[FRIAM] Warring Darwinians for Glen, Steve

Wed Apr 29 17:27:12 EDT 2020

Yeh! Right! Like what  Eric said. 

I may confuse the “hard” problem with the “what is it like to be a bat” problem,  which I also find a bit baffling because to me it seems also not to be a problem, let alone a hard one.  Seems, as Peirce says, just to be a matter of “an arrangement of language.”  See  <https://www.researchgate.net/publication/281287965_Interview_with_an_Old_New_Realist> "old new realist" of  which the most relevant passage to the present discussion goes as follows: 

Devil’s advocate: But, Nick, while “paining” sounds nice in an academic paper, it is just silly otherwise. The other day I felt quite nauseous after a meal. I am interested in what it’s like to feel nauseous, and you cannot honestly claim that you don’t know what feeling nauseous is like. Behavioral correlates aren’t at issue; stop changing the subject.

What is “being nauseous” like? It’s like being on a small boat in a choppy sea, it’s like being in a world that is revolving when others see it as stable, it’s like being gray in the face and turning away from the sights and smells of food that others find attractive, it’s like having your head in the toilet when others have theirs in the refrigerator.

But you have brought us to the crux of the problem. Nobody has ever been satisfied with my answers to these “What is it like to be a          ?” questions. “What is it like to be in pain? What is it like to be a bat? What is it like to be Nick Thompson?” *Notice how the grammar is contorted. If you ask the question in its natural order, you begin to see a path to an answer. “What is being Nick Thompson like?” “It’s like running around like a chicken with its head cut off.” OK. I get that. I see me doing that. You see me doing that. But most people won’t be satisfied with that sort of answer, because it’s the same as the answer to the question, “What do people like Nick Thompson do?” and therefore appears to convey no information that is inherently private. To me, the question, “What is it like to be X?”, has been fully answered when you have said where X-like people can be found and what they will be doing there. However, I seem to be pretty alone in that view.

Devil’s advocate: Now I see why you annoy people. I ask you a perfectly straightforward question about the quality of an experience and you keep trying to saddle me with a description of a behavior. You just change the subject. You clearly understand me when I ask you about the quality of feeling nauseous, yet you answer like a person who doesn’t understand.

Well, here you just prove my point by refusing to believe me when I say that; for me, feeling is a kind of doing, an exploring of the world. Where does somebody who believes that mental states are private, and that each person has privileged access to their own mental states, stand to deny me my account of my own mental states? You can’t have it both ways….

The devil’s advocate, here, is, of course Eric Charles.

Glen, I realize I have not answered your probe yet.  You are poking at my consistency, and I really need to think hard before I answer, lest I say something inconsistent.  You are asking me, “Is there a here here?” 

Thanks, as always, 

Nick 

*For that matter, what is it like to be a brick?  For those of you who accept such arrangements of language as cogent, on what grounds do you assert that “there is nothing that it is like to be a brick.”  

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

 <mailto: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 Eric Charles
Sent: Wednesday, April 29, 2020 11:12 AM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam at redfish.com>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Warring Darwinians for Glen, Steve

I think we should take the inadequacy of the wastebasket example as evidence that Nick is being honest about really, really not understanding what the hard problem is. That leaves us to wonder what Nick SHOULD say about the hard problem. Obviously, to be consistent with his other thinking about psychology, he has to deny it somehow... and there are not many ways to do that. 

The deny-the-hard-problem option closest to Nick's way of thinking about psychology is, I think, William James's solution. Radical Empiricism predates the modern label "hard problem", but James understood the looming challenge well. I think that, if Nick was pressed properly, he would fall back on something that looked a lot like what James was saying. 

James would assert that there is - for the purpose of the challenge posed - no fundamental difference between any types of qualities of the objects and events around us, and therefore the desired distinction between easy and hard questions is bogus. The questions are all easy, or all hard. If you think they are all "easy", i.e., all tractable scientific questions, then you are a Radical Empiricist. If you think they are all "hard", i.e., ultimately none will yield to scientific inquiry, then you should go straight to dualistic solipsism. And we should all stop pretending there is a middle ground, because the deeper issues won't allow for a middle ground. 

