Il Pleut…

…not right now, but it seems a good title given what my day’s been like.

It got off to a good start, getting away from the hotel near Canterbury in good time to catch the 8am sailing from Dover to Dunkerque (check in 45 minutes early, after dealing with customs and passport control, which in this case consisted of a chap looking at you from a kiosk as you drove past). The weather was dullish but dry and still.

The crossing was uneventful. I’d paid a tenner extra to get access to the VIP lounge, but there were no VIPs there, or at least I didn’t recognise anybody. It was very quite, just me, a couple of retired-seeming couples and two or three business people. I spoke to one of the couples and we took turns watching each others’ things, allowing some unencumbered exploring, not that there was much to see, besides the sea. (Sorry.) And the duty free, of course, but I resisted the temptation. I’ve been cutting right back on the demon drink recently. Which is not to say I might not pick something up on the way back.

(By the way, maybe the best bit of the VIP treatment is priority in getting on and off—I was one of the first two or three cars each way. Some people might consider that alone worth £10.)

I managed to find a place to park just outside the docks and pointed the satnav at the Auchan Hypermarket, which I vaguely remembered from the last time I took a vehicle across the channel, about 20 years ago. It was just as big and stuffed full of stuff as back then, but it was a bit of a waste of time because all I got was a cheese roll. Well, actually half a French loaf split and loaded with butter and Leerdammer, which was very nice and quite cheap, but I could have gotten something just as good on the road, and it was noon before I got going, with a six hour drive to look forward to.

I think it rained, quite heavily, for somewhere between five and six hours, altogether, though not quite continuously. The journey actually took a bit over seven, door to door.

It’s all sort of merging into one tedious, soggy memory, but two points stand out.

(1) My first encounter with the French toll road system. I was slightly apprehensive about this, after reading that you should be careful to have plenty of change, and so on. There were no manned kiosks, and when I drove up to the box, which of course was on the wrong side, all I could see was a slot, with no indications as to what should be put in it. I will freely admit that at this point I panicked, put the car into reverse, switched on the hazard lights, and starting moving back very slowly. Then I made a very stupid move, causing a large truck to brake very sharply. For that I got, not so much a mouthful of abuse, as a belly and two lungs-full. The only word I understood was “English”. He must have seen the GB plate. The only response was a sort of shrug, but as apologetic as I could make it, unlike the French variety. Eventually he gave up trying to convey his meaning to me and drove on. I’ll cut the story short—it includes me crossing the streams of traffic back and forth on foot trying to find a clue what to do—eventually I decided that it must be a collection point for tickets, and if you didn’t have one, it would let you through, but when I drove up to it the second time I noticed another slot, this one with a ticket poking out, so I grabbed it, the barrier went up and I was on my way.

(2) The last hour or so stands out too, and not because it was such great fun, either. But I need to go back and tell you that I’d originally intended to put the beam converters on the headlights in Dunkerque, but forgot. I lived to regret that, because due to a combination of the time difference and the weather it began to get dark much earlier than I’d expected. I’d been running on sidelights most of the afternoon anyway, but it got to the point where just about everybody else had their headlights on with about 40 minutes of the journey left. I was on an autoroute so I couldn’t just stop and do it, and it really wasn’t a job I fancied attempting in the pouring rain anyway. I tucked in behind a big truck and prayed we wouldn’t get overtaken by a police car. We were, but in one of my few pieces of luck on this journey so far, it happened to be when the sky had lightened up a bit. Or maybe they wouldn’t have noticed, or cared that much, anyway, but the point is that I got away with it.

I’m still thinking about whether this is a good substitute for a postcard. I have free wifi where I’m staying tonight, but that’s a bit iffy when I get where I’m going. It would be nice to add to this, with some photos, though. We’ll see how it goes. Another six hours of driving tomorrow, but I’ll get a much earlier start, and there should be plenty of time to pitch the tent and get a meal under my belt before the sun goes down on the Côte d’Azur tomorrow night! (And the weather forecast is pretty good!)

