ELEPHANT TO DAVID PRINCE AND ALL, NOT EXCLUDING DANIEL DENNETT:
David, that was a thoughtful and deep post. In replying to it I will try to
aim for that same standard so that I might be honoured to be included in the
address 'Gentlemen' you so charmingly revive. I have something to say about
evolutionary awareness.
DAVID WROTE:
> Ladies and Gentlemen,
>
[ ..... ]
> Now, although "virtually no one" holds a subjective/objective
> metaphysical view, psychologists have fought against the Behavioral,
> Monistic, view of the universe because it does not explain such things as
> awareness, self-consciousness, and qualia. I find the following quotation
> from Daniel Dennet very interesting,
>
> "Valéry’s “Variation sur Descartes” excellently evokes the
> vanishing act that has haunted philosophy ever since Darwin overturned the
> Cartesian tradition. If my body is composed of nothing but a team of a few
> trillion robotic cells, mindlessly interacting to produce all the
> large-scale patterns that tradition would attribute to the non-mechanical
> workings of my mind, there seems to be nothing left over to be me. Lurking
> in Darwin’s shadow there is a bugbear: the incredible Disappearing Self.[2]
> One of Darwin’s earliest critics saw what was coming and could scarcely
> contain his outrage:
>
> In the theory with which we have to deal, Absolute Ignorance is the
> artificer; so that we may enunciate as the fundamental principle of the
> whole system, that, IN ORDER TO MAKE A PERFECT AND BEAUTIFUL MACHINE, IT IS
> NOT REQUISITE TO KNOW HOW TO MAKE IT. This proposition will be found, on
> careful examination, to express, in condensed form, the essential purport of
> the Theory, and to express in a few words all Mr. Darwin's meaning; who, by
> a strange inversion of reasoning, seems to think Absolute Ignorance fully
> qualified to take the place of Absolute Wisdom in all the achievements of
> creative skill.[3]
>
> This “strange inversion of reasoning” promises–or
> threatens–to dissolve the Cartesian res cogitans as the wellspring of
> creativity, and then where will we be? Nowhere, it seems. It seems that if
> creativity gets “reduced” to “mere mechanism” we will be shown not to exist
> at all. Or, we will exist, but we won’t be thinkers, we won’t manifest
> genuine “Wisdom in all the achievements of creative skill.” The individual
> as Author of works and deeds will be demoted: a person, it seems, is a
> barely salient nexus, a mere slub in the fabric of causation.
>
> Whenever we zoom in on the act of creation, it seems we lose
> sight of it. The genius we thought we could see from a distance gets
> replaced at the last instant by stupid machinery, an echo of Darwin’s
> shocking substitution of Absolute Ignorance for Absolute Wisdom in the
> creation of the biosphere. Many people dislike Darwinism in their guts, and
> of all the ill-lit, murky reasons for antipathy to Darwinism, this one has
> always struck me as the deepest, but only in the sense of being the most
> entrenched, the least accessible to rational criticism. There are thoughtful
> people who scoff at Creationism, dismiss dualism out of hand, pledge
> allegiance to academic humanism–and then get quite squirrelly when somebody
> proposes a Darwinian theory of creative intelligence. The very idea that all
> the works of human genius can be understood in the end to be mechanistically
> generated products of a cascade of generate-and-test algorithms arouses deep
> revulsion in many otherwise quite insightful, open-minded people."
> Reference: http://ase.tufts.edu/cogstud/papers/apapresadd.htm
>
ELEPHANT:
I guess I'm one of the deeply revolted. Dennet gives quite a good summary
of the external form of my attitude to an evolutionary theory of creative
intelligence. What he leaves out, of course, is the argument which supports
that external shape. Your post might be a good place to start from in an
exploration of that argument. You suggest one possible line that such an
argument might take, and although I think freewill is the direction to look
in, it doesn't take us the whole way there:
DAVID:
> Why is it that this position would be so abhorrent to so many people
> that Dennett should comment upon it? Ask around and see who believes in
> determinism and who believes in free-will. I know of no one who holds a
> position of determinism. You see, if the universe generates our
> intelligence, really, it is the universe that controls our intelligence as
> well. We are simply an interaction of materialistic forces. We lose our
> subjectivity because we lose our selves.
>
> The "cascade of generate-and-test algorithms" that Dennett refers to is
> really just one algoirithm. It is Quality. It is the same algorithm outlined
> in Radical Empirical Behaviorism for learning, it is the same algorithm for
> evolution, it is the same algorithm for the empirical method. It is Monist
> in its perspective in that it denies the subject/object duality of the
> soul/mind/feeling/thought/self against the brain/neuronal net/physical
> reaction/discarge of neurons/set of perceptions. Quality says that those
> things are all one thing. That minds and brains are the same thing. That
> what you see is what you get. From the Zen, Only This.
ELEPHANT:
Yes, there is a monistic aspect to the insight that such algorithms underly
many supposedly separate kinds of being, such as mind and matter. And I do
not subscribe to a mind/matter dualism. But there is also a dualistic
aspect of this same insight about algorithms, because not everything is an
algorithm. Algorithms are linguistic entities. Your argument goes awry, I
think, in the claim that the cascade of generate and test algorithms is
quality, because there is absolutely no way in which such linguistic
entities could be Dynamic Quality itself. What you might rightly say is not
that such a cascade *is* quality, but that it *has* quality: and that is
quite a different matter. The quality that it has is static quality - not
that I think the cascade is unchanging, but that I think that the cascade
consists of the static (in the way that a movie consists of so many frames
per second).
