Skywritings

      Was ever such a perfect last-minute rescue possible?

If only Kristine Bogyo, Julian‘s much-loved mother and Anton‘s cherished soul-mate could have been there. Cellist and conductor of Toronto’s Mooredale Youth Orchestra, she lost a 14-year battle with cancer on Good Friday 2007.

Both father and son were playing under a bittersweet handicap.

Comments on the video of Sal Kripke’s 2006 talk on “The First Person“.

(I only understood about 25%, because of the poor sound quality of the recording and because SK had bronchitis, so I may have have filled the gaps wrong.)

SK was raising problems about pinpointing the referent for “I”. SK (rightly) pointed out that his own case was different from that of those people who claimed to be insentient robots, but that with testimony like that from others, and no way to determine whether it was true or false, all SK could conclude was that that confirmed the (familiar) uncertainty about the minds of others, and it raised anew the question of what exactly was different about one’s own case (for those of us who know we are not insensient robots).

Then SK brought up a Kripke/Wittgenstein-like point about uncertainty or even indeterminacy in trying to pinpoint the referent of “I”: The objective referent (roughly speaking, what is going on inside the body of SK) is not a problem, and anyone, SK or anyone else, can pick out that referent.

But the specific private Cartesian goings-on inside the body of SK — or SH: let me switch to my own “I”, because I’m not a robot either, and the points are clearer in I-language — are not as easy to pin down in the usual way. I think SK’s point was that I can have the usual Cartesian certainty that the private mental goings on are indeed going on (hence I am not a robot), but from that I still cannot fix the referent of “I.”.

So, along the same lines that SK has previously used to suggest that there is no way I can determine the fact of the matter between adding and “quadding,” I also cannot determine the fact of the matter about “I” — apart from the fact that private mental goings on are indeed going on. In both cases, it’s the Wittgensteinian problem of private error and its incorrigibility that makes this sort of private-language issue indeterminate even in the special (seemingly opposite) case of the incorrigibility and cartesian certainty of the Cogito.

There were also two other points, one Fregean one I couldn’t fully follow, concerning the sense vs. the reference of “I”. Perhaps that was just the “I”/”SCHMI ” version of the add/quadd problem of pinpointing the referent of I, which, in both cases, and unlike Hesperus/Phosphorus, fails, because of the private-language incorrigibility I summarized above.

The second point was about mirrors: that the mirror needs to be big enough for the entire body to fit (maybe that was about uncertainty concerning the spatial boundaries of the locus of the objective entity that we try to use to localize the subjective one); and that the naive non-philosopher who thought mirrors were the solution to the problem may not have been altogether wrong. (But I still don’t quit see how it could be done with mirrors!)

Now let me try an alternative view.

(1) Cogitatur. I’ve always felt that the Cogito, though one of the most important philosophical insights, had over-reached. Descartes had rightly pointed out that one cannot deny that cogitation is going on, when it is going on, hence that it exists. But to go on to conclude that an “I” exists, and that I am that I, might be a little more weight than the Cogito itself can bear, because what, after all, is that “I” — apart from the (undeniable) cogitation that exists and is ongoing? The “I” seems to be a more fallible, theory-laden matter. People can disagree about it; some (like the “robots” you point out some people claim they are) can even deny some aspects of it. Perhaps, like add/quadd, there is not even a fact of the matter about the “I”.

(2) Feeling. To get rid of unnecessary extra terminology that just makes it seem as if there is more going on, and more to account for, in contemplating the mind/body problem, I’ve tried to set aside all the synonyms and paranyms and variants (mind, mental, mentation, cogitation, consciousness, subjectivity, qualia, sentience, sapience, 1-st personhood, even intentionality) and to focus exclusively on that “mark of the mental” that we all (those of us who are not robots, at least) recognize as the necessary and sufficient mark and sine qua non of the mental, namely feeling.

(3) Senitur. So the slight over-reaching in Descartes’ gloss of his Cogito intuition is, I think, remedied if we reduce it to: I feel, therefore there is feeling (“Sentio ergo sentitur” — both said without needing a detached pronoun “I”, though “Sentitur ergo sentitur” would say much the same thing, at the cost of sounding like an empty tautology, which it isnt: it is perhaps more like what [I think you said] Shoemaker said it might be: an “analytic a-posteriori”, concluding from the experience of a mental event that there are indeed mental events). (That’s the non-robot intuition that you share with the others who deny they are robots.)