September 1, 2009   Posted in: announcements  No Comments

My knee and me

Nobody understands me.

OK, that’s an emotional over-reaction. Nobody understands my knee.

But that’s not true either. Or rather, it is and it isn’t.

I have a patellar maltracking problem in my left knee, due to atrophied quadriceps muscles, in turn due to previous knee problems. As the knee bends and straightens, the kneecap tracks off to the side of where it should be, causing irritation to the underlying tissues, because the quads aren’t pulling as strongly as they should in the opposite direction.

That condition is well understood by the appropriate medical specialists. But, in my experience, management of it is not. I’ve seen two specialists, two or three general practitioners and maybe six or eight physiotherapists. Of those who thought they understood the situation, all seemed to think I was over-sensitive to pain, or lazy, or that the main issue was really depression, or some combination of these. You might well be thinking they might be right, but I’m writing this, for myself in the first instance, to try to get down what’s really going on in and around my knee, and in the hope that it might help somebody in a similar situation.

OK, I was over-reacting, at the top of this piece, for a number of reasons that I won’t bore you with, except this one: I’m prone to depression anyway (so the medics were not completely wrong, or at least had some excuse), and this condition, imposing physical inactivity and social isolation as it does when at its worst (in combination with some other factors), dragged me down really quite deep at times, and it’s been threatening to do so again. This after a longish period of feeling all that was behind me—I’ve been off anti-depressants for the best part of a year.

The problem, which many people don’t seem able to get their heads around, though it seems quite simple to me, is that sometimes the condition flares up—the irritation causes inflammation—and that’s a slippery slope, because the worse it is, the more easily it’s made worse still. And on the other side of the coin, the less flared up it is, the more of the exercises I can do, so the better still it gets. Until I go too far.

The solution as the medics see it is very simple: build up the quads. But, depending on the degree of flare-up, the exercises can make it worse.

For a few months up to around mid-summer I was doing the exercises, and the quads were getting stronger, to the point where one day I managed a nine mile walk over rough ground with no ill-effects, the most I’d done in several years. But the following week I went to a three day conference in Edinburgh, by public transport (parking in Edinburgh is nightmarish), which was too much, and then, a week or so later, when it seemed to have improved a little, I thought I’d get away with doing some gardening, but I was wrong, and that started a downward spiral, so that now I’m spending all day every day sitting in my easy chair using my laptop, reading, playing my guitar or watching television. Not only are the unavoidable trips to the toilet and kitchen painful—not seriously so, but a sign it’s getting no better—but just getting a bit tense, so the quads contract a little, hurts too. Meanwhile, because that’s hardly exercise, they’re wasting away again.

I think maybe what the medics don’t appreciate is that, when it’s flared up, the off-centre kneecap is no longer the main problem. Almost any movement that involves the kneecap causes pain and prolongs the flare-up. The priority at that point is to get the inflammation down. (By the way, the inflammation is of the tissue under the kneecap, and it’s not visible, the pain being the only symptom.) But, back when I was still talking to the medics, it was flared up most of the time, but I didn’t really appreciate that and so failed to communicate it to them, and they just said “if you won’t do the exercises, it won’t get better”. But to me, doing the exercises was one of the surest ways to make it worse.

Five weeks later: Not only am I now managing to attend a full-time course at Edinburgh University, but I’m keeping the business going too, and I’ve had a two week camping holiday on the French Riviera since writing the foregoing. What made the difference? In general terms, a much more positive attitude. Specifically, I realised that I had to learn to walk again, in a way, but that it would be very easy. I already knew that I could do a great deal more wearing my walking boots than without them. What I then realised was that I should walk as if wearing them even when I wasn’t. My main problem had been not using my left leg properly, but the relative inflexibility of the boots forced me to do that, and I just had to get into the habit of doing it all the time. So far so good!

August 21, 2009   Posted in: announcements  No Comments

The Churchlands

(All references are to Susan Blackmore, Conversations on Consciousness, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2005.)