So, as I was saying: there is a dualistic aspect to the insight about
algorithms and evolution, because although mind/matter dualism has been
overcome, there is now an algorithm/non-algorithm dualism which parrallels
the intellect/non-intellect dualism that I have been talking about in this
forum and over in Focus. These replacement dualisms are not dualisms of
substance, because the idea of metaphysical substance is essentially the
imputation of grammatical structure to the world itself, while the
non-intellectual dynamic quality is neither a subject, an object, a verb, a
participle, or an attribute. It comes before all that. Dynamic quality
comes before language. But algorithms don't, do they?
I want you agree here and you might not. You might say that the algorithms
just exist and then language comes along and discovers them. Well this is
like the issue that fascinated Feynman: what does the calculating: the
universe or the physicist? I say it's the physicist, and in this one move
my whole position vis a vis freewill and evolutionary intellects is
contained.
But if you agree and say that algorithms are expressed in language and that
language is the medium of intellect, then my task suddenly becomes a lot
easier. Now I don't simply have to assert that we have freewill, and that
the excercise of our intelligence isn't something evolved: I can prove it.
Because now it is obvious (or seems it) that evolution is something
contained within the intellectual sphere, not the other way around. A wine
glass contains wine. If it contains that wine, that same wine cannot
contain it. You can imagine a vat of wine into which wine glasses are
poured: in this case the wine glasses to do not contain wine, they are
contained in it - but then the vat is not contained in the wine it contains.
Well, I think that conceptual activity by free intellects is on the glass
and vat side of things, and that all discrete, that is to say
conceptualised, entities are the wine. I don't think that evolution is
'just' a theory because there is really nothing informative or helpful in
the 'just' here. All the facts we rely on are embedded in theories. But
even though evolution is not just a theory, it is a theory. It is a
conceptualisation. Those algorithms of yours are too. They belong in the
intellectual realm, not in the world of the mystically real. And if they
belong inside the intellectual realm, I can see no sense in which (as an
evoloutionary theory of intellect suggests) the intellect could be contained
within the realm of the conceptualisations it creates.
DAVID WROTE:
> I mean that if minds are really only matter, that all matter must be
> mind. I realize that I have to overcome a necessary and sufficient problem.
> But before I tackle that, let's think about this for just a second. Is it
> impossible that planets and solar systems could interact to create some kind
> of vast universal awareness? Certainly it seems absurd. However, neurons are
> nothing more than single-celled orgamisms living in a symbiotic
> relationship. How is it that millions of single-celled organisms could ever
> form the complex entity that is you?
>
> But, you say, "I am aware" and the planets are not. I have said this
> before, and I want to say it again. To define awareness objectively is to de
> fine it behaviorally. It is to define it by what can be observed. How do we
> define awareness empirically? Well, I know my wife is aware when she
> responds to my inquiries. I know she is aware when I pinch her and she says.
> "Yeow." So, she is aware if she responds to her external stimuli. If she
> does not respond to external stimuli, she as a system, is not aware of it.
>
> The door responds to external stimuli. It responds to far fewer external
> stimuli than my wife, but, nevertheless when I tug on the doorknob, the door
> opens. It seems absurd to say that the door is aware. But how do we know
> that it is not?
ELEPHANT:
One suggestion would be: because the door show no signs of conceptualising
anything. Even a sparrow shows signs of conceptualising. A door does not.
Your train of thought is leading, I'll wager, towards saying that the
universe is aware of itself through us. It happens that we can define
awareness behaviourally in the case of Humans, but not the universe. But
awareness can exist on the level of the universe too, because it need not be
linked to specific objects in the way that our behavioural approaches tend
to do. This is an interesting and serious point. My only worry is that in
this case 'universe' is being taken as an object, which, ex hypothesi, is
just what it has not to be in order to be counted aware. The sentence 'the
universe is aware' has an inescapable grammar about it which makes the
universe an object. If there is any sense in which the universe is aware,
then this must be a sense which is not directly expressible in english.
Dynamic quality, which is neither an object nor a predicate, therefore
attracts us here as a promising candidate for universal self-awareness. But
I have been round this mountain several times, and every promising way to
the top turns out to be merely a path.... if our travelling is conceptual
our destinations are too. Quality can't be self-aware, or it would have to
be something less than an aesthetic continuum: it would have to fit two
distinct conceptualisations at once, when fitting one is enough to make it
other than itself.
DAVID WROTE:
> ..... it is absurd to believe that the stars could be aware, or that
> the door is aware. But at the same time, awareness is only a concept that
> describes an empirical state. Even if one should point to a set of neurons
> as a correlate of awareness, those neurons must respond. There is no way we
> can get inside a neuron to see how it feels. It responds and feels
> simultaneously. It is both subjective and objective at the same time.
>
> But, virtually no one buys this monist view of the universe.
>
> I do. All of the universe is responding. In multiple systems of heavenly
> bodies, and earthly bodies, the universe is responding. When the universe
> ceases to respond, time stands still. There is nothing. When the universe or
> any part of it responds, it change, and time moves forward. When time moves
> forward, the Universe orders itself in a new way to fit the present
> circumstances. It moves to a state of higher Quality.
>
ELEPHANT:
An interesting veiw that is suggested by very many of the things that Pirsig
says. But I don't think that this can be quite right. The mystical reality
doesn't 'respond' to anything, because to every reaction there is an action,
and an action supposes objects - it can only be specified in subject-object
terms (factoring in the quality that the subject is pursuing in his
objectifications). Causes and events exist at the level of objects, ie
within the intellectual level, not at the level of the Universe of the
mystically real.
This is what I think at the moment.
Thank you David for an interesting and high-quality post.
Elephant
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