[FRIAM] [EXT] Re: A pluralistic model of the mind?

Mon Dec 9 12:03:42 EST 2019

Dave, 

Thanks for this; and thanks, Frank, for forwarding it, else I should never have seen it.  

Well, that’s what I get for labeling my Monism.  Once labeled, monisms become dualisms.  Let me just say that the experiencer of an experience is simply another experience.  

Isn’t admitting to the ineffable throwing in the towel? 

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> On Behalf Of Frank Wimberly
Sent: Monday, December 9, 2019 6:20 AM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam at redfish.com>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] [EXT] Re: A pluralistic model of the mind?

I think we've gotten somewhere.

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 Mon, Dec 9, 2019, 4:08 AM Prof David West <profwest at fastmail.fm <mailto:profwest at fastmail.fm> > wrote:

Nick,

No need to be ill at ease — I do not mean illusory in, or with, any sense/degree/intimation of dualism.

Ultimately, either: I am more of a monist than thou. Or, you are equally a mystic as I.

You cannot speak of Experience without explicitly or implicitly asserting an Experiencer --->> dualism. If there is an Experience "of which you cannot speak," or of which "whatever is spoken is incorrect or incomplete;" then you are as much a mystic as Lao Tzu and the Tao.

Because your sensibilities will not allow you to admit your mysticism, I offer an alternative: you are an epistemological monist but not an ontological monist. On the latter point; I have already accused you of believing in an ontological "Thing" other than experience: a human soul or essence or spirit.

My monism is both ontological (except for the myth that infinitely long ago, and infinitely in the future, there were two things "intelligence" and "matter") and epistemological (accepting that my epistemology is ineffable).

davew

On Fri, Dec 6, 2019, at 8:49 PM, thompnickson2 at gmail.com <mailto:thompnickson2 at gmail.com>  wrote:

Hi, David,

Thanks for channeling me so accurately.  It is a talent to channel what one does not agree with so faithfully that the person channeled is satisfied.   Thank you for that. 

I would have only one ill-ease, about the last part of your version:

both equally illusory.

I think “illusory” is used here, in your way, not in the way I would use it, but to refer to the world that truly is but which we an never truly grasp.  I.e., dualistically.  For me, an illusion is just an experience that does not prove out.  I arrive at my coffee house three days in a row and there is a “day old” old-fashioned plain donut available for purchase at half price.  I experience that “donut at 4” is something I can count on.  That turns out not to be the case because, another customer starts coming in at 3.59 and commandeering all the donuts.  My experience was illusory.  Or, think flips of a coin.  You flip a coin 7 times heads and you come to the conclusion that the coin is biased.  However, you flip it a thousand times more and its behavior over the 1007 flips is consistent with randomness.  You come to the conclusion that the bias was probably an illusion. 

My understanding of illusory is probabilistic and provisional. 

Nick

Nick Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com <mailto:ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com> https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com <mailto:friam-bounces at redfish.com> > On Behalf Of Prof David West

Sent: Friday, December 6, 2019 10:16 AM

To: friam at redfish.com <mailto:friam at redfish.com> 

Subject: Re: [FRIAM] [EXT] Re: A pluralistic model of the mind?

I dare not really speak for Nick, but I think the essence of his position is that there is no "out there" nor is there any "in here." There is only a flow of "experience" that is sometimes "evaluated" (interpreted?) to a false distinction of in or out — both equally illusory.

davew

On Fri, Dec 6, 2019, at 3:27 PM, John Kennison wrote:

Hi Nick, and Eric,

I am grappling with Nick's ideas that mental states must be physical things and even are "out there" rather than "in here". What about delusions? If I think I see bear in the woods but I am mistaken, is this false perception "out there" even when the bear is not?

--John

  _____  

From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com <mailto:friam-bounces at redfish.com> > on behalf of Eric Charles <eric.phillip.charles at gmail.com <mailto:eric.phillip.charles at gmail.com> >
Sent: Thursday, December 5, 2019 8:41 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam at redfish.com <mailto:friam at redfish.com> >
Subject: [EXT] Re: [FRIAM] A pluralistic model of the mind?