Faced with those options, James chooses Radical Empiricism, asserting that things feel the way they do because that is how they are: Why does X look square? Because, something about it is square, and that aspect of it is what is being responded to. Why does Y feel soft? Because something about it is soft, and that aspect of it is what is being responded to. Why does Z smell fresh? Because something about it is fresh, and that aspect of it is what is being responded to. And in all cases, we can, by various methods, investigate what aspects of the thing are being responded to. Sometimes such investigations will be incredibly difficult; they will be as time-consuming, laborious, and full of dead ends as any other serious scientific endeavor. Sometimes the challenge might be on par with going to the moon or finding serious evidence for the Higgs boson.... and that is hard, hard, hard.... but they we will never be "hard" in Chambers's sense of being inherently impossible to investigate. 

-----------

Eric P. Charles, Ph.D.
Department of Justice - Personnel Psychologist

American University - Adjunct Instructor

On Wed, Apr 29, 2020 at 4:07 AM Jochen Fromm <jofr at cas-group.net <mailto:jofr at cas-group.net> > wrote:

Hi Nick,

I am not sure I understand the wastebasket example, but I would like to encourage you to finish whatever you have started. About the question "why we act" the following book that I just stumbled upon might be interesting:

Why we act: turning bystanders into moral rebels

Catherine A. Sanderson

https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674241831

-J.

-------- Original message --------

From: thompnickson2 at gmail.com <mailto:thompnickson2 at gmail.com>  

Date: 4/29/20 00:55 (GMT+01:00) 

To: 'The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group' <friam at redfish.com <mailto:friam at redfish.com> > 

Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Warring Darwinians for Glen, Steve

Jochen and Eric

I am not writing a book about the hard problem of consciousness because I have never understood what the hard problem of consciousness IS.  Maybe I am not conscious in the way the rest of you are?   For instance, when I miss the wastebasket with a piece of paper I am genuinely unsure whether I am going to get up from my chair and go put it in, or … um …. leave it there for somebody else to pick up.   Once I start to get up from my chair, I am pretty sure, but, hey, if the phone rang at that moment, I might never get across the room, and the wad of paper might still be there the next morning for my wife to cite as further evidence of my male callousness.  The rest of you seem to think that you KNOW what you are going to do in advance of doing it.  If that has anything to do with the hard problem of consciousness, I don’t have that problem.

By the way, my wife KNOWS and will tell  you with alacrity, that whatever I might say, I was NEVER going to pick that piece of paper up.  As evidence, she points to the pile of wadded up pieces of  paper wadded around the wastebasket. 

N

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

 <mailto: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 <mailto:friam-bounces at redfish.com> > On Behalf Of Eric Charles
Sent: Tuesday, April 28, 2020 3:05 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam at redfish.com <mailto:friam at redfish.com> >
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Warring Darwinians for Glen, Steve

Yeah Nick.... have you ever thought of writing a book?!? <cough, cough>

-----------

Eric P. Charles, Ph.D.
Department of Justice - Personnel Psychologist

American University - Adjunct Instructor

On Sun, Apr 26, 2020 at 6:12 PM Jochen Fromm <jofr at cas-group.net <mailto:jofr at cas-group.net> > wrote:

Hi Nick,

have you thought about turning your ideas about the hard problem of consciousness into an article or book? 10 years ago you had this nice idea of a cross section of reality, a unique slice of the same world that is responsible for our subjective experience. Our discussion in 2010 inspired me to write these blog posts (which nobody except Glen read):

http://blog.cas-group.net/2010/11/the-solution-to-the-hard-problem-of-consciousness/

http://blog.cas-group.net/2011/11/path-dependent-subjective-experience/

http://blog.cas-group.net/2013/06/solving_the_problem_of_subjectivity/

I believe this approach is a good explanation for the hard problem. It is what Hollywood has been doing for the last 100 years: showing us what it is like to be someone else. In this sense Hollywood has solved the biggest problem of philosophy. As I said the biggest secrets are often hidden in plain sight.

-J.

