What, Why & How do we Know ?
Amusing link on “Unqualified Offerings“, Via Robert’s “Pavlov’s Blog” post at Libertopia.
Don’t have time to be a blog junkie at the moment, but it naturally satirises how bloggers interact (on a good day). Now that’s what I call a meme – a life of its own – over 1000 links, and long since closed.
John Stuart Mill of his own free will,
On half a pint of shandy was particulary ill.
Will. The Pythons’ song memeing itself in my brain the last day or so, was prompted by listening to the BBC’s “In Our Time” this last Thursday. Anthony Grayling, Janet Radcliffe Williams, and Alan Ryan discussing the life and work of Mill with Melvyn Bragg. I’ll say more about Mill another time – I need to read more about him first – but he struck me as ahead of his time and on the money in his views on the evolution of quality of life through levels of biology, culture and intellect.
What it did do apart from nurture the infectious meme, was put me in mind of will, and create a connection with the Daniel Wegner book I’m currently reading; “The Illusion of Conscious Will” and motivate me to pick it up again and continue where I’d left off.
Wegner’s book was leaving me cold in the first few chapters, so I put it down and read Arundhati Roy’s “God of Small Things”. (Very reminiscent of Salman Rushdie’s “Midnight’s Children” for obvious reasons of location and culture, and a great read, with great inventive language – playful psychological (autobiographical ?) account of how people treat people, and the usual “what really matters after all” themes – the story itself marred only by the fact that the “secret” scandal behind the looming trajedy is too easily worked out early on. Anyway I digress.)
Wegner’s is a good textbook summary of psychlogical perspectives on conscious will. As such I wasn’t finding much new other than a light amusing presentation of issues covered already by Sacks, Edelman, Austin et al. (In fact the reference list is full of material I’ve read already.) To be fair, it is well written, and easy to read apart from my own impatience with the subject matter. Dennett and Blackmore, heros of mine, both give it their seal of approval.
Apart from my impatient reaction to the usual mis-interpretation of Libet’s results, I am really railing against the word “illusion” in the context of consciousness and will …
To be finished (Off to Chatanooga, back later. In which we find that Choo-Choo really does indicte a major historic connection with railroads, and that Alonzo Boden, the reason we made the trip, did a really good stand-up routine at the “Comedy Catch”. Good thoughful comment and funny enough to have Southern Tennesee folks laughing continuously at his republican politics and racial stereotyping gags. Great tirade on Cheney. Good mix of material and assured delivery. Very funny, and a very exciting drive back to Huntsville in torrential rain and thunderstorms, too.)OK, continuing …
Railing against illusion ?
Bearing in mind that “causation” is itself a pretty weird concept – nothing like as “concrete” as most of our common sense induction would have us believe (Ref – Mill above, Paul Turner’s buddhist perspective, and David Deutsch’s “explanatory science”). Wegner rightly makes ongoing reference to our psychological need “crying out for causal agent explanations” – who did that ?
But causation itself is remarkably illusory, so much so that just about any “explanation” of anything could be deemed illusion, if that’s your game. It’s a doubly cheap-shot, if your interest is causation and your subject is the mental realm – a meta-illusion. Explaining what “really exists” in mind ? And we find ourselves back at Ontology-101, when we should probably be at Epistemology-101. Let’s not go there.
I’ve disagreed already with both Dennett and Blackmore about conclusions like consiciousness or conscious will being illusions, and I 99% agree with most of their arguments. My problem is the sense that suggesting “illusion” means it’s somehow “not real”. Ephemeral yes, but it’s real enough.
A large part of the published debate is about the extent to which (human) causation is “free-will” and how much is automatism, “mechanistic” physio-biological activities. Unsurprisingly, all empirical evidence shows that a great deal of what we characterise as mental free-will is indeed mechanistic, operating at levels below (or in advance of) what we’d think of as conscious mental will. (Libet etc, and all the neuro-psychological studies of mental abnormalities, Sacks, Autsin, etc). Hardly surprising since we are clearly “thinking with (physio-biological) meat”
In reality our consciousness is highly evolved on many levels, with many loopy, recursive, strange, (Hofstadterian) interactions between the levels. Only new blue-sky or supervisory intervention “thoughts” and “wills” need reach the level we call active consciousness. “Free won’t” as it has been dubbed. The “better” our consciousness, surely the less we should expect to impinge on it. Good management is delegation. Same with minds. Really well organised systems look like “machines” – look at a top class tennis player on top form.