Nick, 

Your need to complicate things is fascinating. You are a monist. You are a monist is the sense of not thinking that "mental" things and "physical" things are made of different stuffs. At that point, you can throw a new word in the mix (e.g., 'experience', 'neutral stuff'), or you can throw your hat in with one or the other side of the original division, e.g., "I am a materialist" or "I am an idealist". To that, you add the insight that that later discussion is all a bit weird, because once you have decided to be a monist it weirdly doesn't matter much what you call the stuff.That insight is in need of support, because the old dichotomy is so built in to our language and culture that the claim it doesn't matter which side you choose is very unintuitive. That is solid, and you should develop it further. 

Instead, you bring up some sort of discussion about serial vs. parallel processing that has nothing to do with that topic at all, then you muddle the issues up. Whether you think of "consciousness" as "serial" or "parallel" has no bearing on the prior issue. Given that you are talking with a bunch of computationally minded people, and that you brought up Turing Machines, the first problem is that a serial system can simulate a parallel system, so while parallel buys you time savings (sometimes a little, sometimes a lot), it doesn't change what the system is capable of in any more fundamental way (assuming you are still limited to writing zeros and ones). But you don't even need that, because it just doesn't matter. Being a "monist" has nothing to do with the serial vs. parallel issue at all. There is no reason a body can't be doing many things at once. Or, you can change your level of analysis and somehow set up your definition so that there is only one thing the body is doing, but that one thing has parts. It is just a word game at that point. If I have a 5-berry pie, is it 5 different types of pie at once, or is it its own 1 flavor of pie? We can talk about the pros and cons of labeling it different ways, but it is the same thing whichever way we label it.... and... it has nothing to do with monism vs. dualism....

Admonishment over.

So... Say more about the monism part... That is a solid issue and you are getting somewhere with it...

It SEEMS so important a difference if one person claims that all we can never know is ideas ("You don't know 'the chair', just your idea of the chair!") and another person claims that knowing isn't ever a thing and that there is just material ("There is no 'idea' of the chair, there is only your physical body in relation to the physical world!"). It seems that they are making vastly different claims, and that they should disagree about almost everything. How is it that THAT doesn't matter? 

Eric

-----------

Eric P. Charles, Ph.D.

Department of Justice - Personnel Psychologist

American University - Adjunct Instructor

On Thu, Dec 5, 2019 at 1:20 AM <thompnickson2 at gmail.com <mailto:thompnickson2 at gmail.com> > wrote:

Hi, everybody,

I have gotten all the communications off of nabble and concentrated them below.  If you read this message in plain text, a lot of useful formatting will go away, so I encourage you to enable HTML.  Or perhaps, I can fit it all up as a Word file, tomorrow.

.  I have not had time to dig into the contents much.  I am pleased that everybody took the issue straight on, and I look forward to grappling with your comments.

A recapitulation of the thread:

First, some text from the review which Roger sent:

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!”  

MY COMMENT ON THE REVIEW:

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

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.

RESPONSES TO MY COMMENTS:

Glen’s First

But why is serialization different from any other monist tendency? Serialization is a reduction to the uni-dimensional *sequence*, whereas parallel implies pluralism, anything > 1 dimension. It would be inconsistent of you to allow for parallelism and retain your monism. So, to me, you're better off sticking with a sequential conception.

And don't forget, as we've discussed before, any output a parallel machine can produce can be "simulated" by a sequential machine. So, again, monism is moot. Yes, it may well be True in some metaphysical sense. But if it walks like a pluralist and quacks like a pluralist ... well, then it's a pluralist.

Unification is only useful in so far as it *facilitates* multiplication, i.e. demonstrates constructively how we get many things from few things. If you can't show your work, then you don't understand the problem (or you haven't read the instructions 8^).

Dave West’s Comment:

Nick, I read your Old New Realist paper, but to get a grip on it I must read some Tolman and Holt - or at least it appears so. However, I have come to one conclusion so far: that in your academic persona you are a committed experience monist, but in your public/political persona you are an irredemptive dualist, believing that humans have a soul/spirit/essence apart from mere experience. (I know, how dare I cast such an aspersion?)

Other things.  I will not attempt to explain the Turing Model, others have the technical expertise to do so, but I will speak a bit about the Turing Metaphor.

Metaphorically, a Turing machine is a device with three elements: a read/write head, a set of instructions "in memory," and an infinite tape divided into cells with each cell containing a 1 or 0.

