[FRIAM] haldane — ethology

Tue Jun 30 23:45:43 EDT 2020

Hi, Frank, 

Well I cannot say that you have “steelmanned” me, to use a local term of art.  See Larding below: 

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> On Behalf Of Frank Wimberly
Sent: Tuesday, June 30, 2020 7:56 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam at redfish.com>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] haldane — ethology

Good question, Dave.  I have a lot of experience with rabbits and with dogs.  I find the sense of a relationship with dogs immensely greater.  Of course, I was shooting at the rabbits at ages 10-16.  Maybe they didn't want a relationship with me.  But I've also had more congenial interactions with rabbits.  My impression is that their highest priorities are eating and eliminating.  Dogs love to play, be scratched and petted. They get anxious when their people leave and ecstatic when they return.  I could go on.  I feel confident that dogs have a richer inner life than rabbits.  Nick, for example, will say that you can not experience the inner life of "an other" because the only thing observable is its/her/his behavior even to itself.  [NST===>i.e., there is nothing that constitutes the inner life of an organism<===nst] TUnless he's changed his mind he doesn't think inner lives exist.

[NST===>Well, unless one understands “inner life” in some way quite different from your understanding, say, for instance, the sense in which Glen offered it, some weeks back.  <===nst] 

  A position that I think he has embraced is the idea that a person infers his own feelings by observing his own behaviors.  I asked him recently what *is* that observer and he hasn't answered yet. [NST===>I acknowledge that there is a stream of experience, that all experiences are experiences of other experiences, and the experience of “me” is just another experience, on a par with my experiences of you, or the rabbit. <===nst] I  Nick, I apologize for picking on you but you are the only one I know who has taken that position.  Besides Laird. 

[NST===>Even Laird waffled <https://www.researchgate.net/publication/260060117_A_BEHAVIORIST_ACCOUNT_OF_EMOTIONS_AND_FEELINGS_MAKING_SENSE_OF_JAMES_D_LAIRD'S_FEELINGS_THE_PERCEPTION_OF_SELF> .  There’s Eric Charles, of course.  <===nst] 

 Please correct me if I have misrepresented your views.

[NST===>I suspect that proper philosophers would say I shouldn’t make existence claims; I should only claim that there is nothing of which we speak when we speak of it.  Or to speak of it as “inner” is oxymoronic.  Or, there is something that we are talking about, but it is not in any useful sense, “inner”.  Or, that as most people deploy it, it is simply obscurantist, distractionary blather.  You know, one of those things.  

<===nst] 

Frank

---
Frank C. Wimberly
140 Calle Ojo Feliz, 
Santa Fe, NM 87505

505 670-9918
Santa Fe, NM

On Tue, Jun 30, 2020, 7:27 PM Prof David West <profwest at fastmail.fm <mailto:profwest at fastmail.fm> > wrote:

just came across this quote:

“it is difficult to be sure how a rabbit feels at any time. Indeed many rabbits make no serious attempt to cooperate with scientists” (Haldane 1932).

How do ethologists get past this issue?

Is the bias against an interior "consciousness" simply pique because with rabbits, "what we have here is a failure to communicate." [Cool Hand Luke]

davew

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