(4) Ego. But that still does not pin down the “I”.

(5) Feeling Feelings. It is true (though I don’t think it solves the problem) that “feeling” is intrinsically a 2-part relation: There is not only what is felt, but the feeler, feeling it. It is undeniable that that’s part of the content (the quality, the nature) of feeling itself, that it feels like “I” am feeling it. But that is only undeniable in the more general sense that it is undeniable that whatever one is feeling (when one is indeed feeling it) in fact feels-like whatever it feels like (and not like something else, or nothing). (This is the same point as the point that “is” is corrigible, but “seems” is not.)

(6) Feeling Like the Feeling Feeler. From the certainty that we feel, and the fact that feelings feel as if they are being felt by a feeler, it does not follow that an additional “I” exists, over and above the existence of the fact of the felt feelings. (It is undeniable that I feel cold when I feel cold, but that does not mean that I am cold, or that it is cold — or even that there is cold! There may be just feeling-like-cold — and by the same token there may be just feeling-like-I.)

(7) Free-Floating Feelings. Hence when we are trying to pinpoint the referent for “I”, we are right to detect a certain indeterminacy: We do have a (reasonably reliable) spatiotemporal locus for feeling itself. That’s probably not much more open to doubt than any ordinary here/now/this deixis. But the spatiotemporal locus (and indeed the existence) of the “I” — as anything over and above the brute fact that feeling is going on now (sentitur) — is another matter.

(8) Doing. To wrap up with the question of robots and causality: A robot is merely a certain kind of (“autonomous”) causal mechanism, with certain input/output performance (“doing”) capacities. Let us call the mechanism underlying the robot’s spatiotemporal performance capacities its “function.” (The goal of cognitive science is one day to reverse-engineer that function at the scale of human performance capacity, so as to be able to fully explain the causal mechanism. That’s what the goal of passing the Turing Test is all about.)

(9) I Robot. When people say “I’m just a robot,” they probably mean that they have a theory that all there is is their performance capacity, and once the underlying functional mechanism of that is known, there’s nothing else.

(10) Feeling Robots. But of course there is something else. We don’t just function, we also feel: Feeling is going on (if/when we are indeed feeling) and to deny that would be absurd. (And usually when people deny it, they are denying something else, not the fact tat they are feeling when they are feeling.)

(11) The Feeling/Function Problem. So we are indeed robots, but feeling robots. Hence the mind/body problem is really the feeling/function problem. It is a problem of causal explanation: How and why are some functions felt, rather than just “functed”?

(12) Causality. It is not that the fact that some functions are felt rather than just functed that is in doubt. The problem is explaining the causal status of feelings.

(13) Telekinetic Dualism. And a causal explanation of feeling looks impossible. For — except if we are ready to believe (without physical evidence, and contrary to all evidence except our feelings) in a “telekinetic dualism” in which feelings have independent causal (telekinetic) power, alongside the four other forces of nature (gravity, electromagnetism, and the strong and weak subatomic force) — feelings must be acausal and hence superfluous in any complete causal explanation of our robotic function.

(14) Patience and Agency. So if cognitive science has no hope (short of resorting to telekinesis) of causally explaining the (undeniable) fact of feeling, it follows, a fortiori, that there will be no objective way to pinpoint the referent of the even more elusive “I” that feels like both the agent and the patient of those feelings, whilst the robotic mechanism is functing their doings.

Stevan Harnad

Your view is that: – the world is made of physical events (qualityless, feelingless, atomic, quantitative) (A)

I can already sense the irrelevancies creeping in! The reason I have reduced the m/b problem to presence/absence of feeling alone — and the rest to just physical “functing” is precisely to avoid equivocation on a proliferation of irrelevant, redundant and profligate synonyms, paranyms and peripherals that simply cloud (crowd!) the picture and make it appear as if there are more things to face and answer than the one simple one:

Apart from feelings, there is no explanatory problem. Everything there is is causally explainable (in principle). I call all that “functing”. The problem then is simply to explain how and why some of the functing is felt. Never mind “atomic” and “quantitative”! And “qualityless” adds nothing: it just means feelingless.

– consciousness is having feelings (relational, intentional, qualitative)(B)

Again, all the needless, distracting synonyms, paranyms and irrelevancies:

“Relational” is irrelevant, “intentional” is highly ambiguous and equivocal, but if it means that, amongst our feelings, there’s the feeling that we cause things to happen, then yes, that’s one meaning of “intentional”. And yes, the problem of explaining the causal role of feeling is what the why and how are about.

