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

Mon Dec 9 08:20:25 EST 2019

I think we've gotten somewhere.

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 Mon, Dec 9, 2019, 4:08 AM Prof David West <profwest at fastmail.fm> wrote:

> Nick,
>
> No need to be ill at ease — I do not mean illusory in, or with, any
> sense/degree/intimation of dualism.
>
> Ultimately, either: I am more of a monist than thou. Or, you are equally a
> mystic as I.
>
> You cannot speak of Experience without explicitly or implicitly asserting
> an Experiencer --->> dualism. If there is an Experience "of which you
> cannot speak," or of which "whatever is spoken is incorrect or incomplete;"
> then you are as much a mystic as Lao Tzu and the Tao.
>
> Because your sensibilities will not allow you to admit your mysticism, I
> offer an alternative: you are an epistemological monist but not an
> ontological monist. On the latter point; I have already accused you of
> believing in an ontological "Thing" other than experience: a human soul or
> essence or spirit.
>
> My monism is both ontological (except for the myth that infinitely long
> ago, and infinitely in the future, there were two things "intelligence" and
> "matter") and epistemological (accepting that my epistemology is ineffable).
>
>
> davew
>
>
>
> On Fri, Dec 6, 2019, at 8:49 PM, thompnickson2 at gmail.com wrote:
>
> Hi, David,
>
>
>
> Thanks for channeling me so accurately.  It is a talent to channel what
> one does not agree with so faithfully that the person channeled is
> satisfied.   Thank you for that.
>
>
>
> I would have only one ill-ease, about the last part of your version:
>
>
>
> *both equally illusory.*
>
>
>
> I think “illusory” is used here, in your way, not in the way I would use
> it, but to refer to the world that truly is but which we an never truly
> grasp.  I.e., dualistically.  For me, an illusion is just an experience
> that does not prove out.  I arrive at my coffee house three days in a row
> and there is a “day old” old-fashioned plain donut available for purchase
> at half price.  I experience that “donut at 4” is something I can count
> on.  That turns out not to be the case because, another customer starts
> coming in at 3.59 and commandeering all the donuts.  My experience was
> illusory.  Or, think flips of a coin.  You flip a coin 7 times heads and
> you come to the conclusion that the coin is biased.  However, you flip it a
> thousand times more and its behavior over the 1007 flips is consistent with
> randomness.  You come to the conclusion that the bias was probably an
> illusion.
>
>
>
> My understanding of illusory is probabilistic and provisional.
>
>
>
> Nick
>
>
>
>
>
> Nick Thompson
>
> Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology
>
> Clark University
>
> *ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com
> <ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com>https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/
> <https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/>*
>
>
>
>
>
>
> *From:* Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> *On Behalf Of *Prof David West
> *Sent:* Friday, December 6, 2019 10:16 AM
> *To:* friam at redfish.com
> *Subject:* Re: [FRIAM] [EXT] Re: A pluralistic model of the mind?
>
>
>
> I dare not really speak for Nick, but I think the essence of his position
> is that there is no "out there" nor is there any "in here." There is only a
> flow of "experience" that is sometimes "evaluated" (interpreted?) to a
> false distinction of in or out — both equally illusory.
>
>
>
> davew
>
>
>
>
>
> On Fri, Dec 6, 2019, at 3:27 PM, John Kennison 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
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> 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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