Skywritings

Not to put too shrill a point on it, but what do the following have in common?

paparazzi
pornographers
pimps
tobacco companies
drug dealers
arms dealers

Just trying to make ends meet?
Just giving people what they want?
Just doing what Darwin (or Adam Smith) dictated?

I don’t know anything about Steven Jones, but I became virtually certain that he’s a quack from just a few glances at the links. There’s a familiar profile to all this (9/11 conspiracy theory, cold fusion, wikipedia celeb, blogger hero).

This is the kind of urban mythology of which we will alas be seeing more and more in an age where the media have enfranchised rumor and opinion on an instant, pervasive, globalized scale. No wonder everyone wants to be a celebrity and celebrities are getting voted in as elected officials instead of people who actually have qualities:

We are headed (quite naturally) for an Opinocracy in which truth has about as much weight as it has in Wikipedia policy and chat TV, and “notability” reigns supreme…

I take OA‘s struggle for its small (peer-reviewed) niche in cyberspace to be a countervailing measure, if ever so small a one. (If the peer review abolitionists have their way — as they well might — even OA won’t help.)

Why would anyone desire to become a posthumous cult, like CS Peirce? If one’s ideas have any value, let them be given enough credence, that vital irrigant, while one is still compos mentis, one’s cortex not yet compost! Bury them with their author, still-born, and they might as well not have been, for never having become what they might have been.

A “deletion debate” recently took place on Wikipedia about whether or not to remove what looks to be a vacuous and self-promoting entry on a set of equations (apparently self-baptised by a collaborator and compatriot of the author as the “XXX Equations”).

A remarkable series of interactions! I am neither a physicist nor a mathematician, hence I am completely unqualified to make any judgment about the substantive content at issue here, so I won’t.

But I think I may be qualified (after a quarter century of umpiring Open Peer Commentary) to make a judgment about the quality of the interactions among those who appear to be adjudicating the content in this deletion debate.

One observation is inescapable: Those who say (and sound like) they understand the substantive content under debate are the ones who are for deletion, and those who say they do not understand the content are for retention.

This is quite striking. I have never before looked into a Wikipedia deletion debate, but if this trade-off is not an uncommon one, the question that naturally arises is whether the quality of Wikipedia content (such as it is) arises because of or despite factors like this.

Those adjudicators who proudly state that they “don’t know what they are talking about but…” seem to cite two things in defense of deciding on a basis other than understanding and truth:

(1) Wikipedia is not by or for qualified experts (“peers”), but by and for “ordinary people”.

(Is this true? If true, what does it mean? Do ordinary people not need content whose truth can be relied on?)

(2) The alternative to truth or understanding is “notability”.

(Presumably this means that even if something is wrong, if it gathers enough attention, it merits a Wikipedia entry.)

There does, however, seem to be some consensus against using Wikipedia for self-promotion.

Another striking feature of Wikipedia is that most contributors (whether authors or editors) seem to prefer to contribute anonymously. (I wonder why?)

In peer review (about which I know somewhat more), referees have the option to be anonymous to authors, and authors (sometimes) have the option to be anonymous to referees, but both are answerable to the editors, who know their identities, and who are themselves openly and personally answerable to the entire peer community (including their authors and referees) for their editorial judgments.

There is no such personal answerability in Wikipedia. (Is that a problem?)

And without open personal answerability, and without the need to be qualified to judge content, hence no answerability to understanding or truth, what are we to make of “notability”?

They say that the ultimate goal of commercial “branding” is to make a product’s name so notable that you are ready to pay just for the name.

I spend a lot of my time defending and promoting open access to peer-reviewed research, and one of the chief incentives I cite is that open access increases citation impact (“notability”).

But citation impact is based on refereed work citing refereed work (not self-citation, or circle citation), and refereeing is constrained by personal answerability. (Could the growing spate of email and search-term spamming be a sign that free-floating, unanswerable “notability” may not be a value but a virus?)

There’s something to be said for a “CiteRank” version of Google’s PageRank algorithm (recursively weighting citations by the citedness of the citer, rather than just relying on flat citation counts).

