Consciousness and Pirsig

Following a search hit I find a source that links many of mine ….

Pirsig and VUB/Heilighen, (Einstein Meets Magritte) with Josephson (explaining the paranormal with open minded science) with Dennett, Searle and Chalmers (PoM / Consciousness) in the Journal of Consciousness Studies.

A paper in the 1995 JCS reviewing the 1995 Einstein Meets Magritte conference.

Both a bit pricey ? Let me think about this.

(Almost looks like the 1995 “Einstein Meets Magritte” conference intiative was a direct pre-cursor to the later multi-disciplined “Science of Consciousness” conferences. – I had just assumed some coincidence of content, but I think not. Interestingly the title of the 2004 JCS article here, about the Tucson conferences, was “Ten Years On”, and this JCS editorial talks about working on the Tucson agenda in 1993. Interesting read. – Oh well, so much for causality.)

Talking of Magritte, he seems to link several other threads of mine too. Foucault’s review of “Ceci n’est pas un pipe” (This is not a pipe) by Magritte, Oliver Sacks front cover “Ceci est ma femme” (The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat) in the style of Magritte. “Le Grand Guerre” on the cover of Searle’s “Mind – A Brief Introduction”

And talking of Searle, I’m now almost finished. After my impatient initial view, I have to say this is 100% common sense and pragmatic view of consciousness and mind.

Sorry to keep going on about it but there really is some great convergence here for the taking, if people are prepared to synthesise debate constructively, rather than analyse arguments destructively. Careful with that razor Occam, or that knife Aristotle, or that axe Eugene.

(PS also picked-up a search hit linking Donald Schon with Positivism. Come back to that later.)


Absenteeism, Turnover and Stress.

I remember as an MBA student studying absenteeism, turnover and stress – the fundamental difference between people being ill and being off-sick – being ill in any minor or major way is a medical issue, being off-sick from paid employment is a matter of individual choice. And vice versa, being ill may be significantly related to the stress of choosing to go to work. In both cases, look for the (human) reason, not the symptoms.

I recalled this when I heard a story on BBC Radio 4’s Home Truths this week about a schoolboy feigning illness to avoid a day at school that held some specific fear of trouble, and the ploy getting out of hand as the individual found himself being prepped for surgery in hospital after playing parents and doctors along with his symptoms.

Actually the recollection became a flood when I saw Michael Jackson’s latest stunt.

What’s it Like to be a Bat – II

Man hears in colour, or “sees” with the sound of music. [report via BBC]. Another variation on the Neuroscience explanations of consciousness – see earlier blogs on Sacks, Zeman and others.

I stand corrected that it is not quite what Nagel’s bat was about. He was being general about the concept of “being like” something as an indication of being conscious, but surely the point of choosing a bat, rather than a giraffe, is because a bat perceives its world, even spatial geometry, topology, motion and texture (colour) through sound. Psychlogically, it surely sees a picture of the world illuminated with sound, in pretty much the identical way that we see the world by the light of … light.

BTW,
Q. What’s it like to swim if you’re a giraffe ?
A. Problematic, unstable, fatal in fact once out of standing depth. Imagine if your buoyant thorax was so far from your dense head. Bit tricky keeping head above water I think you’ll find.

Skype Gets Even Better

Now with Skype – both Voice and Text free over IP
(see sidebar)

We recently had
SkypeOut to call any phone line from within Skype, not just on-line Skype users

We now have
SMS to Skype from any SMS device (for the cost of a UK SMS call)
(And with SkypeOut, a return call from your PC is one click away)

And soon
Skype to SMS is on its way, and
Phone to Skype is in the pipeline

Thanks to Robin Good for the link and instructions.

Creationism in a Tuxedo

Intelligent Design as an alternative to Darwinian Evolution rumbles on in school curriculum debates in the US. Those stickers keep turning up in biology textbooks.

It wouldn’t be so bad if it simply referred to “The Theory of Darwinian Evolution”, and let people infer the pejorative tone of the word “theory”, but no, for the hard-of-thinking they kindly include the phrase “it’s a theory, not a fact”

With that, an appeal to balance says any old “theory” has equal rights to a hearing.

Err, no. There are no facts or theories. Another false dichotomy. What there is, is empirical evidence [sic fact] and explanation [sic theory]. The “best” explanation is not a matter of logic, it’s a matter of quality, including subjective fit and consistency as well as “objective” evidence. The test is credibility, not proof. That quality has subjective, collaborative and democratic aspects, not purely objective, competitive and logical, just like evolution itself in fact, in its broadest sense.

Another case of mysticism appealing to logical argument and science falling for it yet again. The Catch-22 of logical positivism or objective fundamentalism wins again. We need to shift the rules of argument. In this case the Catch-22 is a double-bind; the rules themselves are “evolution”.

The Standard Model

of elementary physics of fundamental “particles” and forces.

Just for general knowledge interest, but this Icelandic site by Jon Erlandsson has some great links, including these two …

Stanford University – Building Blocks of Matter

Contemporary Physics Education Project – The Particle Adventure

Readable summaries. Fascinating.

What Do You Believe …

… is true, even though you cannot prove it ? The Edge 2005 Annual Question. All the usual suspects, mixed bag of answers though.

Dennett, says language is a necessary pre-condition for consciousness, and interestingly, his reason concerns the need for “I”, a subject. Like that.

Blackmore, says she believes that neither free-will nor herself actually exist. (At least I think that’s what she’s saying.) Hmmm.