The other meaning of intentionality is “aboutness”, a useless, pseudo-explanatory term, but fine, yes, feelings are “about” things in the sense that I seem to be feeling what it feels like to eat an apple, or to refer to 2+2 as being =4 etc. The “aboutness” is the content of the feeling, what feelings feel like, when they feel like they are about an outside world (rather than just my own, say, fatigue).

But this too is just make-words. The issue, again, is that there exist feelings, and the problem again is to explain how and why there not just unfelt functings instead.

thus there is no way to put together A with B.

No explanation of how and why some functings are felt. (The F/f problem.) try to show that our feelings are somehow reducible to the physical world as it is defined in A. You don’t think this epistemic strategy is going to work. Neither do I. You demolish many popular attempts at reducing B to A. One of your key arguments is the fact that the functional cannot produce the felt. Fine. I couldn’t agree more.

But here is a different view against which I didn’t find any specific critique to my position, which is, very shortly:

– the physical world is made of processes (qualitative, relational …) (A’) – consciousness could be a subset of such processes (relational, intentional, qualitative) (B)

You have just managed to fall into the usual trap: To simply say by fiat that feelings simply are a form of functing — whereas the problem is to explain how and why! You have simply begged the question.

I don’t doubt for a minute that some sort of “identity” theory is correct. That’s not the point! The problem is to explain “how” and “why,” not just to state “that”.

And it won’t do to state “well, some things just are as they are, like gravitation: no further hows or whys!”

The point is that electromagnetism is among the unproblematic functions. And the problem is to explain how and why some functions are felt, not simply to state that some functions are felt because they are “identical” with feeling. That is just another way to state that the F/f problem is insoluble.

(That’s fine too, but then we have to acknowledge, explicitly, that what we are saying is that although the question — “how/why are some functions felt?” — was a perfectly natural and justified one to ask, exactly like innumerable other reasonable functional questions that we ask, and get an answer, this time there is no answer. We are simply told that asking that question is like asking how/why gravity pulls, in other words, feeling is just one of the brute facts about the way things are. That sounds like no answer at all to me! Does it mean the m/b question made no sense? I think not…)

A is an abstraction that hinders our understanding both of the nature of the physical world and consciousness.

“A” is everything there is, and that happens, apart from feeling, along with our functional explanation (from maths, physics, chemistry, biology, engineering, etc.) of how and why everything is and happens.

You say this is all just an “abstraction: that hinders our understanding of function and feeling.

In reality, it is our understanding of function, and there is nothing at all wrong with it — except that it can’t explain feeling.

No point blaming the success for the failure. Especially when you have nothing remotely near the explanatory power of the successful part (physics etc.) to replace it!

The world is not made of atomic physical events on top of which you have a functional level that cannot transfigurate in feelings. The world is made of processes which are in themselves qualitative and relational. Could you explain why not? I am not trying to reduce B to A, but rather I claim that A’ should be substituted for A’ and then there is no opposition between A’ and B.

First, as I said “qualitative” and “relational” are weasel words. I don’t know what “qualitative” means if it does not mean either unfelt physical properties (such as mass, frequency, etc.), with which there is no problem at all — or it just means “felt”, in which case that is the one and only problem, and you are camouflaging it with all the paranyms.

“Relational” is even worse. There are plenty of unfelt relational properties (functions). “Bigger,” for example.

Feelings are another matter. And calling them “relational” adds absolutely nothing. It can only mean either:

(i) what it feels like to perceive or contemplate relational properties (which in no way helps, because the F/f problem is explaining how/why anything at all is felt) or

(ii) that feeling itself is “relational” (the “relation” between the feeler and what is felt, the “relation” that is rhapsodized in the notion of “aboutness” or “intentionality”):

This banal property of feeling (that feeling is something that is felt by a feeler) will not explain itself by its bootstraps. And it is not a “relation” of a kind that dissipates the F/f problem, turning it into just another functional relation problem!

