2009/8/26 Brent Meeker <meekerdb.domain.name.hidden>:
> I sometimes have the feeling you're saying something interesting...and
> wishing I knew what it was.
Alas, I'm filled with chagrin. On reflection, I share both of those
feelings fairly regularly! I've spent a lot of time over the years -
too much probably - reading, thinking and talking around the range of
topics we love on this list, and have no very definitive conclusions
to show for it. But I continue to be fascinated by decoding and
contrasting the assumptions and vocabularies of what seem to be
different approaches to the same problem, and this has sensitised me
to the ways theories characteristically mask their deepest
assumptions, even from their proponents - perhaps *especially* from
their proponents.
It's because of this that I try sometimes to define my own terms in
what I (forlornly!) hope are modestly articulated ways that struggle
very hard to assume no more and no less than what is stated. In this
way I try to avoid some of the theoretical baggage that gets carried
along willy-nilly with established terminology. But I know this is
demanding a lot of others' available attention, or sometimes even my
own! It works better in 'non-virtual' company, just because more
channels of communication are available and people can more easily ask
"why are you making such a point of this or that?"
All that said, I appreciate the spirit of your comment very much.
I've been thinking again about what I've been arguing recently, and
the challenges posed by some of the excellent responses. I've still
got some things I want to say, and I will consider carefully the best
way to articulate them. As ever, feedback - not least your own - will
be indispensable.
David
>
> David Nyman wrote:
>> 2009/8/25 John Mikes <jamikes.domain.name.hidden>:
>>
>>> David, (and Stathis?)
>>> I appreciate David's 1,2,3, variations on the "it's or "our", but you just
>>> destroyed my position with
>>> "I should perhaps emphasise that purely for the purposes of the
>>> argument I'm assuming brain = mind to be a one-for-one correlation."
>>> Well, not entirely.
>>> If WE cannot desipher the 'meanings' ('context') of our brainwork how can an
>>> alien observer do it? Or better: if we need the
>>> "historic and current context of experience and action"
>>> what 'meanings will the alien decipher in THEIR context and action in THEIR
>>> experience?
>>> Do the aliens base the world on human numbers?
>>> Just musing
>>>
>>> John M
>>
>> Just so. To recapitulate the (approximate) history of this part of the
>> discussion, Peter and I had been delving into the question - posed by
>> him - of whether a complete scan of a brain at the subatomic level
>> could in principle capture all the available 'information'. So my
>> rider about brain-mind correlation was in the context of that specific
>> question posed in that specific way.
>>
>> As to your more general musings John, I suppose the line I've been
>> pursuing is questioning the applicability of the soi-disant 'view from
>> nowhere' - i.e. the notion of 'information' as being comprehensible in
>> any totally extrinsic, abstracted, uninterpreted sense. Because we
>> can't help being fish, we can't help but swim in our interpretations.
>> And we can only guess what oceans alien fish may swim in.
>>
>> It seems as though we can comprehend 'mind' only in terms of some
>> self-instantiating, self-interpreting context, in which meaning
>> depends always on the self-relating logic of differentiation and
>> interaction. Hence the 'perspective' of mind is always intrinsic,
>> and 'meaning' doesn't survive abstraction to any extremity of
>> 'external' observation. We can comprehend the 'externalised' flux -
>> i.e. what is abstractable out-of-context - as somehow correlative of
>> mind with mind, and mind with matter. But whatever meaning is finally
>> recoverable will again be 'as received' - i.e. as re-interpreted in
>> its context of arrival.
>
> I sometimes have the feeling you're saying something interesting...and
> wishing I knew what it was.
>
> Brent
>
>>
>> This reminds me of the aphorism that "the meaning of a communication
>> is the response it elicits". Just consider the regress of nested
>> interpretations *that* implies!
>>
>> David
>>
>>> On Mon, Aug 24, 2009 at 8:33 AM, David Nyman <david.nyman.domain.name.hidden> wrote:
>>>> 2009/8/24 Stathis Papaioannou <stathisp.domain.name.hidden>:
>>>>>> In the example of the alien brain, as has been pointed out, the
>>>>>> context of meaning is to be discovered only in the its own local
>>>>>> embodiment of its history and current experience. In Stathis' example
>>>>>> of *our* hypothesized observation of the alien's behaviour - whether
>>>>>> simulated or 'real' - any meaning to be found is again recoverable
>>>>>> exclusively in the context of either its, or our, historic and current
>>>>>> context of experience and action. It is obvious, under this analysis,
>>>>>> that information taken-out-of-context is - in that form - literally
>>>>>> meaningless. The function of observable information is to stabilise
>>>>>> relational causal configurations against their intelligible
>>>>>> reinstantiation in some context of meaning and action. Absent such
>>>>>> reembodiment, all that remains is noise.
>>>>> Wouldn't the meaning (to the alien) still be there if the brain did
>>>>> its thing without us understanding it, creating its own context? You
>>>>> can divide it into two interacting parts, one the brain proper, the
>>>>> other the virtual environment. The brain finds meaning in and
>>>>> interacts with the environment, but to an outside observer it all just
>>>>> looks like noise.
>>>>>
>>>> Yes, exactly - that's what I intend by: "any meaning to be found is
>>>> again recoverable exclusively in the context of either its, or our,
>>>> historic and current context of experience and action". "Either its
>>>> or our" here splits into:
>>>>
>>>> 1) Any meaning available to the alien would be situated in terms of
>>>> its locally embodied historic and current interpretative context.
>>>> 2) Any meaning recoverable by an observer would be bounded by her own
>>>> historic and current interpretative context.
>>>> 3) No meaning is recoverable outside the foregoing interpretative
>>>> contexts.
>>>>
>>>> I should perhaps emphasise that purely for the purposes of the
>>>> argument I'm assuming brain = mind to be a one-for-one correlation.
>>>>
>>>> Having said all this, it is interesting to reconsider your formulation
>>>> "the brain did its thing without us understanding it, creating its own
>>>> context". What is it about *being* the brain that causes this context
>>>> to be self-referentially available, but hides it beyond possibility of
>>>> recovery from 'observation'? Again this is the crux of the question
>>>> that Peter poses. If one hold that *all* the information is in
>>>> principle available to external observation, how could the foregoing
>>>> be true? And indeed, if one consistently follows an eliminativist
>>>> path, one cannot consistently hold it to be true; rather one must hold
>>>> that colour-deprived Mary, because of the extraordinary scope of her
>>>> 'objective knowledge' of colour, has in fact no surprises in store
>>>> when she finally 'sees redly'.
>>>>
>>>> Can this be made plausible? Well, oddly, if I try this for size in
>>>> the form of a gedanken experiment, I can find one - and only one - way
>>>> to make it so. It is to conclude that - given Mary, for the
>>>> experiment to be viable, must possess the intrinsic capacity for
>>>> colour vision - her interpretation of the objective data is so
>>>> complete that it permits her to *imagine redly*. IOW the
>>>> meaning-in-context for Mary - the immediate local effect of
>>>> stimulation of her retinas by red-wavelength light - is in fact
>>>> recoverable in the context of her locally available interpretative
>>>> capacities, just as it will be again when she finally leaves the
>>>> laboratory.
>>>>
>>>> David
>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> --
>>>>> Stathis Papaioannou
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>
>>
>> >
>>
>
>
> >
>
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Received on Wed Aug 26 2009 - 18:11:05 PDT