[FRIAM] Is consciousness a mystery? (used to be "mystery...deeper".T

Tue Jul 9 20:56:44 EDT 2024

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

505 670-9918
Santa Fe, NM

On Tue, Jul 9, 2024, 5:35 PM Santafe <desmith at santafe.edu> wrote:

> Yeah; wish it were possible to say something interesting.
>
> The aspect of, or within, the field of experience, that “consciousness”
> and other related words are somehow “about", should be general among all of
> us who are made of about the same stuff.  (So, the vertebrates, the
> mammals, the social mammals, the hunting-social mammals; etc.)  I say that
> as an assertion within the network of scientific representations, in the
> kind of way we normally walk around that network by extrapolation, like
> spiders along threads in a web.  So should have many of the familiar
> successes; surely has all the recognized hazards.
>
> But [consciousness]-the-term is a word in a language.  So it has formal
> aspects.  What is it doing as we use it?  Maybe it is putting up “an
> object” toward which attention can be directed.  One would glibly say
> “making consciousness available as an object of attention”, but I don’t
> want to say that.  The aspect of, or within, the field of experience is
> whatever it is.  When the capacity for, and use of, a language brings
> objects into that formal world which can be targets for attention, we don’t
> have any promises for how good the objects are as proxies for whatever they
> are meant to be proxies for.  Or even what is the nature of such “objects”,
> a thing that has to be made more clear, along with whatever those objects
> are proxies for, and whatever is the associational relation of the two.
>
> I am aware, while speaking, that what I would like is to go one step
> further than the logical positivists in characterizing formal systems as
> opposed to characterizing all of life.  I would like to say that, when
> something is really a formal system, it has been made an object in the
> world.  So one can mechanise it.  What Hilbert imagined maybe mathematics
> could be, and which we seem to be pretty sure mathematics cannot _only_ be,
> though it can have parts of that nature.  That means we can say things
> about the mechanistic relations among tokens in formal systems.
>
> The positivists seemed to me (in my ignorance of almost-everything
> historical) to have the tastes of logicians; they wanted to work out
> technical things.  They were willing to put to the side the questions of
> how that logical edifice ever “stands for” “something” in the broader field
> of life.  If they made an important mistake, it was to go beyond putting
> them to the side, to dismissing them entirely.  Their notion of
> “pseudo-questions” is generally apt where I can find concrete applications
> of it; but in dismissing what was driving people to make those
> unsatisfactory attempts, they threw out much of what is interesting to try
> to do.
>
> That is the more-literal landscape to which my metaphor of the spider in
> the web alluded.
>
> Anyway, whatever its form, which varied among people and changed over time
> on into the modern era, that separation left what they were doing very
> limited, but within that, I feel like they made category distinctions that
> remain useful.  They get even more useful when one is very clear about how
> limited they are, and tries to put them in a Pragmatist frame.  Even better
> when we apply Pragmatism to itself.  This is where we try to deal, for
> real, with the way everything formal hangs in mid-air, as its very nature.
>
> Back from that digression:
>
> The things that we can’t export into machinery in the world (formal
> systems with the definition written in the language of the formalism), may
> remain actually still formal systems, but they become like a computer
> program that can only run on a certain kind of hardware, which is us, and
> as we don’t understand that hardware very well, we can’t make very good
> proxies of it (or know whether we have done so), leaving us unsure what
> formal systems can run on which hardware.
>
> With all those caveats and hedges in all the over-interpretations I don’t
> want for wording, if I were to suggest what is different about us with
> language from dogs that are not using this particular kind of formal layer
> (I strongly suspect, again said like the spider walking along the web), it
> is this “making consciousness an object of attention”.
>
> It seems to me that, if we promised to remain constantly alert to the fact
> that all those terms are placeholder terms in placeholder usage
> conventions, we could ask why it matters and what it does to “make
> consciousness an object of attention”, while also “inhabiting” it (or
> whatever word), as contrasted with mostly-just inhabiting, and letting
> attention do all the other things it is already also doing.
>
> Eric
>
>
>
>
> > On Jul 10, 2024, at 7:37 AM, Nicholas Thompson <thompnickson2 at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> >
> > Frank
> >
> > What you laid out is an abduction,,isn't it?;  I don[t think I am doing
> that in either of my syllogisms.  But I am no logician;
> >
> > An induction is a valid inference, although a probabilistic one, at
> least on Peirce's account.
> >
> > David,
> >
> > If humans are conscious, I am pretty sure that animals are conscious, .
> >
> > I am just not sure that humans are conscious.
> >
> > I am not sure why the fact that your dog loves you, implies its
> consciousness.  George agrees with you that things like love are signs of
> consciousness, but he could never explain why.
> >
> > Eric,
> >
> > Yes, I am pretty sure I am a worthless piece of Baconian Behaviorist
> Crap.  Stipulated.  Still, I like your questions.  So,  do you see any way
> of proceeding to develop those question in a such a way that we are roughly
> on the same page as we go?  If you do, I would love your help, here.
> >
> > All,
> >
> > Sorry, it is hot, here,  and I am cranky.  I resent you all sitting in
> your air-conditioned offices being paid huge sums of money to be cool.  I
> just thought it might be nice to have a conversation about consciousness in
> which everybody is not sitting in front of their own hut shouting.  Happy
> to abide by any method that isn-t like an explosion in a concept shop.
> >
> > Nick
> >
> > Nick
> >
> >
> >
> > On Tue, Jul 9, 2024 at 5:00 PM Frank Wimberly <wimberly3 at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> > Nick, That is not a valid syllogism.
> >
> > All X have Y
> > x has Y
> > Therefore x is an X
> >
> > Is that a correct formalization of what you said?
> >
> > ---
> > Frank C. Wimberly
> > 140 Calle Ojo Feliz,
> > Santa Fe, NM 87505
> >
> > 505 670-9918
> > Santa Fe, NM
> >
> > On Tue, Jul 9, 2024, 1:54 PM Nicholas Thompson <thompnickson2 at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> > While I find all the  ancillary considerations raised on the original
> thread extremely interesting,  I would like to reopen the discussion of
> Conscious as a Mystery and ask that those that join it stay close to the
> question of what consciousness is and how we know it when we see it.  Baby
> Steps.
> >
> > Where were we?   I think I was asking Jochen, and perhaps Peitr and
> anybody else who thought that animals were not conscious (i.e., not aware
> of their own awareness)  what basis they had in experience for thinking
> that..  One offering for such an experience is the absence of language in
> animals.  Because my cat cannot  describe his experience in words, he
> cannot be  conscious.  This requires the following syllogism:
> >
> > Nothing that does not employ a language (or two?) is conscious.
> > Animals (with ;the possible exception of signing apes) do not employ
> languages.
> > Ergo, Animals are not conscious.
> >
> > But I was trying to find out the basis for the first premise.  How do we
> know that there are no non-linguistic beings that are not conscious.  I
> hope we could rule out the answer,"because they are non-linguistic",  both
> in its strictly  tautological or merely circular form.
> >
> > There is a closely related syllogism which we also need to explore:
> >
> > All language using beings are conscious.
> > George Peter Tremblay IV is a language-using being.
> > George Peter Tremblay IV is conscious.
> >
> > Both are valid syllogisms.  But where do the premises come from.
> >
> > Nick
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