[FRIAM] A pluralistic model of the mind?

Wed Dec 4 16:40:02 EST 2019

Dear Friammers, 

Derelict poor sod that I am, I was hoping for some commentary on the note below sent a few days back, particularly the last paragraph where I speculate inexpertly about the relation between a Turing system model of a computer and our serial (?) model of the mind?  

I am hoping that you will, as usual, inflate these flabby ideas with some of your wisdom. 

Nick 

Nick Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

 <mailto:ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com> ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com

 <https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/> https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

From: thompnickson2 at gmail.com <thompnickson2 at gmail.com> 
Sent: Tuesday, December 3, 2019 3:08 PM
To: 'The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group' <friam at redfish.com>
Cc: 'Dix McComas (dixmccomas2 at gmail.com)' <dixmccomas2 at gmail.com>
Subject: RE: [FRIAM] Would send to Nick

Hi, Frank, 

No I didn’t receive a cc of this, and am grateful for it.  Thanks Roger.  I now have a cc of it in Word on my hard disk, so we can talk about it endlessly.  

I think this review may be a wonderful example of what happens when a (Romantic) dualist tries to explain monism to dualists.  To wit: 

This is exactly as radical as it sounds. Bishop Berkeley and other idealists argued that objects are dependent on mind; Manzotti argues the reverse of this: Mind exists in objects. In The Spread Mind, Manzotti contends that we are mistaken to believe that objects “do not depend on our presence. . . . Our bodies enable processes that change the ontology of the world. Our bodies bring into existence the physical objects with which our experience is identical. We are our experience. We are not our bodies.” And later: “We are the world and the world is us—everything is physical.” This includes dreams, hallucinations, memories—all are the imagined physical objects themselves, not neural firings or mental representations (we must at one time have perceived an object to hallucinate or dream it, although it can be an unreal combination of other objects, as in the case of flying pink elephants). Manzotti impishly dubs this doctrine no-psychism. It’s idealism turned on its head, a reductio ad absurdum of scientific materialism. (If you’re confused, well, I’m not sure I understand it myself, and I read the book.)

Manzotti first drew Parks’s attention during a conference at IULM University in Milan, where Parks is a professor, by bellowing “There are no images!” in response to a neuroscientist’s discussion about how the brain transforms visual stimuli into images. On Manzotti’s view, the brain does nothing of the kind. There are no pictures, only objects. “He really couldn’t believe how stupid we were all being, he said, buying into this dumb story of images in our heads.” Parks was besotted.

He could as easily have said “There are no objects, only pictures!”  What nobody in this discussion seems to understand is that one can have objects OR images BUT NOT BOTH.  The lunacy begins when people imagine that  there are things outside of experience.  Or experience outside of things… really it doesn’t matter: they are both equally crazy.   The fact is, everything we know comes in over one channel – I call it experience – and from that channel every form of experience is derived.  So, images and objects are not different sorts of stuff, they are arrangements of the same stuff.  And once you have agreed that there is only one kind of stuff, it doesn’t make a damn bit of difference what you call it, “images” or “objects”.  

Take phantom limb, for instance.  I feel like I have a leg but when I put my weight on it I fall down.  Now the dualist will artificially divide experience into the feeling that I have a leg (i.e., I start to put my weight on it) and the experience of falling down, and call one the ineffable experience the other the brute reality.  But this is an artificial division.  Not falling down when you put your weight on your leg is as much part of the experience of having a leg as expecting that you wont fall down.   

This is where I always imagine that glen and I must ultimately find agreement.  He has to concede that he is a monist in that everything we experience is, well, experience.  I have to concede that I am a pluralist, in that experience can be be organized in a zillion different forms depending on how, and the degree to which, it proves out  Hypothesis testing is as much a part of experience as hypothesis formation. 

Now, there is a a hidden assumption in my monism which I would think you computer folks would be all over me about.  I am thinking of consciousness as serial, rather than parallel.  Where do I stand to assert that what ever else can be said about experience, it comes down to a series of single, instantaneous points from which all the varieties and forms of experience – objects and fantasies, etc. – are constructed.  This is where ProfDave has me, because there is no more reason to believe on the basis of looking at the brain that it has a single point of convergence, a choke point in its processing, than to believe the same of the kidneys. Kidneys can make urine and clean the blood at the same time.   This is why I wish I understood the Turing Model better, because I intuit that the computers we use are based on just this seriel fallacy.  Now, I suppose behavior provides something like a choke point.  We either walk to the supermarket or we drive.  But we may do a dozen different things on our way to the supermarket, whether or not we walk and drive. We can listen to a pod cast, we can plan our summer vacation,  we can muse about which tuxedo we will wear for our Nobel Address.  And if we don’t, as I suspect Frank and Bruce will want us to, artificially separate these musements from the circumstances that occasion them and the actions they ultimately occasion, we will see that the myth of the choke point (the fallacy of the turing machine model?) is contradicted by the fact that we can do and do do many things at once all the time. 

Nick 

Nick Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

 <mailto:ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com> ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com

 <https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/> https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com <mailto:friam-bounces at redfish.com> > On Behalf Of Frank Wimberly
Sent: Tuesday, December 3, 2019 12:47 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam at redfish.com <mailto:friam at redfish.com> >
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Would send to Nick

I'm sure Nick got this via Friam.  It's a fascinating and intelligent book review.  The conclusion is well stated in the first paragraph.  No one knows how consciousness arises from the physical despite confident assertions to the contrary.

Frank

-----------------------------------
Frank Wimberly

My memoir:
https://www.amazon.com/author/frankwimberly

My scientific publications:
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Frank_Wimberly2

Phone (505) 670-9918

On Tue, Dec 3, 2019, 12:03 PM Roger Critchlow <rec at elf.org <mailto:rec at elf.org> > wrote:

https://www.bookforum.com/print/2604/the-unending-quest-to-explain-consciousness-23772

But my phone doesn't have his revised email address.

An entertaining review from a Prof in the town where I grew up, dear old Montclair, NJ.

-- rec --

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