A cell of the tape is available to the read/write head and, depending on the instructions in memory, will read or write (or both in sequence) and advance or retire the tape for 1 to n positions.

The Turing machine "computes" the tape and, simultaneously, the tape "instructs" (programs) the computer (read/write head plus tape advance-retire mechanism).

The "instructions in memory" are just sequences of the same "stuff" — ones and zeros — as the "stuff" on the tape.

Subsequent to some "bootstrap" set of instructions (you have no interest in "end cases" so I will not pursue), the "instructions in memory" can originate on the tape, i.e. the tape contains both "program" and "data." As the "instructions on tape" "move" to "instructions in memory," the "instructions in memory" can become arbitrarily complicated.

So far, nothing that contradicts your "experience monism."

A favorite science fiction meme: once enough ones and zeros have moved from the tape into "memory" the Turing Machine "wakes up"  becomes conscious. Instant dualism, but without much reason as mere "location" changes nothing about the "stuff" which is still ones and zeros. (one "stuff," two values)

Because the tape is infinite in length, it matters not that it is "serial" because any parallel computational experience can be replicated serially  just takes longer.

Still nothing to interfere with your experience monism. The interesting questions might be:

1- Is each individual human being a separate (but equal) instantiation of a Turing Machine consuming a separate (but equal) infinite tape.  If yes, then the door seems to be opened for "private" experience/consciousness.

2- each human is a separate Turing Machine, but all consume the "same" infinite tape. "Same" meaning mostly identical, but with some allowance for perspective (slight variation in which portions of the tape are consumed when??). I believe that this would be your preferred interpretation as it might allow some kind of dialog among Turing machines as each one "wrote" to the infinite tape that all were consuming and, perhaps, somehow, thereby lead to some kind of "consensus computation."

3- there is but One Turing Machine, co-extensive with the Universe and One infinite tape, also co-extensive with the Universe and therefore the Universe is constantly "computing" itself. (Writing to the tape equals popping quantum quiffs, i.e. collapsing wave functions by observing.)

I am pretty certain that option three is the only one possible for one committed to both ontological and epistemological monism. Ouroboros Rules!!

Glen’s Second:

Well, I did reply, as did Dave. If you're ever wondering whether someone replied, you might check the archive at:

 <https://nam10.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=http%3A%2F%2Ffriam.471366.n2.nabble.com%2F&data=02%7C01%7Cjkennison%40clarku.edu%7Cd797357f28854a68954e08d779ed8593%7Cb5b2263d68aa453eb972aa1421410f80%7C1%7C0%7C637111933386669699&sdata=I3i4o%2FUwNgskuqC9FZm%2FJ7ih8ktHpk7XmBUVU2wsO8M%3D&reserved=0> http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/

Dave's was rather interesting w.r.t. Turing machines.  Mine was more flippant. But to continue mine, your discussion of serial attention or behavior hearkens back to our prior discussions of quantum computing. Parallelism vs. serial(ism? ... sequentialism?) can be monified/unified by considering a 2 dimentional space of "space" vs time. In the ideal, even things at, say, space = 1 billion can operate that the same *time* as things at space = 1. Similarly, space at time = 1 billion can be at the same position as time = 1. But reality doesn't work that way. And quantum computing demonstrates this kinda-sorta painfully. But traditional distributed computing demonstrates it, too. Parallel computations across large spaces run into inter-process communication bottlenecks. I.e. sure, we can have 10 computers compute the same thing with different inputs and fuse the outputs. But we can't do the same thing with 1k computers without having "bus" or "backbone" bandwidth problems.

This sort of thing seems pragmatically clear when you talk about your issues handling "serial consciousness". And, at risk of conflating 2 unrelated weird things (quantum with consciousness) for no good reason, there's a *coherence* to the parallel processing that goes on in quantum computing that kinda-sorta feels like your reduction to a serial attention/behavior in parsing consciousness. A loss of that coherence results in separate things, whereas a retention of the coherence maintains your "monism". But, in the end, it's all about the orthogonality between space and time and the *scales* of space and time wherein such orthogonality breaks down.

I hope that's clear. I'm a bit occupied with debugging an uncooperative simulation at the moment.

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