Year: 2005

Still Reading David Chalmers’ “The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory” after blogging about the intro earlier.

It’s quite tough technically, as well as tough in terms of credibility. His appeals to logical possibility in his thought experiments stretch “conceivability” (and I never was very good with pure thought experiments, in the absence of physics); you can’t help feeling the problems might be inherent in the logical premises, rather than any conclusions that follow. However, to give him his due, he appreciates this and spends a good deal of space addressing every possible objection and doubt, every which way he can think of. Tedious, and I almost gave up, but I’m glad I didn’t.

His most famous thought experiment is his Zombie Twin, a variation on earlier Twin Earth ideas (watery stuff vs H2O, has “essential” connotations). In this case you are asked to accept the “logical possibility” of having a Zombie twin of yourself on a physically identical twin earth where the only difference is that the Zombie has no “subjective aspect to its consciousness” yet all its behaviours, decisions and responses being otherwise identical. The Zombie is identical to you except that its lights are out, it’s all dark inside, it knows nothing it is like to “feel like” you, subjectively.

Like the “mile-high unicycle” it stretches credulity that it could come about, and work with any natural physical history, so it may be physically impossible, but you have to concede it’s “logically possible”. (Deutsch by the way spends a good deal of time on this distinction between logical and physical possibility too, and I notice Chalmers himself has several other papers dealing with any gap between “conceivability and possibility” – interesting in its own right).

His main case is that subjective (or phenomenal) consciousness is the hard unsolved problem, as opposed to any causal, behavioural, (psychlogical) explanation of how conciousness works, which if not solved beyond dispute, is at least soluble in principle. I think he’s right there.

His other main thread is “supervenience” – roughly being dependent on, but not necessarily causally explained by. The Zombie stuff above is saying subjective (phenomenal) consciousness is not logically supervenient on the phsyical world. I like the fact he concedes that taking physics as (by definition) the most fundamental explanation of how things work in the world, consciousness must be physically supervenient on the physical world, but what he’s effectively saying that physics as it is currently known must have something missing that can reductively and logically explain subjective consciousness. I have to admit the penny hasn’t quite dropped yet on supervenience. He goes on to review all the whackier quantum consciousness theories, (even Hameroff’s pixie-dust) and for me he is right, that whilst these “may” turn out to have some relevance to the physical causal description of how psychological consciousness works, they are still not addressing the hard problem. The observer participation aspect in quantum physical outcomes is about as close as it gets, but it still doesn’t seem much like the view from the subjective side.

For me the problem he is showing is still the obvious one. “Scientific reasoning” is never going to explain subjectivity, without some new resources in addition to the logically positive objectivity of scientific reasoning, which by definition excludes subjectivity. He insists that’s not what he’s showing, but so far that’s my conclusion. Anyway, the guy’s obviously done his homework, so it seems essential to read on and absorb.

I guess the point he would agree with me is that the problem with the “hard problem of subjective consciousness” is not a mystery in the physics per se, though there may yet be something to be discovered in physics in this area, it’s an absence of the right reasoning tools and techniques generally, and perhaps specifically for explaining causation (where I need to understand his supervenience better).

Strange that Chalmers doesn’t include reference to Deutsch, I guess he must have become aware since this book however. Also don’t quite understand his objections to Dennett’s natural history views, like whatever logical and physical possibilities, any explanation has to include how it came to be. So far time is missing from Chalmers story. But there’s still time 🙂

Fixed Contact page, Fixed resource pages, Pirsig pages and Pirsig Photos page in terms of broken links and some minor re-organisation. If you find any broken links please let me know.

(Still have Categories, Bibliography and RSS / XML feeds to sort. Getting there.)

Great story on the Beeb.

(Unfortunately it’s from that class of “today scientists announced to the media” so take it with a pinch of white powder, that they may be extrapolating their findings just a touch, working up justification for something, funding maybe ?)

The clue is the word “only” in the fifth para. Yeah right.

I’ve uploaded the slides I used to present my paper at the 7 July 2005 Metaphysics of Quality conference. They include a link to the paper itself. The slides make less sense by themselves than the paper, which as Alice points out is pretty incoherent itself 🙂

[ The Paper ] [ The Slides (Require MS-Powerpoint or viewer.) ]

(For future use, they’re also linked under the “Pirsig MoQ Pages” links heading in the side-bar. I now have some housekeeping to do on broken links in the non-blog pirsig and other pages on the psybertron site. Bear with me.)

