Not School Digest Nov-Dec 2012: A Bonus Quasisode

0:07 Mark: Hey, folks, this is Mark from the Partially Examined Life. What you're about to listen to is not a regular episode of the podcast, but a very special sneak peek at some of the content available to what we call Partially Examined Life citizens who register through partiallyexaminedlife.com you see, we've just started having these discussion groups where some of our listeners, sometimes joined by one or more of the podcasters, pick a book themselves to read. And sometimes this results in a recording that is kind of like a Partially Examined Life episode, but of course, not created specifically for broadcast.

Not everybody's going to have a great audio setup. Much less time is going to go into editing what's posted. So these recordings are really created for the benefit of the group members that can't make that particular meeting and for the participants to reflect upon what they've learned, and they're shared with all other members on the site. So what you're going to hear today are three segments, each about 10 minutes long, right, from three different discussions. The full discussions from which these excerpts are taken are each an hour and a half.

And if you like the little bits you're hearing here, Please go to partiallyexaminedlife.com and register to be a member. You can download them right away. Okay, so first up, here's about 10 minutes of the discussion about David Chalmers book, the conscious mind from 1996. This will warm you up for our discussion with David Chalmers on the regular podcast. The discussion includes me and Alan, Evan, Steve, Marilyn and Russ. And in this clip, we're puzzling over, on the one hand, his dualist concept of mind. And given that what he takes a scientific conception of consciousness to be, which in the very speculative chapter that we all made sure to read was something like panpsychism, where you might say, whenever there is information represented, there will be consciousness.

So in part of this book, he talks about a thermostat that in some sense knows what temperature it is and acts on that temperature under certain conditions. This is supposed to be a boundary case for something that's certainly not conscious in the sense that we are, but we could call it proto conscious, and that this ubiquitous pairing of consciousness with any physical representation of information is, he opines, maybe a fundamental feature of reality.

2:11 Unknown speaker: I quoted from one of his later papers where he makes a distinction between a science of consciousness, the one hand, and the philosophy of mind on the other. And he seems to treat those as very different things and suggests that it would be possible to develop a full science of consciousness that would remain agnostic on the fundamental issues of the philosophy of mind. Issues of philosophy of mind are materialism versus dualism, those kinds of things. Most of what he's doing in this book up until the chapter 8 are issues in the philosophy of mind things that are mostly of interest to philosophers.

It's in chapter eight that he starts to present the outlines or suggestions for a theory of consciousness. And those are two substantially different things, I think. And if what you're mostly interested in is an explanation of consciousness, then a lot of the stuff about supervenience. Yes. Isn't particularly relevant to your interests.

But I think it is relevant to his formulation of hard problem though. Doesn't that all set the stage for him saying that there is something over and above a physicalist explanation of consciousness that is being missed? Therefore he needs to get this logical supervenience foundation going to sort of support the rest of his formulation?

Yeah, it's this. He's looking to discover or set the stage to discover these psychophysical laws which are parallel to the physical laws, you know, which are subject to the science of consciousness.

Right.

Which is his version of dualism, which is this dual instantiation of information spaces, physical and phenomenal.

Is that a very distinctive version of dualism in your experiences?

Well, he develops that in two steps. First he says that it's a version of property dualism in which there are both physical properties and phenomenal properties. And then he goes on later to to suggest that the base there are these information spaces. And I see him making the two claims as somewhat separate. In other words, I think he would defend a version of property dualism or the proposal of property dualism independently of whether the information based stuff is plausible or not.

Right.

I think he explicitly says that as well.

He doesn't say that he's sure that

information is the key connection between the two. He actually described it.

But in chapter eight, I mean he's really. If this is his preliminary theory or the basis of a theory, it seems to really be supporting this informational space view for a theory of consciousness. He seems to be non committal to so many metaphysical positions. But again, you could see that he's leaning towards these as plausible.

Well, it's the structure of the correlation.

5:07 Mark: Right.

5:08 Unknown speaker: His dualism amounts to just saying there's this brute unexplainable. Yeah, I think it's not just unexplained,

5:13 Mark: it's unexplainable correlation between the physical and the mental. But we don't have to stop there because the problems with, you know, old

5:19 Unknown speaker: fashioned Dualism are like Descartes is.

