergence After you answer those
questions, I promise not to be frustrated, ever again. Deal? Nick Shhhhhh!
Nick has finally gone bonkers. Nicholas S. ThompsonEmeritus Professor of
Psychology and BiologyClark
Universityhttp://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/
-----Original Message-----From: Friam [mailto:[email protected]] On
Behalf Of Prof David WestSent: Sunday, May 05, 2019 9:04 PMTo:
[email protected]: [FRIAM] words RE: words Just finished Thomas K.
Disch's, Camp Concentration, first published in 1968 . Very dystopian future.
My pleasure reading ti came from the dozens, perhaps as many as 100, words
encountered for the first time. Unusual, obscure, sometimes archaic, (e.g.
orthoepy) and yet the author put these words into the mouth of the narrator in
a seamless, organic, manner — the words were necessary to convey the precise,
nuanced, narrative. Hours later I was reading the words," toilette spoelt
automatique," above a urinal. I was wondering if "spoelt" might derive from a
root common to the English word, 'spill'. it does not - spoelt = flushes.
(Spill = morsen.) Before I made myself aware of the facts, I spent some time
idly wondering about the circumstances and contexts in which the two words
"spill/flush" might be used as synonyms despite the fact that the former word
is usually far less lethargic than the latter. I mentally pictured a Venn
diagram with significant overlap but with definite areas/contexts where only
one word or the other could possibly convey desired precision or nuance. On the
heels of that musing, a recent FRIAM discussion about vocabulary came to mind.
The question was raised about whether or not "big" words were used simply to
demonstrate how erudite one was. (I first encountered that word in the 1950s on
"Make Room for Daddy" aka The Danny Thomas Show; to describe a learned uncle
and I decided I want to be that.) My own observations of the list would suggest
that such mean spirited use of vocabulary is quite rare. Vocabulary is a
vehicle for conveying exact meaning — to the extent that meaning can be either
'exact' or 'communicated'. And yet there is a very definite 'Yin-Yang'
stylistic difference observable in the conversation. Most participants seem to
be grounded in the Yang style inherited from the rationalism of Descartes and
scientism of Bacon and use vocabulary as a means for finding precision and
accuracy. Others [yes you Nick, despite how you cringe at the characterization]
reflect the Yin of hermeneuticism with a soupcon of post-modernism. And this,
perhaps, explains Nick's simultaneous fascination and frustration with FRIAM —
a well meaning group willing to explore a lot of different topics and the means
to communicate a shared understanding of those topics, using the 'best'
vocabulary to do so. Alas, too often, communication and understanding falter
between the accuracy bias of Charybdis and the metaphor bias of Scylla.
davewest ============================================================FRIAM
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