(In fact, the only substantive insight that has ever come out of the fact that feeling feels-like a 3-part relation — (1) what the feeling feels like [“qualitatively”], the fact (2) that the feeling is felt, and (3) that it feels like the feeler is the feeler — is the Cogito! And even that was expressed in an equivocal way, making it seem as if it delivered more than it real did: “I think therefore I exist”. In fact it was just “I feel therefore I feel” and even that has too many entities [the feeling plus the “I”]: It should just have been “feeling is being felt, therefore feeling is being felt”. In other words, feelings exist. The “I” who feel the feelings is just what the feelings feel like. It is not a further ontological entity, squeezed out of a 2/3-part relation!)

This solution to the problem of consciousness is not a thesis on the nature of consciousness, but rather a thesis on the nature of the physical world. Is it such a crazy view?

I regret to say that pointing out that feeling is a relation, “just like” other relations in the world begs the question. It is not “just like” other relations (like “bigger”)! And that’s the problem.

One final comment. If feelings were identical (not produced by or emergent from) certain physical processes, the issue of mental causation would be solved since there would be no longer mental causation (mental to physical) but only physical to physical.

Again, too many synonyms simply delude us into thinking that repeating the questions with redundant terminology amounts to answering them!

“Mental” just means felt. So I repeat, without the multiplication of terms:

First, the m/b or F/f problem: “How/why are certain functions felt rather than just functed?”

Your reply:

“If feelings were identical with (not caused by) certain functions, the m/b problem is solved, because everything would be functional”.

Yes, yes. But you left out how/why certain functions are felt, which is what this is all about! You cannot answer a substantive question about how/why certain functions are felt by simply stating that they are identical with feeling. They may well be. But the part you left out was how and why! And that is a problem of causal, functional explanation not solved either by multiplying terminology or invoking identities without explaining them.

If I had been afforded more heed, I could have afforded to be less headstrong — and more.

[Reflections on two talks on Spinoza by Rebecca Goldstein at McGill

1. Subjectivity is not really making a comeback in cognitive sciencei, at least not as a form of empirical data or as a part of theory, or as a way of generating or testing theory.

2. Nor is language the window on the mind, or on the mind/body problem or the other-minds problem.

3. Subjectivity just means that we feel: We have subjective states. The rest is just about the contents of those subjective states — anything from ouch to cogito ergo sum.

4. So it’s equally certain (within the limits of the other-minds problem, which applies as much to other talking people as to behaving rats) that other people as well as other rats feel. And we have ways of inferring it, reliably, in both cases; and that’s fine for psychophysics and psychophysiology (but it certainly does not solve the mind/body problem).

5. Certainty about the fact that subjectivity exists has never been the problem. The (mind/body) problem is: explaining how and why subjectivity exists: how and why matter feels, how and why some functional states are felt states, rather than just “functed” states.

6. That is the problem that Spinoza (and others, including me) think, for various reasons, is unsolvable. So, so much for Spinoza’s conviction that at the end of the day all questions will be answered, or answerable! He has already refuted that conviction with his conviction that the two “aspects” have no unified explanation.

7. Still, it’s a good rule of thumb for intellectual inquiry — perhaps the only viable rule of thumb — that every question has an answer.

8. About your moral indignation if your fellow-picnickers knowingly let you bite into a wasp without warning you: That’s valid (though not quite universal, because it is not clear whether autists and psychopaths would share your indignation, even if they were in the same situation).

9. But either way, it’s not a viable basis for objective ethics (for deriving “ought” from “is”). All it means is that, as biological creatures, we have a (mostly) shared adaptive “mind-reading” ability and propensity (“mirror neurons”) and needs and expectations. So far that says absolutely nothing about “is” or “ought,” but only about survival value and adaptive advantages — i.e., about “can” and “does”.

10. The fact that it feels like something to be morally indignant that someone does not do what you feel he ought to do simply adds — to the “can” and the “does” — the insoluble problem already mentioned: the very fact that we feel (the mind/body problem).

11. There would of course be no ethics if there were no feeling (and hence no feelings to hurt). But that doesn’t help. It just means that feeling is a necessary condition for ethics; but it doesn’t make ethics objective. On the contrary, it highlights its subjectivity. (And then there are also the autists and psychopapths and non-telepathic or apathetic animals, who feel otherwise, or feel nothing at all on the matter of the feelings of others.)

12. There’s no question that Spinoza has a large following today. (Whether it is a substantive intellectual revival or just another cult — like Peirce and Dewey and Gibson, or even vulgar Darwinism — is another matter!)