5:22 Mark: You can't even imagine how these things would be interacting. But if he says that their relation

5:27 Unknown speaker: is one of supervenience.

5:29 Mark: Right.

5:29 Unknown speaker: So if you jab a poker in your brain, then that's going to affect consciousness in some comparable way. And then he just has to set up like, well, can we characterize this brute correlation? And some of it is. Has to do with structural properties.

5:44 Mark: So he gives that whole, you know,

5:46 Unknown speaker: there's a phenomenal structure to color space, and so there has to be somehow

5:50 Mark: instantiated in the brain some comparable structure that will mirror that.

5:56 Unknown speaker: It doesn't mean you're going to, you know, look and see a color wheel

6:00 Mark: or something like that.

6:01 Unknown speaker: In fact, this is all on the

6:03 Mark: functional schematic level, like the software level, not the hardware level.

6:06 Unknown speaker: He's not making any commitments about exactly

6:08 Mark: what kind of neural patterns are going to instantiate this. It's just we can give these functional descriptions.

6:14 Unknown speaker: And then he avoids calling it the dualism. I think he calls it the double aspect principle or something, but I think it's basically the same thing.

Yeah, I was really surprised how. I feel like, again, reflecting back on that Searle book where he acknowledges the. The objection to dualism is typically that it's just. It's a metaphysical objection that it doesn't

6:35 Mark: make sense that ultimately for science to work, you have to be able to connect the two. Yeah, yeah.

6:40 Unknown speaker: You have to be able to have a.

6:42 Mark: An information space of all the stuff you have.

6:44 Unknown speaker: Something that's truly dualist. That's my biggest problem I still have with.

Well, in order for him to do that, he's going to have to make some ontological commitments that he shies away from. And when we get to the example of the thermometer having consciousness and I mean, that's where he started to lose me with.

I mean, oh, it's proto consciousness. It's not consciousness, proto consciousness. We don't understand it,

but I mean, it's the panpsychism. He has to make some sort of ontological commitment in order to tie these two worlds together somehow, even though he doesn't really want to make that full commitment.

Something that I found myself wondering as I read this. I don't know if this bothered anybody else was he talks about properties over and over again. Mental properties, phenomenal properties, physical properties. And I kept asking myself, properties of what? I mean, ordinarily when we talk about properties, we talk about properties of an object, some substance, a substrate, a particular whatever. And he never addresses that. And that seems like when you start coming up with an actual thing theory, those kinds of questions are going to be important. Is the fact that the laptop computer in front of me right now is black, that I'm seeing black? Is that purely a property of my brain? Is it a property of the laptop? Is it a property of the system that includes my brain in the laptop? What are these properties of?

I don't know.

Did that.

Maybe that's something he's trying to leave for the end. So that one of the speculations on that is that it could be that information is fundamental and that it has

8:24 Mark: a physical and a mental appearance.

8:26 Unknown speaker: So it's like it's a form of monism. But the substance that is the one thing that the monism is based on is not physical or mental. It's something that is underlies both, which

I don't understand that I didn't either. But I'm interested about that whole information theory aspect of this. Did anybody see that that really got us to consciousness or kind of left us still in the computer brain?

I was very disappointed.

Yeah. I felt like it's sort of on the road there, but I felt like there was still a huge gap.

Oh, yeah, I think there is. And I think Chalmers would admit that there is. I mean, I saw the whole tone of that chapter as very speculative. Just, hey, here's an idea that occurred to me and I think that's borne out by a little bit. I've looked at of his later stuff. He's not particularly committed to that.

He hasn't evolved it beyond speculation in the last 10 years.

No, no. What he's done since then, he's written. I mean, a lot of his articles are on unrelated topics in metaphysics. I mean, I think it's telling that his most recent book is sort of developing Carnap's program. And he's engaged in a lot of arguments about the details, like the color argument, what Mary knew, and some of those very technical arguments in the philosophy of. But at the level of sort of developing a science of consciousness, he's very much at the very speculative level. He writes a lot of forwards and prefaces to collections of papers that sort of offer an overview of what's going on in the book. But he doesn't really go beyond that in terms of advocating a particular view. And I get the impression he doesn't really think that he's qualified to do that. I think he thinks that most of the details there are going to emerge out of neuroscience.

