Hi Peter,
Thanks for this note. I too am no fan of “meat robot”, as I suggest in this blog “Between a Meat Puppet and a Heavenly Soul<https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/theory-knowledge/201611/between-meat-puppet-and-heavenly-soul>”. The metaphor completely misses the fact that we are alive, that we feel and that we are self-conscious and socialized persons. Put differently, misrepresents us a complicated mechanistic machines, rather than complex adaptive systems across the dimensions of Life, Mind, and Culture. A complex adaptive system is different from a complicated machine. When complicated machines break, they don’t heal themselves. And, they can generally be taken apart and put back together. You take a cell, an animal or a person apart, you can’t put them back together and have everything be just fine. That said, I do think we should empathize with a “human critical” view of the species, just to be sure we have perspective. My candidate for that human critical view is “Verbals”.<https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/theory-knowledge/201203/verbals> It captures our essential features while “objectifying us”.
I agree that we want adults to be effectively regulated via executive self-organization. A fair chunk of the clinical work I do involves folks who are “imposters”; i.e., their press secretaries dominate. That said, press secretaries serve important roles. The “public self consciousness” is a key domain.
I also generally agree with you re the “verb” conception. The ToK writ large is a process philosophy. It invites folks to take a step back and see the universe as an unfolding wave of behavior, across the various levels and dimensions of complexity.
Finally, I would slightly rephrase that classic existentialist maxim and say ontic reality precedes our ontology. It is an important thing to keep in mind. But we do need “understanding”, and to do that we do need essential categories that allow us to see why we are not meat robots. The problem is that, philosophically, we have not gotten our ontological essences right, at least in the West. Rather the modern West has been raised on a false dichotomy of dead matter versus the apex of the human mind. And folks have been basically given a choice to believe either in dead matter that is just complicated or heavenly souls. The answer is neither.
Best,
Gregg
From: tree of knowledge system discussion <[log in to unmask]> On Behalf Of Peter Lloyd Jones
Sent: Monday, November 4, 2019 9:10 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Blog on Behaviorism v Reductive Physicalism
Dear Executive Control Center, and all,
I suspect that those who are on this list spend an unusually robust amount of time being self-reflective and being pre-reflective. Which is a good thing.
As I think you’re saying, within our normal realm of choices we choose according to the environment we are in and the organism that we are at each moment, often without being cognizant of why we have chosen what. But when a project requires a novel choice to a novel situation, the method is likely reversed, such as in your process of interpreting the content of those over-due books, and organizing your conclusions and doubts.
I should admit that I am not big on metaphors for describing human behavior. Jerry Coyne says over and over that we are meat robots, which is the worst of them. I am also not a fan of the terms AI. What computers do is not a type of intelligence relevant to human mental activity. Also, I’m happier giving equal roles to the various contributing features of our cognitive processes. As above, we often have conscious intentions, and often do not. We are sometimes pre-reflective but often not. We purposely build for ourselves a repertoire of learned behaviors. We take mental short cuts. We are, unlike robots of any material structure, able to adapt and explore alternatives. I want to fire your press secretary, or at the least promote him/her to the position of co-executive.
Maybe it’s a difference in philosohy from psychology, but it makes more sense to me to use conscious as a verb; it is what we do, not who we are. It is not a mechanism, it is an act. If we need to attach this to the material, then we refer to the electro-chemical process, and various imputs. I’m sure that you can smell the existentialism in what I’m saying; ontologically speaking, existence precedes essence.
Thank you for your previous thoughtful reply.
peter
Peter Lloyd Jones
[log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>
562-209-4080
Sent by determined causes that no amount of will is able to thwart.
On Nov 4, 2019, at 4:20 PM, Henriques, Gregg - henriqgx <[log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>> wrote:
Hi Peter,
Thanks for this note. Here is how I conceptualize myself. I am a self-conscious agent that has a domain of sovereignty, which refers to the domain of my influence and the part of the world I can voluntarily impact. It is easy to see all the things that are outside my domain. I can’t choose to bring peace to the middle east or stop forest fires in California. However, whether to respond to this email or take some overdue books back to the library are both within my realm of choice.