13. But I don’t think it counts as evidence that the Spinoza revival is a substantive intellectual one to cite the fondness of Einstein for Spinoza! What made Einstein an immortal intellectual giant was not the quality of mentation that went into his thoughts about Spinoza. If his intellectual weight depended on the quality of his mentation (or verse) about Spinoza, Einstein would be an exceedingly minor thinker.

14. Nor does the fact that both Einstein and Spinoza were guided by a faith in the answerability of all questions give that affinity more substance. That motivation is a prerequisite for many kinds of intellectual quest. If you think of it, pessimistically, as a losing game — whether zero-sum or non-zero-sum — it’s like going hunting convinced you have no quarry. (That’s as much of an evolutionary non-starter as Walt Whitman’s “Do I contradict myself? Well then I contradict myself…”)

15. Damasio’s affinity for Spinoza does not make the revival substantive either. Damasio focusses on emotion in brain function, but he never explains how and why the brain feels rather than just functs: He does not even realize the problem!

16. In general, the fact that the findings of contemporary “cognitive science”  square with seventeenth-century Spinoza does not necessarily attest to the fact that Spinoza was advanced: it could alas just as well mean that cogsci is retarded…

17. And last: What on earth does “God is Nature” mean? Does every imaginary entity become real if we simply declare it identical with some other entity that really does exist?

18. Does Charlie Brown’s “Great Pumpkin” become real if I simply aver that He is in reality just the Secret of French Cooking?

19. Is polytheism vindicated if I say that each deity is in reality a hadron (or each hadron is in reality a deity)?

20. And are the armchair consolations of philosophical understanding invoked by Spinoza really a nontrivial balm for Auschwitz inmates? (If not, then what more does it mean than that minor malaise can sometimes be minimized by mentation — just as it can by medication?)

Given the obsessive fascination of daily horoscopes of self and kin for huge swaths of the populace, the readiness of much of the subcontinent to use the planets as oracles to pick a lifelong marital match, the unflagging grip of particolored neural imagery on those striving to decipher the brain’s secret code, not to mention a century of western fealty to Freudian fantasies, Marxian (or — pick your poison — Market) moronics and our continuing global affinity for the local equivalent of the Bible and the pin — it is hardly surprising that the cerebral hermeneuts who elect to do their dechiffrage on behavioral function rather than on spatiotemporal patterns are having a field day freely projecting their animism onto robots’ ramblings… We are a superstitious species.

[In hindsight, from the age of Trump, a decade later, it’s clear that the likes of Black and Trump deserve everything that’s coming to them. Trump’s villainy and vacuity is obvious, but Black’s more genteel and glib criminality is just as foul.]

Review of: “Robber Baron: Lord Black of Crossharbour” by George Tombs (ECW Press, 2007)

First, it cannot escape the reader’s attention that in wooing his confidence to elicit information for his book, the author, George Tombs (in a far milder way) used wiles not unreminiscent of the ones that Conrad Black used to enhance his fortune — but it is Conrad Black who now faces prison.

Fair enough. Black did it on an incomparably grander scale. So did just about everyone else in Tombs’s book, as far as I can tell — Black’s partners and competitors, his supporters and detractors, his defense lawyers and the prosecution, to greater and lesser degrees. Humans are a deceitful and manipulative lot, to greater and lesser degrees, and when that degree passes a certain threshold, they need to be restrained or punished.

And Black undeniably passed that threshold. The only question is whether the proposed punishment is commensurate with his crime, and to this reader it is absolutely clear that it is not.

Conrad Black is a hero-worshipper (and his heroes — numbering Duplessis, Nixon and Napoleon alongside Roosevelt and Churchill — are not all admirable); he is a money-maker (skillful, lucky, but not especially creative, if one can be said to be creative at all in the direct quest for money, rather than the quest of something else, with money only a byproduct); he is an ostentatious spend-thrift on a grand scale (not a noble or admirable trait, when so many are so poor, but not in itself a crime); he is considerably more intelligent, learned and cultivated than average (and what intelligence he does not dedicate to money-making, he devotes to reading, writing and publishing on history and politics, likewise on a scale far above the average); his neo-conservative political views are not noble or admirable either (except to other neo-conservatives and money-makers), and, as always in such cases, they depend on a considerable degree of self-deception, alongside the usual quota of deceipt and manipulation.