Yeah, it seems to me he Perceives his contribution is highlighting. Whenever we try to explain consciousness, we do cover the phenomenological. That all the other efforts of Dennett and those sort of guys are throwing the difficult part away. And I think he sees himself as trying to save that part. Whether he does that is another question, of course. But I. I think the book is about that rather than he's prepared to put up a theory.

That's a good point.

And he does say that it's the part that's most likely to be wrong. But I think the bit he is committed to is that formulation of the hard problem.

Yes, exactly.

I had to reread the chapter 8 to understand how he was able to throw in information theory. Kind of out of the blue, it seemed to me. And then I saw maybe why I think he was doing that was because you can see a physical information and a psychological aspect of that. The actual neural networks and that kind of thing. But the problem was I just felt like it ended right where you'd end up with. You were equating minds to computers.

11:22 Mark: Second, we've got an excerpt from a discussion Wes Alwan had with group members Neil and John. About Thomas Nagel's new book, Mind and Cosmos. You may remember Nagel from our Philosophy of Mind episode. He wrote the very famous article, what is it like to be a Bat? This excerpt kicks off right near the beginning of the discussion where Wes tells you what the book's about.

11:42 Unknown speaker: So Nagel argues that evolutionary naturalism, which he thinks of as naturalism as it's currently materialistically conceived, cannot satisfactorily explain a few things. Or it's inconsistent. It either can't satisfactorily explain or it's inconsistent with three things, really. The first is the existence of consciousness. The second is what he calls cognition or the use of reason. Really I think is the better way to put that. And the third is what I call moral realism. So consequently, he's going to argue that evolutionary naturalism must be amended to incorporate a non materialist explanation in which mind is a basic feature of the universe.

And then he goes through a number of alternatives. But the one he favors is teleological. And he has a very specific conception of how that teleology works. Which is to say the available forms upon which natural selection operates are not merely the product of mutation and other material factors as it's usually conceived, but they are part of product of that for him. But he also thinks that there must be a pre existing tendency of the universe to produce beings that are capable of consciousness reasoning and making objective judgments of value.

And this tendency is not itself reducible to physics or chemistry. That's the broad overview. So really there's a chapter for each of these claims about consciousness and cognition and value. But I guess we can get into that as we discuss it. So, Neil, you were saying you were really disappointed and I was agreeing with you. Yeah. My first pass through the book was just a catalog of ranting comments on the annotations on my Kindle. Doesn't he know about this?

Doesn't he know about that?

Which I imagine is how philosophers feel when scientists write about philosophy.

Yeah, it seemed like a rant in itself, too, a little bit just where I was having. Like, I felt like it was pretty plainly written. Like I understood kind of what he was saying, but I didn't really feel like he was building on anything. It was kind of like he was coming at things and a priori saying that this is the way things have to be. So. So therefore all the rest of this, you know, that's why it just kind of blew my mind that we. In order to get to where he wants to go, he felt like he had to kind of knock down biology as a whole, as I was kind of talking about on the blog. It's just that or the forum, it was just confusing that it seemed like really deconstructive in a way that didn't have to be of our knowledge that we have already kind of built up and feel pretty comfortable with, you know.

Do you guys have anything you're thinking of, specifically with regards to the scientific claims that he's getting wrong? Well, there is a kind of teleology built into physics, and that's entropy. Right. That gives everything a direction. It's like the flow of a river.

You know, things can happen in it,

but everything's still being carried in a particular direction from the bottom up. And it's very, very powerful. It's inescapable once you get up to macroscopic system. Right. One of the things people were talking about in our discussion forum was this claim that he makes that the evolution of consciousness is somehow implausible. He uses this word implausible, which people take to mean improbable. And then how do we evaluate that? Because, you know, as someone, as one of the participants of the discussion forum pointed out, well, if we're saying it's improbable, then that could be, you know, probability is usually a matter of ignorance of initial conditions.

If we knew all the initial conditions and the rules by which we operate, we should be able to derive what's going to happen. So this idea that it's implausible, I mean, my problem with that, it doesn't seem to me to be the type of thing you could know. Whether or not it's implausible.

