[FRIAM] A pluralistic model of the mind?
Eric Charles
eric.phillip.charles at gmail.com
Thu Dec 5 20:41:55 EST 2019
Nick,
Your need to complicate things is fascinating. You are a monist. You are a
monist is the sense of not thinking that "mental" things and "physical"
things are made of different stuffs. At that point, you can throw a new
word in the mix (e.g., 'experience', 'neutral stuff'), or you can throw
your hat in with one or the other side of the original division, e.g., "I
am a materialist" or "I am an idealist". To that, you add the insight that
that later discussion is all a bit weird, because once you have decided to
be a monist it weirdly doesn't matter much what you call the stuff.That
insight is in need of support, because the old dichotomy is so built in to
our language and culture that the claim it doesn't matter which side you
choose is very unintuitive. That is solid, and you should develop it
further.
Instead, you bring up some sort of discussion about serial vs. parallel
processing that has nothing to do with that topic at all, then you muddle
the issues up. Whether you think of "consciousness" as "serial" or
"parallel" has no bearing on the prior issue. Given that you are talking
with a bunch of computationally minded people, and that you brought up
Turing Machines, the first problem is that a serial system can simulate a
parallel system, so while parallel buys you time savings (sometimes a
little, sometimes a lot), it doesn't change what the system is capable of
in any more fundamental way (assuming you are still limited to writing
zeros and ones). But you don't even need that, because it just doesn't
matter. Being a "monist" has nothing to do with the serial vs. parallel
issue at all. There is no reason a body can't be doing many things at once.
Or, you can change your level of analysis and somehow set up your
definition so that there is only one thing the body is doing, but that one
thing has parts. It is just a word game at that point. If I have a 5-berry
pie, is it 5 different types of pie at once, or is it its own 1 flavor of
pie? We can talk about the pros and cons of labeling it different ways, but
it is the same thing whichever way we label it.... and... it has nothing to
do with monism vs. dualism....
Admonishment over.
So... Say more about the monism part... That is a solid issue and you are
getting somewhere with it...
It SEEMS so important a difference if one person claims that all we can
never know is ideas ("You don't know 'the chair', just your idea of the
chair!") and another person claims that knowing isn't ever a thing and that
there is just material ("There is no 'idea' of the chair, there is only
your physical body in relation to the physical world!"). It seems that they
are making vastly different claims, and that they should disagree about
almost everything. How is it that THAT doesn't matter?
Eric
-----------
Eric P. Charles, Ph.D.
Department of Justice - Personnel Psychologist
American University - Adjunct Instructor
<echarles at american.edu>
On Thu, Dec 5, 2019 at 1:20 AM <thompnickson2 at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi, everybody,
>
>
>
> I have gotten all the communications off of nabble and concentrated them
> below. If you read this message in plain text, a lot of useful formatting
> will go away, so I encourage you to enable HTML. Or perhaps, I can fit it
> all up as a Word file, tomorrow.
>
>
>
> . I have not had time to dig into the contents much. I am pleased that
> everybody took the issue straight on, and I look forward to grappling with
> your comments.
>
>
>
> *A recapitulation of the thread:*
>
>
>
> First, some text from the review which Roger sent:
>
>
>
> *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!” *
>
>
>
> *MY COMMENT ON THE REVIEW: *
>
>
>
> I think this review may be a wonderful example of what happens when a
> (Romantic) dualist tries to explain monism to dualists.
>
>
>
> 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.
>
>
>
>
>
> *RESPONSES TO MY COMMENTS*:
>
>
>
> *Glen’s First*
>
> But why is serialization different from any other monist tendency?
> Serialization is a reduction to the uni-dimensional *sequence*, whereas
> parallel implies pluralism, anything > 1 dimension. It would be
> inconsistent of you to allow for parallelism and retain your monism. So, to
> me, you're better off sticking with a sequential conception.
>
>
>
> And don't forget, as we've discussed before, any output a parallel machine
> can produce can be "simulated" by a sequential machine. So, again, monism
> is moot. Yes, it may well be True in some metaphysical sense. But if it
> walks like a pluralist and quacks like a pluralist ... well, then it's a
> pluralist.
>
>
>
> Unification is only useful in so far as it *facilitates* multiplication,
> i.e. demonstrates constructively how we get many things from few things. If
> you can't show your work, then you don't understand the problem (or you
> haven't read the instructions 8^).
>
>
>
> *Dave West’s Comment:*
>
>
>
> 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!!
>
>
>
> *Glen’s Second: *
>
>
>
> Well, I did reply, as did Dave. If you're ever wondering whether someone
> replied, you might check the archive at:
>
> http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
>
>
>
> Dave's was rather interesting w.r.t. Turing machines. Mine was more
> flippant. But to continue mine, your discussion of serial attention or
> behavior hearkens back to our prior discussions of quantum computing.
> Parallelism vs. serial(ism? ... sequentialism?) can be monified/unified by
> considering a 2 dimentional space of "space" vs time. In the ideal, even
> things at, say, space = 1 billion can operate that the same *time* as
> things at space = 1. Similarly, space at time = 1 billion can be at the
> same position as time = 1. But reality doesn't work that way. And quantum
> computing demonstrates this kinda-sorta painfully. But traditional
> distributed computing demonstrates it, too. Parallel computations across
> large spaces run into inter-process communication bottlenecks. I.e. sure,
> we can have 10 computers compute the same thing with different inputs and
> fuse the outputs. But we can't do the same thing with 1k computers without
> having "bus" or "backbone" bandwidth problems.
>
>
>
> This sort of thing seems pragmatically clear when you talk about your
> issues handling "serial consciousness". And, at risk of conflating 2
> unrelated weird things (quantum with consciousness) for no good reason,
> there's a *coherence* to the parallel processing that goes on in quantum
> computing that kinda-sorta feels like your reduction to a serial
> attention/behavior in parsing consciousness. A loss of that coherence
> results in separate things, whereas a retention of the coherence maintains
> your "monism". But, in the end, it's all about the orthogonality between
> space and time and the *scales* of space and time wherein such
> orthogonality breaks down.
>
>
>
> I hope that's clear. I'm a bit occupied with debugging an uncooperative
> simulation at the moment.
>
>
>
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