Pat says we don’t know that the “hard problem” is really any more hard than many others (p50-52), and “we don’t know how consciousness is produced in brains” (p51). I know that it’s a pseudo-problem, and that consciousness is not produced.

(Added October 2009: Now that I’m an apprentice academic I shouldn’t say things like that, but what the hell…)

Paul says the brain working at a low level and psychology at a high level are “not two things embracing one another, they’re actually just one thing, looked at from two different points of view.” (p59)

So near and yet so far. . . If he’d just put this together with the fact that the brain is objective while consciousness is subjective, he’d have it. He might even be right that work on the “easy problems” will lead to this understanding, though I’d say it needn’t necessarily do so.

Pat: “. . . there really are these qualitative experiences. . . ” (p60)

But it depends what you mean by “really.” For years I insisted that consciousness was real, despite being subjective, and I’m still tempted sometimes to use that kind of language. But “really” really needs to be qualified. Naive realism just doesn’t cut it in such a subtle and complex context.

May 25, 2007   Posted in: consciousness, differentials, philosophy  No Comments

Some thoughts on Dennett

Added December 2009: This now needs a health warning. It was written before I knew anything about theory-theory and simulation theory, and though my basic stance has changed little if any, I’d now express some of these ideas quite differently. (Also, some of the internal links might not work.)

In Susan Blackmore’s Conversations on Consciousness [Bla05], Daniel Dennett says that a philosophical zombie “could cry at sad movies, be thrilled by joyous sunsets, enjoy ice cream. . . and yet not be conscious at all.” (p81)

This might seem a trivial point, but it’s a typical example of Dennett’s thinking, or at least his writing. To be thrilled, or to enjoy, of course, one has to be conscious. He should have said “appear to be thrilled” and “act as if enjoying.” These concepts are inter/subjective, even if Dennett thinks they should not be. Of course this is probably just a slip, but there are many other such slips in his writing, which some people, such as myself, find quite off-putting. If these are genuine mistakes, then they’re uncharacteristically sloppy, and if not, then this is the philosophical equivalent of sleight-of-hand, and intellectually dishonest.

Moving on to actual philosophical issues…

Here is how it [the intentional stance] works: first you decide to treat the object whose behavior is to be predicted as a rational agent; then. . . you predict that this rational agent will act to further its goals in the light of its beliefs. [Den87, p17]

I believe what we usually do when trying to guess what someone else in a given situation might do is to say to ourselves “what would I do?” Rationality will often play a part in that, but projection of the self, identification with the other, is psychologically much more basic.

It could be argued that my story reduces to Dennett’s: that, with sufficient qualification in the way of beliefs, desires and context generally, we can all be treated as rational agents, and that is what we do with each other, in principle. The answer to that is that my view is more practical, on a more appropriate level, closer to the actual action, and has greater explanatory power.

Dennett’s zimbo “would think it was conscious, even if it wasn’t.” [Den91, p311] And Dennett thinks “Nobody is conscious—not in the systematically mysterious way that supports such doctrines as epiphenomenalism!” [Den91, p406]

There’s a very easy way to circumnavigate all such difficulties: consider the consciousness of any entity to be entirely a matter of opinion. Of course we want to say, if others consider us not to be conscious, that they’re wrong, but why? Isn’t it just because they might thus fail to consider our feelings? That’s a legitimate concern, but they’d not be factually wrong—if that’s wrong, then it’s morally so. Inter/subjectively, people are conscious, and so is anything else to which we find it useful to attribute consciousness, i.e. with which we might identify. Objectively, the word has no meaning, therefore nor does the question as to whether any entity is conscious.

Some might want to put “or desirable” after “useful” in the previous paragraph, but I would argue that the attribution of consciousness is only legitimate where it is genuinely useful to do so—that the concept is “naturally” instrumental, so usefulness is validity, and desirability is insufficient. Thus, attribution is not merely subjective, but intersubjective, because, as it concerns identification, we only find it useful where there are genuine similarities between attributor and attributee. Some opinions are more useful (and more natural) than others. See Intersubjective panpsychism.

