[From Bruce gregory 92003.0625.1620)]
I am forwarding this to the list for Marc who is no longer a subscriber.
from [ Marc Abrams (2003.06.23.1822) ]
Bruce Gregory was nice enough to forward me this post on my request. I
decided to respond because I did not like the way I bowed out the other evening,
and wanted to leave CSGnet on a more positive note.
> [From Bill Powers (2003.06.23.0720 MDT)]
> Yeah, yeah, I know. Losing my temper gets us nowhere. I was doing fine
> except for that last sentence or two. Sorry about that.I have to keep
> reminding myself that in Brooklyn this would be just a normal
street-corner
> conversation among friends.
Not quite. People in Brooklyn (or anywhere else I am aware of ) don't call
others 'manic' and expect to get kisses in return. I don't know what got up
your behind but it sure wasn't me.
> I'm used to people who take "asshole" and "fuck you to" as an
irrevocable declaration of war.
Declaration of war? Not quite. Just heart felt sentiments. I apologize for
the use of the language. I do not apologize for the ideas they conveyed.
>Believe it or not, Marc isn't even particularly mad at me.
No, just disillusioned. You are not the person I thought you were. Not even
close. It's hard for me to believe that I could have been so wrong about
someone. I have not met many people who are so entrenched in a set of ideas
and so unwilling to listen to anyone else as you. They didn't dig deeper
trenches then you have in the past 30 years in all of World War I.
>He's just trying to win an argument.
I didn't know I was in one until your last post last night. I mistakenly thought I was 'discussing some ideas. Unknown to me was the fact that what I was actually doing was 'attacking someone's long held beliefs. Sort of like Rick bashing religion. Only this 'religion' was not so evident. What can I say, I'm just some dumb manic from Brooklyn. Sometimes the lights don't go on as quickly as I would like.
Actually, it all started coming together the post before. I couldn't understand what you were getting upset about. Your final response put it all into view. My 'entrenched' views have been entrenched for about 30 days. If you recall, I explained I was going to come back to CSGnet in about 2 weeks. I decided to do it a bit sooner and I'm actually glad I did.
I realized last night that I have developed a very different theory for myself. It's not Powers' theory, it's not Churchland's, it's not Fuster's , and it's
not Edelman's. It's _mine_. I have basically put together 3 different ( but compatible) views ( Fuster, Edelman, Powers ) and have come up with my own Cognitive Neuroscience Theory. I believe you might call it _The Cognitive Hierarchal Control Identity theory_ :-). It's materialistic, and I like it a lot. ( I should it's my own concoction 
). I won't bore you with the details. But I was stupid enough to think that you and Rick might be interested in tossing around the pro's and con's of this theory I put together. What a joke. You have no such interest.
And your little 'me too' helper Rick, is a real piece of work. You could not have found yourself a better lap dog. In fact he was probably easier to train then a dog.
> As I said (and it would be interesting to get your take and some others on
> this subject), materialists have long argued from a faith that is mainly
> anti-religious in character.
B. S. The argument has actually gone the other way. Dualism is the rage (the more popular theory, in many different forms ), and has been since
Descartes set back the study of mind 300 years. The dualists are the ones claiming god and religion. How can you have a 'soul' and be a materialist? You can't. There can be no afterlife either. So goodbye to 6/8's of the world's population who believe in these things in one form or the other.
> In the early part of the 20th century, the consensus among scientists was that purpose was
> superstitious nonsense.
That is from the behaviorists, _not_ from the materialists. The 'materialists' would have been looking for a 'biological' reason for purpose. Just as they are doing today. Not all scientists subscribed to this notion.. William James understood consciousness to be a process, not a stuff.
>The real reason for this assertion, I might guess, was that they were trying to discredit religious ideas about supernatural souls, God's
>Purpose, and Free Will, maybe out of a desire for revenge (religion having treated science
> pretty badly in the past). I don't know what the real reasons were,
I think you have this a little mixed up. 'They' ( meaning, behaviorists ) were interested in developing a 'science' of human behavior. Consciousness was simply to difficult to handle. So they did the next best thing to studying it. They made believe it didn't exist. Out of sight, out of mind.
>of course, and they probably differed from one scientist to another. But the
> main reason I suspect hidden motives is that the arguments against
> purposive behavior or goal-directed behavior were so shoddy by scientific standards.
For your 'scientists' there were no arguments _against_ purposeful behavior. It simply was not considered 'scientific' to study purpose or consciousness. Bringing 'mind' back into nature has been a rather recent development.
>If scientists had simply taken the evidence for purposive behavior at face value, they probably could have come up with the
>negative feedback control concept decades before electronic engineers finally did.
I believe W. James at the turn of the century began to understand the notion of feedback.
> it. As it is, I have spent 50 years of my life trying to overcome the materialist resistance to any suggestion that mechanisms can actually
>have purposes and carry them out.
Materialists resistance? Are you serious? You can't be. All that 'materialist's' say is that _everything_ is biologically based. Materialism _does not_ say there is no purpose. I don't know who you have been fighting but it hasn't been the materialists. It's the dualists who refuse to acknowledge intentionality and purpose. It's your behaviorists ( who don't acknowledge purpose at all, and the Cog sci people who believe in the computational approach, that is, brain/computer). Not the materialists. Who was the last 'materialist' you read? You really need to look into Edelman and Fuster. But you won't. You are to busy fending of strawmen, and actually believing the stuff you just said.
>Look what happened to the word "intention." I think it was Brentano who coined that usage of the word.
Yes, It was Franz Brentano, a German Philosopher, who felt that intentionality was a good indicator of mental processes.