Block, says consciousness will be explained by neuroscience. Good.

Dawkins, says evolution came before design. Yawn, tell us something we didn’t know.

Pinker, says our brains are organised for the concepts we think about. Ditto.

Kurzweil, says we’ll beat the speed of light. Wow !

Lanier, says the potential for communication (betwen people) far exceeds capabilities of language and media as we know them. Interesting.

Sheldrake, says memory is inherent in nature (not just conscious brains). Interesting corollary of information being the foundation of existence perhaps ?

Many others seem to believe in life, intelligence, and the origins of life, beyond the earth, etc.

Aha !!
Charles Simonyi believes we are programming computers the wrong way. The motivation in the manifesto behind this very Blog. Programming the problem in a computer language, is an evolutionary backwater, he says.
[Quote] …. complexity inflation comes from encoding. The problem statement … is obviously oversimplified, … and we haven’t even used the [domain] jargon which can make these statements even more compact and more precise. But once these statements are viewed through the funhouse mirror of software coding, it becomes all but unrecognizable: thousand times fatter, disjointed, foreign. And as any manual product, it will have many flaws?beyond the errors in the rules themselves. What can be done? Follow the metaphor …. recording of the subject matter experts’ contributions using their own terms-of-art, their jargon, their own notations. Next, empower the programmers to program not the problem itself, but to express their software engineering expertise and decisions as a computer code for the encoder that takes the recorded problem statement and generates the code from it. This is called generative programming and I believe it is the future of software. [Unquote]

Post-Rationalisation

Still working my way through Searle, but reading a 1952 booklet of essays by William Hubben on Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Dostoevsky and Kafka. “Easily the most straightforward and easily understandable introduction to existentialism” says William Barrett (author of Irrational Man 1958, covering pretty much the same subjects).

Kierkegaard said …
“Life must be understood backwards, but lived forwards”
“Irony is the keenest medium for truth”
“Papers … published contrary to the will of the author”
(by a pseudonymic alter-ego, Phaedrus ?)
“The more concrete and positive we are in speaking about [it], the lower is the level of comprehending [it]”
(Wordsworth – “We murder to dissect” ?)
(Dostoevsky – “The lullness and death of order” ?)
“Belief is something to be lived, not comprehended in abstracto”
(Some things have to be believed to be seen ?)

Searle in Denial ?

I’ve now read about 40% of Searle’s “Mind”.

For most of the first third he is outlining Philosophy of Mind issues, mainly stemming from Descartes (and other disasters, as he puts it). He outlines the classic mind / matter problems, the standard refutations, and his arguments against the refutations and alternatives. I found myself screaming “No!” at the pages; all just a bit too pat and naive I thought. In one or two places he is very dismissive of alternatives views (Stapp’s quantum based mindfulness for example) and very anti the motives of many arguments – clinging to the defense of religiously held beliefs, etc, rather than positing credible new arguments, he says.

My main disagreements with the arguments so far, has tended to be too naive a view of “physics” and narrow (poorly defined) use of terms like mental, conscious, physical, material, substance, etc. Basic stuff, and over simplified Turing-machine brain-as-computer, mind-as-software metaphors. Schoolboy errors. (I have loads of notes to document my alternative views of the problems, refutations and arguments, but it seems futile, given …

… anyway – good news – in “Consciousness Part I”, ” … forget about history and traditional ways of thinking” he says, let’s just look at what we know. I say history is useful for understanding why things are in the mess they are, and the (religious) intentions behind many of the traditional mind-matter distinctions, but whilst helping avoid pitfalls, it can actually block progress in understanding. Effectively he is saying many of the problems and arguments around Philosophy of Mind are semantic misunderstandings around the traditional terminology. So we’re agreeing there.

He says the solution to the mind-matter problem really is that simple … mentality really is neuro-biological, with chemical / phsyical explanations. The only problem ever was what we though we meant by the mind-matter ontological split.

I still think I’m a “physicalist”, but not “reductionist” (effectively a good old “materialist”, but with a wide definition of “physical”), an epiphenomenologist, but without abandoning causation – roughly, mental is emergent from physical. As a self-proclaimed “biological naturalist” he makes some distinctions worth recognising however ….

Ontological distinctions, classifications, whilst binary, need not be exclusive in terms of entity membership – what is being classified is “aspectual” – an entity is being classified “in terms of” some aspect or properties, or “in some respect” – ie there is a “basis” for its classification.

For “mental” things, a first-personal, subjective ontology exists, whch may not map usefully to any third-personal, objective ontology – (ref qualia, spectrum reversal conundrum). This first person ontology includes “meaning” as well as intrinsic properties.

Identity remains a key knotty problem, given multiple ontological descriptions of the “same” thing. There are functional, intentional distinctions, as well as intrinsic properties, but these are really the first-person ontological distinctions

Causation is not all about sequencing of distinct events – there is an emergent simultaneous causation of underlying continuous micro-effects – like force fields.

Many descriptions are “logically possible” but not “interesting”, not likely to be of any use. (Motorcycle engine made comprising and arrangement of atoms, etc.) There are appropriate “levels” of description. (Interesting + appropriate = pragmatic IMHO)

(He excludes any possibility of “consciousness” existing separate from any material substrate … unnecessarily in my view … but I’d need to expand of “consciousness” to make sense. I’m tempted to use an “ethereal vs substantial” ontology rather than the traditional “mental vs physical”. Substantial is pretty much res-extensa, but the complement is not res-cogitans.)