So, all to the good. > I do question the heuristic value of the idea of the impenetrable interior, > but if somebody wants explore it as a scientific approach, even a pragmatist > should be willing to explore its empirical implications. What are the > scientific implications of believing that you have an inner life that is, in > principle, impenetrable to observation by others? Let's explore those. By > all means. I think at least Frank and Bruce are temped by that possibility. > > > Or is the objection of another form: Do we have to be doing science all the > time? Can't we just have fun SOME of the time?
I think not the latter. I wrote out some horrible pages-long attempt to say something, and it was so awful I hope it will shame me into doing the work I should be doing for the rest of the day, instead of posting to lists. But I think what I was after is that the way one says things can sometimes preempt what one is able to say. There can be information content in formulaic agreements that certain communities settle on, about what they think they have to say, and one can’t just toss out the formula and replace it with constructions in which their claims are inexpressible, without at least admitting that they are being rejected out of hand. When I listen to the phenomenologists, whom I can’t understand but can parrot, I think they are saying they can refer to a big field of “experience”, and within that field, there is a difference in ways of experiencing — different kinds of “how” — particularly between experience-of-objects and experience-as-a-subject. This “how” dimension is not of the same kind, they would say, as the distinction between experience-of one object and experience-of another. So the fact that this whole thread has been framed in terms of different experiences-of seems to me like it rules out of discussion the main thing they claim they have to say. i.e., experience-of another person’s state of mind versus experience-of some simply operationalized behavior; that kind of framing. (And I know this thread didn’t claim to be about phenomenology; I will circle back to why I brought it in here.) The challenge with all this is that the distinction dwells in the prepositions. As Ray Jackendoff reminds us, prepositions are the worst things to translate and the least stable elements, because they cobble together the groupings we don’t really have systems for. Certainly I dislike much of what I see from Hard Problem people, because they seem to want to express an objection that can’t be answered, by construction, which seems to me like preening. But if I had to take responsibility for arguing their position, I would say that they too are arguing there is a different dimension of “how” one experiences, between experience-of-objects and experience-as-subjects. The reason I talk about how one says things is that, when they say “What is it like to be a bat”, they are using something that is not explanatory in itself as an English construction (clearly so), but has been accepted by a certain community as a conventional form, which I think intends to point to the same “how”-distinction as the phenomenologists’ experience-of versus experience-as. If you simply reject that there is any information content in their choice to settle on that distinction — which they merely signal in formulaic speech — and say “Look how awkward that locution is. What they should have said, what they _mean_, is `What is a bat like’, and then go off on a neo-Skinnerian deconstruction showing that they can only mean what your framing allows them to mean, then the point at which you rejected their premise was not in the answer, but in the refusal to suppose there was any basis for their way of putting the question. When I asked (in the earlier post) the question about when it is seeking an angle to tell the finger from the moon, and when it is a gambit to win a contest, and CRUCIALLY: whether those two are even distinguishable in some cases, I mean it as such. We always change the terms of framing, because that is how we parallax on whatever is on the other side of the language. But when the commitments inherent in the question are not in the “productive” part of the language and instead are somehow in its formulaic aspects, one can be refusing to engage de facto, while seeming to retain the terms de jure. For me, when I see these conversations that seem to have tangled themselves into an impasse, or when they seem now far from what I thought I understood as the topic, my impulse is to go back to the common-language that seemed to me the start of it all. The challenge is that common-language formulations present themselves as descriptions of reality, or of experience, or whatever, and certainly I do not take them as such at all. They are part of a signaling system _within_ the larger coordinated socio-cognitive “us”. So it is not surprising that often the common-language locations are unusable as formal description. But if they think they point to a distinction, which is encoded all cryptically in who-knows-what aspects of the discourse, how are we to best respond to that claim? In the Rota lectures that I linked a while ago, he has a line in there that irritates me in all the usual ways. Referring to exactly this distinction, he says “Of course we can’t talk about [what we are talking about]; we can only babble around it.” (This has to do with what phenomenologists call the Hermeneutic circle, and probably many others before them.). DaveW wrote nearly the same thing in a post maybe a month ago (or three?). This is standard stock, as far as I can tell, in what I am told by every Eastern-traditions person I have ever met. Jack Nicholson just needs to write on the chalkboard 100 times “The Dao that can be told is not the Dao”. (Of course it is actually much worse than the Hard Problem when one gets to either the phenomenologists or the Eastern-traditions people: they would both say that experience-of and experience-as, both objects and subjects, are constructions within some larger field — I think the keyword is “the transcendental subject” — so however obscure the hard-problem people already believed it is, the meditation-oriented philosophers want to claim it is much more obscure than that, in the sense of being resistant to linguistic rendering. But let me put all that to the side other than acknowledging that it is there.) So, again, what are we to do? Suppose that they actually aren’t saying _anything_? For the