Browsed Rivets for a while this evening. I’m still wiping the tears from my eyes.

Scroll down to see “This is what happens if you eat Pizza with pineapple.” An example of fine “send us the money” web design for evangelists – not. (I won’t link on principle – Rivets just has to be browsed to get the effect.)

This is typical of the whacky stuff he links to “Don’t Eat it“. Toss up which is whackier, the food manufacturers who sell this stuff or The Sneeze for recording it all for us. Love putting the jigsaw of the pig back together. Magic.

Dean’s BA Dissertation “Pragmatism and The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: A study of Robert Pirsig’s contribution to the Pragmatism of Peirce, James and Dewey.” is excellent. It points out explicitly how Pirsig’s MoQ adds constructively to Peirce, Dewey and James’ “American Pragmatism”, and more than that reminds us how far the “anything you like” caricature meme of pragmatism couldn’t be further from the moral reality of the matter.

As well as looking backwards to recent philosophers, I’ve been trying to link Pirsig to current writers too. I was struck by a number of things, about which there really seems little room for argument …

Pirsig is pragmatic.
Morals are pragmatic.
The “static” is only temporarily so, it’s evolving.
It’s the “dynamic” that drives the evolution.

Dean (1994) summarises “MoQ is a philosophical movement which aims at reunification of philosophy with life …. in a sense [Pirsig’s] texts may be seen as a demonstration of the pragmatic intention. In them he does unify philosophy with everything else that goes to make up a persons life …. evolutionary morality follow[s] logically and without contradiction.”

Which is uncannily close to intentional pragmatist Dennett who (in DDI 1995) said “In a single stroke, the idea of evolution by natural selection unifies the realm of life, meaning and purpose with the realm of space and time, cause and effect, mechanism and physical law …” The best idea ever, bar none.

Having finished Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, it was a toss-up between more Dennett or David Chalmers (or something completely different like Barbara Tuchman, still unread).

Chalmers name-drops an impressive list of acknowledgments, but is brave enough to point out that Hofstadter (his original mentor) and Dennett largely disagree with him. I think he overhypes the exciting mysetry angle, but he is right to distinguish the hard problem (the subjective “quality” of consciousness) from the easy problem (the physical “causality” of senses and actions), and in doing so admits to preserving an unfashionable duality. OK by me.

Lingusitically it gets tough because all the words are overloaded in this space. I actually believe his choice of phenomenal for the former and psychlogical for the latter seems somewhat perverse to me, but he explains his choice of terms. With similar caveats I would choose “mental ” and “causal”, but clearly previous use of the word mental is too overloaded for Chalmers to accept.

I’m going to have to read more to understand precisely how “qualia” are distinguished from immediate experience, but despite previously believing I disagreed with qualia, the parallel’s with Pirsig, Barfield, Peirce and Northrop are almost tangible. Now that is exciting, as is the use of quality and the root of qualia (phenomenal quality). Sadly none of those references makes it to Chalmers’ bibliography – but nothing new there – there is an academic mainstream that insulates itself from what it sees as non-academics. Still, we’re after quality, not fame here.

[Post Note : One thing I do agree with Chalmers on, that I forgot to mention, is the idea of consciousness being just some kind of “illusion” is not very helpful, in fact it’s a cop-out. Probably the point at which Dennett disagrees with him ?]

Saw Sin City (ex Local Pricks) in Perth’s Amplifier Bar on Saturday night. Too short a set, but as good as I remembered. Plenty of none-too-serious strutting, pouting stage-craft form Barbie (Tash) and heavy rock sound, but with catchy riffs and choruses. I remember now why Tommy’s drumming was so distinctive; twin pedals / hammers on the bass, both feet barefoot. (They slightly overdid the “it’s great to be back in WA” angle, but they and the audience were happy – that’s what counts.)

They were supported by Screwtop (Screwtop Detonators actually). Undistinguished but competent twin guitar rock; Once I’d observed to the two frontmen, one blond & shaggy the other dark & straight, had something of the boyish, comfortable tomfoolery of Rossi and Parfitt about them, I couldn’t stop thinking of them as a heavy version of the Quo. Harmless fun.

At Blue to the Bone beforehand I saw John Meyer again (but no Flick ?), and afterwards saw Lindsey Wells in a new light – his mannerisms of exaggerated accents, gestures and face-pulls, not to mention the flash behind the head and tooth picking on Hey Joe, still grate in a man “of his age”, but actually he’s makes a very good blues rock sound, much more subtly understated than his manner. Must watch him with my eyes closed next time.