>I suspect that he saw this perfectly good word lying around that no longer had any meaning
> (because intentions, like purposes and goals, had been discarded once and
> for all by self-respecting scientists) and decided to give it a meaning of
> his own -- "aboutness," or "being directed toward," for crissake.
Not quite. 'Intentionality was used in it's earliest forms ( around 1600 )
as a way of expressing god's will through man. Again, Your dualist friends
took the study of mind away from science. It was not the materialists.
> The funniest aspect of this is the way materialists can say that "mental
> processes" are all in your imagination. All in your WHAT? They argue
> about whether introspection reveals mental processes or only the same old
> physical processes in the brain, but somehow it never seems to occur to
> them that introspection itself, whatever it is looking at, also requires
> explanation. What is it that can look either outside or inside? They can
> talk about appearances being illusions, but they never say who is being fooled.
Again, you seem to be confused. This statement does not reflect the opinions
of the materialists I have read. It represents the notions and ideas of the cog sci functionalists, I have read.
> In Churchland's _Matter and Consciousness_, the chapter where he finally
> gets down to the arguments about consciousness goes off the rails
> completely. A basic question is whether the Observer can be mistaken about
> what goes on in the mind. Somehow this gets turned around into the question
> of whether what goes on in the mind is a true representation of what is
> REALLY going on, which is beside the point. One example is someone being
> tortured by having a hot iron pressed against his back. The 20th time this
> happens, it is a piece of ice instead of the hot iron, and in this
> completely imaginary (I trust) example, the victim at first howls in pain,
> and then does a double take and realizes that this instance is different from the others.
First of all you speak as if Churchland 'invented' this stuff or came up with this theory. He didn't. He simply presented a wide range of views on the subject and tried to provide a number of different angles to some very interesting problems. You are implying here that he has some 'agenda' to push and some favorite theory he is trying to sell. I don't believe any of that. Sure he has his opinions, and he clearly states them, not as gospel and fact, but as one of a possible number of views. he maintains that only empirical research will unveil the final answers. This is quite a different picture from the one you are conveying. I also realized that Churchland also 'attacked' some of your cherished beliefs, and as such you asked of him what you yourself can't do. "prove" that such and such is such and such. I guess the best defense is a good offense.
I believe Churchland to be a Cog sci functionalist. He probably considers himself leaning more toward materialism then dualism, but he's not. Not as he has outlined it in his book.He loves the computational/ Cog sci model. That book was written 15 years ago, I would love to know what his current line of thinking is.
> So this is supposed to prove that consciousness can be mistaken about what
> is going on in the mind (it's interesting to see how many philosophical
> arguments rest not only on making up experiments that never happened,but
> in making up the results, too). In fact, all it would prove,
He's a philosopher, this is what philosophers do. They think about the imponderables. That's one reason they are philosophers and not scientists.
Exactly what have you 'proven' with your theory? Why is your conjectures any more valid then his? he can point to any number of experiments that back up his argument. Do you really believe that the tracking task 'proves' control exists. I must admit, the correlations look real good, but we all know that correlations in and of themselves are not enough to warrant a finding of causality. At least that what Phil Runkel says. And your introspection is certainly not sufficient to 'prove' hierarchy or the specific levels you have ascribed to it.
Exactly what parts of the model have you been able to clarify and 'prove' over the past 30 years? What do you know today, that you didn't know 30 years ago? One level, and a rearrangement of a couple more? What else? What kind of progress have you made in advancing the plausibility of your model? I say, not much. I say you have spent 30 years defending something you had no need to defend. But hey, who the hell am I. I'm just some dumb manic from Brooklyn with a bad attitude. I am not saying these things to be either super critical or hurtful. I am saying these things because I believe them to be both true, and the main reason I am leaving this list. I am not interested in advancing your agenda, like you lap dog pal is. I think you _did_ a magnificent job of putting this theory together, but it seems both your imagination, and your willingness to accept new ideas stopped about 30 years ago. That is truly unfortunate for all of us.
> A person encountering these materialist arguments for the first time might find them very convincing,
Your 'arguments' in this post were _not_ materialistic arguments. They were and are both Cog Sci Functional, and behaviorists arguments.
> before all the little problems start to surface. I've been encountering them for most of my professional life, and they no
> longer have much to say to me.
Bill, I hate to say this, but I don't think you have a clue. Not only have you been battling demon's and strawmen over the years, but you have blinded yourself to anything that might remotely threaten the plausibility of your beloved model.
With all this, I would still like to thank you for the time and patience you afforded me. Both you and HPCT will always hold a special place in my heart. But like a child growing a bit long in the tooth it's time for me to move out on my own.
I want to thank you though for some very interesting insights. You're utilization of hierarchy and control was magnificent. But I have diverged from your line of thinking and it's not a minor point or two. I believe _everything_ associated with 'mind' is biologically based. The whole ball of wax. I don't know this to be true, and I might very well be wrong. At this point I believe rather strongly that a biological basis of mind is the way to go.
If dualism were true, That is, 'mind' & 'Brain' are two distinct entities and one has nothing to do with the other, than brain damage, and brain disease would not effect emotions, memory, behavior, and thought. But the exact opposite is true. Dualism, in my opinion, is seriously flawed in a number of important ways.
I disagree with the direction you are trying to take your model. Just like Fuster, Churchland, and Edelman. Powers has missed a significant aspect of a model on . That is, a biological basis for 'mind'.
I don't believe there is much interest on this list for my ideas and I am not much interested in the direction you are trying to take your model. It's been fun.
Happy flying
Marc
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