Exactly. I mean, if you're talking in Bayesian terms, like you have no sort of prior probability of what's going on with it, and I think you can kind of throw the same sort of objections people do to theism at it. You know, it's just assuming an extra thing on top of what we already know. So he's, you know, it's not plausible that we would have minds, you know, arriving from evolution by natural selection unless there's, you know, like, that's already part of the universe to begin with. And that just kind of assumes an extra thing that in itself is implausible. You know, it doesn't really. It just kind of creates problems for itself. It seems to me that what we actually have is incompleteness. There's a gap there.

And you can look at it as

being, well, we don't have anything to

put in it yet, but we are gradually closing it. Versus, you know, he sees incompleteness as implausibility. But I'm just going to assume outright that it cannot be done, that you guys are all talking a little rubbish and are never going to get anywhere. Therefore, let's add this new ghost to the machine. Yeah, that's a good point. It's really. If we approach this from the sort of naturalistic framework, and I respect Nagel's desire to bracket that and say this naturalistic point of view, we assume that everything is to be explained naturalistically, that we should bracket that off. And maybe it's necessary to broaden our view. But in this case, I don't see any strong objections to evolution, except that it hasn't been fully worked out yet. To say that it hasn't been fully worked out in detail is different from saying it's implausible.

I have something here that he says he objects to. He says evolutionary naturalism implies that we shouldn't take any of our convictions seriously, including the scientific world picture on which evolutionary naturalism itself depends. Yeah, I mean, it's an interesting claim to raise. And it's kind of like you said, bracketing things like what can naturalism explain? But I think you have to understand that naturalism doesn't have to necessarily be built on that. All of our sense data is completely correct all the time. It's just what Our sense data tells us and how we can work with that in the world, you know, and I think a lot of times where he kind of sort of tries to throw something out there like that and then doesn't really raise, I think, any satisfactory way to get around that in what he's talking about geologically and stuff, you know.

Yeah, I think with that he's in the second and third chapters, we get his view of why it is he thinks naturalism is undermining self undermining in this sense. So this chapter on cognition, which is really, he's referring to theoretical knowledge in the domains of science, logic and ethics, linguistic stuff. The idea is that it's self undermining in the sense that if it's one, whatever abilities we have that have been selected for, for survival don't imply that they're good for theoretical knowledge. So this doesn't apply to the accuracy of sense perception.

So there's a clear evolutionary advantage to having sense perceptions that get at the truth in some sense. Right. We need to know that the fire is hot. We need to accurately perceive that in order to avoid getting burned. But when it comes to higher level theoretical pursuits, he thinks that you get this circularity. So with logical judgments, for instance, if we say logical judgments have an adaptive value, then insofar as we do that we rely on this evolutionary account that itself presupposes the accuracy of logical judgments. And he thinks that this is circular.

And then he says reason must involve a direct access to truth unqualified by whether such truths enhance fitness. Consequently, we need to amend anyway, so that this is one of his arguments for the sort of self defeating nature of naturalism. Now I think this is one of his errors because I don't think there's anything circular about this. To presuppose it's circular is to presuppose that we need to justify our logical judgments and that evolutionary naturalism is going to be our justification. But then it's circular because evolutionary naturalism relies on the accuracy of logical judgment.

But that's not what's going on here. We don't need to justify logical judgments, we merely need to show that they're not inconsistent with evolutionary naturalism and to show that they're not inconsistent with naturalism, it's perfectly, you know, it suffices to say that there's evolutionary value to them.

19:53 Mark: And lastly, we've got a discussion from our Philosophy of Literature group which incidentally is continuing this month reading Italo Calvino's Cosmicomics. I should also say that the first group, the Philosophy of Mind group, is also continuing reading a book by John Searle. But this inaugural discussion of the Philosophical Literature Group was on a novella by one of my favorite authors, Paul Auster. It's called City of Glass. It's from a book published as the New York Trilogy from 1987. It's referred to as a post existential detective story and does a lot of playing with issues of self and language.

