[FRIAM] A Question For Tomorrow

[Nick Thompson]

Glen, 

You are right, here.  We could conduct this conversation just as well if not better over the question of how the organism develops from the zygote.  

Still, I think it's useful to have the conversation about the "-Isms" every once in a while, because we are committed to them in ways we do not know.  I was in a forum with a bunch of physicists last year many of whom were wedded to the notion that nature was determined by things beyond experience that we would never know.  That's both a tautology AND an oxymoron.  

After my exchange with Lee, I wasn't sure the conversation couldn't be had around the manner in which cellular automata generate entirely unexpected outcomes ... "seething dog vomit" as Carl used to so charmingly say ... never mind psychology or biology.   Clearly, the fact that we understand how something came about (in the way that we "understand", down to the finest detail, how cellular automata phenomena are generated) cannot be the criterion for non-conscious, if we are ever to ask the question, "How do we explain consciousness?" in any way that is not inane.  (Geez, was that a quadruple negative?)

But I am clearly in over my head, here.   I am still trying to get for Russ a definition of the material relation that is consciousness, something that I used to do confidently only a few years ago.  

Nick 

Nicholas S. Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology
Clark University
http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

-----Original Message-----
From: Friam [mailto:friam-bounces at redfish.com] On Behalf Of glen?C
Sent: Tuesday, April 30, 2019 9:54 AM
To: friam at redfish.com
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] A Question For Tomorrow

I struggled to find the proper branch of the thread-tree to place this post.  But I decided to do it, here, because your invocation of "organism" confirms my bias.  The inclusion of "consciousness" is a red herring, I think. And the expansion to "relations between entities", including "triads" is nice-to-have icing, but unnecessary[†].

The important part is, as Marcus pointed out with self-driving cars, and I tried to affirm, the glove *knows* hands just like a pattern recognizing AI knows the patterns it's been programmed to recognize. We've demonstrated that knowledge can be instantiated into objects/machines/animals/people. The term we use for that is "specific intelligence" these days, in order to distinguish those tasks/jobs that are straightforward to automate. Those difficult to automate jobs require general intelligence (GI).

The attribute of our current examples of GIs (animals and maybe even plants) that we long settled on is "alive" and the common term for the machines that exhibit GI is "organism". So I struggle to find a unique question in this thread that does NOT boil down to "what is life?"

What am I missing? Why are we talking about all these abstract things like "monism", "mind", "knowledge", "experience", "consciousness", and all that malarkey instead of the more biologically established things? How is this thread NOT about biology?


[†] The common term "ecology" and the pairwise, triadic, ..., N-ary, relations it implies seems sufficient without diving into semiotic hermeneutics.

On 4/27/19 11:10 AM, Nick Thompson wrote:
> As we talk, here, I am beginning to wonder if the minimal conditions for a ‘knowing” require co=ordination between two organisms.

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