John Page

Adrian:

Nice post .
The main difficulty I see is the proposition that there is only one true ontological realm. One the other hand, if one can arrive at a physical explanation why the mind perceives and thinks what it does, including having the freedom to invent many ontologies, this would seem to close the loophole.

Cheers, John

P.S. Reading your post, I couldn't help thinking "Double-entry bookkeeping"!

Adrian Selby

Hmm, one could fall foul of the parsimony edict, i.e. if he can get away with a single ontology, and still offer a coherent model for what we observe and experience (in relation to this field of discourse for example) then it is, in his words, a perspicuous model. Also, as per the preamble, he's hoping the model sets up to answer some of the problems of positing multiple ontologies outside the physical, such as the classic dualist problem of just how the mental connects with the physical and why a particular mind is always seeming to be near or at a particular body.

The book was written in 1979, fairly recent in philosophical terms, but at the time, he found the explanations offered by cognitive scientists, AI modellers and neuropsychologists to contain the ability to conceptualise properly the things we experience and see in others that were previously categorisable effectively only in the OA model, or the dualist model. It's precisely because we can render 'intention' into purely physical goal directed terminology such as employed in guidance missile systems that we can begin to think about more complex intention in this way as a property of a physical system. One hundred years ago I daresay Wilson's model wouldn't have worked, there would have not been the observations and experience gathered by all these researchers that have allowed the model to render more and more completely explanations for consciousness and the mind in purely physical terms.

Thanks John

John Page

Ockham strikes again!! But isn't the razor just pointing to experience that the easiest way of understanding things tends to be the simplest explanation? That doesn't make it "right" though - for example, "The simplest way of understanding what's up and what's down is to consider yourself standing up." I could argue, for example, that a parsimonious ontology ignores the true complexity of existence.
IMO we need to understand how the mind constructs and uses ontologies rather than seek a unifying ontology. Why? I think a proposed "unified ontology" would only be relevant to the capability of human minds to understand the environment in which they live. (My relativism peeking through again....)

Cheers, John

cobrashock

Having read several books on the philosophy of this subject down through the years I couldn't agree any more. True, science does not know a lot on this subject but that doesn't mean that we don't know anything either, from a scientific standpoint.
I was involved with Prosac and its effect on the mind, at least in a partial cursory sense during my active employment days at Lilly.

Some things we do know to be fact though.
The mind is controled by a chemistry, and that chemistry can be programed by experience. It takes a form called motor neuro- ways (passage ways) that connect the various areas of the mind.
These passage ways become more complex as we age and tend to build up in channels to limited areas of the mind. This is why we have the varied personalitys as human adults we think, and why children can be programed to have a certain personalitys.
It's thought that consciousness is a learned state but don't confuse that with the "ability" to become conscious or its degree, that is determined by genetics we think.
Regarding the consciounsness, the example that's mostly listed to show this is- quick, think of the first memory memory that you can remember? How old were you? Yes you were conscious prior to that moment, but not at a level of self awareness. That's why you started to remember things at that point on. While this example may or may not be valid, the point is consciousness is thought to be learned.
To think otherwise, to my way of thinking, is metaphysics and more than we observe.
cobrashock

Adrian Selby

A parsimonious explanation for existence would be the one that captured the complexity most elegantly!!

Wilson argues at length at the start of his book that conceptual systems are measured in terms of how well suited they are to describing and otherwise understanding our experience. Thus, our experience was once suitably described astronomically by the geocentric model. The heliocentric model then developed because with the assumption that the earth went around the sun, observations we made knit together better. Crucially, Wilson believes that the success of a system is not that it is more right than others, rather, that it is simply adopted in place of them, after all, these conceptual systems have different axioms, it is questionable that they are comparable, though they are coextensive with experience as it 'comes in'.

This is exactly the purpose of the BIT, to understand how the mind relates to the brain. Systems philosophy attempts to be a trans-paradigmatic explanation for the attempts we make to model our experience, insofar as it attempts to be neutral to the subjects under discussion, thus, the emphasis isn't on I and Self, rather its on subsystem within supersystem. (I don't think it is trans-paradigmatic, but it is attempting to neutralise perspective focussed understanding of reality).

Wilson's point is that he's not proposing as he calls it "doctrinaire advocacy" of some position, just that the research undertaken in neuroscience allows us to address some age old questions about the mind body relationship in new ways. The efficacy of the model resides in whether new research (i.e. new experience and observations) supports its 'root model' and where there are problems, the replacement of the model, or the restructuring of it can occur when extraneous or currently unprocessable experiences form the basis for a new understanding. It may therefore be possible that the BIT is replaced by a revised OA model again, after showing itself to be ineffective at allowing us to understand our experiences in a coherent way.

