[FRIAM] Warring Darwinians for Glen, Steve

Tue May 5 13:31:32 EDT 2020

Hi, all, 

I agree with Eric’s first two points.  Yay Pragmatic Maxim!

On Eric’s third point: 

Ok, I think this conversation is starting to  relate to others we have had on the list.  What do we say when we discover that the next words out of our mouths are almost certainly to be nonsense?  For Wittgenstein, this is not the end of speech, but the end of Philosophy.  I think he is happy that we go on speaking, but only if we recognize that we are no longer doing philosophy.   But we can go on eating, drinking, singing, making war, making love, doing meditation etc just fine without philosophy. This is the sort of thinking that led to Harvard’s finest joining the marines or the psychedelic movement in the sixties.  And you are correct, it makes me uncomfortable.  

Let’s take that first stanza of the Jabberwok as an example.  It is classified as nonsense.  But is it really?  

’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves 

      Did gyre and gimble in the wabe: 

All mimsy were the borogoves, 

      And the mome raths outgrabe

No, because we can read it.  And I also think it is philosophy because it asks us to engage in the grammaratization of experience.  This suggests that philosophy is just the project of putting experience into speech.    Hard to imagine not doing that while writing to FRIAM.  I suppose we could communicate in smiley’s. ☹

As usual,  you are forcing me to THINK here, and I have to be grateful for that, much though it annoys me. 

Nick

Nicholas 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 Eric Charles
Sent: Tuesday, May 5, 2020 10:27 AM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam at redfish.com>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Warring Darwinians for Glen, Steve

Quite a few things suddenly going on here....

1) The "can computers act?" thing is a bit of a red herring, I think. We would be more obviously where we want to be by talking about robots, instead of computers. We could then separately discuss the issue of overt vs covert behavior (which has been phrased many different ways, none of which are ideal). After that, we could muse over which side of that distinction sending packets over the internet or altering pixels on a screen fall upon. 

2) The question of metaphors at the heart of thinking might have more legs. There are two separate issues there: One is about the role of metaphors in communication between two people, which might connect to "the hard problem"... maybe... The other is about whether much, or even all, individual "thinking" is in metaphors, which I don't think relates to "the hard problem", but I could be convinced otherwise. Also, in those discussions, Nick would take a formal model as a highly-abstracted metaphor. He wrote extensively about "The Prisoner's Dilemma" as a metaphor, for example, even its formally specified form. 

3) We have an explanation of "the hard problem" that places it remarkably close to "the Turing Test". I think there are pros and cons to that way of looking at it. The pro is that it focuses us on that "how would you know?" part of "the hard problem", i.e., "How would you know if someone else experienced blue as you experience blue?" The con is that it focuses us on a "subjective" attempt to answer that, rather than a pragmatist / broad-scientific attempt to answer it. In Turing Test comparison leads us to ask what a computer would have to do for us, as individuals, not to be able to tell if we were dealing with man or machine. the pragmatist approach is to ask, as comprehensively as possible, what the organism is doing when doing mental things, and then to determine if the machine is doing those same things. A pragmatist approach to "How would you know if someone else experienced blue as you experience blue?" should be to place ourselves and the other person in every possible situation in which "blue" is a relevant concept, and see if the resulting behavior matches. If it does match, then we have the same concept, and there is nothing else to talk about. If it doesn't match, then we are different in only and exactly those non-matches, and there is nothing else to talk about. The responses to the various probes are individual, but the individual is not relevant for determining the array of relevant situations. I am worried that the Turing Test comparison might lead us to think that our individual ideas about how to prob the machine matter, when they don't. 

4) Also, separately, Nick has accused my of intellectual slander. To clarify my prior statement: I have seen Nick become convinced, more than once, that some particular set of assumptions is so incredibly wrong that he loses the ability to do anything with the ideas those assumptions lead to. At least that's my impression of what happens. I take "the hard problem" to be an example of such. I think Nick's "problem" is related to Wittgenstein's saying about being silent. Once the conversation becomes centered completely around something about-which-we-cannot-speak, Nick can't get himself to keep speaking, beyond trying to point out to everyone that something has gone horribly wrong. (I'm not sure if Nick will be any happier with that diagnosis, but it's as close to a mia culpa as he is likely to get out of me.) If you a priori declare that "How would you know if someone else experienced blue as you experience blue?" as an inherently unanswerable question, and then you ask the question... well... then there is nothing more to do; there is nowhere to go, other than to point out that something has gone wrong. 

-----------

Eric P. Charles, Ph.D.
Department of Justice - Personnel Psychologist

American University - Adjunct Instructor

On Tue, May 5, 2020 at 11:56 AM Steven A Smith <sasmyth at swcp.com <mailto:sasmyth at swcp.com> > wrote:

Maybe I missed something that makes this redundant but if a highschool student asked me what the hard problem is I would say:  There appears to be no limit to how competent computers can be.  They seem to be able to do just about anything that people think requires thought.  But I am persuaded that they can't think.  What makes the difference between thinking people and hypercompetent computers?  

Nick would say if it behaves as if it thinks then it thinks.  I think.

I think I think, therefore I think I am?    A real-world exercise in terminating tail recursion?  Waddya think?

Frank

On Mon, May 4, 2020 at 7:50 PM Steven A Smith <sasmyth at swcp.com <mailto:sasmyth at swcp.com> > wrote:

I thought this was a support group for recovering (or just
self-indulgent) metaphorists... you mean it's not?   Why do I feel like
I'm in a scene from "Fight Club"?   I guess that would make me more of
an allegorist?

> Is it? You people can't help yourselves. It's compulsive. You might want to get some help for that.
>
> On 5/4/20 10:47 AM, Frank Wimberly wrote:
>> Choosing one's rifle is so concrete.  It makes me want to run out and blow away a few cacti.  Oh, it's a metaphor!

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-- 

Frank Wimberly
140 Calle Ojo Feliz
Santa Fe, NM 87505
505 670-9918

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