[FRIAM] Warring Darwinians for Glen, Steve

Thu Apr 30 17:05:36 EDT 2020

Glen, and all, 

This is very good, so good that I am in danger of getting lost in thought and never giving it any reply.

So let me attempt a short reply.  

Following Holt, I am going to take the metaphor (if you will) of point of view.  Let's say we are all blindfolded philosophers palpating an extremely patient elephant.  Even without introducing the qualia problem,  there is an odd sense in which we all feel the same thing and an equally odd sense in which we each feel a different thing.  And to know what you are feeling, I have to question you (and ask you to use metaphors) to convey what you are feeling to me.  Here there is no question of qualia.  If I were standing where you are and feeling the same part of the elephant that you feel, then I would feel the same thing (ex hypothesi).  

One of the challenges here, of course, is how we come to the conclusion that we are all palpating the SAME thing.  We could all behave as some of my "qualitative" colleagues at Clark wanted to behave, and simply "share our experiences"--.  "I am having a scaley experience; I am having a fuzzy experience."  "I am having a mucussy experience" "Ugh! Something just wacked me over the head." -- and then walk away.   There has to be the possibility of classes of objects for us to appeal to before we can begin to integrate the various information that each of us is gathering.  And there is philosophical difficulty enough here to concern us without introducing the problem of whether each of us experiences fuzziness, say, in the same way that each of the others do.  

Now if we were determined to study THAT problem, we could take a group of extremely standardized objects ... a perfect steel sphere, a perfect cylinder, etc., say, and ask each of us to report on what we feel as we feel them.  We might notice, from this research, that one of us focusses on weight, another on surface texture, another on warmth and coldness, etc.  And across objects we might find individual differences in how each of us describes the objects.  That might get at our individual uniqueness in how we approach the touching of objects.  And just as we could agree, after a time that we were surrounding an elephant, we could agree, after a time and a discussion, that you approach objects in one way and I approach them in an other.  We could, with the diligent application of metaphors, come to see the world approximately from one another's point of view  

To me, the mystery of consciousness is no greater than the fact that we never stand in exactly the same place when we look at something.  But as steve Guerin has pointed out, just as we can work out where the fire is by all of us pointing our differently located cameras at it, we can as easily work out the location of each of the cameras from the same information.  This is no accident because Steve is a student of Gibson and Gibson was a student of Holt, and Holt's metaphor of consciousness is a point of view metaphor.

I note with particular interest this paragraph in Glen's letter: 

The hard problem of consciousness is that any given creature/object/thing/situation has a qualitative experience, a *comprehension* of the situation/state/condition that creature finds itself it at any given time, any given place, or any given trajectory through time and space. The hard problem is one of uniqueness. The uniqueness of that experience.

I just don’t think “experience” is that sort of thing.  Experience is always a step from one thing to another.  A “unique experience” is like acceleration an instant.  A fiction that is useful for some purposes.  We know how to study the elephant; and we know how to study the uniqueness of the observers of the elephant.  But those are distinct objects of study.  

Not short.  Ugh.  Glen, you are allowed to say I begged your question.  

Nick 

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com

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

-----Original Message-----
From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> On Behalf Of u?l? ?
Sent: Thursday, April 30, 2020 9:44 AM
To: FriAM <friam at redfish.com>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Warring Darwinians for Glen, Steve

OK. Here's the setup:

Nick says 1: Metaphorical thinker maps their experience onto another's experience, modeling that other's experience with their own.

Nick says 2: I don't understand the hard problem of consciousness.

Glen says: Expressions 1 and 2 are contradictory.

I suppose it's on me to show that they're contradictory. The idea that abduction is an inference from the unique to a class might be helpful. But I think it's a jargonal distraction. So, here goes.

Let's propose that there exist unique situations/objects ... things or points in time or whatever that are not, cannot be, exactly the same anywhere else or at any other time. They are absolutely, completely unique in the entire universe. Because they are unique, there's absolutely no way any *other* thing/situation can perfectly model them. E.g. no 2 electrons are in exactly the same state at exactly the same time in exactly the same place. There will always be something different about any 2 unique things. So analogies/metaphors/maps from 1 unique thing to another unique thing will always be slightly off.

Now, a metaphor/model/analogy/mapping thinker will accept an imperfect mapping and go ahead and model a unique thing with another unique thing. That's what a metaphorical thinker does, inaccurately models one thing with another thing.

The hard problem of consciousness is that any given creature/object/thing/situation has a qualitative experience, a *comprehension* of the situation/state/condition that creature finds itself it at any given time, any given place, or any given trajectory through time and space. The hard problem is one of uniqueness. The uniqueness of that experience.

The AI/ALife component of the hard problem asks how can we build a machine that will have these experiences. But that's not important to this conversation. The modeling/mapping/metaphorical component is how can any one thing (machine, rock, golfball, human) *understand* the experience of any other thing (car, elephant, galaxy, bacterium).

The answer is that one thing *models* the other thing imperfectly. The only reason anyone would be a "metaphorical thinker" is because they recognize the hard problem. If they don't recognize the hard problem, then there's no need to use metaphor. Sure, it might be convenient to use metaphor, but there's no NEED because there is no hard problem.

Therefore, Nick *does* understand the hard problem, even if only tacitly, and even if he doesn't *believe* in it. He states it and restates it every time he insists that thinking is metaphorical.

On 4/29/20 8:19 PM,  <mailto:thompnickson2 at gmail.com> thompnickson2 at gmail.com wrote:

> I think the first was Glen, and I agree, I don’t see how a belief in 

> the centrality of metaphor to thought commits one to a belief in the hardness of, or even the existence of, the hard problem.

> 

>  

> 

> It was me that floated the thought that “all thinking is 

> metaphorical”. (I was trying to draw Dave West in on my side of the argument, at the time.)  I meant only to say that the application of any word (save perhaps grammatical operators or proper names) involves abduction, which I think we both believe, is a very close relative of metaphor.  You and I have struggled over this for years, decades, almost, but I think we believe that abduction is an inference from the properties of an object to the class to which it belongs whereas a metaphor carries the process further in some way I have trouble defining.  For instance, when Darwin said that evolution was caused by selection, it definitely was an abduction of sort.  But as selection was understood at the time, it involved the intentional intervention of a breeder.  So the metaphor not only abduces selection, it seems also rupture the original concept in some say.

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