I notice that someone “weighted” the deletion votes here by affixing the voter’s prior number of Wikipeditorial contributions; but surely we can come up with a more sophisticated algorithm than that, lest our self-generated busybody-metric becomes our self-validating ticket to “notability.”

Perhaps it’s safer to trust a mindless algorithm for measuring “notability” (suitably designed to detect and expose self-citation, circle-citation, noncumulativity, etc.) than measures of “notability” invoked by minds that have cheerfully declared themselves to be without understanding or answerability to the truth.

At least that would be my view if it were the treatment of Myocardial infarction that was at issue, rather than “XXX equations” — but then maybe “ordinary people” are not that concerned with the truth about Myocardial infraction either…

      Was ever such a perfect last-minute rescue possible?

If only Kristine Bogyo, Julian‘s much-loved mother and Anton‘s cherished soul-mate could have been there. Cellist and conductor of Toronto’s Mooredale Youth Orchestra, she lost a 14-year battle with cancer on Good Friday 2007.

Both father and son were playing under a bittersweet handicap.

Comments on the video of Sal Kripke’s 2006 talk on “The First Person“.

(I only understood about 25%, because of the poor sound quality of the recording and because SK had bronchitis, so I may have have filled the gaps wrong.)

SK was raising problems about pinpointing the referent for “I”. SK (rightly) pointed out that his own case was different from that of those people who claimed to be insentient robots, but that with testimony like that from others, and no way to determine whether it was true or false, all SK could conclude was that that confirmed the (familiar) uncertainty about the minds of others, and it raised anew the question of what exactly was different about one’s own case (for those of us who know we are not insensient robots).

Then SK brought up a Kripke/Wittgenstein-like point about uncertainty or even indeterminacy in trying to pinpoint the referent of “I”: The objective referent (roughly speaking, what is going on inside the body of SK) is not a problem, and anyone, SK or anyone else, can pick out that referent.

But the specific private Cartesian goings-on inside the body of SK — or SH: let me switch to my own “I”, because I’m not a robot either, and the points are clearer in I-language — are not as easy to pin down in the usual way. I think SK’s point was that I can have the usual Cartesian certainty that the private mental goings on are indeed going on (hence I am not a robot), but from that I still cannot fix the referent of “I.”.

So, along the same lines that SK has previously used to suggest that there is no way I can determine the fact of the matter between adding and “quadding,” I also cannot determine the fact of the matter about “I” — apart from the fact that private mental goings on are indeed going on. In both cases, it’s the Wittgensteinian problem of private error and its incorrigibility that makes this sort of private-language issue indeterminate even in the special (seemingly opposite) case of the incorrigibility and cartesian certainty of the Cogito.

There were also two other points, one Fregean one I couldn’t fully follow, concerning the sense vs. the reference of “I”. Perhaps that was just the “I”/”SCHMI ” version of the add/quadd problem of pinpointing the referent of I, which, in both cases, and unlike Hesperus/Phosphorus, fails, because of the private-language incorrigibility I summarized above.

The second point was about mirrors: that the mirror needs to be big enough for the entire body to fit (maybe that was about uncertainty concerning the spatial boundaries of the locus of the objective entity that we try to use to localize the subjective one); and that the naive non-philosopher who thought mirrors were the solution to the problem may not have been altogether wrong. (But I still don’t quit see how it could be done with mirrors!)

Now let me try an alternative view.

(1) Cogitatur. I’ve always felt that the Cogito, though one of the most important philosophical insights, had over-reached. Descartes had rightly pointed out that one cannot deny that cogitation is going on, when it is going on, hence that it exists. But to go on to conclude that an “I” exists, and that I am that I, might be a little more weight than the Cogito itself can bear, because what, after all, is that “I” — apart from the (undeniable) cogitation that exists and is ongoing? The “I” seems to be a more fallible, theory-laden matter. People can disagree about it; some (like the “robots” you point out some people claim they are) can even deny some aspects of it. Perhaps, like add/quadd, there is not even a fact of the matter about the “I”.