Moreover, we should be clear that I make choices based on what my subsystems present me with. There are many ideas that I would never think of that I thus can’t choose to act on. So, my “choice” system is constrained by my sphere of influence, impacted by apparent options, and framed by the options that emerge on my field of conscious awareness.
Within that self-conscious system is where my sovereign self sits. In terms of functional metaphors, I think about it in both executive and press secretary terms. It is an executive system in the sense that it is generally aware of what the system (my body) is doing and why. Moreover, like an executive, it is not fully aware of everything and why. That is, there are a lot of details that are happening automatically. What Libet’s study shows is that the body-into-brain will offer a pre-conscious signal. This is like a memo from someone in the unconscious part of the company that is my organism as a whole.
It is an executive-press secretary relationship in that a lot of the function of the self-consciousness system is to develop an “interpretive justification narrative” for what is happening. That is, from my vantage point, a primary reason we have the kind of self-consciousness system we do is because we needed to develop an “interpreter”. Namely, language resulted in the adaptive problem of social justification and that meant that mother nature needed to craft a “mental organ of social justification”. This set in motion the evolution and development of Culture and turned us primates into persons. This evolutionary history is crucial because to understand why I justify the things the way I do we need to put me in the larger Big History context.
As a person, I am a self-conscious agent in an intersubjective field that can ask me about the “whys” of my actions and require I give an account and be held responsible. In other words, there are norms and rules and social justifications that coordinate us. And to be a person means that you can play the language games on the Person-Culture plane of existence. Our community holds you accountable for what you write on this blog. If all of a sudden you started attacking someone or using racial slurs you would be kicked off and we would say you were not the “kind of person” we wanted on this list. It is neither accidental nor part of my sovereignty that I speak English rather than Chinese. It was the world I happened to be thrown into that determined that. But via my various stages of socialization, learning and development, I have grown from a “social actor” (a child who follows norms) into an “agent” (a self-conscious entity that can reflect on choices and choose to challenge norms) into an “autobiographer” (a reflective person who sees the themes of his life as part of a larger narrative and is looking to author a generative story and is attempting to live by that broad narrative, that is, I want to be that which enhances dignity and well-being with integrity.
The ToK’s ontology is an “energy-information” ontology. The different cones/dimensions posit that you will never reduce the higher dimension information-communication patterns and processes to the causes and effects or scientific language of the level beneath the primary level of interest. The 4th dimension of the culture-person plane of complex adaptive behavior cannot, even in principle, be described and explained in mechanistic physicalist terms.
I apologize that this is a bit rambling. I need to get over to the library and return these books or else I will be held accountable. As such, I am choosing to leave some of this ambiguous and am heading out ☺.
Best,
Gregg (or, perhaps more directly, the Executive Control Center of the primate we know as Gregg☺)
From: tree of knowledge system discussion <[log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>> On Behalf Of Peter Lloyd Jones
Sent: Monday, November 4, 2019 9:58 AM
To: [log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Re: Blog on Behaviorism v Reductive Physicalism
Gregg,
Thank you for alerting me to another of your inspiring blogs. A difficulty I have with it is that, coming from the perspective of philosophy, I look at ontology as the study of the nature of being in a metaphysical sense, though my slant is to keep the metaphysical firmly glued onto the physical. In other words, what does it mean to “be", philosophically speaking, not materially speaking. What does it mean to be conscious? Are we autonomous choosing agents? What is the meaning of self?
I do know, though, that recent writings by some who argue against the existence of free will, or free choice as I prefer to call it, claim that the laws of physics and facts of science defend their claims. In other words, they are appealing wholly to material explanations of ontology.