religious people talking about God as an empirical part of nature, I’m fine with that resolution. But if there is anything that getting slapped by complex subjects has made me believe, it is that there is far less that we can formalize than the richness that we think we can catch out of the corner of our eyes, and informal language may signal a lot of it. It can take considerable empathy to notice the bizarre ways informal language can carry information; any syntactician will be sensitive to that challenge. So, to get to the point before this spirals into another nightmare, I had always taken a less cutesy formulation of the hard problem to be something along the lines of: Does the prepositional dichotomy between experiece-of and experience-as reflect anything real in what one wants to mean by “experience” at all? Is it a difference of kind from all the differences we do formalize between experiences-of different objects? If so, how do we capture in a satisfying way that difference in kind, and what the experience-as-subject then refers to as the “other” part of the dichotomy? I think this is not so far from implying other things that have been said in this thread: one of the features I attach to experience-as is that it is part of what is meant by “me”, so if I knew what either term referred to, I should still be able to conclude that “me” is the only one whom I can “experience-as-subject”. We now have two undefined terms rather than one, but at least there is a constraint between them that we would like to believe will hold. But it has never seemed to me that modeling-the-other-as-object was at the center of what Hard Problem people want to be after; it seems like a corollary. Yuck. This is what happens when I can’t drag an answer out of the silly easy things I am supposed to know; I fritter away time writing about things I don’t know anything about. Eric > > Nick > > Nicholas Thompson > Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology > Clark University > [email protected] > https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/ > > > > -----Original Message----- > From: Friam <[email protected]> On Behalf Of David Eric Smith > Sent: Tuesday, May 5, 2020 4:54 PM > To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[email protected]> > Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Warring Darwinians for Glen, Steve > > I think the phenomenologists would claim that until you have realized that > all worlds are only “inner worlds”, you haven’t properly interpreted the > informal use of the word “world” into a philosophically serious frame. > > Of course they are Continental Philosophers. So one has the option to simply > refuse to use any of the patterns or forms that they try to use consistently, > and replace anything they say _in the way they say it_ with something else > that oneself says _in some different way_, and then claim that when said in > the different way, the point they were trying to make cannot be sensible, by > construction. > > I have on many occasions wondered what is the balance between rephrasing to > get more angles on a question, versus rephrasing to insist on a scheme in > which the question is unexpressible. The former is an essential act of > reason and discourse; the latter is a refusal to cooperate and a gambit to > win a contest. For any given statement, are we sure that it can be assigned > to one and not the other? > > Eric > > > >> On May 6, 2020, at 4:35 AM, [email protected] wrote: >> >> Hi,Glen, >> >> Careful. Isn't the formulation "inner world" entirely contradictory? >> >> N >> >> Nicholas Thompson >> Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology Clark University >> [email protected] https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/ >> >> >> >> -----Original Message----- >> From: Friam <[email protected]> On Behalf Of u?l? ? >> Sent: Tuesday, May 5, 2020 12:50 PM >> To: FriAM <[email protected]> >> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Warring Darwinians for Glen, Steve >> >> However, I think we can come up with a (maybe someday) testable hypothesis >> based on hidden states. In principle, if EricC's principle is taken >> seriously, the inner world of a black box device will be *completely* >> represented on its surface (ala the holographic principle). Any information >> not exhibited by a black box's *behavior* will be lost/random. >> >> This implies something about the compressibility and information content of >> the black box's behavior, right? >> >> On 5/5/20 10:38 AM, Prof David West wrote: >>> This does not advance an argument against the possibility of a computer >>> thinking — merely an assertion that "behavior" is not a valid basis upon >>> which to argue that they do. >> >> >> -- >> ☣ uǝlƃ >> >> .-. .- -. -.. --- -- -..-. -.. --- - ... -..-. .- -. -.. -..-. -.. .- ... >> .... . ... >> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv >> Zoom Fridays 9:30a-12p Mtn GMT-6 bit.ly/virtualfriam unsubscribe >> http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com >> archives: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/ >> FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ >> >> >> .-. .- -. -.. --- -- -..-. -.. --- - ... -..-. .- -. -.. -..-. -.. .- ... >> .... . ... >> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv >> Zoom Fridays 9:30a-12p Mtn GMT-6 bit.ly/virtualfriam >> unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com >> archives: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/ >> FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ > > > .-. .- -. -.. --- -- -..-. -.. --- - ... -..-. .- -. -.. -..-. -.. .- ... > .... . ... > FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv > Zoom Fridays 9:30a-12p Mtn GMT-6 bit.ly/virtualfriam > unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com > archives: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/ > FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ > > > .-. .- -. -.. --- -- -..-. -.. --- - ... -..-. .- -. -.. -..-. -.. .- ... > .... . ... > FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv > Zoom Fridays 9:30a-12p Mtn GMT-6 bit.ly/virtualfriam > unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com > archives: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/ > FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ .-. .- -. -.. --- -- -..-. -.. --- - ... -..-. .- -. -.. -..-. -.. .- ... .... . ... 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