On Fri, Apr 1, 2011 at 4:12 PM, Gordana Dodig-Crnkovic < gordana.dodig-crnko...@mdh.se> wrote:
Dear Stan, Ø The key is whether the trait involved can be modeled; on these grounds it has not yet been shown that 'qualia' can be generalized beyond the human experience, yet even > a child can see, for example, that a mother hen is very unhappy when her chicks are threatened. Being a computer scientist I don’t really know enough about qualia, so I checked Wiki and read: “Examples of qualia are the pain of a headache, the taste of wine, the experience of taking a recreational drug, or the redness of an evening sky.” I believe that hen and other animals have some sort of qualia, of course not human qualia, but their own, animal qualia. Am I wrong in my believe that animals can feel pain, have headache, feel taste of drink and food, can see colors and can even get drunk (Animals Are Beautiful People, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dDknJ6KPLxc ) and that pain, headache etc. that they experience represent their qualia? With best regards, Gordana Gordana -- Of course, you are right. My point is only that, while we can intuit that other animals have feelings insofar as they have nerves, my position, using Peirce's idea of Firstness, is that it is the simplest hypothesis to suppose that all dissipative structures (storms, etc., including the living) have all that we have. So a cyclone, a tree, must be supposed to have at least what we would feel when, for example, we meditate -- no thoughts, no special feelings, just beingness. BUT, as we have no model for this, so we are not entitled, as scientists or even philosophers, to pretend to KNOW in some verbal or mathematical fashion what qualia are. (I may send this to the list tomorrow) Best STAN Gordana -- On Fri, Apr 1, 2011 at 5:04 PM, Gordana Dodig-Crnkovic < gordana.dodig-crnko...@mdh.se> wrote: Stan, thanks for your quick reply and explanation. I risk to discuss things above my head, but I agree with Maturana that life and cognition coincide. So I don’t see why would we ascribe any cognitive functions to non-living nature. "Cognitive" is too 'rich'. I would see {mind {cognition}}. Cognition comes in with the nervous system, but mind is more general, not requiring cognition to be in effect. So, a tree may have some manifestation of mind, but not (seemingly!) cognition. (This example is tricky because a tree obviously lives its life at a scale much larger than ours, and so one of its moments might have a duration of some of our hours). I guess that cyclone does not possess minimum of self-star properties that we would expect from something living. This is the main point I have been trying to insist upon so far. Nature is one. The dissipative structure concept is he unifying one here. If we would generalize qualia to organisms that do not possess nervous system, what would that be? I try to visualize it as what we feel in deep meditation -- no thoughts, no emotion. No information at all. Would plants be qualified to have qualia? Hard to imagine. See above on the tree. I love plants, and I suppose this makes me a bit crazy, but they do have sly behaviors. More to the point they do have organized chemical activities; our brains have organized chemical activities.... The organization is different, yes. But qualia are SO general and indiscribable ... But cognition and even intelligence according to my understanding could be defined without reference to subjective feeling of an organism, and thus could be generalized to any living organism. Is that correct? If you have an explicit model of it, then it must be able to be generalized, by removing constraints. STAN Best Gordana Gordana -- On Sat, Apr 2, 2011 at 3:59 AM, Gordana Dodig-Crnkovic < gordana.dodig-crnko...@mdh.se> wrote: Stan, I used my two posts in the FIS, so I reply off-list. Thank you very much for your valuable comments. I continued thinking yesterday evening about what I wrote to you and I also concluded that my skepticism about plants having qualia was not well grounded. I agree with you and especially concerning the fact that we have different time scales, that human perception is not well attuned to recognizing such slow and incremental changes. Plants are adaptive systems and they certainly communicate with the world and with us. I also love plants and remember a performance many years ago at Zagreb Musical Biennale. They connected several plants with sensors that measured pressure, temperature and chemical concentrations and those signals were allowed to impact on some Mozart music piece which was played in the background. As the public would approach the plant, Mozart music would change in different ways, but you could hear quite quickly in fact how plant was affected in different way as you touched them. It was a good demonstration that plants were alive and that they obviously register inputs. !! Wonderful! I will pass this on to some interested folks. It is in fact very difficult for us to think in terms of systems with different time scales. I have often suggested to computationists that this ought to be an interesting problem for them to model. But my idea of qualia would be how it feels for a plant to be interacting with the world. So I was influenced by typical computer scientist prejudice that one needs some central place to register what is going on (like brain or at least nervous system with ganglia). But of course one might say that actually there are emergent properties that simply result of the fact that different parts of an organism are acting in certain ways. I think our own bodies have some of these properties as well -- in connection with hormones, which diffuse through the blood stream to many regions simultaneously, as well as in the intercellular matrices and fluids. In this way, we too have a 'slow component' of the plant type. So if mind would be a function of cognition and thus appear on a higher level of abstraction, that would again require that there is a cognition that mind arises from. Yes, but that could be quite fast if neurally mediated. And if cognition is required, then only living beings qualify (including plants of course). So cognition is out of question and mind could somehow appear as emergent from all the processes of change that come as a consequence of cognition in living beings. But then self-organized dissipative systems that are not alive would not qualify. Since I think of mind as more 'primitive' than cognition, it seems to me that cognition tends to 'focus' mind into a more conscious phenomenon. A tornado's ‘mind’ would be very vague; a tree's mind more grounded (pun!) and localized; an animal's mind more focused upon events; a human's mind even more focused by way of language. How does that seem to you? As far as I can understand, living systems must have many more self-star properties and not only self-organization. They must show self-reproduction- self-adaptation - self-awareness - self-configuration - self-management - self-optimization - self-organization - self-repair or at least enough of those to be considered alive in the sense of http://www.cs.unibo.it/self-star/ Could any self-organizing system like cyclone be ascribed all those (or at least many of those) self-star properties? It seems to me that it would have all together, and VERY vague from or point of view -- that is, undifferentiated. This concept of vagueness I find to be very useful to consider with regard to natural systems. Almost everything natural is to some degree vague, but our models (and computations) are all as 'crisp' as possible. I think computationists need to become more aware at least of fuzzy systems. STAN Gordana
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