“It is tempting to suppose that some concept of information could serve eventually to unify mind, matter, and meaning in a single theory.” [DH87] (emphasis in the original)

I do agree with this and in fact I think it’s quite easily achieved. The concept of physical information is now well established: it is the form or structure of matter, so every material thing is considered to embody its own description. So if we add what I call “the formal stance” to Dennett’s array of stances, in which we focus on form, i.e. information, rather than substance, i.e. rather than taking the physical stance, we get physical information. The common concept of information is intentional, being always about something, but it is always encoded in physical information, and what’s encoded is in the eye of the decoder, thus intentional information is inter/subjective. Meaning is basically intentional information. Mind is the user/processor/creator of intentional information. It could be considered a virtual processor, running on the hardware of the brain. More on this under Mind, matter, meaning, and information.

[Bla05] Susan Blackmore. Conversations on Consciousness. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2005.

[Den87] Daniel C. Dennett. The Intentional Stance. MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1987.

[Den91] Daniel C. Dennett. Consciousness Explained. Allen Lane, London, 1991.

[DH87] Daniel C. Dennett and John Haugeland. Intentionality. In Gregory [Gre87].

[Gre87] Richard L. Gregory, editor. The Oxford Companion to the Mind. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1987.

May 16, 2007   Posted in: Dennett, consciousness, differentials, information, philosophy  6 Comments

Hofstadter on perception and reception

I’m reading Douglas Hofstadter’s new book I Am A Strange Loop just now, and just ran into my first significant disagreement with him (in this book, that is). On page 76, after describing a walk along an airport concourse during which various scents evoke numerous associations, he writes (emphases in the original):

Each of these examples of symbol-triggering constitutes an act of perception, as opposed to the mere reception of a gigantic number of microscopic signals arriving from some source, like a million raindrops landing on a roof.

So it’s meaning that matters. Which, of course, denies the possibility, or at least the significance, of “raw feels”. But I’m quite convinced that I sometimes perceive sights, sounds, smells and other signals without recognising their source. I don’t mean when I mistake something for something else, but when I’m quite mystified, and have no idea what a particular sound or sight signifies. Some people say that there are no raw feels, because there is always some interpretation, however minimal, but I say, if so, sometimes it’s so minimal as to make no difference, in this context anyway.

In the preceding pages Hofstadter writes quite a lot about video, and especially about video feedback, which he says will serve well in the following discussions of perception and other mental phenomena, so what he’s comparing the sense of smell with, in that passage, is the signals transmitted from a video camera to a television (“receiver”) to which it’s directly connected. Also implicit is the fact that scents are carried through the air by molecules of the substances concerned, so his “million raindrops” stands for millions of molecules, and there’s the matter of levels of explanation too, because these might trigger just one symbol.

My theory of consciousness copes very well with the problem of “meaningless perception”. The crucial point is whether we’re willing or able to identify with the receiver/perceiver. It might be an extremely sophisticated chemical sensor connected to a powerful computer programmed so that it can identify smells just as well as you or I, but unless you imagine yourself as that computer (or software, whatever), “smelling” what it “smells”, it’s still just a piece of automatic equipment to you. To attribute consciousness is to identify with the attributee. That’s what it’s all about.

Later: I just realised, this fits in very well with something Hofstadter wrote earlier, on page 17, which struck me at the time as not quite right:

Some of us (myself included) believe that the late President Reagan was essentially “all gone” many years before his body gave up the ghost, and more generally we believe that people in the final stages of Alzheimer’s disease are essentially all gone.

When I read that I made a note: “Does that mean it’s OK to abuse them?” He goes on to say that these peoples’ souls have departed (contradicting “before his body gave up the ghost”), though of course he emphasises throughout that he uses that word “poetically”, not religiously. But then most or all animals lack the higher cognitive faculties, and animals are generally denied souls, so maybe that makes some sort of sense. But like people with Alzheimer’s, they can suffer. Doesn’t that matter?

April 25, 2007   Posted in: AI, consciousness, differentials, philosophy  No Comments