[FRIAM] Warring Darwinians for Glen, Steve

[uǝlƃ ☣]

OK. Here's the setup:

Nick says 1: Metaphorical thinker maps their experience onto another's experience, modeling that other's experience with their own.

Nick says 2: I don't understand the hard problem of consciousness.

Glen says: Expressions 1 and 2 are contradictory.

I suppose it's on me to show that they're contradictory. The idea that abduction is an inference from the unique to a class might be helpful. But I think it's a jargonal distraction. So, here goes.

Let's propose that there exist unique situations/objects ... things or points in time or whatever that are not, cannot be, exactly the same anywhere else or at any other time. They are absolutely, completely unique in the entire universe. Because they are unique, there's absolutely no way any *other* thing/situation can perfectly model them. E.g. no 2 electrons are in exactly the same state at exactly the same time in exactly the same place. There will always be something different about any 2 unique things. So analogies/metaphors/maps from 1 unique thing to another unique thing will always be slightly off.

Now, a metaphor/model/analogy/mapping thinker will accept an imperfect mapping and go ahead and model a unique thing with another unique thing. That's what a metaphorical thinker does, inaccurately models one thing with another thing.

The hard problem of consciousness is that any given creature/object/thing/situation has a qualitative experience, a *comprehension* of the situation/state/condition that creature finds itself it at any given time, any given place, or any given trajectory through time and space. The hard problem is one of uniqueness. The uniqueness of that experience.

The AI/ALife component of the hard problem asks how can we build a machine that will have these experiences. But that's not important to this conversation. The modeling/mapping/metaphorical component is how can any one thing (machine, rock, golfball, human) *understand* the experience of any other thing (car, elephant, galaxy, bacterium).

The answer is that one thing *models* the other thing imperfectly. The only reason anyone would be a "metaphorical thinker" is because they recognize the hard problem. If they don't recognize the hard problem, then there's no need to use metaphor. Sure, it might be convenient to use metaphor, but there's no NEED because there is no hard problem.

Therefore, Nick *does* understand the hard problem, even if only tacitly, and even if he doesn't *believe* in it. He states it and restates it every time he insists that thinking is metaphorical.


On 4/29/20 8:19 PM, thompnickson2 at gmail.com wrote:
> I think the first was Glen, and I agree, I don’t see how a belief in the centrality of metaphor to thought commits one to a belief in the hardness of, or even the existence of, the hard problem. 
> 
>  
> 
> It was me that floated the thought that “all thinking is metaphorical”. (I was trying to draw Dave West in on my side of the argument, at the time.)  I meant only to say that the application of any word (save perhaps grammatical operators or proper names) involves abduction, which I think we both believe, is a very close relative of metaphor.  You and I have struggled over this for years, decades, almost, but I think we believe that abduction is an inference from the properties of an object to the class to which it belongs whereas a metaphor carries the process further in some way I have trouble defining.  For instance, when Darwin said that evolution was caused by selection, it definitely was an abduction of sort.  But as selection was understood at the time, it involved the intentional intervention of a breeder.  So the metaphor not only abduces selection, it seems also rupture the original concept in some say. 


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