OK, so picking up on Wegner, on p143 he says
“… the attribution of outside agency suggests that when we see an action we immediately require that someone did it … The agent can be found in the self when there is an illusion of conscious will, and elsewhere when the illusions breaks down. And the presence of any potential agent other than self can relieve us of the illusion that we consciously willed our action.”
Well, OK, but the illusion of “will” is no less real or more illusory than “self”, “agent”, “we” or “us” in the statements above. Let’s join up the dots here and use the Blackmore (or Dennett) idea that “we”, our conscious selves, are nothing more than the sum total of all these interacting thoughts (and memes). Our thoughts are illusory, only in the sense that we are already illusory (and vice-versa of course, it’s a loopy world).
Strong evidence that we and our wills are just a connected mass of thoughts is to be found in Wegner’s own examples of doing precisely what you are thinking hard about not doing. Stepping off a cliff, veering into oncoming traffic, mentioning the war, etc … thinking about not doing something is connected to doing that something in just the same way as a consciously willed thought of doing it. And thinking about something completely unconnected with something creates that very connection too. This is Hofstadter, this is recursive strange loops. Success relies on game theory, learned tricks of the trade of thinking. That’s the human trade. Cat’s sneak up on their prey, we sneak up behind our memes. Let the evolution begin. Welcome to the real world.
The fact that our explanations of mind and will, make them look ever more illusory, the more we try to explain them, doesn’t mean we have the wrong explantions. These mysteries are exactly explained. We need to learn that and move on before we paralyse ourselves with analysis.
Teddy Sheringham (aged 40) was the only penalty taker to score in the FA Cup Final shoot out for West Ham. (See previous two posts).
Futher to yesterday’s THES story on wisdom in education, here is another UK MSN News Story (via Cherryl Martin) – The Kids Are Alright – contrasting youth with experience and making the connection with media clamour for the surface beauty of youth – wittily linked to the Theo Walcott news story.
A brilliantly witty piece.
Notwithstanding the fact that skilled but uninhibited naivite might actually be an asset in a competitive sports context, (where the downside of being wrong is more important than life or death, only metaphorically unless you’re Bill Shankly), the parallel with the youthful beauty contest for the qualities valued by the media, is precisely part of the meme that undervalues the true qualities of wisdom far beyond the walls of academe.
Beauty is part of it, but we’ve stripped it down the the simplistic surface appearances, rather than the truly simple complexities of elegance.
Would that Thierry Henry were an Englishman.
Scholars, get wise, not just smart
Anthea Lipsett writing yesterday
in the Times Higher Education Supplement
Universities should help people acquire wisdom rather than knowledge ” this is the rallying cry of a growing band of academics who want to revolutionise the nature of academic inquiry.
Friends of Wisdom, a group of scholars from across the world, argues that the preoccupation with accumulating knowledge is flawed and that the higher aim must be to apply such knowledge to benefit society.
Members of the association believe that academic work should help humanity acquire more wisdom, which they defined as “the capacity to realise what is of value in life, for oneself and others”.
Friends of Wisdom was started by Nicholas Maxwell, emeritus reader in philosophy of science at University College London. He said: “We hope to transform universities so that their basic aim becomes to help people realise what’s of value in life ” wisdom. That would include technical knowhow and understanding,, but also other things as well.
“If the basic aim really is to help promote human welfare, then the problems that need to be solved are fundamentally problems of living, not problems of knowledge,” Mr. Maxwell said.
The pursuit of knowledge was important, but it was secondary to acquiring wisdom, he added. The Friends of Wisdom want universities to help people challenge politicians by raising public debate and giving individuals the power that comes from having the highest quality education.