(2) Feeling. To get rid of unnecessary extra terminology that just makes it seem as if there is more going on, and more to account for, in contemplating the mind/body problem, I’ve tried to set aside all the synonyms and paranyms and variants (mind, mental, mentation, cogitation, consciousness, subjectivity, qualia, sentience, sapience, 1-st personhood, even intentionality) and to focus exclusively on that “mark of the mental” that we all (those of us who are not robots, at least) recognize as the necessary and sufficient mark and sine qua non of the mental, namely feeling.

(3) Senitur. So the slight over-reaching in Descartes’ gloss of his Cogito intuition is, I think, remedied if we reduce it to: I feel, therefore there is feeling (“Sentio ergo sentitur” — both said without needing a detached pronoun “I”, though “Sentitur ergo sentitur” would say much the same thing, at the cost of sounding like an empty tautology, which it isnt: it is perhaps more like what [I think you said] Shoemaker said it might be: an “analytic a-posteriori”, concluding from the experience of a mental event that there are indeed mental events). (That’s the non-robot intuition that you share with the others who deny they are robots.)

(4) Ego. But that still does not pin down the “I”.

(5) Feeling Feelings. It is true (though I don’t think it solves the problem) that “feeling” is intrinsically a 2-part relation: There is not only what is felt, but the feeler, feeling it. It is undeniable that that’s part of the content (the quality, the nature) of feeling itself, that it feels like “I” am feeling it. But that is only undeniable in the more general sense that it is undeniable that whatever one is feeling (when one is indeed feeling it) in fact feels-like whatever it feels like (and not like something else, or nothing). (This is the same point as the point that “is” is corrigible, but “seems” is not.)

(6) Feeling Like the Feeling Feeler. From the certainty that we feel, and the fact that feelings feel as if they are being felt by a feeler, it does not follow that an additional “I” exists, over and above the existence of the fact of the felt feelings. (It is undeniable that I feel cold when I feel cold, but that does not mean that I am cold, or that it is cold — or even that there is cold! There may be just feeling-like-cold — and by the same token there may be just feeling-like-I.)

(7) Free-Floating Feelings. Hence when we are trying to pinpoint the referent for “I”, we are right to detect a certain indeterminacy: We do have a (reasonably reliable) spatiotemporal locus for feeling itself. That’s probably not much more open to doubt than any ordinary here/now/this deixis. But the spatiotemporal locus (and indeed the existence) of the “I” — as anything over and above the brute fact that feeling is going on now (sentitur) — is another matter.

(8) Doing. To wrap up with the question of robots and causality: A robot is merely a certain kind of (“autonomous”) causal mechanism, with certain input/output performance (“doing”) capacities. Let us call the mechanism underlying the robot’s spatiotemporal performance capacities its “function.” (The goal of cognitive science is one day to reverse-engineer that function at the scale of human performance capacity, so as to be able to fully explain the causal mechanism. That’s what the goal of passing the Turing Test is all about.)

(9) I Robot. When people say “I’m just a robot,” they probably mean that they have a theory that all there is is their performance capacity, and once the underlying functional mechanism of that is known, there’s nothing else.

(10) Feeling Robots. But of course there is something else. We don’t just function, we also feel: Feeling is going on (if/when we are indeed feeling) and to deny that would be absurd. (And usually when people deny it, they are denying something else, not the fact tat they are feeling when they are feeling.)

(11) The Feeling/Function Problem. So we are indeed robots, but feeling robots. Hence the mind/body problem is really the feeling/function problem. It is a problem of causal explanation: How and why are some functions felt, rather than just “functed”?

(12) Causality. It is not that the fact that some functions are felt rather than just functed that is in doubt. The problem is explaining the causal status of feelings.

(13) Telekinetic Dualism. And a causal explanation of feeling looks impossible. For — except if we are ready to believe (without physical evidence, and contrary to all evidence except our feelings) in a “telekinetic dualism” in which feelings have independent causal (telekinetic) power, alongside the four other forces of nature (gravity, electromagnetism, and the strong and weak subatomic force) — feelings must be acausal and hence superfluous in any complete causal explanation of our robotic function.

