eliot@phoenix.Princeton.EDU (Eliot Handelman) (10/06/90)
In article <3560@media-lab.MEDIA.MIT.EDU> minsky@media-lab.media.mit.edu (Marvin Minsky) writes:
;
;It seems to me that njs identifies awe, mystery, and the aesthetic
;experience as "human". Well, I beg to differ. Those, in my view are
;the barren world of infantile thought. Yes, I don't like "beauty"
;because I have certain suspicions about what's happening "I like
;something without knowing why".
"Beauty" also means types of historico-critical and individuated
experience that may or may not aspire (as Walter Pater put it)
to condition o0f knowledge: Minsky assumes that all such
experience does indeed aspire to this condition, and if I read
him correctly he's proposing, not unreasonably, that this
aspiration serve, where applicable, as the basis of its
appreciation. In other words, one ought to admire Bach not because of
your affective response to Bach, but rather -- and I'm going to
try to say this in the way I think Minsky would -- because of
the resource it provides to cognitive inquiry, in that hrough
this music one might come to understand more of the mind. In
other words this music is admirable to the extent that it
helps build a bigger theory of what the mind is. It is not admirable
because you have such and such feelings that you think are
induced by this music.
I don't know if Minsky will agree with that formulation, and I'll be
curious to see how he emends it if he does, but I'm going to disagree
with it anyway. What, principally, is objectionable from the perspective
of the cognitive agenda -- that is, the extraction of cognitivity
from the work in question -- is that it doesn't make it clear
what's being done with time. Music is temporal experience, however
you can (and I do) cogitate about its nature: it's experience
with a particular here and now built right into it. Similarly,
the experience of "the blue sky," if awe-inspiring, is
basically a "here-and-now" experience, it's a thing that must
happen to one -- however one coordinates this "happening" --
and that experience is quite distinct from any sort of contemplation
concerning that experience. In short, ACTUALLY doing something
is quite distinct from reflecting on, or contemplating, or
cogitating about something. When we're speaking about "aesthetic"
experience -- not, incidentally, a term I often take in the
mouth -- we're speaking, I believe, of the nature, and
non-duplicity, of these various actualities.
Now I want to stress these forms of actuality as being the occasion
of the only forms of intersubjectivity known to the human mind. I mean,
by "intersubjectivity," the potential for qualities of experience which
are not directed, or conducted, or steered, by my primary selfhood.
If awe-inspired by the blue sky I in sense momentarily become the
blue sky -- I "get into" it, the way you can "get into" your favorite
music or an engaging film, or anything else engaging. "Engaging" is
a weak word for "willing to cede volitional control" and is a condition
of one's capacity to listen. By "listening" I mean more than what
Minsky seems to mean, that is, "abstracting properties from, and making
theories of" -- I mean something like intersubjectification of self,
of which looking at a blue sky isn't the worst example I can think of.
The best example I can think of would be something like the exchange
of private consciousness -- as McCluhan said, the ultimate media
development: and I want to think of advanced thinking as tending in
that direction, rather than the non-participant position on experience
espoused by Minsky, which finds "feelings of awe" at best "annoying,"
a philosophy which, I assume, at some point must transpose into
one's private ethics. Probably this lack of sympathy -- or my reading
of this lack -- is what some people here have found disturbing.
En bref, Minsky takes experience and wants to extract from it understanding;
whereas the understanding I seek is how to increase, to perfect,
technologically and through the agencies of thought, the intensity of
that experience, of which "understanding" itself is no doubt a type.
There are times when I understand things more or less -- in other words
I attribute to understanding the basic actuality of experience.
