[FRIAM] Why the Mystery of Consciousness Is Deeper Than We Thought
Nicholas Thompson
thompnickson2 at gmail.com
Wed Jul 17 21:54:06 EDT 2024
Stephen,
Thank you for prompting me to respond to Dan’s scaling questionaire. I
tried to when I first received it, but quit because I could not recognize
my own thinking in most of the alternatives.
But you have asked me to be a good sport, so here I am.
If you offer me, as in Q1 a choice between materialism and dualism I am
stumped. I am an avowed monist who believes that all monisms are more or
less equivalent – materialism, idealism, or neutral), and I believe that
dualism is one of the great mind-fucks of all time, But I don’t think the
brain has a damned thing to do with the definition of consciousness and
that it is disrespectful to brain research to consider it in that way. So
give me a 0.7 on Q1.
So, on Q2, my response is stronger than the question allows. Consciousness
is not shaped by relations to the environment, it IS one of them. So put
me down for a 1.2 on that one.
I think Q3 is just berserk. I think the attribution, "X is conscious [of
Y]" is a third-person attribution. I can see that X is responding to some
portion of our shared experience. So, when attribute to myself, I am
making a first-person attribution while adopting the perspective of a
third-person. If we start with the belief that first-person attributions
must be, in principle, different from ordinary third-person ones, then we
are left with a “mystery" But, I don’t think that; I think my concept of
self is just my attempt to model me from the outside So, put me down for
a zero on this one.
On Q4, I think my response is probably “meh” or “nu”. On the one hand I
agree that we need evidence at the level of a relation to identify it,
still we locate it at the individual. This is called metonomy and is
frerquent in speach. For instance, we locate motivation in individuals at
a momennt,but we know motivations from broad patterns in time and space. I
am usually against that sort of thing, because it misdirects the
attribution from the evidence for it. However, unlike”communication” which
requires at least two conscious beings, consciousness can be at a sentient
being and directed toward a non-sentient one. I can be conscious of a rock.
So, put me down as 0.5, I guess.
As to the last question, I think there is a grammatical sleight of hand
built into “What is it like to be a …..?” Put the question in its natural
grammatical form and the answer becomes obvious “what is being Stephen
Guerin like?” " It’s like running on a treadmill with jammed on-off switch."
Notice that presented in its undistorted form, the answer will be a
reference to some experience that I would have. The grammatical
impersonal creates the mystery by throwing one off the track. So, put me
down as a zero.
So, Stephen, I cannot bring myself to fill in the entries myself, but feel
free to fill them in for me and report the results to whomever you see fit.
I share your admiration Professor Gupta and will be eager to see what he
makes of it.
You said you would look in on THUAM tomorrow around .... what a minute
.... when? I may be mixing up my time zones.
Nick
On Thu, Jul 4, 2024 at 7:26 PM Jochen Fromm <jofr at cas-group.net> wrote:
> I don't get Philip Goff: first we send our children 20 years to school,
> from Kindergarten to college and university, to teach them all kinds of
> languages, and then we wonder how they can be conscious. It will be the
> same for AI: first we spend millions and millions to train them all
> available knowledge, and then we wonder how they can develop understanding
> of language and consciousness...
>
> https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-mystery-of-consciousness-is-deeper-than-we-thought/
>
> -J.
>
> -. --- - / ...- .- .-.. .. -.. / -- --- .-. ... . / -.-. --- -.. .
> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
> Fridays 9a-12p Friday St. Johns Cafe / Thursdays 9a-12p Zoom
> https://bit.ly/virtualfriam
> to (un)subscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
> FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/
> archives: 5/2017 thru present
> https://redfish.com/pipermail/friam_redfish.com/
> 1/2003 thru 6/2021 http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/
>
--
Nicholas S. Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology
Clark University
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://redfish.com/pipermail/friam_redfish.com/attachments/20240717/f4f6bc34/attachment.html>
More information about the Friam
mailing list