-------- Original message --------

From: thompnickson2 at gmail.com <mailto:thompnickson2 at gmail.com>  

Date: 4/26/20 23:05 (GMT+01:00) 

To: 'The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group' <friam at redfish.com <mailto:friam at redfish.com> > 

Cc: gepr at tempusdictum.com <mailto:gepr at tempusdictum.com> , stephen.guerin at redfish.com <mailto:stephen.guerin at redfish.com>  

Subject: [FRIAM] Warring Darwinians for Glen, Steve 

Hi, everybody, 

I am striving mightily to get my brain out of the corvid19 cesspit, and Stephen and Glen have been helping me, in part by talking about an old wrangle that Stephen and I have shared over the role of selection (if any) in evolution.   In these arguments, I have always felt that Stephen has strived to maneuver me into the sights of his largest gun, but, whenever he fires it, the shells seem to go whizzing by me as if fired at somebody else entirely.   So this letter is written primarily to Glen and Steve, but I post it here because I think some few of you (Dave?) may have something to say about what I say, here.   

I have often said that FRIAM saved my intellectual bacon.  I say this because when I came to Santa Fe in 2006, it was to help my wife help my son and his wife raise my infant grandchildren  -- clearly not a full time job.  I justified the venture to my provost with vague hope that I would attach myself either to the evolutionary psychology group at UNM or to the Santa Fe Institute or both.  In fact, neither panned out.  

And thus, cast loose in Santa Fe, I fell into the arms of Stephen, Carl, and Owen, and …   FRIAM.  The attached abstract of  piece I never wrote (because I never could dragoon Gillian Barker into writing for me) reveals the state of my mind at the time.  I was clearly already teetering between selectionist and systemist thinking.  It had dawned on me during my previous sabbatical down the corridor from Lyn Margulis that any theory of natural selection required as a precondition additivity of variance, and nothing that we had learned about epigenesis in the previous gave us much hope that additivity of variance was a likely condition of inheritance.  So, if additivity of variance was not an obvious consequence of epigenetic relations, it must somehow be an achievement of them.  Two possibilities occurred to me at the time: one is that genetic mechanisms were themselves selected for “fairness” – a selectionist explanation; or, that fairness somehow fell out of the underlying chemical and biological structures – a systemist explanation. 

This is already enough biography to choke a horse, so I shall wrap up, here.  Suffice it to say that, when Stephen showed me Wolfram’s book I was stunned.  Here was a demonstration of how simple rules could generate complex structures without any nudges from any selection mechanism.  Could additivity of variance and, therefore, natural selection, itself “fall out” of chemical and energetic relations.  Could systems coddle natural selection the way rear flank downdrafts coddle a tornado.   Could we have natural selection for free. 

Only in my late 60’s at the time, I harbored the illusion that I myself could be come a master of the art of computation.  Alas, that ship had sailed.  So, now you see me.  “I yam what I yam,” as Popeye used  to say.  But one thing I yam NOT is the ferocious adherent to genic selection theory that Stephen needs me to be if I am going to be felled by his biggest gun. 

And now I have to cook dinner for my 13 and 17 year old grandchildren.  The oldest is learning rendering from Stephen.  Life will go on!

Ever grateful for your assistance, 

Nick 

.-. .- -. -.. --- -- -..-. -.. --- - ... -..-. .- -. -.. -..-. -.. .- ... .... . ...
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Zoom Fridays 9:30a-12p Mtn GMT-6  bit.ly/virtualfriam <http://bit.ly/virtualfriam> 
unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
archives: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
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.-. .- -. -.. --- -- -..-. -.. --- - ... -..-. .- -. -.. -..-. -.. .- ... .... . ...
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Zoom Fridays 9:30a-12p Mtn GMT-6  bit.ly/virtualfriam <http://bit.ly/virtualfriam> 
unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
archives: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ 

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

 <mailto: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 Eric Charles
Sent: Wednesday, April 29, 2020 11:12 AM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam at redfish.com>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Warring Darwinians for Glen, Steve

I think we should take the inadequacy of the wastebasket example as evidence that Nick is being honest about really, really not understanding what the hard problem is. That leaves us to wonder what Nick SHOULD say about the hard problem. Obviously, to be consistent with his other thinking about psychology, he has to deny it somehow... and there are not many ways to do that. 

The deny-the-hard-problem option closest to Nick's way of thinking about psychology is, I think, William James's solution. Radical Empiricism predates the modern label "hard problem", but James understood the looming challenge well. I think that, if Nick was pressed properly, he would fall back on something that looked a lot like what James was saying. 

