Here is my 3rd installment of very many critiques of this paper. Not all
issues
will resonate will everyone so pick and choose what you find interesting
to
debate pro/con and I will defend any of my comments.
I will post the paragraph(s) I have a comment about, and highlight the
particular words at issue by enclosing them between "***" characters.
I'll
also include citations in the paper when helpful. I seek (intelligent and
informed) technical/theoretical critique or feedback from anyone on the
issue(s) presented/raised.
See page 12, line 28:
VI. What Motivates Embedded/embodied Coping?
But why is Dasein called to cope at all? According to Heidegger, we are
constantly solicited to improve our familiarity with the world. Five
years
before the publication of Being and Time he wrote:
Caring takes the form of a looking around and seeing, and as this
cir***spective caring it is at the same time . concerned about developing
its cir***spection, that is, about securing and expanding its familiarity
with the objects of its dealings. [i]
This pragmatic perspective is developed by Merleau-Ponty, and by Samuel
Todes.[ii] These heirs to Heidegger's account of familiarity and coping
describe how an organism, animal or human, interacts with what is
objectively speaking the meaningless physical universe in such a way as to
cope with an environment organized in terms of that organism's need to
find
its way around. All such coping beings are motivated to get a more and
more
refined and secure sense of the specific objects of their dealings.
According to Merleau-Ponty:
My body is geared into the world when my perception presents me with a
spectacle as varied and as clearly articulated as possible...[iii]
In short, in our skilled activity we are drawn to move so as to achieve a
better and better grip on our situation. For this movement towards
maximal
grip to take place one doesn't need a mental representation of one's goal
nor any problem solving, as would a GOFAI robot. ***Rather, acting is
experienced as a steady flow of skillful activity in response to the
situation. When one's situation deviates from some optimal
body-environment
gestalt, one's activity takes one closer to that optimum and thereby
relieves the "tension" of the deviation. ***[asb1] ***One does not need
to
know what the optimum is in order to move towards it. One's body is
simply
drawn to lower the tension.*** [asb2]
***That is, if things are going well and I am gaining an optimal grip on
the
world, I simple respond to the solicitation to move towards an even better
grip and, if things are going badly, I experience a pull back towards the
norm.*** [asb3] If it seems that much of the time we don't experience any
such pull, Merleau-Ponty would no doubt respond that the sensitivity to
deviation is nonetheless guiding one's coping, just as an air****t radio
beacon doesn't give a warning signal unless the plane strays off course,
and
then, let us suppose, the plane gets a signal whose intensity corresponds
to
how far off course it is and the intensity of the signal diminishes as it
approaches getting back on course. The silence that accompanies being on
course doesn't mean the beacon isn't continually guiding the plane.
Likewise, the absence of felt tension in perception doesn't mean we aren't
***being directed by a solicitation***[asb4] .
As Merleau-Ponty puts it: ***"Our body is not an object for an 'I think',
it
is a grouping of lived-through meanings that moves towards its
equilibrium***[asb5] ."[iv] Equilibrium being Merleau-Ponty's name for
the
zero gradient of steady successful coping. Moreover, normally, we do not
arrive at equilibrium and stop there but are immediately taken over by a
new
solicitation.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
MY CRITIQUES indexed by my initials "ASB" followed by the number of my
comment above:
[asb1]this sounds a lot like dominoes combined with cognitive dissonance
theory at a more sensory level. This "skillful coping" is much like a
cascade of dominoes that automatically fall in right pattern in response
to
a certain stimulus. It seems that you try to avoid the need for a mental
representation by making the stimulus automatically trigger a response
that
is perfectly adapted instead of going through an abstracted mental
representation of the event and using that model to calculate the best
response. Such notions of the right gestalt to every sensory
event/situation is not much different than a well trained neural network
that takes sensory inputs that are spread to all neural nodes, and
depending
upon the landscape of trained weights, the learned pattern of output
response it "automatically" achieved. It would seem that such a
behavioral
system has no mental representation; however, I would disagree. For
example, any sufficiently complex decision landscape will have to deal
with
an uncertain range, combination, and timing of sensory inputs, so this
logically necessitates that all decision making elements will necessarily
have to represent various abstracted aspects of the sensory pattern that
was
learned to be most key to achieve the desired output and error level.
This
representation of the various abstracted aspects is effectively the
gestalt
that each (or multiple) neuron has learned alone or in combination with
others. Hence, because a finite system that must deal with high
uncertainty
must contain abstracted representations then all such systems can be
thought
of as having mental representations. It is just when the task at hand is
more low level the represented abstractions seem like automatic,
unspeakable, gestalts as opposed to highly abstracted models that would
tend
to occur for processing events that are more disconnected from the sensory
moment. In this way, I don't see how you can refute mental
representations.