In my naiveté I get lost in arguments I see today that don’t just suggest a Cartesian mind-body dualism, but insterad suggest a three-way split of mind-brain-body. I see this in the requirement put forth by some that a free act must be a conscious act, and not a non-conscious act, and that we cannot take credit for what our brain thinks. What this implies is that running while dribbling a basketball, or a playing a musical instrument, are not freely performed or freely chosen acts as we do those things without conscious refection. Also, pain alters choices, sweating influences what we do, and so on and so on. A popular interpretation of Libet’s experiment (though not Libet’s interpretation) is that we do not act freely because there is brain activity associated with an act that precedes awareness of that act, dividing consciousness from non-consciousness and dividing observed-physical brain activities.
When I read Skinner’s philosophy of behaviorism in the 1970s I recoiled in horror, but in my recent rereading of him I greatly appreciation how he puts the acts of man into their complete context, which is even more than I stated above; mind-brain-body-environment. We never ever make a choice in the vacuum of agent. This seems the initial error in the determinist interpretations of Libet’s experiment; prior to any non-conscious brain activity associated with the monitored act is an awareness of the task at hand; choosing when to push a button. It is the agent’s relationship to this task that provides a leadership of intent, otherwise there would be no button pushing and only a choosing agent making no choices.
I hope I am not too far afield on this.
Best to all,
Peter
Peter Lloyd Jones
[log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>
562-209-4080
Sent by determined causes that no amount of will is able to thwart.
On Nov 1, 2019, at 12:33 PM, Henriques, Gregg - henriqgx <[log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>> wrote:
Hi List,
I put up a blog today on Tree of Knowledge’s behaviorist ontology versus a reductive physicalism.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/theory-knowledge/201911/scientifically-say-yes-behavior-no-physicalism<https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=https-3A__www.psychologytoday.com_us_blog_theory-2Dknowledge_201911_scientifically-2Dsay-2Dyes-2Dbehavior-2Dno-2Dphysicalism&d=DwMFaQ&c=eLbWYnpnzycBCgmb7vCI4uqNEB9RSjOdn_5nBEmmeq0&r=HPo1IXYDhKClogP-UOpybo6Cfxxz-jIYBgjO2gOz4-A&m=NZh4K6w80Ozqfpf0M6y1uI92SyviTZSkGacGS96Pi3U&s=XKHn4XzBhx7Ke7KAs5qez6LAME6c8Ef6VPQFgvatBso&e=>
Best,
Gregg
___________________________________________
Gregg Henriques, Ph.D.
Professor
Department of Graduate Psychology
216 Johnston Hall
MSC 7401
James Madison University
Harrisonburg, VA 22807
(540) 568-7857<tel:(540)%20568-7857> (phone)
(540) 568-4747<tel:(540)%20568-4747> (fax)
Be that which enhances dignity and well-being with integrity.
Check out my Theory of Knowledge blog at Psychology Today at:
https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/theory-knowledge<https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=https-3A__www.psychologytoday.com_blog_theory-2Dknowledge&d=DwMFaQ&c=eLbWYnpnzycBCgmb7vCI4uqNEB9RSjOdn_5nBEmmeq0&r=HPo1IXYDhKClogP-UOpybo6Cfxxz-jIYBgjO2gOz4-A&m=NZh4K6w80Ozqfpf0M6y1uI92SyviTZSkGacGS96Pi3U&s=cdK_Yb0x_cNtDs4S4TetmTNiPWLplXhNCom5_Q3GFEY&e=>
Check out my webpage at:
www.gregghenriques.com<https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=http-3A__www.gregghenriques.com_&d=DwMFaQ&c=eLbWYnpnzycBCgmb7vCI4uqNEB9RSjOdn_5nBEmmeq0&r=HPo1IXYDhKClogP-UOpybo6Cfxxz-jIYBgjO2gOz4-A&m=NZh4K6w80Ozqfpf0M6y1uI92SyviTZSkGacGS96Pi3U&s=ltRB5sMsH_zZ7p5aE_VMsRwojTNlSpfy_DPp8BqJ_1Y&e=>
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