Re: Creation escaping creator's eyes


travalian3@xxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
This Marvin Minsky's essay I've come across

http://kuoi.asui.uidaho.edu/~kamikaze/doc/minsky.html

isn't available on his site - and it is good and important enough to
be... (plus this way there is a slight uncertainty that it is genuine
in entirety.)

I'm leaving this note here because MM seems to check this place
regularly.

What reminded me the article might not be completely genuine was this
passage-

"Even the most technically sophisticated people maintain that
whatever
consciousness might be, it has a quality that categorically places it
outside the realm of science, namely, a subjective character that is
makes it utterly private and unobservable. Why [...] ? [...] I'll argue

that vitalism still persists because we're only starting to find a way
to understand the brain."

................


I think the article is genuine, and I think the quote above refers to
the so-called "mysterian" perspective [see below]. Certain people [such
as Pinker, if I am not mistaken] maintain this about consciousness.

I'll include the following quote from MM's paper ...

==============
And that's what this essay is all about: that certain things are too
complex to summarize! This includes the mechanisms of highly evolved
organisms and, especially, the workings of their nervous systems. It
also includes the highly evolved systems that we call cultures and
societies. And especially, it includes what we call consciousness.
==============

and another ...

===============
Because we're living in the early times of psychology, no one can yet
answer such questions. Clearly it is time to begin to seek constructive
ways to study them. To do this we should prepare ourselves for coping
with complexity, because it seems unlikely that so many different
functions can emerge from a single, completely new principle.
================

Basically, there are some topics which are so difficult to understand,
especially in the classical tradition of __reductionist__ science, that
it spawned the "mysterian" perspective, which essentially says there
are some things so complex we will NEVER be able to understand them,
and so they will forever remain mysteries.

I think the mysterian opinion, and also the limitations of much of past
psychology, are both shaded by the reductionist approach to science.
Classical physics envy.

Luckily, however, over recent decades the new sciences of systems and
complexity theory have been developing, and which give us much better
tools for understanding the operation of complex nonlinear systems
which possess many simultaneous and parallel interactions.

Most of the old style, linear 1-dimensional thinking is obsolete,
especially when applied to biological systems. Eg, you just cannot put
something like consciousness into a little box, draw a circle around
the box, and then start positing propositions about the "box" the way
that philosophy and older areas of psychology have been doing for 100+
years. This is just inadequate, and smacks simply of 18th and 19th
century reductionist physics envy.

The final quote in MM's paper is ...

=================
But the point of all this is to emphasize that none of those old
simplistic concepts from the past -- those spirits, souls, and essences
-- can help us with that modern task, of understanding how all those
different resources, are constructed, operated and managed. Surely they
work to a large extent as a partially cooperative parallel system --
but also, surely, those are largely controlled (much as Dennett
suggests in [3]) by one or several sequentially controlled systems,
which in turn are assembled from smaller parts. The first sentence in
my book [2], attributed to Einstein, is "Everything should be made as
simple as possible, but not simpler." The first step to take toward
doing that is to exorcise those Spirits from Psychology.
==================

The term "old simplistic concepts of the past" does not encompass
simply spirits and essences. It also encompasses [IMO] loads of 19th
century baggage, in terms of reductionist concepts. The new sciences of
emergence and complexity theory provide a new way to approach study of
these problems - although, I think, this is not quite what MM had in
mind in his final quote.

.

Relevant Pages

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