James would assert that there is - for the purpose of the challenge posed - no fundamental difference between any types of qualities of the objects and events around us, and therefore the desired distinction between easy and hard questions is bogus. The questions are all easy, or all hard. If you think they are all "easy", i.e., all tractable scientific questions, then you are a Radical Empiricist. If you think they are all "hard", i.e., ultimately none will yield to scientific inquiry, then you should go straight to dualistic solipsism. And we should all stop pretending there is a middle ground, because the deeper issues won't allow for a middle ground. 

Faced with those options, James chooses Radical Empiricism, asserting that things feel the way they do because that is how they are: Why does X look square? Because, something about it is square, and that aspect of it is what is being responded to. Why does Y feel soft? Because something about it is soft, and that aspect of it is what is being responded to. Why does Z smell fresh? Because something about it is fresh, and that aspect of it is what is being responded to. And in all cases, we can, by various methods, investigate what aspects of the thing are being responded to. Sometimes such investigations will be incredibly difficult; they will be as time-consuming, laborious, and full of dead ends as any other serious scientific endeavor. Sometimes the challenge might be on par with going to the moon or finding serious evidence for the Higgs boson.... and that is hard, hard, hard.... but they we will never be "hard" in Chambers's sense of being inherently impossible to investigate. 

-----------

Eric P. Charles, Ph.D.
Department of Justice - Personnel Psychologist

American University - Adjunct Instructor

On Wed, Apr 29, 2020 at 4:07 AM Jochen Fromm <jofr at cas-group.net <mailto:jofr at cas-group.net> > wrote:

Hi Nick,

I am not sure I understand the wastebasket example, but I would like to encourage you to finish whatever you have started. About the question "why we act" the following book that I just stumbled upon might be interesting:

Why we act: turning bystanders into moral rebels

Catherine A. Sanderson

https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674241831

-J.

-------- Original message --------

From: thompnickson2 at gmail.com <mailto:thompnickson2 at gmail.com>  

Date: 4/29/20 00:55 (GMT+01:00) 

To: 'The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group' <friam at redfish.com <mailto:friam at redfish.com> > 

Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Warring Darwinians for Glen, Steve

Jochen and Eric

I am not writing a book about the hard problem of consciousness because I have never understood what the hard problem of consciousness IS.  Maybe I am not conscious in the way the rest of you are?   For instance, when I miss the wastebasket with a piece of paper I am genuinely unsure whether I am going to get up from my chair and go put it in, or … um …. leave it there for somebody else to pick up.   Once I start to get up from my chair, I am pretty sure, but, hey, if the phone rang at that moment, I might never get across the room, and the wad of paper might still be there the next morning for my wife to cite as further evidence of my male callousness.  The rest of you seem to think that you KNOW what you are going to do in advance of doing it.  If that has anything to do with the hard problem of consciousness, I don’t have that problem.

By the way, my wife KNOWS and will tell  you with alacrity, that whatever I might say, I was NEVER going to pick that piece of paper up.  As evidence, she points to the pile of wadded up pieces of  paper wadded around the wastebasket. 

N

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

 <mailto: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 <mailto:friam-bounces at redfish.com> > On Behalf Of Eric Charles
Sent: Tuesday, April 28, 2020 3:05 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam at redfish.com <mailto:friam at redfish.com> >
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Warring Darwinians for Glen, Steve

Yeah Nick.... have you ever thought of writing a book?!? <cough, cough>

-----------

Eric P. Charles, Ph.D.
Department of Justice - Personnel Psychologist

American University - Adjunct Instructor

On Sun, Apr 26, 2020 at 6:12 PM Jochen Fromm <jofr at cas-group.net <mailto:jofr at cas-group.net> > wrote:

Hi Nick,

have you thought about turning your ideas about the hard problem of consciousness into an article or book? 10 years ago you had this nice idea of a cross section of reality, a unique slice of the same world that is responsible for our subjective experience. Our discussion in 2010 inspired me to write these blog posts (which nobody except Glen read):

http://blog.cas-group.net/2010/11/the-solution-to-the-hard-problem-of-consciousness/

http://blog.cas-group.net/2011/11/path-dependent-subjective-experience/

http://blog.cas-group.net/2013/06/solving_the_problem_of_subjectivity/

I believe this approach is a good explanation for the hard problem. It is what Hollywood has been doing for the last 100 years: showing us what it is like to be someone else. In this sense Hollywood has solved the biggest problem of philosophy. As I said the biggest secrets are often hidden in plain sight.

