[FRIAM] Warring Darwinians for Glen, Steve

[thompnickson2 at gmail.com]

Well, if epigenesis,  emergence, etc., has taught us anything it is that what goes on inside the organism is not reliably modeled by what the organism does.  What I expect FRIAM is trying to digest here is which "mind" is a model of.  Some hold that mind is "in" the organism; others that mind is "of" the organism.  Eric and I are in that latter school, and I think you are, too, but I shouldn't presume.   If you are, then I expect you will join me in believing that the outards and the innards of an organism ate mostly different realms of discourse with some contingent but few necessary connections between them. 



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: Tuesday, May 5, 2020 2:20 PM
To: FriAM <friam at redfish.com>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Warring Darwinians for Glen, Steve

Your interpretation is not quite what I would have said, but close enough. 

You're also right about what I meant by "black box". But the point I was making is that if we take EricC's principle seriously, then anything that goes on inside the box can be accurately and precisely "surmised" from outside the box. Anything else would be lost or random.

Also, my comment was in response to Dave's claim that behavior is not a basis for determining whether the box is thinking or not. I'm suggesting that if there's a large "random" component to the box's behavior, then perhaps it is thinking -- i.e. there's stuff going on inside the box that *cannot* be "surmised" from outside it.

On 5/5/20 1:09 PM, thompnickson2 at gmail.com wrote:
> Eric believes that everything that is going on in a black box is evident from outside the box.
> [...]
> That, you rightly perceive, I disagree with.  In fact, the whole idea 
> of a black box is that you don’t know and can only surmise what is going on within it.  If you could “see” within the box, it wouldn’t be black.  If I owned a “golden goose”, I might surmise all sorts of internal arrangements by which the goose took in food and produced gold, but I would never kill the goose for the gold “inside”.  That’s to confuse a behavior of an entity with the internal processes that mediate that behavior.  And I really DO mean “internal” here.


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☣ uǝlƃ

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