Conrad Black’s business ventures (consisting mostly of buying up newspapers and making them profitable by firing staff and tightening their efficiency) increased their revenues by billions, and he appropriated hundreds of millions for himself in the bargain, through both legitimate and inflated fees and inflated payments from “non-compete” agreements. His crime was pocketing those extra payments rather than passing most of them on to the share-holders of the private company that he had subsequently made into a public one (though I’ll wager that he generated an order of magnitude more revenue for others — “wealth creation” — than the inflated fraction of it that he withheld illicitly for himself). He also wrote three thoughtful biographies (Duplessis, Roosevelt, Nixon), an autobiography, and a large number of newspaper articles, all in much the same neo-conservative vein. He consorted (and loved to consort) with the rich, titled, famous, and influential.

That’s about the size of it. And the question is whether for that he deserves to spend years in a medium-security prison, alongside murderers, violent drug-dealers and mafiosi by way of punishment.

If we set aside our (justified) resentment at the unrestrained and remorseless pursuit of wealth and power (and Black’s ideological celebration of that very pursuit), our glee at seeing a high-roller caught in the act of pilfering, our distaste (not untinged with envy) at the self-assured arrogance with which Black operated until his fall, and our (self-righteous) applause when corporate criminality is caught, exposed and punished — can we really say that Black deserves anything worse for his crimes than to lose his fortune and prestige and to spend the rest of his days repaying his debts?

This urbane, knowledgeable, eloquent (if long-winded and hyperbolical) man was indeed caught in corporate crime that is on no account to be pardoned or permitted. But he was not violent, not psychopathic, and not (this must be stressed) purely venal either, being also an impassioned and resourceful advocate of a political position that I personally find revolting, but worthy of discussion and analysis, if only so that its iniquities can be exposed and rebutted.

I do not think anyone’s interests are served, nor any useful example is made, by incarcerating such a man with violent criminals or even common Enron rogues. His assets should be seized to pay back his debts, but he should be allowed to write his memoirs in peace, exiled to his economic Elba, not the US penal system.

To punish Black any more than that would be to show exactly the same lack of understanding and empathy for those less fortunate than ourselves that Black himself showed in his single-minded pursuit of fame, power and fortune, and his benighted championship of that pursuit as the meaning of life.

There is no example to be set here, to warn off similar corporate malfeasance by others; there will never be another like Conrad Black, not even close.

(Tombs’s book is fairly well-written, but quite repetitious, not always well-integrated, and with a number of undetected typos.)

Professor Colquhoun’s Guardian article on our age of “endarkenment” is perhaps a bit exaggerated, but it’s basically right. Educational and research institutions are being turned into corporate bottom-line-feeders and democracy itself is morphing into opinocracy and hypocracy (shaped by hearsay and well-funded media manipulators). Promoting “metrics” in research risks feeding into this, and that is troubling. Metrics are, of course, fallible, misinterpretable, and manipulable. For me, they are not an end in themselves, but a possible means of making research freely accessible to all. Right now the media are dominated by trash and quackery. Injecting all of real research into that open database might — just might — mitigate that a bit. Openness might even help constrain metrics (monitoring, exposing and shaming abuses). I doubt it can make things worse. (Trouble is that although openness may be asymptotically self-corrective in the long run, technology, including the media, are beginning to make it possible to do such monstrous acute mischief in the short run that the long run might come too late. Let’s hope this is merely a hysterical hypothetical…)

STEVAN HARNAD

Commentary on:
The poet who could smell vowels
Times Literary Supplement November 14 2007
(article on Ferdinand de Saussure by John E Joseph)

Please don’t be frightened off by the symbols; they are made fearsome for a purpose: Suppose we have a hundred things. These can all be physical objects, or words, or speech sounds. Now suppose we sort them into (say) two categories, A and non-A, based on three, two-valued (+/-) properties, X, Y, Z. The properties could be natural ones (+/-solid, +/-edible, +/-pronounceable) or social (+/-kosher, +/-english, +/-posh). Each thing can be described by its value on the three properties (e.g., +-+). Let’s say that to be in category A you need to have a + on property X, otherwise you are in category non-A.

Now I hope that this exercise has left you a little lost in a bunch of meaningless formal symbols. So even if you followed well enough to be able to tell me that a thing that was -++ would be a non-A, you would still have little idea of what the things, or the properties or the categories were. This would be true even if you spent years categorizing examples I fed you, in the form of “Would a -+- be an A or a non-A?”