--eliot handelman
princeton u., music dept.smoliar@vaxa.isi.edu (Stephen Smoliar) (10/12/90)
In article <3129@idunno.Princeton.EDU> eliot@phoenix.Princeton.EDU (Eliot Handelman) writes: > > What, principally, is objectionable from the perspective >of the cognitive agenda -- that is, the extraction of cognitivity >from the work in question -- is that it doesn't make it clear >what's being done with time. Music is temporal experience, however >you can (and I do) cogitate about its nature: it's experience >with a particular here and now built right into it. I think this points out a general shortcoming in the development of cognitive models rather than a problem with a cognitive agenda for aesthetics. There have, in fact, been attempts to factor time into such models. One might wish to view Husserl as a pioneer along this front, particularly when we see the impact of Husserl (via Miller) on David Lewin's recent account of music behavior. (Note, also, that Lewin's deliberate emphasis on "behavior" is very much concerned with the relevance of the "here-and-now" in an approach to aesthetics; but I would still say that Lewin is following a cognitive agenda.) On the biological front, we have Gerald Edelman's analysis of the "organs of successions" in the brain, discussing how vital they are to more "cognitive" forms of behavior. As I recall, time is not a major issue in THE SOCIETY OF MIND. (Minsky will surely correct me if this is an oversight.) On the other hand, time is very much an issue in his essay "Music, Mind, and Meaning." There, the dynamics of interaction between mind and the music which passes by the ears seems to be of critical importance. How does the mind keep up with all those stimuli? How to the stimuli help or hinder the mind in its efforts to keep up? In summary, then, it is not the cognitive agenda which is wanting but simply some of the shallower approaches to this agenda. ========================================================================= USPS: Stephen Smoliar USC Information Sciences Institute 4676 Admiralty Way Suite 1001 Marina del Rey, California 90292-6695 Internet: smoliar@vaxa.isi.edu "It's only words . . . unless they're true."--David Mamet
minsky@media-lab.MEDIA.MIT.EDU (Marvin Minsky) (10/12/90)
In article <15268@venera.isi.edu> smoliar@vaxa.isi.edu (Stephen Smoliar) writes: >As I recall, time is not a major issue in THE SOCIETY OF MIND. (Minsky will >surely correct me if this is an oversight.) On the other hand, time is very >much an issue in his essay "Music, Mind, and Meaning." There, the dynamics >of interaction between mind and the music which passes by the ears seems to >be of critical importance. How does the mind keep up with all those stimuli? >How to the stimuli help or hinder the mind in its efforts to keep up? I did discuss two such issues. Once we give up the single-self idea, we see that there can be no such thing as "momentary mental time" -- and no such thing as the "here and now" of pre-scientific thinking. The brain has many different parts. What happens in part A cannot affect part B in less than a certain minimal time -- normally of the order of milliseconds -- because of nerve-transmission time. But in some situations, the times will be much longer than that, because of gating by brain-wave mechanisms, etc. Who did that classic research on speech + nonspeech perception, in which random clicks were perceived as closer to phrase-boundaries than they really were? The point is that each sub-agency of the mind can - and must - construct its own model/theory of what happened recently. The other point, discussed in section 17.9, is that different agencies have different time-scales for changing. You can become "attached" to another person (or thing) on one time scale; this involves building some memory-structures; but modifying those structures may take much longer. Thus some of Konrad Lorenz's "imprints" are never erased. This could explain aspects of various human phenomena of "mourning", and of "infatuation"; situations in which one part of your mind is attached, while another is not, and perhaps actively trying to prevent the interference or influence of those memory/processes. Anyway, distrust arguments based on "here and now" experience, unless they are accompanied by some sort of systems description of how they're suppose to work.