Today, I went to the charity Sunday Lunch review by Rick Steele and his family at the Dianella, in aid of Amputees in Action. Musically a little too casual and un-rehearsed, a little more emotional than technical, but this was for the most part a family affair amongst 150 old family friends, so let’s cut ’em some slack. Sadly no Ryan Narkle with his Digeridoo, but good to see Rick with his Jess, Jake, Luke and Katy all playing & singing. Wayne Freer kept it all together on the bass. Luke led on Across the Universe (Harrison) and Starting Over (Lennon) and had technical difficulties getting his guitar amp going, so I’m not quite sure what to expect of his band Sleepy Jackson. Katy did four or five solo un-plugged versions of her own Little Birdy stuff. Great voice & sounds, if limited musically by the format. Be interesting to hear the arranged versions.

I’m trying to draft a couple of “considered” posts for here and for MoQ-Discuss.

I’ve just about finished Dennett’s “Darwin’s Dangerous Idea”. It’s so good that perversely I’ve made almost no annotations, because it’s all note-worthy and in need of re-reading in future. I’ve blogged a number of points already, but there are some important themes arising … these are just some holding thoughts.

Evolution of Morality – Dennett’s pragmatic story of naturalised ethics and the moral first aid manual, is Pirsig’s MoQ in everything but name. At the MoQ Conference there was one line of argument, from Jorg, Dean and Brent I think, in the discussions ensuing Mati’s presentation, that MoQ needs to be hitched to the philosphical mainstream, needs to have its own (however original) ideas picked-up in other philsophers who have achieved mainstream credibility. Pirsig does not want personal celebrity, or even credit, and he’ll probably always be a deranged hippy in the eyes of any establishment, whatever the quality of his thinking. Those of us who wish to promote quality thinking per se (without Pirsigian labels necessarily) need to be hitching our wagon to Dennett.

[Insert major block-quotes from Dennett here.]

Game Theory, Doubt, Rhetoric and Philosophising Rules of Engagement

Difficult to disentangle and sumarise my thoughts here, but here goes.

[Insert another block-quote from Dennett here.]

I was struck in Hofstadter (GEB) about the game theory nature of evolution, culturally evolving best decision making paradigms for given situations. Dennett makes decision-making (and decision support and justification) a subject in his work, and of course it is precisely the point where I came into epistemology, through (business) information modelling. The mechanism by which nagging doubt is exaggerated to become a crucial decisive issue is well illustrated in the “reverberant doubt” game-theory example Dennett quotes from Hofstadter. If our position in the world is “ballistic”, ie we are always battling falling into a sea of entropy with the negative entropy tools of evolution, but with no metaphysically fundamental foundations, just temporary static latches and layers, doubt is a powerful mechanism to hold onto the certainty of theistic skyhooks. It’s a very subtle variation on the “religion is for wimps” meme, and it is actually worse (the nagging doubt more reverberrant) than that, the doubt is greater the more intellectual thought one can put into it. (Wow, it’s surely also my Catch-22 isn’t it !!)

Rhetoric, and other forms of “impure rationality” are absloutely essential in this zone of ballistic trajectories without firm foundations. I knew it.

Philosophising Rules of Engagement – This isn’t new, but Dennett describes this very clearly. In my words, philsophy is the archetypal domain for analysis paralysis – it’s what philosphers do. Doubt can be cast on just about any argument, by undermining some premise or other (hence why I can’t disentangle it from the doubt topic itself). If you’re going to make (pragmatic) progress in producing useful philosophic output, as philosophers you have to set up some premises that you are going to treat as fixed (for now) even if your open mind says the might not be absolutely. These are the layers and latches of MoQ – they’re all debatable in the long run, but not in the short run. We need to keep debate isolated from meta-debate, or it may has well just be tortoises all the way down.

Meta – I used the word meta in this context somewhere recently myself. Dennett makes the meta-distinction frequently. I recall a sense of relief in my data modelling history, when I’d been working with what turned out to be meta-models almost meta-languages, and I noticed a headline, a front-page story in some illustrious journal like The Economist or Harvard Business Review as I recall, proclaiming in some end of year review at the height of the dot-com boom – the the word for next year is “Meta”. Something in this I believe.

Sorry – a bit incoherent, and incomplete but important enough for a “hold that thought” post.

Just made a connection … between the comment about Gould’s attitude to evolution and his theistic beliefs, according to Dennet, and the point Deutsch made about mainstream science that doesn’t become common-sense world view even of practicioners using that science.