This is an example of the arbitrariness of symbols (which is what A/non-A, X/Y/Z and +/- are here). Words too are symbols. Whether a mushroom is edible or not is not a symbol, but its name “A” and the names of its properties are. Saussure is best known for stressing the arbitrariness of symbols, but apparently that was already well known from Scottish sources before his time. Saussure also had synesthesia, which means, for example, that for him vowels had a smell, and this helped him see (or feel or taste) associations between words and objects that most of us do not see. He perhaps thought that such associations somehow provided a bridge between the arbitrary shape of symbols and the natural shape of the things that symbols signify.

But Saussure’s main contribution, which he derived from his English lineage (via Mill from Hamilton) was the view that (what we would today call) cognition is “differential”: it is somehow based upon encoding differences in terms of the kinds of +/- properties illustrated above. This led to structuralism. We don’t see things as absolutes. We see them in terms of a network of formal contrasts. An A is an A because it is +X. The “representation” of a thing then becomes the set of +/- values on its properties.

This is all fine as far as it goes, but there is a problem: Just as my behaviour could very well be described as categorizing when I used the rule “All and only A’s are +X” to reply to questions like “Would a -+- be an A or a non-A?” I could do that task till doomsday without ever knowing what an A or an X was, and with no way to recognize one if I saw it. This is called the “symbol grounding problem.” Today, cognitive science tends more toward computationalism than structuralism, but both approaches are insufficient to explain cognition, and for much the same reason: Because arbitrary symbols — whether part of a structural diagram, or a computational algorithm, or, for that matter, an English sentence, are merely (as the philosopher John Searle calls them) “squiggles and squoggles.” Their connections with the things they signify are parasitic on the meanings in our heads, and what we have in our heads is definitely not just more squiggles and squoggles.

To ground symbols, to put concrete flesh on their arbitrary bones, be they ever so systematically structured, the symbol system first has to have the direct sensorimotor capacity to categorize the physical objects that its symbols signify — not merely after something has magically reduced them to a symbolic description. And the “shape” of sensorimotor capacity (like the shape of objects themselves) is not symbolic or arbitrary: it is analog and dynamic. This is not synesthesis, but esthesis, and it requires a mechanism for learning and identifying categories that a symbol system alone will always lack.

Anonymous correspondent: “Peer review is elitist and oligarchic; adding a web-based post-hoc system would be democratic. It is often non-specialists, or Pro-Ams, who expose quackery.

Aristotle, by the way, taught a monarch, studied under Plato (who advocated oligarchies), and then lived in the Athenian democracy. He concluded that the democratic method was the most effective.

See Aristotle on Smart Mobs!“

On peer review: I agree completely that adding a web-based post-hoc system would not only be democratic but a dramatic, powerful new safeguard on validity. Don’t forget that post-hoc commentary is and has been my bandwagon all along: it’s what motivated “scholarly skywriting” and drew me into Open Access!

But the critical point is that it is post-hoc. It is not a competitor to peer review but a complement (“not a substitute but a supplement”). It is when people propose post-hoc commentary as a substitute for (rather than just a supplement to) the advance correction and filtration by answerable, qualified experts provided by peer review that I (appear to) go into opposition to the very thing I am fighting for — post-hoc skywriting — (but that is a misunderstanding).

Nothing is lost, and everything is gained, in putting a global, open commentary system at the tail end of expert-vetted work. But when it comes to medical treatment for my loved ones, I don’t want their medicine to be administered on the basis of a net-based straw poll or free-for-all alone. You see how rumour and ignorance and superficiality also propagate on the Web. A prior phase of closed, answerable vetting by qualified specialists is essential, otherwise we may as well treat patients on the basis of the latest in wikipedia. (And science and scholarship are surely not that much less important than health!) Entrusting all that to populist polling and vigilantism is a form of gaussian roulette.

On expertise: To put it another way: I really think we need to re-think, or think through, exactly what we mean by “elitist” and “oligarchic” in this sense: Is it elitist to have certified cardiologists decide what should be published as being a safe healthy operation to perform, rather than having it voted on by a Gallup Poll or swayed by persuasive blogsters? Is it oligarchical (to put it even more luridly) to keep hobbyists out of the operating theatre?