(14) Patience and Agency. So if cognitive science has no hope (short of resorting to telekinesis) of causally explaining the (undeniable) fact of feeling, it follows, a fortiori, that there will be no objective way to pinpoint the referent of the even more elusive “I” that feels like both the agent and the patient of those feelings, whilst the robotic mechanism is functing their doings.

Stevan Harnad

Your view is that: – the world is made of physical events (qualityless, feelingless, atomic, quantitative) (A)

I can already sense the irrelevancies creeping in! The reason I have reduced the m/b problem to presence/absence of feeling alone — and the rest to just physical “functing” is precisely to avoid equivocation on a proliferation of irrelevant, redundant and profligate synonyms, paranyms and peripherals that simply cloud (crowd!) the picture and make it appear as if there are more things to face and answer than the one simple one:

Apart from feelings, there is no explanatory problem. Everything there is is causally explainable (in principle). I call all that “functing”. The problem then is simply to explain how and why some of the functing is felt. Never mind “atomic” and “quantitative”! And “qualityless” adds nothing: it just means feelingless.

– consciousness is having feelings (relational, intentional, qualitative)(B)

Again, all the needless, distracting synonyms, paranyms and irrelevancies:

“Relational” is irrelevant, “intentional” is highly ambiguous and equivocal, but if it means that, amongst our feelings, there’s the feeling that we cause things to happen, then yes, that’s one meaning of “intentional”. And yes, the problem of explaining the causal role of feeling is what the why and how are about.

The other meaning of intentionality is “aboutness”, a useless, pseudo-explanatory term, but fine, yes, feelings are “about” things in the sense that I seem to be feeling what it feels like to eat an apple, or to refer to 2+2 as being =4 etc. The “aboutness” is the content of the feeling, what feelings feel like, when they feel like they are about an outside world (rather than just my own, say, fatigue).

But this too is just make-words. The issue, again, is that there exist feelings, and the problem again is to explain how and why there not just unfelt functings instead.

thus there is no way to put together A with B.

No explanation of how and why some functings are felt. (The F/f problem.) try to show that our feelings are somehow reducible to the physical world as it is defined in A. You don’t think this epistemic strategy is going to work. Neither do I. You demolish many popular attempts at reducing B to A. One of your key arguments is the fact that the functional cannot produce the felt. Fine. I couldn’t agree more.

But here is a different view against which I didn’t find any specific critique to my position, which is, very shortly:

– the physical world is made of processes (qualitative, relational …) (A’) – consciousness could be a subset of such processes (relational, intentional, qualitative) (B)

You have just managed to fall into the usual trap: To simply say by fiat that feelings simply are a form of functing — whereas the problem is to explain how and why! You have simply begged the question.

I don’t doubt for a minute that some sort of “identity” theory is correct. That’s not the point! The problem is to explain “how” and “why,” not just to state “that”.

And it won’t do to state “well, some things just are as they are, like gravitation: no further hows or whys!”

The point is that electromagnetism is among the unproblematic functions. And the problem is to explain how and why some functions are felt, not simply to state that some functions are felt because they are “identical” with feeling. That is just another way to state that the F/f problem is insoluble.

(That’s fine too, but then we have to acknowledge, explicitly, that what we are saying is that although the question — “how/why are some functions felt?” — was a perfectly natural and justified one to ask, exactly like innumerable other reasonable functional questions that we ask, and get an answer, this time there is no answer. We are simply told that asking that question is like asking how/why gravity pulls, in other words, feeling is just one of the brute facts about the way things are. That sounds like no answer at all to me! Does it mean the m/b question made no sense? I think not…)

A is an abstraction that hinders our understanding both of the nature of the physical world and consciousness.

“A” is everything there is, and that happens, apart from feeling, along with our functional explanation (from maths, physics, chemistry, biology, engineering, etc.) of how and why everything is and happens.

You say this is all just an “abstraction: that hinders our understanding of function and feeling.

In reality, it is our understanding of function, and there is nothing at all wrong with it — except that it can’t explain feeling.

No point blaming the success for the failure. Especially when you have nothing remotely near the explanatory power of the successful part (physics etc.) to replace it!

