[From Bill Powers (2010.03.31.0844 MDT)]
Bruce Gregory (2010.03.31.0900 EDT) –
BP: OK, with that preamble out
of the way, how about trying to tell me what’s wrong with dualism?
Well, I’ve sampled it a bit, and it explains a lot. I can even see why
you thought PCT has something to do with your ideas. “Wishful
thinking” can be construed as a version of control-system behavior,
in that we think (and act) as a means of making our experiences match
what we wish to experience. Wishes, of course, are reference signals, and
wish-fulfillment is simply the usual error-correction that all control
systems do. If I wish to type “the” as I just did, the wish is
immediately made real, as we both can see.
In PCT, the pejorative sense of wishful thinking that underlies
everything you say about it could be seen as using imagination in
preference to real-time perception. I can imagine typing “the”
without actually doing so – that is, without producing any actions to
affect my own or anyone else’s perceptions. An imagined perception is, of
course, much easier to control than one that originates in sense-data.
All that’s necessary is to substitute the reference signal into the
perceptual pathways, and from there on up in the hierarchy it’s as if the
desired perception had actually occurred. You can control perceptions in
imagination that you have no way of controlling by acting on the outside
world – dreams of flying without aid are an obvious example.
Controlling imagined perceptions is, of course, useless as a way of
having any effects in the outside world. I can agree with you that this
aspect of wishful thinking is a problem and should be avoided. However,
manipulating imagined perceptions as a way of reaching a goal can also be
extremely useful; it’s called designing or planning. My first big project
at the Dearborn Observatory
led me to spend a lot of time imagining how I would achieve a wish I had
had since my first experience of a fuzzy round black and white television
screen: to put a television camera on a telescope (this was 1961 or so).
Wishful thinking did not cause this wish to be fulfilled, but it did lead
to designs of a rather complicated piece of electronics including a
television camera built from scratch in which the number of scan lines,
the speed of scanning, and the interval between scans could be varied
with precision pots on the control panel, and so on. A lot of features
were imagined before solder was ever melted. The concrete results of this
wishful thinking are still in existence and might even still operate,
though they’ve been superseded by CCD devices.
Your arguments against wishful thinking are well-founded when they
address the attempt to believe that what is actually impossible has been
achieved. I imagine that as a child I heard admonitions against this sort
of thinking almost as often as you did, and ignored them even more often
than you did. But I think I realized earlier than you did that such
admonitions were often just expressions of doubt and attempts to
discourage, disguised as lectures on strength of character. Many people,
like the Wright brothers, have done things in the face of such
discouragment, ignoring the scoffing that they were dreaming of
impossible feats, indulging in wish-fulfilling fantasies, and so on.
Accusations of wishful thinking should not be taken too seriously, since
they quite often only reveal the timidities of the accuser.
In fact, it’s all too easy to use the demonstrable cases of irrational
wishful thinking as an argument against the reality of anything one
doesn’t understand or believe in. The argument is probably used more
often that way than in legitimate cases; it has the advantage that one
doesn’t actually have to have any way of demonstrating that the wishing
is misguided. By attacking the validity of someone else’s thinking, one
can bypass the need for a convincing rebuttal.
In our present discussion, the question relates to consciousness. I
quote, I hope with permission, from your web page:
···
=============================================================================
No discussion of the brain can avoid the most obvious result of the
activities of the brainconsciousness. Countless books have been written
on the subject of consciousness. I will make only one observation. No one
has the slightest clue as to how the workings of the brain lead to
conscious awareness. No one. The question is so baffling that it is not
even clear what an answer might look like. What kind of story would
constitute a convincing solution to the problem of consciousness? It is
hard, not to say impossible, to imagine. With understanding the origin of
consciousness, we may have reached the limits of our ability to concoct
convincing stories.
I definitely agree with this:"No one has the slightest clue as to
how the workings of the brain lead to conscious awareness. "
However, we don’t even know IF consciousness is a brain function, which
you seem to assume without proof when you ask how it could arise from
brain function. And of course the same goes for the origin of
consciousness. One of my main points has been that we don’t know these
things, but of course that’s not what we’re arguing about. We’re arguing
about whether consciousness exists, whether we can explain it or not. I
claim, quite consciously, that it does exist. You appear to be claiming,
quite consciously and somewhat paradoxically, that it doesn’t – that
it’s just a story concocted to convince – well, that’s the question,
isn’t it? Just who is making up this story, and whom is it supposed to
convince? If there are just neural circuits converting inputs into
outputs, as you appear to be proposing in various parts of your web page,
there is nobody to be convinced in there but a collection of neurons
which are operated by chemical reactions. If your arguments convince that
collection, then they do, and if they don’t, they don’t. It doesn’t
matter which happens; the outcome is determined by physiology and
chemistry, not by truth or falsehood. By your own hypotheses, the brain
can convince itself of falsehoods, but under your apparent model, so
what?
Here’s some more:
There is nothing wrong with thinking there is a ghost in the machine,
so long as we keep in mind the fact that the ghosts knowledge is limited
to what the machine tells it. A further limit to the ghosts power is
also important; the ghost apparently has no ability to tell the machine
what to do, although the ghost thinks it is in charge.
The first sentence is exactly my view: the ghost in the machine, which I
call awareness, knows nothing but what is represented by perceptual
signals in the machine. The objects of awareness are perceptual signals.
To awareness, perceptual signals look like a real three-dimensional world
complete with sound, smell, color, and so on. Nobody has ever found those
features of the world in neural signals, but there they are.
The second sentence is not self-evidently true, because of the phenomenon
of volitional action. There’s some circumstantial evidence that awareness
is accompanied by the ability to alter things in the hierarchy; an
ability modeled in PCT as the reorganizing system. However, the ghost as
I experience it doesn’t think. It can observe thoughts, but the thoughts
are activities in the machine, the brain: specifically, imagined
perceptul signals. These words you are reading are being organized by and
in the machine, as the ghost attempts to reorganize the machine to bring
its operation into harmony with the fact that the ghost exists, and to
get the “I” in the machine to realize that it is not,
ultimately, in charge. I, here in the machine, have realized that I do
not reorganize myself. I am a bit humbler than I used to be.
All this spooky stuff no doubt raises hackles about mysticism and
theology, which are echoes of the days of Descartes. Mysticism and
theology are attempts to avoid saying “I don’t know,” but I
don’t use that way out. I just don’t know what awareness is: like you, I
really and truly don’t even know what to guess. All I have is the
phenomenon, and a few observations about how it relates to other
experiences. And a mental model, of course, since I’m a model fan. But I
have no prejudices about the actual nature of awareness. I just don’t
know.
I can understand how wrestling with these experiences can make a
scientist nervous. The danger of lapsing back into religious explanations
seems reason enough just to stay away, not to go there. I recommend a
thorough exposure to science fiction as a way of curing the anxiety.
Eddington said that the universe is not only stranger than we imagine,
but stranger than we can imagine. Science fiction, however, makes
a pretty good try at imagining things we have yet to discover in reality.
And the things it imagines are not scenes of angels floating around in
Heaven while some white-haired God smiles at some of them and calmly
sends others to be tortured forever. The whole point of science fiction
is to encourage the suspension of disbelief, by presenting
magical-seeming phenomena as taken-for-granted aspects of ordinary life
in some other or some future world. The teleporter is housed in some
other world’s spittoons, and matter-to-energy converters power
toothbrushes. The whole message is that there’s nothing to be afraid of,
or worship, in innovations. A true science-fiction fan loves to find
things he or she doesn’t understand. Not understanding isn’t a threat;
it’s a promise.
Best,
Bill P.