This is why the last half of the book deals with jurisprudence, because the test for such a model resides in how its vocabularies and conclusions fit with our experience that we currently categorise as 'punishment' 'blame' 'guilt' and 'free will'.

Of course, the construction and use of ontologies by the mind on his model is something the brain does in order to make sense of its environment. It's relevance is central to our existence, in Wilson's view as I understand it.

sodium

So, are you saying that you would find it more satisfying if souls were shown both to exist and to not exist, that qualia are both just an error in reasoning, and a real part of the world?

There can't really be more than one true ontological realm. If there were two that were in some sense both right, we would call their combination the true ontological realm. The statement that there is only one true ontological realm isn't a falsifiable statement about the world; it is a description of our own thinking processes. You're just using the terms differently.

John Page

Perhaps, but consider:

If it is true that "The statement that there is only one true ontological realm isn't a falsifiable statement about the world; it is a description of our own thinking processes. " then I could argue there are as many ontological realms as there are minds.

I could move in the direction of there only being one common reality that we inhabit, but then I would arrive at the proposition that the "one common reality we inhabit" is the same as the "only one true ontological realm".

What I'm thinking is that an ontology (noun) is an explanation of being in general and an ontology may embrace all of existence or may smaller in scope - such as an ontology of knowledge. Maybe I'm misunderstanding what you mean by the term "ontological realm".

Cheers, John

Peter Soderqvist

Matt Ridley reviews Freedom Evolves by Daniel C. Dennett
"Either our actions are determined, in which case there is nothing we can do about them, or our actions are random, in which case there is nothing we can do about them."

Daniel Dennett to the rescue. The ebullient, pugnacious and ever pithy sage of Boston has written books on free will, consciousness and Darwinism. He now returns to free will with a remarkably persuasive new idea derived from Darwinism: that freedom of the will is something that grows, that evolves. The greater the sophistication of an organism, the greater its knowledge of the world and of itself, so the greater its ability to take charge of its own destiny. A rock has no freedom to choose; a bacterium has very little; a bird has some; a conscious primate has much more; a conscious primate inheriting a rich lode of cultural knowledge has the most of all.

Determinism - the idea that a cause automatically produces an effect - is not, says Dennett, the same as inevitability. This is a surprising assertion which he spends several chapters justifying, and I think he succeeds.
http://www.arts.telegraph.co.uk/arts...09/bomain.html

Freedom Evolves by Daniel Clement Dennett
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/AS...479688-7395333

Soderqvist1: It must be a misunderstanding that Dennett deny the existence of consciousness. Denial of consciousness is absurd when we take his last book, Freedom Evolves into consideration! Btw, I am finish with my readings of David Deutsch book, The Fabric of Reality, free will is in according with quantum physics' many worlds interpretation! The Fabric of reality has four strands, namely, Everett's many worlds interpretation, Karl Popper 's epistemology, Turing's theory of computation, Richard Dawkins's theory of the selfish gene! The Fabric of Reality can explain, and predict everything that is known according to David Deutsch! This is a link to his home page!

Deutsch is a physicist, winner of the 1998 Paul Dirac prize for theoretical physics and a researcher at the Centre for Quantum Computation at Oxford University's Clarendon Laboratory. http://www.qubit.org/people/david/David.html

Thomas Ash

I don't think this quite sufficient. Why is there is a distinct, unified conciousness based on precisely the area of physical matter comprised by your brain (or more precisely your concious brain, as the regions of your brain involved in, for example, giving the precise orders required to coordinate movement aren't manjifested in your conciousness) - nothing more, nothing less? Your answer doesn't really answer the problem at all. And why couldn't you say to a rock: 'you' are your iron ore? Why is it that a rock doesn't have a 'you' and you do? And isn't your body pretty "intricately intertwined with yourself"? Yet it's not part of your conciousness just by merit of this.

ComestibleVenom

In point of fact, the body does play an active part in our consciousness. The sense of body image does take a small but non-negligible part of cognitive processing, and it is in continued communication with the rest of the nervous system.

Frankly, I don't believe that you appreciate why you are dissatisfied with the network distinction between the mind and the brain. It's like asking why a chair isn't part of a computer. The physical exchange of menginful information is *obviously* limited, I just don't see the problem.

The porperties of neural networks are well known, and the nature of their internal access is no metaphysical mystery. Unitary access, time sensitive memory, unconscious subagency modifications, varing intensities of access, the connection of various elements of experience and memory are all quite naturally explicable in neural networks. No magical metaphysical explanation is necessary.

I suspect that fact that people try to interpose (totally unecessary and very confused) metaphysical problems is due to incoherent intuitions about a mental private language.