It's about a writer who gets a call looking for Detective Paul Auster, which is funny, given that Paul Auster is the author's name and the author himself shows up as a character in the book later, not as a detective, but as himself. But this guy, whose name is Daniel Quinn, decides after receiving this call a couple times to just say, yes, I'm Paul Auster, what do you need? And he's called out on this detective assignment basically to protect this young man who was terribly abused by his father while he was growing up, because his father locked him in a room for years and years and years with no light and no exposure to anyone, with the idea that if he was deprived ordinary interaction and in fact was beaten to forget what little amount of language that he had when he was put in there, I guess he was three years old, then he would somehow start speaking the natural language, the language of the gods.

So yes, it's very crazy. And the assignment is to protect this young man, Peter Stillman, from his father, who's now just been released from a mental institution. He's also called Peter Stillman. And so Quinn ends up following this old guy around and himself suffering something of a psychotic break, not to give too much away. Anyway, even knowing that the book is great, you should definitely go read it. It's very short and I hope you enjoy this little bit of discussion about it that features me, Jordan, Paul and Nathan. We started here trying to figure out what the title of the novella City of Glass, means.

22:04 Unknown speaker: I mean, first the cliche metaphor of like, glass is something fragile, but glass is something that all like new skyscrapers were built out of. I guess also about the labyrinth, right? You have this new sort of city that is all the buildings become sort of identical because you have this new city of glass. And sort of after that period of like Mies van der Rohe, all the buildings started to look the same. And it's kind of a place where you could seemingly be somewhere but nowhere because it's all sort of just a labyrinth of this sort of sameness thing. So I guess that's what I Thought about the title.

I guess the only other way that I'd read it. I don't know if any of you guys have read A Head into Ghosts or even The Locked Room, but I think something that becomes even more important is this kind of. This idea of looking and being looked at. And I guess, Jordan, what you were just saying about all skyscrapers essentially being made out of glass strikes me as being kind of going, well, okay, well, if everything's made out of glass, then surely you can see everything. But equally, anyone who's ever been to a big city knows that that's just not true, that it becomes, as you just said, it all becomes the same and you actually can't see anywhere and it all just looks the same and you just get lost in it.

Yeah, I see that too also. Just about sort of like looking and like the public and private. Because as I was looking back over things, I noticed that the interiors of where they are seems to be like a foundation that keeps people sort of stable in terms of. You have towards the end when Daniel Quinn goes back to his apartment and you know, it's sort of unraveling when he realizes that he doesn't have this place to be anymore. And you also have steps Stillman, who has spent his entire life sort of indoors.

You know, I just. I did a search on City of Glass title and came up with some kind of review or essay. City of Glass, as its title indicates, suggests the security of the middle class notion of home is itself little more than an ideological fantasy, as this space is continuously invaded by that which it seeks to erase or escape. That homelessness which Quinn has in effect always belonged. For what that's worth.

I think it's interesting that that picks up on the homelessness because to try not to detract too much context, it's kind of a biographical note about Auster, is that he spent a period of time essentially living like Quinn does. He was virtually homeless. He was writing just to stay alive. And I think that whether you could say that the fact that the other biographical or semi autobiographical aspects of the text, whether that's reflected in the City of Glass and that's how Auster perhaps perceives where he lived, whether that's a valid kind of discussion point, I don't know about anything.

I get a sense that with the whole of this trilogy, all these three stories, there's an awful lot of the author coming through. I mean, he obviously he makes it very overt because he puts himself in it. And we do, we should say, for people that haven't read it. There is a character called Paul Auster who turns up later.

Right.

I don't. I think this is going to ruin it for anybody that hasn't read it. So we shouldn't, we shouldn't assume, just read it.

I kind of went in with the idea of if you're going to listen to the this, you need to either have read it or be prepared for spoilers.

I'll just spoil. Somebody said that Auster was the narrator, but actually it's revealed in the last two pages of the book he's not the narrator. It's somebody that was Oster's friend that Auster gave the red notebook to that is the narrator. So I thought that was a little bit of mischief on par with the discussion of Don Quixote and the authorship of that.

I would recommend, if you haven't done so already, reading through the other two books. I won't two parts, but I won't spoil it. But the ending to the Last Locked Room, really, it ties everything off neatly and you kind of come away thinking that it makes sense. But hopefully. I don't want to spoil it, but I think in terms of City of Glass, I don't think we can have a spoiler free discussion and really get to grips with it because otherwise we're just going to be scattering around all the issues at the time.

