mkent@violet.berkeley.edu.UUCP (02/26/87)
[] In article <33446a71.44e6@apollo.uucp> nelson_p@apollo.uucp writes: >Marty Kent writes: > >> Suppose you say something rude about my mother, and I punch you in the >> nose. Tom's in the room and sees all this happen. Mary comes in and asks >> him what's up, and he tells her ... complex, mechanistic description of "purely physical" events with no reference to participants' intentions ... >> Now all of this is *true*. But most people would agree that this level >> of description rather misses the point, don't you think? > > Yes, I agree that it 'misses the point' in the sense that Tom could just as > well have said, "Peter said something rude about Marty's mother so Marty > punched him". But note that the neurological level of description and > the behavioral/social level of description are not essentially in conflict. I think we're in agreement here; this was what I meant when I wrote "all of this is *true*." Now it happens you and I see these descriptions as not in conflict, for which I'm glad. But many people, elementary school teachers of my era (late 1950's) for example, seem(ed) to think that "more physical" descriptions are always correct, and that they somehow preclude animistic, "unscientific" ones. At last year's (or was it two years ago?) ACM SIGCHI conference, Allen Newell spoke of a variation on Gresham's Law: "Hard science tends to drive out soft." What he seemed to me to be saying was that more quantitative, "engineering-type" descriptions tend to drive out qualitative ones (actually he was speaking of the character of psychological research that might be useful in the design of computer-human interfaces). The cultural roots of our scientific study of the material world are so much stronger than the roots of our scientific study of mind that we tend to label non-materialistic descriptions of phenomena as "unscientific", in some cases simply rejecting such descriptions out-of-hand. I think there's a meta-level to this, and it has to do with the usefulness of descriptions in the first place. To the extent that we're completely involved in the pursuit of some well-defined set of goals, we can evaluate "competing" descriptions of events in terms of what they buy us in that goal structure. We need to be explicit about this. For instance if we believe in and are primarily concerned with the emotional states of the participants in a conversation, we'll have use for different kinds of descriptions than if we're concerned with neurological events. I don't mean to imply any kind of mutual exclusivity either, but only that our focus and orientation define and prioritize what we consider "elementary" and some cases even relevant. > They just look at the same events at two different levels. > It's the same as if we described the ReadNews program in terms of 'C' > source code or in terms of the machine language in the binary file. There > is a definite mapping from one to the other, though I concede that all the > details of this mapping in the nose-punching case have yet to be worked > out. I think this remains to be seen. To the extent that our descriptions really constitute a hierarchy of detail, I agree. In my original example of a verbal disagreement as seen from the "everyday" perspective and from some kind of physio/neurological perspective, I tend to think each high-level (everyday) event maps to a (set of) low-level events. But this may not be true. I just got a copy of Drexler's "Engines of Creation," in which he presents the possibility of (among many other things) creating an atom-by-atom duplicate of a physical object. Suppose we were to create such a duplicate of a living being: would the duplicate be alive? Would it be "the same being" in some sense? If not, it would mean that our description of the being as a material phenomenon was missing something. (Of course this missing something could simply be a matter of the granularity of the atomic description; perhaps Life is fundamentally a material phenomenon, but shows up below the atomic level...) > If there is some mapping from neurological events to 'astral bodies' perhaps > someone can suggest what it might be. Oh, yes, and as I usually request, > also suggest *by what means* we might know this to be the case. I think this is a good path to be on, but, obviously, it's really a tough one. To my knowledge noone's yet been able to draw any kind of serious mapping between neurological events and even very "mundane" everyday mental events like formulating a sentence or holding a particular image in the mind's eye. Some work in this direction has been to associate certain frequency ranges of electrical brain activity (so-called beta, alpha, theta and delta waves) with certain kinds of everyday activities, but the correlations seem pretty weak. Still, it's a start. Perhaps neurological events are just too low-level to use as an adequate basis for description and measurement of personal mental (psychic? spiritual?) experiences. Gotta run... more soon. . . - Marty . . . . . . ... . . . . . . Marty Kent net: MKent@violet.berkeley.edu work: Dept. of EMST / 4527 Tolman Hall / UC Berkeley / Berkeley, Ca. 94720 415/ 642 0288 home: 1129 Bancroft Way / Berkeley, Ca. 94702 415/ 548 9129 . . . ... . . . . . . . ... . . .