[FRIAM] Would send to Nick

[Prof David West]

Nick,

I read your Old New Realist paper, but to get a grip on it I must read some Tolman and Holt - or at least it appears so. However, I have come to one conclusion so far: that in your academic persona you are a committed experience monist, but in your public/political persona you are an irredemptive dualist, believing that humans have a soul/spirit/essence apart from mere experience. (I know, how dare I cast such an aspersion?)

Other things. I will not attempt to explain the Turing Model, others have the technical expertise to do so, but I will speak a bit about the Turing Metaphor.

Metaphorically, a Turing machine is a device with three elements: a read/write head, a set of instructions "in memory," and an infinite tape divided into cells with each cell containing a 1 or 0.

A cell of the tape is available to the read/write head and, depending on the instructions in memory, will read or write (or both in sequence) and advance or retire the tape for 1 to n positions.

The Turing machine "computes" the tape and, simultaneously, the tape "instructs" (programs) the computer (read/write head plus tape advance-retire mechanism).

The "instructions in memory" are just sequences of the same "stuff" — ones and zeros — as the "stuff" on the tape.

Subsequent to some "bootstrap" set of instructions (you have no interest in "end cases" so I will not pursue), the "instructions in memory" can originate on the tape, i.e. the tape contains both "program" and "data." As the "instructions on tape" "move" to "instructions in memory," the "instructions in memory" can become arbitrarily complicated.

So far, nothing that contradicts your "experience monism."

A favorite science fiction meme: once enough ones and zeros have moved from the tape into "memory" the Turing Machine "wakes up" becomes conscious. Instant dualism, but without much reason as mere "location" changes nothing about the "stuff" which is still ones and zeros. (one "stuff," two values)

Because the tape is infinite in length, it matters not that it is "serial" because any parallel computational experience can be replicated serially just takes longer.

Still nothing to interfere with your experience monism. The interesting questions might be:

1- Is each individual human being a separate (but equal) instantiation of a Turing Machine consuming a separate (but equal) infinite tape. If yes, then the door seems to be opened for "private" experience/consciousness.

2- each human is a separate Turing Machine, but all consume the "same" infinite tape. "Same" meaning mostly identical, but with some allowance for perspective (slight variation in which portions of the tape are consumed when??). I believe that this would be your preferred interpretation as it might allow some kind of dialog among Turing machines as each one "wrote" to the infinite tape that all were consuming and, perhaps, somehow, thereby lead to some kind of "consensus computation."

3- there is but One Turing Machine, co-extensive with the Universe and One infinite tape, also co-extensive with the Universe and therefore the Universe is constantly "computing" itself. (Writing to the tape equals popping quantum quiffs, i.e. collapsing wave functions by observing.)

I am pretty certain that option three is the only one possible for one committed to both ontological and epistemological monism. Ouroboros Rules!!

dave west


On Tue, Dec 3, 2019, at 11:08 PM, thompnickson2 at gmail.com wrote:
> Hi, Frank,

> 

> No I didn’t receive a cc of this, and am grateful for it. Thanks Roger. I now have a cc of it in Word on my hard disk, so we can talk about it endlessly. 

> 

> I think this review may be a wonderful example of what happens when a (Romantic) dualist tries to explain monism to dualists. To wit:

> 

> **This is exactly as radical as it sounds. Bishop Berkeley and other idealists argued that objects are dependent on mind; Manzotti argues the reverse of this: Mind exists in objects. In The Spread Mind, Manzotti contends that we are mistaken to believe that objects “do not depend on our presence. . . . Our bodies enable processes that change the ontology of the world. Our bodies bring into existence the physical objects with which our experience is identical. We are our experience. We are not our bodies.” And later: “We are the world and the world is us—everything is physical.” This includes dreams, hallucinations, memories—all are the imagined physical objects themselves, not neural firings or mental representations (we must at one time have perceived an object to hallucinate or dream it, although it can be an unreal combination of other objects, as in the case of flying pink elephants). Manzotti impishly dubs this doctrine no-psychism. It’s idealism turned on its head, a reductio ad absurdum of scientific materialism. (If you’re confused, well, I’m not sure I understand it myself, and I read the book.)**