On specialised division of labour: I pick these melodramatic examples only to bring out the fact that there really is something at stake, and that it’s commonsensical: We cannot, in the modern world (of the past tens of thousands of years of civilization!) each be self-sufficient jacks of all trades. We rely on division of labor, and division of expertise, for everything from our food and shelter to our health and security. Our cumulative, collective knowledge and expertise (our “Creative Commons”) is also dependent on this distributed, complementary expertise.

So I ask: is that division into complementary expertise “elitist”? Is reliance on it “oligarchical”? Should we (like our failing education system) declare everyone equally expert as a matter of birthright, and cede judgment to democratic opinion polls in all matters instead?

On re-thinking “elitism”: Without for a moment denying that qualified expert judgment is fallible too (but recognizing also that mass inexpert judgment is no remedy for that, just a useful check/balance), I really think the rhetorical buzzword “elitism” needs a serious rethink — especially where it is in fact referring to specialized expertise, skill, knowledge that a minority have, and have worked hard to attain, whereas the majority have not…

In a sense, representative democracy involves something like this division of labour too: It is only that the tyranny of the daily opinion poll is sadly constraining the work of our elected representatives. Democracy, too, used to be “post hoc”: We would vote for those we considered to be provisionally best qualified to represent our interests (alas not always noble interests, but that’s another matter) and then let them do their job, until it’s time to vote again on whether they deserve re-election.

On mass micro-management: But now, with pervasive media and instantaneous polling, we hardly let them exercise any expertise they may have, or may have acquired on the job (for we hardly vote for experts either, preferring ignoramuses like ourselves, as more flattering and congenial!): we look over their shoulders daily, not only at their sex lives and their expense accounts, but at their daily professional judgments. We insist on a day-to-day participatory democracy, and we get what we insist on: a fashion show of trends and opinions: capital punishment ok today, not ok tomorrow, abortion yes, no, veils in schools, on, off, etc. etc.

Since many of these are matters of opinion anyway, perhaps it doesn’t matter if it is the winds of fashion or rumor rather than the wisdom of trusted electees that decides. But sometimes it does matter. And the catastrophic “popular” (at the time!) Iraqi war is one such result. The rest seems now to be putting out daily forest fires (still on the basis of day-to-day public opinion).

We not only blindly trust “populism” (and condemn “elitism”) — thereby ceding judgment to the vagaries of the “normal distribution” (“bell curve”), which, at best, guarantees regression on the mean; but at worst, or meanest, it is the occasional but inevitable burst of noise, or worse, closer to the tail end [the extreme] of the distribution, which sometimes manages to appeal to the mean, and become mainstream.

On more sinister background forces we also trust: Today we are also blindly trusting another unquestioned “force,” rather akin to the ponderous inertial mass of populism, and that is the inexorable march of capitalism: global military-industrial interests being inexorably — indeed psychopathically, as the excellent movie The Corporation, showed — pursued in the background (the Cheneys behind the Bushes).

It is as unfashionable today to be anti-capitalist (in anything) as it is to be anti-populist (in anything). It is axiomatic that what is good for the market is good, and good for everybody, and what is judged good by the majority is good, and good for everybody.

On the wisdom of time: I beg to differ; and to be allowed the time to show that what appears momentarily to be right either to prevailing public opinion or to the corporate bottom-line, may not be right at all. It’s all a matter of time, after all. What allegedly sets our species apart is our capability of deferring gratification and deferring judgment, even deferring to the judgment of those who may be better qualified to judge. Yes, let’s have post-hoc controls on all that, but let them be “post” enough to give experts the chance to do what they are best qualified to do…

On Aristotle on collective wisdom: As to Aristotle on the latent collective (“whole is better than the sum of its parts”) wisdom, morality and ethics of mobs — that might be true of the audience of Hellenic Theatre, it might occasionally coalesce in the conscientiousness of juries (though one thinks of OJ Simpson) , but it hardly seems true when it comes to lynch mobs, Danish cartoon hysteria, or American voting patterns! Nor, for that matter, the mean value on which pop music has regressed, with the extinction of connoisseur elites (there, you can pillory me on that one!).

Aristotle may feel at ease facing a crowd, and deferring to its judgment. I am terrified; utterly terrified. Only demagogues can “reason” with crowds, particularly online, in real time.

I cannot share the feeling of many that the accolade “most popular” is synonymous (or even remotely related) to “best quality.” My own default reaction (sometimes wrong, I admit, but born of experience, not native conviction!) is the exact opposite: Most popular? Then chances are it is rather superficial, uninformed, and trashy…