smoliar@vaxa.isi.edu (Stephen Smoliar) (10/12/90)
In article <3679@media-lab.MEDIA.MIT.EDU> minsky@media-lab.media.mit.edu (Marvin Minsky) writes: > Who did that classic research >on speech + nonspeech perception, in which random clicks were >perceived as closer to phrase-boundaries than they really were? The classic click experiments I know about were performed by Jerry Fodor and Tom Bever, who wrote them up in the paper, "The psychological reality of linguistic segments," published in the JOURNAL OF VERBAL LEARNING AND VERBAL BEHAVIOR, Volume 4 (1965), pages 414-421. I do not remember this work for its results on distinguishing speech from non-speech. Rather, I remember that they used the phenomenon of click displacement for evidence of segmentation. From this, they attempted to produce real-time models of parsing which takes place as the words are heard. These models were subsequently implemented as augmented transition networks by Ron Kaplan ("Augmented Transition Networks as Psychological Models of Sentence Comprehension," ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE, Volume 3 (1972), pages 77-100). > The >point is that each sub-agency of the mind can - and must - construct >its own model/theory of what happened recently. > This actually seems to be one of the more salient points which Husserl was trying to make in his work on time-consciousness. However, Husserl was particularly taken with the "processing" of time in BOTH directions. In other words the mind not only constructs a model of the recent past but also projects that model into the near future. This is in the same vein as Schank's argument in DYNAMIC MEMORY that understanding involves our ability to form expectations and recognize which of them are satisfied and which are thwarted. Leonard Meyer has tried to deal with music the same way, although he spends so much time looking at scores that he tends to lose track of the issues of real-time processing. Why hasn't anyone been able to define an analogous set of click experiments for listening to music? ========================================================================= USPS: Stephen Smoliar USC Information Sciences Institute 4676 Admiralty Way Suite 1001 Marina del Rey, California 90292-6695 Internet: smoliar@vaxa.isi.edu "It's only words . . . unless they're true."--David Mamet
wcalvin@milton.u.washington.edu (William Calvin) (10/12/90)
One of the problems is dealing with the time dimension in brain
function is that there is no master clock, no lock-step to processing
that insures catch-up by slower processes (as in microprocessors).
To use an example that I put somewhere in THE CEREBRAL
SYMPHONY as "The Postal Principle," the difference between conduction
velocities in various branches of motor cortex neurons are
order-of-magnitude. In particular, branches crossing from one
cerebral hemisphere to the other tend to be rather slow, in
comparison to the cortex-to-spinal cord branches. And so it takes
about as long for the muscles to be made aware of the message as it
does the other side of the brain. It's like the familiar finding
that it takes about as long for a letter to cross town as it does to
cross the country.
I think that the interesting ways of how the brain handles
time are to be found in the sequencing specializations of (in
particular) left brain. This permits episodic memories (where
everything stays strung together, as in a film clip or sound bite),
and it permits scenarios to be constructed, to be judged against the
imperfect episodic memories for reasonableness. Quite a little
darwinian shaping-up can be done that way, allowing an initially
awkward plan of movement to be shaped up into one that has a much
better chance of success, even though totally novel (with no perfect
matches from memories). The connected-time specializations, rather
than time in the usual sense of a microprocessor actions, are thus
not only interesting in themselves but also because of their
relevance to creating such novelities of hominid evolution as grammatical
language, music, and dance.
William H. Calvin wcalvin@u.washington.edueliot@phoenix.Princeton.EDU (Eliot Handelman) (10/15/90)
In article <3679@media-lab.MEDIA.MIT.EDU> minsky@media-lab.media.mit.edu (Marvin Minsky) writes:
;Once we give up the single-self idea,
;we see that there can be no such thing as "momentary mental time" --
;and no such thing as the "here and now" of pre-scientific thinking.
;each sub-agency of the mind can - and must - construct
;its own model/theory of what happened recently.
;Anyway, distrust arguments based on "here and now" experience, unless
;they are accompanied by some sort of systems description of how
;they're suppose to work.
Why should I? I distrust "systems descriptions" as a substitute for
analysis. As Adorno put it, "the force of consciousness extends to
the delusion of consciousness ... regression of consciousness is a product
of its lack of self-reflection." One can, in other words, easily
verify Minsky's "theories" (if these are what they are) by becoming
Minsky's theories.
