http://www.whatfeelingislike.net/tiki-forums_rss.php?ver=2 Wed, 08 Sep 2010 17:02:41 +0100 Tiki CMS/Groupware via FeedCreator 1.7.2 http://www.whatfeelingislike.net//img/tiki.jpg http://www.whatfeelingislike.net//tiki-index.php en-us http://www.whatfeelingislike.net//tiki-view_forum_thread.php?forumId=2&comments_parentId=0 therese Mon, 23 Apr 2007 17:00:28 +0100 http://www.whatfeelingislike.net//tiki-view_forum_thread.php?forumId=4&comments_parentId=0 balaramdas Fri, 16 Jun 2006 00:36:19 +0100 http://www.whatfeelingislike.net//tiki-view_forum_thread.php?forumId=2&comments_parentId=0 ErikMyin Fri, 09 Jun 2006 11:57:40 +0100 http://www.whatfeelingislike.net//tiki-view_forum_thread.php?forumId=3&comments_parentId=0 PaulReeve Fri, 02 Jun 2006 12:46:43 +0100 http://www.whatfeelingislike.net//tiki-view_forum_thread.php?forumId=2&comments_parentId=0 > it seems to me that the sony aibo is able to exercise a few sensorimotor skills, like walking, but I doubt very much that it "has feel", and I would suggest this is because it has not cognitive system. As far as I'm concerned, I would therefore on the opposite stress the notion of cognitive access, whatever this can mean. kevin wrote: > i agree witht his. my reply: Why do cognitive systems have feels and not non-cognitive systems, just incidentally? kevinoregan wrote: > concerning whether "skill" already implies cognition: > first what is cognition? Your immune system could be considered to do > categorisation of foreign cells... a soap bubble might be said to have cognitive > capacities since it calculates its shape by making a minimum of surface area. my reply: This soap-bubble notion truly seems like a terrible idea. But in fact it seems to touch on a global problem with the skill/cognitive access/knowledge approach as you describe it. See Daniel Hutto's [http://www.springerlink.com/(5to4jk55hssou255f4mv35mp)/app/home/contribution.asp?referrer=parent&backto=issue,3,5;journal,2,17;linkingpublicationresults,1:108987,1|paper] from the latest issue of Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences on the relationship between the laws of physics and sensorimotor skills and laws and "knowledge." (NB I don't endorse everything in that paper, but there's enough thoughtful material, including arguments already raised here, to warrant careful scrutiny.) kevinoregan wrote: > > Maybe david can find us a definition of cognitive capacities which is independent of the point of view in which you place yourself, the way in which you code the behaviors that you measure. davidphilipona wrote: > I just gave one suggestion. It's only a suggestion, maybe this one is not good, but the point is: I don't see why suggestions of that kind would have anything to do with the way you code behaviors. my reply: The "coding" (theoretical or internal to the system? I don't actually get why this issue is raised here, but anyway) of behaviours does seem to be relevant here. Let me try and describe how it's relevant to my problems with the skill analogy. Describing ordinary skills seems to involve describing the behaviours involved, in terms that relate to the goals achieved by the behaviours; in fact they are defined as skills exactly by being the ability to achieve particular behavioral goals in context-relevant ways. Cricket batting as Ed describes it seems to involve being sensitive to a range of factors in a situation - categorizing it, as Aline puts it, in a very fine-grained way - but then that categorization (as described) is actually defined by its contribution to shaping particular actions in the service of particular goals, and so the "coding" of the behaviours themselves seems to be fundamental to saying what the skill is. Sensory perception seems to encompass the sensitivities that are fundamental to the enabling of all and any physical behaviour; if describing behaviour is involved in describing some particular sensory-perceptual skill, the relevant subset of actions will be defined not by any particular set of goal-constrained actions, but by the range of information (find me another word here, Ed) about the situation the perceiver is in that that by virtue of the "skill" can have a shaping influence on any behaviour whatsoever. (So only those with a colour-seeing "skill" can go if the light is green and stop if it's red - but they can also run red lights to show off to friends, etc.) This may seem okay - you could try and describe the skill in terms of the way that sensory-perceptual sensitivities in given organism-environment situations can constrain whole space of physically possible actions, seeing the set of actions