Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 37, No. 405.
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[1] From: James Rovira <jamesrovira@gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [Humanist] 37.402: Freud & workings of mind (97)
[2] From: Gabriel Egan <mail@gabrielegan.com>
Subject: Re: [Humanist] 37.402: Freud & workings of mind (65)
--[1]------------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: 2024-01-19 15:49:29+00:00
From: James Rovira <jamesrovira@gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [Humanist] 37.402: Freud & workings of mind
There are always at least three interrelated issues at stake when
considering the human mind:
1. Our openness to different ideas about the mind.
2. The actual evidence supporting any of these ideas about the mind.
3. The mind as an external object of inquiry scientifically studied vs. the
mind as it experiences and considers itself.
It's provincial to reject ideas about the mind without considering them and
seeking evidence for their support.
It's fair to reject them after considering them and seeking evidence for
them and finding none, as is the case with psychoanalytic theory, which
continues to have historical importance but no scientific validity.
Similarly, there's literally zero evidence supporting the idea that a
machine can gain consciousness. People telling us it can isn't evidence. We
can always say that it could gain a form of consciousness that we can't
recognize, but this is like believing in astrology: very complex data
(patterns of the stars, or patterns of electrical activity) that lends
itself all too easily to any number of patterns. It's always a
self-validating thesis that says nothing about the real world. We need to
support the exploration of different forms of consciousness without
mistaking wishful thinking for critical thinking, or just dishonest hype
for anything bearing any semblance to reality. We need to know the
difference between movies and real life.
Number 3 is the most interesting question to me. That's the point at which
conceptions of the human mind by ancient and current world cultures become
relevant. Do you want to explore different forms of consciousness (at least
human)? This is the place to start: other people, not machines. That might
take us in the direction of consciousness in other life forms, even
alien -- anything biological *could* have something in common with anything
else that's biological. It's also a place to bring psychoanalysis back into
the picture, as it presents ways for the mind to understand itself that are
still compelling for many people -- but here we should understand it's
functioning like ancient myth, not science.
I wrote recently about different ways of speculating about machine
consciousness in science fiction. I saw two big trends: a gnostic trend, in
which the mind is a pattern of electrical impulses that can be replicated
in any electrical environment that could maintain the pattern, biological
or not (the series Black Mirror, for example, or the Matrix films), and an
organic trend, in which the mind is coextensive with the body, so that
consciousness is a function of the body. The character arc of Data in Star
Trek follows this pattern: he went from positronic brain, to emotion chip,
to human skin being grafted onto him by the Borg. It was that last step, in
his own words, that brought him closest to being human, although this
character exhibited the characteristics of consciousness from the start: he
wanted to be something he was not. The arc continues for that character,
but those first three steps were the most important for my question. The
organic model makes the most sense to me: we need sensory apparatus that's
fundamental to our mental environment in order to distinguish "me" from
"not me," which is the first step.
Jim R
On Fri, Jan 19, 2024 at 12:59 AM Humanist <humanist@dhhumanist.org> wrote:
>
> For the purposes of argument, let's put aside whether Sigmund Freud's
> theories of mind are correct or the latest word on the psyche. Let's ask
> instead whether the great influence they have had and continue to have
> tells us something important about how we construe mind. For some of the
> world's inhabitants (e.g. at least some indigenous Amazonians) the idea
> of 'the unconscious' (a black-box mind) makes no sense whatever. To
> paraphrase a forthcoming paper, everyone in a specific tribe knows
> what's going on in another person's mind; what they have no access to is
> what this person’s unknowable relations with other humans and with
> non-human others will lead him or her to do.
>
> The question I want to ask is this: what do we do on discovering people
> who think in radically different ways than we do? Would not the best
> response be to question our possibly quite provincial assumptions about
> mind?
>
> Why is this significant for those interested in computing? For one
> thing, taking radical diversity in the exercise of intelligence just
> might sensitise us to the anomalies of the artificial kind, and suggest
> that its failures to perform as expected just might open a window on
> emergent radical diversity in smart machines.
>
> Comments?
>
> Yours,
> WM
>
--
Dr. James Rovira <http://www.jamesrovira.com/>
- *David Bowie and Romanticism
<https://jamesrovira.com/2022/09/02/david-bowie-and-romanticism/>*,
Palgrave Macmillan, 2022
- *Women in Rock, Women in Romanticism
<https://www.routledge.com/Women-in-Rock-Women-in-Romanticism-The-
Emancipation-of-Female-Will/Rovira/p/book/9781032069845>*,
Routledge, 2023
--[2]------------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: 2024-01-19 07:47:42+00:00
From: Gabriel Egan <mail@gabrielegan.com>
Subject: Re: [Humanist] 37.402: Freud & workings of mind
Willard asks us to consider the possibility
that encountering people who have very different
ideas from our own should teach us some
humility, and make us "question our possibly
quite provincial assumptions". I would say
that the tradition of Humanism tells us the
opposite: that it is mere provincialism
to react that way to differing beliefs,
since the culture of the Enlightenment
that Humanism gave us equips us to distinguish
who is right from who is wrong regardless of
where on Earth they happen to live.
One doesn't need to go as far as the Amazonian
jungle to find people who don't accept the
idea that because we have a Freudian unconscious
we are not fully in control of ourselves.
The classical economic writings of John Stuart
Mill and Adam Smith assume that each of us
understands herself more or less perfectly
and makes essentially rational choices to
maximize her wellbeing, the so-called
'homo oeconomicus' model of the mind.
It is now clear from empirical evidence
that this is false: a fair degree of
irrational behaviour is found in personal
economic choices.
A recent example of the application of this
insight comes from the biographer of
the publisher Edward Blount, who led the
consortium that published the First Folio
of Shakespeare in 1623. The edition was not
a great financial success -- indeed it was
close to a disaster -- and Blount's biographer
Gary Taylor paints a fascinating picture of
a publisher whose actions in publishing the
Shakespeare Folio were driven by Freudian
'reaction formation' (overcompensation) to
project an image of himself as a cultured,
literary man after years of rather grubby
dealings in the trade. (Reference: Gary
Taylor "'Master William Shakesperes workes':
Edward Blount at the Black Bear" in Ben
Higgins 'Shakespeare's Syndicate: The
First Folio, its Publishers, and the Early
Modern Book Trade' (Oxford UP, 2022).
The fact that Freudian categories make no
sense to classical economists or indigenous
Amazonians is not itself grounds for scepticism
about Freud's categories. Neither group is
well-placed to explain the apparent mystery
of why aeroplanes stay aloft either, but that
is irrelevant to our empirical understanding
of aerodynamic lift. As Richard Dawkins put
it (alluding to a Randall Munroe cartoon)
when asked why he privileges scientific
over religious belief, 'It works, bitches'
(Reference: web-search for 'dawkins it
works'.)
Regards
Gabriel Egan
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