> **Manzotti first drew Parks’s attention during a conference at IULM University in Milan, where Parks is a professor, by bellowing “There are no images!” in response to a neuroscientist’s discussion about how the brain transforms visual stimuli into images. On Manzotti’s view, the brain does nothing of the kind. There are no pictures, only objects. “He really couldn’t believe how stupid we were all being, he said, buying into this dumb story of images in our heads.” Parks was besotted.**

> He could as easily have said “There are no objects, only pictures!” What nobody in this discussion seems to understand is that one can have objects OR images BUT NOT BOTH. The lunacy begins when people imagine that there are things outside of experience. Or experience outside of things… really it doesn’t matter: they are both equally crazy. The fact is, everything we know comes in over one channel – I call it experience – and from that channel every form of experience is derived. So, images and objects are not different sorts of stuff, they are arrangements of the same stuff. And once you have agreed that there is only one kind of stuff, it doesn’t make a damn bit of difference what you call it, “images” or “objects”. 

> 

> Take phantom limb, for instance. I feel like I have a leg but when I put my weight on it I fall down. Now the dualist will artificially divide experience into the feeling that I have a leg (i.e., I start to put my weight on it) and the experience of falling down, and call one the ineffable experience the other the brute reality. But this is an artificial division. Not falling down when you put your weight on your leg is as much part of the experience of having a leg as expecting that you wont fall down. 

> 

> This is where I always imagine that glen and I must ultimately find agreement. He has to concede that he is a monist in that everything we experience is, well, experience. I have to concede that I am a pluralist, in that experience can be be organized in a zillion different forms depending on how, and the degree to which, it proves out Hypothesis testing is as much a part of experience as hypothesis formation.

> 

> Now, there is a a hidden assumption in my monism which I would think you computer folks would be all over me about. I am thinking of consciousness as serial, rather than parallel. Where do I stand to assert that what ever else can be said about experience, it comes down to a series of single, instantaneous points from which all the varieties and forms of experience – objects and fantasies, etc. – are constructed. This is where ProfDave has me, because there is no more reason to believe on the basis of looking at the brain that it has a single point of convergence, a choke point in its processing, than to believe the same of the kidneys. Kidneys can make urine and clean the blood at the same time. This is why I wish I understood the Turing Model better, because I intuit that the computers we use are based on just this seriel fallacy. Now, I suppose behavior provides something like a choke point. We either walk to the supermarket or we drive. But we may do a dozen different things on our way to the supermarket, whether or not we walk and drive. We can listen to a pod cast, we can plan our summer vacation, we can muse about which tuxedo we will wear for our Nobel Address. And if we don’t, as I suspect Frank and Bruce will want us to, artificially separate these musements from the circumstances that occasion them and the actions they ultimately occasion, we will see that the myth of the choke point (the fallacy of the turing machine model?) is contradicted by the fact that we can do and do do many things at once all the time.

> 

> Nick

> 

> Nick 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 *Frank Wimberly
> *Sent:* Tuesday, December 3, 2019 12:47 PM
> *To:* The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam at redfish.com>
> *Subject:* Re: [FRIAM] Would send to Nick

> 

> I'm sure Nick got this via Friam. It's a fascinating and intelligent book review. The conclusion is well stated in the first paragraph. No one knows how consciousness arises from the physical despite confident assertions to the contrary.

> 

> Frank

> 


> -----------------------------------
> Frank Wimberly
> 
> My memoir:
> https://www.amazon.com/author/frankwimberly
> 
> My scientific publications:
> https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Frank_Wimberly2
> 
> Phone (505) 670-9918

> 

> On Tue, Dec 3, 2019, 12:03 PM Roger Critchlow <rec at elf.org> wrote:

>> https://www.bookforum.com/print/2604/the-unending-quest-to-explain-consciousness-23772

>> 

>> But my phone doesn't have his revised email address.

>> 

>> An entertaining review from a Prof in the town where I grew up, dear old Montclair, NJ.

>> 

>> -- rec --


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> Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
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