“They must also promote a truly critical debate about what is genuinely of value in life and how it is to be achieved,” Mr Maxwell said. He hopes the group will ignite debate, and there are plans to host a conference of like-minded academics.
For more information, visit
www.knowledgetowisdom.org
I made my coment earlier that this subject is bigger than the education system, but it’s good to see this move being picked-up in mainstream press.
Just another personal update I’m afraid. Been buried in issues around work relocation to the USA for several weeks, but now it’s looking set.
UK house let. Boys’ UK university accomodation sorted. Visas obtained for Sylvia and I. Flights booked. US apartment booked. Start date confirmed. We’re off next week.
I should be offline between next Thursday (4th) (in UK) and the following Monday (8th) in Huntsville, AL.
Just one blog news item … Friends of Wisdom – I see this initiative has got as far as an article for publication in UK national press. Here’s hoping.
Struck by this quote about Waziristan (Pakistan, north of Balochistan), the piece includes some scarier Taleban material too.
“In North Waziristan, it is religion that overrides all tribal bondages and customs, making it the most conservative region.”
The story in neighbouring Balochistan is mainly tribal / local disputes over natural (gas) resources. I recall all the tribal militia check-points on the roads around Dera Bugti, not far from Quetta, when working at a gas plant 15 or so years ago – that was after the Russian Afghan campaign, and just about everyone seemed to own a Kalashikov. (And just about every mud-brick hut had a vcr and a satellite dish too).
Various grades of paranoia surrounding widespread RFID tagging of goods, being associated with movements of ourselves as consumers.
I’ve never quite got the paranoia generated by identification of the innocent (identity cards n’all that). Where I come from a discarded tin can already is a crime scene – a small one naturally.
Anyway, technology is always available to be misused. Nothing new.
Reading “The Unconsoled” by Kazuo Ishiguro, prompted by Alice’s comments about Ian McEwan on the Dawkins “Selfish Gene 30 Years On” thread.
Strange book as the TLS review commented. Some weird situations. First person narrator following two third parties moving out of the first person view, and continuing the first person narrative. Shouting to be heard above the noise in a library (!) Long conversations in a cinema (!), watching 2001, but with Clint Eastwood in the Dave Bowman role. Anonymous mid-European location, with disproportionate number of old school friends from back in the UK ? Confusion compounded by long streams of digression (?) by characters unloading their problems, long preludes to scenes about to happen, with little narrative certainty that they actually do, mixed with historical flashbacks; characters moving along streets between locations in the one city adds to the Joycean feel.
The plot line is a “Clockwise” out-of-control time-pressure not-quite-farce, a concert pianist arriving in a foreign city for a recital, but being confounded by events – real and imagined. The general idea being what really matters in all the confusion? The underlying story is about personal relationships and communication as tacit (mis)-understanding – man who spends long periods away from wife and growing child, and the relationship with that child. Older broken couple(s) who’s “understanding” can allow serious rows and breakdowns within the ongoing loving continuity.
Two thirds through – mainly in two long sittings (one of those, another west-bound transatlantic flight). Enthralling, though not yet mind-blowing. Mind-bending certainly – no clues noticed yet as to the eventual outcomes, or the turn of events at the much heralded climax yet to materialise.
Just reading the latest Edge magazine, and see a review by Stewart Brand of Kevin Kelly’s – “Speculations on the Future of Science”.
I’ve mentioned many times the vaue of recursion, often when people get hung up on cyclical logic, as if it is automatically a dead end, begging some question or other. Most recently I referred to the evolutionary value when something (like a brain) works on itself, and evolves intelligence, many of these thoughts driven by reading Hofstadter (who as I type is speaking at Tucson 2006). I see reading Brand’s piece on Kelly, that he’s talking about the evolutionary recursion of science working on science – science’s self-modification. That’s science as in new structures of knowledge and new ways of discovering knowledge, ie philosophy (of science at least).
Interestingly in the same Edge edition there is a piece by John Horgan reviewing the reconcilliation of scence and religion (referring to the same Event I mentioned involving Dawkins and McEwan). Nothing earth shatteringly original, but an intelligent summary including his atheistic involvement with the Templeton Foundation.