The world is not made of atomic physical events on top of which you have a functional level that cannot transfigurate in feelings. The world is made of processes which are in themselves qualitative and relational. Could you explain why not? I am not trying to reduce B to A, but rather I claim that A’ should be substituted for A’ and then there is no opposition between A’ and B.

First, as I said “qualitative” and “relational” are weasel words. I don’t know what “qualitative” means if it does not mean either unfelt physical properties (such as mass, frequency, etc.), with which there is no problem at all — or it just means “felt”, in which case that is the one and only problem, and you are camouflaging it with all the paranyms.

“Relational” is even worse. There are plenty of unfelt relational properties (functions). “Bigger,” for example.

Feelings are another matter. And calling them “relational” adds absolutely nothing. It can only mean either:

(i) what it feels like to perceive or contemplate relational properties (which in no way helps, because the F/f problem is explaining how/why anything at all is felt) or

(ii) that feeling itself is “relational” (the “relation” between the feeler and what is felt, the “relation” that is rhapsodized in the notion of “aboutness” or “intentionality”):

This banal property of feeling (that feeling is something that is felt by a feeler) will not explain itself by its bootstraps. And it is not a “relation” of a kind that dissipates the F/f problem, turning it into just another functional relation problem!

(In fact, the only substantive insight that has ever come out of the fact that feeling feels-like a 3-part relation — (1) what the feeling feels like [“qualitatively”], the fact (2) that the feeling is felt, and (3) that it feels like the feeler is the feeler — is the Cogito! And even that was expressed in an equivocal way, making it seem as if it delivered more than it real did: “I think therefore I exist”. In fact it was just “I feel therefore I feel” and even that has too many entities [the feeling plus the “I”]: It should just have been “feeling is being felt, therefore feeling is being felt”. In other words, feelings exist. The “I” who feel the feelings is just what the feelings feel like. It is not a further ontological entity, squeezed out of a 2/3-part relation!)

This solution to the problem of consciousness is not a thesis on the nature of consciousness, but rather a thesis on the nature of the physical world. Is it such a crazy view?

I regret to say that pointing out that feeling is a relation, “just like” other relations in the world begs the question. It is not “just like” other relations (like “bigger”)! And that’s the problem.

One final comment. If feelings were identical (not produced by or emergent from) certain physical processes, the issue of mental causation would be solved since there would be no longer mental causation (mental to physical) but only physical to physical.

Again, too many synonyms simply delude us into thinking that repeating the questions with redundant terminology amounts to answering them!

“Mental” just means felt. So I repeat, without the multiplication of terms:

First, the m/b or F/f problem: “How/why are certain functions felt rather than just functed?”

Your reply:

“If feelings were identical with (not caused by) certain functions, the m/b problem is solved, because everything would be functional”.

Yes, yes. But you left out how/why certain functions are felt, which is what this is all about! You cannot answer a substantive question about how/why certain functions are felt by simply stating that they are identical with feeling. They may well be. But the part you left out was how and why! And that is a problem of causal, functional explanation not solved either by multiplying terminology or invoking identities without explaining them.

If I had been afforded more heed, I could have afforded to be less headstrong — and more.

[Reflections on two talks on Spinoza by Rebecca Goldstein at McGill

1. Subjectivity is not really making a comeback in cognitive sciencei, at least not as a form of empirical data or as a part of theory, or as a way of generating or testing theory.

2. Nor is language the window on the mind, or on the mind/body problem or the other-minds problem.

3. Subjectivity just means that we feel: We have subjective states. The rest is just about the contents of those subjective states — anything from ouch to cogito ergo sum.

4. So it’s equally certain (within the limits of the other-minds problem, which applies as much to other talking people as to behaving rats) that other people as well as other rats feel. And we have ways of inferring it, reliably, in both cases; and that’s fine for psychophysics and psychophysiology (but it certainly does not solve the mind/body problem).

5. Certainty about the fact that subjectivity exists has never been the problem. The (mind/body) problem is: explaining how and why subjectivity exists: how and why matter feels, how and why some functional states are felt states, rather than just “functed” states.

