[FRIAM] Warring Darwinians for Glen, Steve

Wed Apr 29 13:11:51 EDT 2020

I think we should take the inadequacy of the wastebasket example as
evidence that Nick is being honest about really, really not understanding
what the hard problem is. That leaves us to wonder what Nick SHOULD say
about the hard problem. Obviously, to be consistent with his other thinking
about psychology, he has to deny it somehow... and there are not many ways
to do that.

The deny-the-hard-problem option closest to Nick's way of thinking about
psychology is, I think, William James's solution. Radical Empiricism
predates the modern label "hard problem", but James understood the looming
challenge well. I think that, if Nick was pressed properly, he would fall
back on something that looked a lot like what James was saying.

James would assert that there is - for the purpose of the challenge posed -
no fundamental difference between any *types of qualities* of the objects
and events around us, and therefore the desired distinction between easy
and hard questions is bogus. The questions are all easy, or all hard. If
you think they are all "easy", i.e., all tractable scientific questions,
then you are a Radical Empiricist. If you think they are all "hard", i.e.,
ultimately none will yield to scientific inquiry, then you should go
straight to dualistic solipsism. And we should all stop pretending there is
a middle ground, because the deeper issues won't allow for a middle ground.

Faced with those options, James chooses Radical Empiricism, asserting that
things feel the way they do because *that is how they are: *Why does X look
square? Because, something about it is square, and that aspect of it is
what is being responded to. Why does Y feel soft? Because something about
it is soft, and that aspect of it is what is being responded to. Why does Z
smell fresh? Because something about it is fresh, and that aspect of it is
what is being responded to. And in all cases, we *can*, by various
methods, investigate
what aspects of the thing are being responded to. Sometimes such
investigations will be incredibly difficult; they will be as
time-consuming, laborious, and full of dead ends as any other serious
scientific endeavor. Sometimes the challenge might be on par with going to
the moon or finding serious evidence for the Higgs boson.... and that is
hard, hard, hard.... but they we will never be "hard" in Chambers's sense
of being inherently impossible to investigate.

-----------
Eric P. Charles, Ph.D.
Department of Justice - Personnel Psychologist
American University - Adjunct Instructor
<echarles at american.edu>

On Wed, Apr 29, 2020 at 4:07 AM Jochen Fromm <jofr at cas-group.net> wrote:

> Hi Nick,
>
> I am not sure I understand the wastebasket example, but I would like to
> encourage you to finish whatever you have started. About the question "why
> we act" the following book that I just stumbled upon might be interesting:
>
> Why we act: turning bystanders into moral rebels
> Catherine A. Sanderson
> https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674241831
>
> -J.
>
>
> -------- Original message --------
> From: thompnickson2 at gmail.com
> Date: 4/29/20 00:55 (GMT+01:00)
> To: 'The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group' <
> friam at redfish.com>
> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Warring Darwinians for Glen, Steve
>
> Jochen and Eric
>
> I am not writing a book about the hard problem of consciousness because I
> have never understood what the hard problem of consciousness IS.  Maybe I
> am not conscious in the way the rest of you are?   For instance, when I
> miss the wastebasket with a piece of paper I am genuinely unsure whether I
> am going to get up from my chair and go put it in, or … um …. leave it
> there for somebody else to pick up.   Once I start to get up from my chair,
> I am pretty sure, but, hey, if the phone rang at that moment, I might never
> get across the room, and the wad of paper might still be there the next
> morning for my wife to cite as further evidence of my male callousness.
> The rest of you seem to think that you KNOW what you are going to do in
> advance of doing it.  If that has anything to do with the hard problem of
> consciousness, I don’t have that problem.
>
> By the way, my wife KNOWS and will tell  you with alacrity, that whatever
> I might say, I was NEVER going to pick that piece of paper up.  As
> evidence, she points to the pile of wadded up pieces of  paper wadded
> around the wastebasket.
>
> N
>
>
>
> Nicholas Thompson
>
> Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology
>
> Clark University
>
> ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com
>
> https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/
>
>
>
>
>
> *From:* Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> *On Behalf Of *Eric Charles
> *Sent:* Tuesday, April 28, 2020 3:05 PM
> *To:* The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <
> friam at redfish.com>
> *Subject:* Re: [FRIAM] Warring Darwinians for Glen, Steve
>
>
>
> Yeah Nick.... have you ever thought of writing a book?!? <cough, cough>
>
>
> -----------
>
> Eric P. Charles, Ph.D.
> Department of Justice - Personnel Psychologist
>
> American University - Adjunct Instructor
>
>
>
>
>
> On Sun, Apr 26, 2020 at 6:12 PM Jochen Fromm <jofr at cas-group.net> wrote:
>
> Hi Nick,
>
>
>
> have you thought about turning your ideas about the hard problem of
> consciousness into an article or book? 10 years ago you had this nice idea
> of a cross section of reality, a unique slice of the same world that is
> responsible for our subjective experience. Our discussion in 2010 inspired
> me to write these blog posts (which nobody except Glen read):
>
>
> http://blog.cas-group.net/2010/11/the-solution-to-the-hard-problem-of-consciousness/
>
> http://blog.cas-group.net/2011/11/path-dependent-subjective-experience/
>
> http://blog.cas-group.net/2013/06/solving_the_problem_of_subjectivity/
>
>
>
> I believe this approach is a good explanation for the hard problem. It is
> what Hollywood has been doing for the last 100 years: showing us what it is
> like to be someone else. In this sense Hollywood has solved the biggest
> problem of philosophy. As I said the biggest secrets are often hidden in
> plain sight.
>
>
>
> -J.
>
>
>
>
>
> -------- Original message --------
>
> From: thompnickson2 at gmail.com
>
> Date: 4/26/20 23:05 (GMT+01:00)
>
> To: 'The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group' <
> friam at redfish.com>
>
> Cc: gepr at tempusdictum.com, stephen.guerin at redfish.com
>
> Subject: [FRIAM] Warring Darwinians for Glen, Steve
>
>
>
> Hi, everybody,
>
>
>
> I am striving mightily to get my brain out of the corvid19 cesspit, and
> Stephen and Glen have been helping me, in part by talking about an old
> wrangle that Stephen and I have shared over the role of selection (if any)
> in evolution.   In these arguments, I have always felt that Stephen has
> strived to maneuver me into the sights of his largest gun, but, whenever he
> fires it, the shells seem to go whizzing by me as if fired at somebody else
> entirely.   So this letter is written primarily to Glen and Steve, but I
> post it here because I think some few of you (Dave?) may have something to
> say about what I say, here.
>
>
>
> I have often said that FRIAM saved my intellectual bacon.  I say this
> because when I came to Santa Fe in 2006, it was to help my wife help my son
> and his wife raise my infant grandchildren  -- clearly not a full time
> job.  I justified the venture to my provost with vague hope that I would
> attach myself either to the evolutionary psychology group at UNM or to the
> Santa Fe Institute or both.  In fact, neither panned out.
>
>
>
> And thus, cast loose in Santa Fe, I fell into the arms of Stephen, Carl,
> and Owen, and …   FRIAM.  The attached abstract of  piece I never wrote
> (because I never could dragoon Gillian Barker into writing for me) reveals
> the state of my mind at the time.  I was clearly already teetering between
> selectionist and systemist thinking.  It had dawned on me during my
> previous sabbatical down the corridor from Lyn Margulis that any theory of
> natural selection required *as a precondition* additivity of variance,
> and nothing that we had learned about epigenesis in the previous gave us
> much hope that additivity of variance was a likely condition of
> inheritance.  So, if additivity of variance was not an obvious consequence
> of epigenetic relations, it must somehow be an achievement of them.  Two
> possibilities occurred to me at the time: one is that genetic mechanisms
> were themselves selected for “fairness” – a selectionist explanation; or,
> that fairness somehow fell out of the underlying chemical and biological
> structures – a systemist explanation.
>
>
>
> This is already enough biography to choke a horse, so I shall wrap up,
> here.  Suffice it to say that, when Stephen showed me Wolfram’s book I was
> stunned.  Here was a demonstration of how simple rules could generate
> complex structures without any nudges from any selection mechanism.  Could
> additivity of variance and, therefore, natural selection, itself “fall out”
> of chemical and energetic relations.  Could systems coddle natural
> selection the way rear flank downdrafts coddle a tornado.   Could we have
> natural selection for free.
>
>
>
> Only in my late 60’s at the time, I harbored the illusion that I myself
> could be come a master of the art of computation.  Alas, that ship had
> sailed.  So, now you see me.  “I yam what I yam,” as Popeye used  to say.
> But one thing I yam NOT is the ferocious adherent to genic selection theory
> that Stephen needs me to be if I am going to be felled by his biggest gun.
>
>
>
> And now I have to cook dinner for my 13 and 17 year old grandchildren.
> The oldest is learning rendering from Stephen.  Life will go on!
>
>
>
> Ever grateful for your assistance,
>
>
>
> Nick
>
>
>
>
>
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