Well, can we dive into some of the. Did you get anything philosophically significant out of this? What did I mean, it's a great piece of art. It's a great piece of. I don't know if it's phenomenology, but certainly describing stuff about our weird relationship with language and our relationship to our surroundings and a lot of things about the self. But I wasn't sure if it amounted to much more than some beautiful art that I don't feel like I learned a lot about the self or really about our relationship to language. Like this talk of the fall of language and how that worked out in Eden Times and what the crazy person just.

It's just like in the. The no country for Old Men or something. You put the philosophy mostly in the mouth of a crazy person that's like. So that Auster doesn't have to feel like he's advocating that. So I. I don't know. I didn't ultimately feel like I came away with a theory or something. It was just more. These are cool ideas. And I have read Sartre. In fact, I bet Auster has even translated Sartre because he was a translator of French literature. As one of his.

26:46 Mark: His jobs.

26:47 Unknown speaker: So I'm sure he's totally familiar with that whole tradition.

Yeah, I mean, I don't know about anyone else. I don't think there's any. Anything that jumps out as being overtly philosophy. I think the other thing that I would perhaps suggest that Mark didn't raise there was. Is there an ethical question that's raised in his very decision at the beginning or initially he rejects the phone calls asking for Paul Auster, but then he takes on his role and he takes on the job and then he takes the money, he takes the check made out to Paul Auster. So there's. I mean, that's the only. I guess the only other theme that you kind of wonder. And it makes him as a character, if he's going to be the voice of these. The person that we relate to, I guess then does that make him questionable by the fact that he knowingly takes on someone else's identity?

I mean, I guess in terms of what you can get out of it philosophically, for me, it was kind of telling of what he was doing when Auster himself or the character of like the writer Paul Auster shows up and is talking about the Quixote piece because Daniel Quinn asks him what he's writing about and he tells him it's purely speculative and that there aren't going to be any answers or just. He doesn't really even know. He's just posing things to me. They kind of seem exactly what the actual Paul Auster was doing. And he was, you know, even admitting it himself as a character in his own story.

Do you guys know that Borges story about, you know, the connections to the Borges?

28:09 Mark: Is it labyrinths? I think. I guess.

28:10 Unknown speaker: Yeah. The Garden of Forking Paths.

Okay, so that's the. Yeah, that's the one story in it about Don Quixote.

No, that's Pierre Menard. The. Yeah, the one. The guy who wrote Don Quixote. But it's exactly the same as Don Quixote.

Yes, that. Like I'm gonna do it. Yeah, I really thought of that.

Yeah.

In that. In that story, it's a guy who rewrotes the entire text of Don Quixote. But it's an original work because it's coming through my voice, even though it results in all the same words, as if that's saying something about the relationship between. You can have the work, but the author's intentions make it a different thing.

Yeah, I mean, that happened. I mean, it's. I guess that's kind of interesting, like sort of the time period this book was written. I mean, I come from like a visual arts background and you have like artists in the 80s like Richard Prince, sort of doing the exact same thing with visual things where they're just re presenting a work as their own as the author's intention completely changes what one is to get out of them.

29:09 Mark: All right, that's it folks. Hope you enjoyed it again. You can hear all three of these full length hour and a half discussions, almost like three extra episodes right now. If you go to partiallyexaminelife.com, click on the big sidebar link that says Become a citizen and sign up. It's only five bucks to get access to this store of great material and have the next month. And for the next month you can participate in the discussions yourself. So that'll be a recurring charge of five bucks a month, but you can opt out at any point or pay 50 and be in it for the year.

We anticipate generating many more of these great discussions and you'll also find things like our audiobook versions of the two Klein essays that we recently covered. We're going to be posting documents as we attempt to write the Partially Examined Life Book. So you can see our little chapter ideas. We've got some of our old academic papers, we've got some guest submissions and plenty more. But of course the most important thing is your opportunity to actually participate in these kind of studies, which don't necessarily generate a recording like this.

A lot of it is just through forum interactions and because you can propose topics, you can determine, as long as you can get some people to go along with you, the direction of the studies on the site to give you an excuse to make the time to read that book that you've always wanted to read and to learn about things that other people are concerned with. Thanks and good night.

30:29 Unknown speaker: Sam.