6. That is the problem that Spinoza (and others, including me) think, for various reasons, is unsolvable. So, so much for Spinoza’s conviction that at the end of the day all questions will be answered, or answerable! He has already refuted that conviction with his conviction that the two “aspects” have no unified explanation.

7. Still, it’s a good rule of thumb for intellectual inquiry — perhaps the only viable rule of thumb — that every question has an answer.

8. About your moral indignation if your fellow-picnickers knowingly let you bite into a wasp without warning you: That’s valid (though not quite universal, because it is not clear whether autists and psychopaths would share your indignation, even if they were in the same situation).

9. But either way, it’s not a viable basis for objective ethics (for deriving “ought” from “is”). All it means is that, as biological creatures, we have a (mostly) shared adaptive “mind-reading” ability and propensity (“mirror neurons”) and needs and expectations. So far that says absolutely nothing about “is” or “ought,” but only about survival value and adaptive advantages — i.e., about “can” and “does”.

10. The fact that it feels like something to be morally indignant that someone does not do what you feel he ought to do simply adds — to the “can” and the “does” — the insoluble problem already mentioned: the very fact that we feel (the mind/body problem).

11. There would of course be no ethics if there were no feeling (and hence no feelings to hurt). But that doesn’t help. It just means that feeling is a necessary condition for ethics; but it doesn’t make ethics objective. On the contrary, it highlights its subjectivity. (And then there are also the autists and psychopapths and non-telepathic or apathetic animals, who feel otherwise, or feel nothing at all on the matter of the feelings of others.)

12. There’s no question that Spinoza has a large following today. (Whether it is a substantive intellectual revival or just another cult — like Peirce and Dewey and Gibson, or even vulgar Darwinism — is another matter!)

13. But I don’t think it counts as evidence that the Spinoza revival is a substantive intellectual one to cite the fondness of Einstein for Spinoza! What made Einstein an immortal intellectual giant was not the quality of mentation that went into his thoughts about Spinoza. If his intellectual weight depended on the quality of his mentation (or verse) about Spinoza, Einstein would be an exceedingly minor thinker.

14. Nor does the fact that both Einstein and Spinoza were guided by a faith in the answerability of all questions give that affinity more substance. That motivation is a prerequisite for many kinds of intellectual quest. If you think of it, pessimistically, as a losing game — whether zero-sum or non-zero-sum — it’s like going hunting convinced you have no quarry. (That’s as much of an evolutionary non-starter as Walt Whitman’s “Do I contradict myself? Well then I contradict myself…”)

15. Damasio’s affinity for Spinoza does not make the revival substantive either. Damasio focusses on emotion in brain function, but he never explains how and why the brain feels rather than just functs: He does not even realize the problem!

16. In general, the fact that the findings of contemporary “cognitive science”  square with seventeenth-century Spinoza does not necessarily attest to the fact that Spinoza was advanced: it could alas just as well mean that cogsci is retarded…

17. And last: What on earth does “God is Nature” mean? Does every imaginary entity become real if we simply declare it identical with some other entity that really does exist?

18. Does Charlie Brown’s “Great Pumpkin” become real if I simply aver that He is in reality just the Secret of French Cooking?

19. Is polytheism vindicated if I say that each deity is in reality a hadron (or each hadron is in reality a deity)?

20. And are the armchair consolations of philosophical understanding invoked by Spinoza really a nontrivial balm for Auschwitz inmates? (If not, then what more does it mean than that minor malaise can sometimes be minimized by mentation — just as it can by medication?)

Given the obsessive fascination of daily horoscopes of self and kin for huge swaths of the populace, the readiness of much of the subcontinent to use the planets as oracles to pick a lifelong marital match, the unflagging grip of particolored neural imagery on those striving to decipher the brain’s secret code, not to mention a century of western fealty to Freudian fantasies, Marxian (or — pick your poison — Market) moronics and our continuing global affinity for the local equivalent of the Bible and the pin — it is hardly surprising that the cerebral hermeneuts who elect to do their dechiffrage on behavioral function rather than on spatiotemporal patterns are having a field day freely projecting their animism onto robots’ ramblings… We are a superstitious species.