I contend, for example, that your mental representations can be thought of
as sensory abstractions. So, are you saying that your absorbed coping
occurs is without abstractions? I assert that the process of abstraction
necessarily builds a (parametric) model of the observation (i.e., a mental
representation, even if distributed) and if your system does not abstract
it
cannot cope with uncertainty or variation of sensory patterns. Gestalts
are
nothing more that highly effective abstractions (even heuristics) that
treat
a whole class of sensory situations with an appropriate response- this is
an
abstracted rule at its best. Thus, I do not see how your absorbed coping
paradyne avoids creating mental representations as I define above. It
would
be helpful if you would explain your logic in terms of a practical (or
even
plausible) computational system. Your Freeman-based chaotic neural
network
model did not seem to address/resolve the issues I question above.
[asb2]now you have me completely confused. It is impossible to generate
an
error signal (i.e., "lower the tension") without comparing against some
model of the expected or desired event/result. The fact you define it
this
way seem to me to require a mental representation that represents an
abstract (representative or ideal) configuration by which the sensory
inputs
are measured against (a la Plato's parallel universe of ideal
representations for all objects) to generate an error signal (tension) in
a
control loop. Even the most simple negative feedback control loop
requires
an abstract model of the problem domain being acted upon. It is just that
this domain model is encoded into the control loop wiring, time constants,
and gain design, which are in effect an embedded mental representation
that
was created by a human and encoded into hardware or software. The body
(organic systems) must do the same thing, they just have automatic
algorithms to create the models that design the control loop. This does
not
avoid mental representations it just distributes them system wide instead
of
concentrating them in a centralized control scheme that most think of as a
mental representation process.
[asb3]I contend that in any practical system, there will always have to
be
a model by which sensory inputs need to be compared to thereby generating
an
error signal for the control loop. This model is a mental representation
even if it is hardwired. Genetic algorithms all require a fitness
function.
Whether that fitness function (i.e., " optimal body-environment gestalt ")
is created by a high order mental process or by natural selection is
immaterial. The fitness function is a model, and it an Ingram of a mental
representation. I am eager to hear your arguments that practically and
logically motivate otherwise.
[asb4]it seems to me that " being directed by a solicitation " does not
contradict a guiding mental representation being present as well. My
prior
comments, in my mind, avoid these two being mutually exclusive as you seem
to contend. It seems you are trying to say that a river (i.e., conscious
action) must flow down a mountain and the way it finds its minimal energy
path is dictated by natural forces (i.e., "the mind/body gestalt"), thus
you
conclude that no centralized mental control/representation system is
guiding
the river to its "intended" destination at the mountain base.
Consciousness
is all about observing the rivers path down the mountain and adjusting the
(mental) landscape to guide the river (conscious action) to a desired
result/location. Gravity may "solicit" water down the mountain, but that
does not necessarily negate there being other forces/systems acting on the
river and shaping the landscape/path the water is to take. It seems to me
that your solicitation is like gravity, and you are concluding that there
are no mental representations because absorbed coping is guiding the river
directed by such solicitation (gravity). This is just one concrete
example
(of many) of how I see your coping/solicitation/no-representations scheme
as
logically and fundamentally flawed.
[asb5]It is curious how you are in effect defining "I think" as a
centralized, disconnected system from the body and environment. How is
your
" lived-through meanings that moves towards its equilibrium [asb5]."
different from a classical neural network which learns meaning (as
distributed abstractions) and uses them to "move towards its equilibrium"?
There is certainly no "I think" in a classical neural network, and it
behaves as you philosophically describe. Again, if your proposed
cognitive
model does not distinguish from systems that we know cannot be conscious
then it must be refined to exclude such insufficient systems as being
within
the set of definitions (behaviors) required of a sufficient human
cognitive
system. Otherwise, such proposed behavioral/architectural models are not
really useful to shed light on how the human mind works.
Citations made in white paper section above:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
[i] Martin Heidegger, Phenomenological Interpretations in Connection with
Aristotle, in Supplements: From the Earliest Essays to Being and Time and
Beyond, John Van Buren, Ed., State University of New York Press, 2002,
115.
My italics.
This away of putting the source of significance covers both animals and
people. By the time he published Being and Time, however, Heidegger was
interested exclusively in the special kind of significance found in the
world opened up by human beings who are defined by the stand they take on
their own being. We might call this meaning. In this paper I'm putting
the
question of uniquely human meaning aside to concentrate on the sort of
significance we share with animals.
[ii] See, Samuel Todes, Body and World, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press,
2001.
Todes goes beyond Merleau-Ponty in showing how our world-disclosing
perceptual experience is structured by the structure of our bodies.
Merleau-Ponty never tells us what our bodies are actually like and how
their
structure affects our experience. Todes points out that our body has a
front/back and up/down orientation. It moves forward more easily than
backward, and can successfully cope only with what is in front of it. He
then describes how, in order to explore our surrounding world and orient
ourselves in it, we have to balance ourselves within a vertical field that
we do not produce, be effectively directed in a cir***stantial field
(facing
one aspect of that field rather than another), and appropriately set to
respond to the specific thing we are encountering within that field. For
Todes, then, perceptual receptivity is an embodied, normative, skilled
accomplishment, in response to our need to orient ourselves in the world.
Clearly, this is a kind of holistic background coping is not done for a
reason.
[iii] Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 250. (Trans. Modified.)
[iv] Ibid, 153. (My italics.)
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