[FRIAM] [EXT] Re: A pluralistic model of the mind?

[Eric Charles]

John,
This is a wonderful question, and though it has already gone one way in the
thread, I want to point out that there is another way it can go. "Are you
really asserting," you ask, a bit rephrased, "that the bear I think is in
the woods is somehow *out there* even when there is no bear?"

 We COULD understand your question as a
philosophical/ontological/metaphysical one.  Along these lines, Glen
channels Nick fairly well, and points out that the judgement of the
in-woods-bear is illusory is a post-hoc judgement, which one can only
arrive based on *later* experience. The judgement of "real" vs. "illusion"
is after the fact, and the fact is that the initial experience is "bear in
woods" without any such baggage. Nick brings in that this is a bit of a
statistical issue, with expectations being based on past experience, and he
points out that the "problem of induction" reminds us that the next time
could always be different. Glen rightly chimes in with the observation that
it is nigh impossible for us to see anything "fully prove out". That point
is wonderful, because it brings us to Peirce's definition of "Truth".
Recall that Peirce is the first combination History/Philosophy/Anthropology
of Science guy. Sure, there is a lot written about science before Peirce,
but Peirce has read the actual records of the scientists, and is a highly
reputed scientist, and is interested in what Scientists are actually doing,
not what they say they are doing, or what it might make abstract sense for
them to be doing. Thus, when on good behavior, Peirce is explicitly
articulating The Scientist's working definition of Truth: Truth is that
upon which we would ultimately agree, when the dust of all the
investigations settle. Truth is *exactly *that which *will be *fully proved
out, should it take millennia for the proving. And until the dust settles,
all assertions of Truth are provisional. Or, to phrase it differently, when
a scientists asserts the truth of a conclusion within their field, they are
exactly asserting that the conclusion will fully prove out in future
investigation, and nothing more. If the conclusion doesn't prove out, then
they were wrong. Any scientists trying to assert they are doing something
else, something philosophically/ontologically/metaphysically deeper than
that is, on Peirce's account, misrepresenting their actual activity and/or
they have squarely stepped outside the role of Scientist.

We COULD understand your question as something bordering philosophy and
psychology (at least as they were understood in the early 1900s). Returning
to the start... That bear in the woods is initially experienced as
out-there, and remains experienced as out-there, unless some later
experience leads you to the conclusion that it is *not* out-there. Given
John's initial question, we can surmise that the further investigation will
lead you to not only conclude that there *is* no bear out there, but that
there *never was* (the latter being a second conclusion, presumably
distinct from the first). But when - via further investigation - we
determine the bear was never-in-the-woods, what do we conclude? Is it
possible to conclude "I was wrong that the bear was out there" without
jumping immediately to "the bear was in-here the whole time"? Nick asserts
that we can conclude our initial belief inaccurate without jumping
immediately to the existence of "mental bears" in the
mind/soul-theater/brain. He asserts that is possible, both because
"in-here" creates a host of philosophical problems, and because we must not
let the 20-steps-down-the-road conclusion color our view of the initial
experience. The initial experience is unalterably of "a bear in the woods".
That experience happened, past-tense, and it some sort of screwy post-hoc
shenanigans to try use that conclusion to reinterpret the initial
experience into something it wasn't. At this point, while we are clearly
drawing upon what we laid out as Peircian in the first paragraph, we are
actually in the middle of a William-James-esque rant about "The
Psychologist's Fallacy" - which is when the conclusion of an analysis is
mistaken for the starting point of the analysis.

We also COULD understand your question as a more straightforward
psychological one. Returning to the start... What is it that you are
referring to, when you say that you think there is a bear in the woods? If
you are being honest, I assert, it means that your behavior is a function
of the out-there bear: You would resist wandering into that part of the
woods; if you did find yourself in that part of the woods, you would be
extra-vigilant; you would warn others about the bear; etc. The actual
location of the thing your behavior is directed towards is in-the-woods.
Should it be determined, at a later time, that there is no bear in the
woods, that changes nothing. Your behavior was not, in any way, directed at
an in-the-head bear. The bear of your thoughts, whether those thoughts
prove accurate or inaccurate, was  100% out-there-in-the-woods. That you
"thought there was a bear in the woods" is nothing more than a description,
confirmed to both yourself and to any observant third party, that your
behavior *was* a function of an out-there bear. We might have all sorts of
questions about how one's behavior comes to be directed at an entity that
is later concluded to not exist, but that is a totally different issue.
There are a myriad of potential explanations for how that might occur, on
various time scales and various levels of analysis (neurological
explanations, evolutionary explanations, life-span developmental
explanations, operant-conditioning explanations, broad physiological
explanations, etc., etc.). So long as we keep our descriptions and
explanations clear, we will never make the mistake of substituting a
particular, narrow, type of explanation (e.g., neurological) for the thing
to be explained (e.g., that my behavior was directed towards an
in-the-woods bear). The bear you are thinking of is in the woods, and even
if we later find out that there is not a bear in the woods, the bear of
your thoughts, the bear your behavior was directed at, the bear your
behavior was a reliable function of, *is* in the woods. At this point, we
are in E. B. Holt's domain - and Holt sees himself as providing the logical
end point of William James's work - and James's work is heavily influenced
by Peirce.

So... John.... which of those questions were you asking? Or do none of
those match up?


-----------
Eric P. Charles, Ph.D.
Department of Justice - Personnel Psychologist
American University - Adjunct Instructor
<echarles at american.edu>


On Fri, Dec 6, 2019 at 9:28 AM John Kennison <JKennison at clarku.edu> wrote:

> Hi Nick, and Eric,
>
> I am grappling with Nick's ideas that mental states must be physical
> things and even are "out there" rather than "in here". What about
> delusions? If I think I see bear in the woods but I am mistaken, is this
> false perception "out there" even when the bear is not?
>
> --John
> ------------------------------
> *From:* Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> on behalf of Eric Charles <
> eric.phillip.charles at gmail.com>
> *Sent:* Thursday, December 5, 2019 8:41 PM
> *To:* The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <
> friam at redfish.com>
> *Subject:* [EXT] Re: [FRIAM] A pluralistic model of the mind?
>
> 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/
> <https://nam10.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=http%3A%2F%2Ffriam.471366.n2.nabble.com%2F&data=02%7C01%7Cjkennison%40clarku.edu%7Cd797357f28854a68954e08d779ed8593%7Cb5b2263d68aa453eb972aa1421410f80%7C1%7C0%7C637111933386669699&sdata=I3i4o%2FUwNgskuqC9FZm%2FJ7ih8ktHpk7XmBUVU2wsO8M%3D&reserved=0>
>
>
>
> 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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