[FRIAM] Nick's Categories

[glen]

Well, I maintain significant skepticism about any coherent utility functions underlying the machines that do the discretization. The concept of utility seems to *need* a somewhat unified/singular, and perhaps exogenous, agency, which makes it circular reasoning in this context. (Note that I defend circular reasoning almost always and everywhere.)

But the main point, going back to DaveW's questions:
On 2/4/23 07:46, Prof David West wrote:
> 1) Is an *Experience* a whole or a composite? 
> 2) Does an *Experience* have duration
> 3) [... snipped ...]
> 4) Can *Experiences* be categorized?
> 5) Does *Experience* 'exist' apart from an experiencer?
> 6) Do *Experiences* persist? Perhaps as memories?

These are all questions brought (back) to the fore in the resurgence of panpsychism. There's simply no evidence-based reason to reject counter-intuitive concepts like electron consciousness or societal/galaxy consciousness. Anyone who's been caught up in any kind of mob *experiences* the mob's consciousness as something separate and higher order than your own. And if we can go up, why can't we go down, too?

I also don't treat bricks as if they have the *same kind* of consciousness/experience that *I* have. Same with the cats. But I do tend to treat them as if they have *some kind* of experience/consciousness. The use of a brick as the example, can be another attempt at an (fallacious) incredulity argument. But using trees makes the argument interesting, especially superorganisms like aspen groves ... or maybe mycelia is an even better foil.

Yes, we all project/impute the structure of our psyche on the things around us. But just because we do that does *not* mean those things don't have psychic structures of their own. By asking structural questions of experience monism, DaveW is probing exactly where such concepts are weakest. The questions deserve authentic attempts at answers.


On 2/16/23 13:25, Steve Smith wrote:
> 
> On 2/16/23 11:26 AM, glen wrote:
>> I don't grok the context well enough to equivocate on concepts like "have" and "category of being". But in response to Nick's question: "What is there that animals do that demands us to invent categories to explain their behavior?", my answer is "animals discretize the ambient muck". So if categorization is somehow fundamentally related to discretization, then animals clearly categorize in that sense.
> 
> .. or more elaborately?  "life *transduces* gradients and spectra (light, sound, chemistry) and then *thresholds* the results into what we would nominally call "discrete categories".  The actual definition of those categories, the stimulus-response patterns are actually built upon (created under the shaping of) some kind of utility function (variations on survival in some sense).   One step removed from this is to begin to "name" these categories and modulate and relate (adjectives and verbs) them to one another and from that build elaborate models of cause/effect that can be used to leverage our sensory inputs in pursuit of optimizing said utility functions?   Semiotic theory probably already has a suite of terminology for this?
> 
>> But Nick does follow that question with this "experience" nonsense. So my guess is there *is* some sophistry behind the question, similar to EricC's incredulous response to DaveW's question about phenomenological composition of experience(s). What I find missing in Nick's (and EricC's) distillation of experience monism is an account of the seemingly analogous position of panpsychism. 
> I don't know if I am fully untangling this construction:   I personally am drawn (intuitively) to panpsychism but more in abstract theory than in practice.   I rarely treat a brick or stone as if it has any level of sentience, yet I do grant (impute) *something* like sentience onto more complex units.  That would be especially life itself, and especially life at my personal scale such as a tree or a horse, while it might be easier to ignore whatever complex adaptivity a protozoa or an entire forest or coral reef or the biosphere as a whole might have (because it is out of my physical/time scale).   But many artifacts in my world which I have an intimate relationship with, I tend to impute *some* sentience (or at least agency/identity) onto?  House, Vehicles, Garden, some toolsets?


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