-J.

-------- Original message --------

From: thompnickson2 at gmail.com <mailto:thompnickson2 at gmail.com>  

Date: 4/26/20 23:05 (GMT+01:00) 

To: 'The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group' <friam at redfish.com <mailto:friam at redfish.com> > 

Cc: gepr at tempusdictum.com <mailto:gepr at tempusdictum.com> , stephen.guerin at redfish.com <mailto:stephen.guerin at redfish.com>  

Subject: [FRIAM] Warring Darwinians for Glen, Steve 

Hi, everybody, 

I am striving mightily to get my brain out of the corvid19 cesspit, and Stephen and Glen have been helping me, in part by talking about an old wrangle that Stephen and I have shared over the role of selection (if any) in evolution.   In these arguments, I have always felt that Stephen has strived to maneuver me into the sights of his largest gun, but, whenever he fires it, the shells seem to go whizzing by me as if fired at somebody else entirely.   So this letter is written primarily to Glen and Steve, but I post it here because I think some few of you (Dave?) may have something to say about what I say, here.   

I have often said that FRIAM saved my intellectual bacon.  I say this because when I came to Santa Fe in 2006, it was to help my wife help my son and his wife raise my infant grandchildren  -- clearly not a full time job.  I justified the venture to my provost with vague hope that I would attach myself either to the evolutionary psychology group at UNM or to the Santa Fe Institute or both.  In fact, neither panned out.  

And thus, cast loose in Santa Fe, I fell into the arms of Stephen, Carl, and Owen, and …   FRIAM.  The attached abstract of  piece I never wrote (because I never could dragoon Gillian Barker into writing for me) reveals the state of my mind at the time.  I was clearly already teetering between selectionist and systemist thinking.  It had dawned on me during my previous sabbatical down the corridor from Lyn Margulis that any theory of natural selection required as a precondition additivity of variance, and nothing that we had learned about epigenesis in the previous gave us much hope that additivity of variance was a likely condition of inheritance.  So, if additivity of variance was not an obvious consequence of epigenetic relations, it must somehow be an achievement of them.  Two possibilities occurred to me at the time: one is that genetic mechanisms were themselves selected for “fairness” – a selectionist explanation; or, that fairness somehow fell out of the underlying chemical and biological structures – a systemist explanation. 

This is already enough biography to choke a horse, so I shall wrap up, here.  Suffice it to say that, when Stephen showed me Wolfram’s book I was stunned.  Here was a demonstration of how simple rules could generate complex structures without any nudges from any selection mechanism.  Could additivity of variance and, therefore, natural selection, itself “fall out” of chemical and energetic relations.  Could systems coddle natural selection the way rear flank downdrafts coddle a tornado.   Could we have natural selection for free. 

Only in my late 60’s at the time, I harbored the illusion that I myself could be come a master of the art of computation.  Alas, that ship had sailed.  So, now you see me.  “I yam what I yam,” as Popeye used  to say.  But one thing I yam NOT is the ferocious adherent to genic selection theory that Stephen needs me to be if I am going to be felled by his biggest gun. 

And now I have to cook dinner for my 13 and 17 year old grandchildren.  The oldest is learning rendering from Stephen.  Life will go on!

Ever grateful for your assistance, 

Nick 

.-. .- -. -.. --- -- -..-. -.. --- - ... -..-. .- -. -.. -..-. -.. .- ... .... . ...
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Zoom Fridays 9:30a-12p Mtn GMT-6  bit.ly/virtualfriam <http://bit.ly/virtualfriam> 
unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
archives: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ 

.-. .- -. -.. --- -- -..-. -.. --- - ... -..-. .- -. -.. -..-. -.. .- ... .... . ...
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Zoom Fridays 9:30a-12p Mtn GMT-6  bit.ly/virtualfriam <http://bit.ly/virtualfriam> 
unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
archives: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ 

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