And regarding "pre-scientific thinking," I distrust invovations of
scientific authority where none obtain; and I distrust claims supported
by this appeal to authority that begin with "anyhow," or smuggle in
a "and must" into speculative (and possibly self-deluding, as above)
claims. It is NOT a matter of "anyhow." It is a matter of demonstration,
which is lacking here.minsky@media-lab.MEDIA.MIT.EDU (Marvin Minsky) (10/15/90)
>In article <3679@media-lab.MEDIA.MIT.EDU> minsky@media-lab.media.mit.edu (Marvin Minsky) wrote: >;Once we give up the single-self idea, >;we see that there can be no such thing as "momentary mental time" -- >;and no such thing as the "here and now" of pre-scientific thinking. ... >;Anyway, distrust arguments based on "here and now" experience, unless >;they are accompanied by some sort of systems description of how >;they're suppose to work. In article <3344@idunno.Princeton.EDU> eliot@phoenix.Princeton.EDU (Eliot Handelman) replied, >Why should I? ... One can, in other words, easily >verify Minsky's "theories" (if these are what they are) by becoming >Minsky's theories. ... And regarding "pre-scientific thinking," >I distrust invovations of scientific authority where none obtain... I agree completely with Eliot's criticism. It was careless of me to flame about "pre-scientific thinking". What I had in mind was "pre-computational thinking" in the sense that the mind is what the brain does, the brain is a large and complex machine, and thus requires a lot of powerful new ideas to understand (or at least describe) what such a machine might do. It needs, in short, good ideas, and it doesn't help to call them "scientific".
minsky@media-lab.MEDIA.MIT.EDU (Marvin Minsky) (10/15/90)
I punched "send" too soon. One more remark. In article <3344@idunno.Princeton.EDU> eliot@phoenix.Princeton.EDU (Eliot Handelman) also writes: > One can, in other words, easily verify Minsky's "theories" (if these > are what they are) by becoming Minsky's theories. They are theories, indeed, so Eliot is guilty of foolish flaming, too. I was maintaining the opposite point, that it is not enough to become convinced about some idea about consciousness by becoming it. I though it was clear that my goal was find ways to build machines that exhibit the phenomena being discussed. Make an AI that appears to be conscious, by commonsense standards, and then consider how it does that to be a working theory of how people do it.
eliot@phoenix.Princeton.EDU (Eliot Handelman) (10/15/90)
In article <3708@media-lab.MEDIA.MIT.EDU> minsky@media-lab.media.mit.edu (Marvin Minsky) writes: ;In article <3344@idunno.Princeton.EDU> eliot@phoenix.Princeton.EDU ;(Eliot Handelman) also writes: ;> One can, in other words, easily verify Minsky's "theories" (if these ;> are what they are) by becoming Minsky's theories. ;They are theories, indeed, so Eliot is guilty of foolish flaming, too. Now hold on, Marvin: just who's flaming whom? It's not in the least obvious to me what a theory of mind ought to look like. If you want to pass over the behavioristic critique of introspectionism so lightly you may as well admit that the status of "theory" itself is bound to be affected -- you can't simply proclaim statements about minds or consciousness to be "theories" without slipping beyond the domain adequate to that discourse. That's why I came down of your "pre-scientific" criticism in the other part of the posting quoted above. We are no longer dealing with "science." "Training one's mind" doesn't help either, unless one wants to make a full retreat back to Wundt (which may turn out to be progress, as Verdi put it). This, in a nutshell, is why I regard the matter of intersubjectivity to be weightier that the matter of "systems descriptions" (whose theortical status John Anderson seems recently to have called into question -- "The Adaptive Nature of Thought") and, to return to the previous discussion, why therfore "awe" ought not to be denounced in the interests of the analysis of mind. "Awe" (or some finer-grained esthetic) is crucial to the transmission of whatever would once have been called a "theory of mind." I doubt that there are, or ever can be, such theories in any currently held sense of the term.