enabled by particular sensitivities as the behavioural side of the skill. But one worry for sensorimotorism that seems pretty obviously to loom up here: when we go to ask how we understand the ways that these so-called skills can "code" such generalized constraints on the space of possible behaviours, it seems hard to imagine that people won't just want to say that people have access to a "representation" of the situation in terms of relevant sensory-perceptual information that goes into shaping their behaviour. The role of action then becomes one of just abstractly fixing the "content" of perception, and we're back something very close to the view that we wanted to get rid of, right? And the problems that come along with it. Saying we have the "skill" of being able, say, to take any action whatsoever in response to the presence or absence of a certain colour doesn't seem to be a very convincing way of undermining the argument that there's something surprising about our having an experience linked into whatever it is that gives us that ability. And if the skill is just detecting the colour (this does seem to be the idea), once again: what is the value-added of the word "skill"? Exactly the trouble I was trying to make clear in my talk in Antwerp in 2004. kevin wrote: > Maybe david can find us a definition of cognitive capacities which is independent of the point of view in which you place yourself, the way in which you code the behaviors that you measure. But while we wait for him to find the solution, if there is one, I prefer to say that yes, all these things may be forms of cognition (with skills having the additional characteristic that they involve sensorimotor interactions). > > But when we have a feel, it is not sufficient for sensorimotor processes to be going on which can be considered "cognitive" or skillful. There has to be a kind of meta- level of cognition which could loosely be called "paying attention to": The organism, considered as an *individual*, acting in an *environment*, must be poised to make use of the skill in its rational behavior. Otherwise the aibo has feel. my reply: "Rational"?!?! This description of attention seems far less radical than the Merleau-Pontyan version of attention that Ed endorses. On this view perceivers are "always already" oriented in the world, and their perceiving is shaped by that orientedness, which combines their spatial focus, their motivations, their memories, etc. "Attention" is a kind of a crude way of describing some limited part of what the whole deployment of the perceiver's sensory skills entails; it has the merit of acknowledging that the skills are actually deployed, with consequences that include spatial focus, for example, but it seems on this view to be a confusion to suggest that this is an extra "meta" factor; it's just what it is to have and use the perceptual skills we actually have. Then again I may be getting this all very wrong, Ed can tell you what he thinks better than I can. davidphilipona wrote: > > I must say that this notion of "focusing attention" is to me the most fuzzy concept of the whole theory (ce qui n'est pas une mince performance) > kevinoregan wrote: > well i mean byfocussing attention the sameas what i mean by having cog access, I think. my reply: Again the confusion: is attention/access focused on the particular qualities picked up through "skilful" perceiving, or on the "skill" itself?! aline wrote: > > > and so on... are > > >already included in access-consciousness so why not using > > > it? > > > > davidp wrote: > > If I don't mistake, Kevin prefers to speak of cognitive access rather than A-consciousness because the later seems to him to be a stronger concept, involving the notion of self. (right, Kevin?) > kevin wrote: > exactly. Cognitive access + notion of self having this access = conscious access. my reply: Whose idea is it that "access consciousness" is defined without regard to an "accessor"? Can you cite any reference that shows this concept to be different from Block's? kevin wrote: > everybody seems to dislike it when I say "having cog access to *the fact that* one is exercising a sm skill". > > The reason I say "the fact that" is that when you have a feel of red, you have no > access to any of the details of the skills involved: you dont know what the rules > are that the piece of paper is obeying as you move it around under the lights. If I > had not said *the fact that*, then it sounds like you have access to the skill as a > whole, all its details and interior workings. Maybe I should find another way of > expressing the idea however, which is that while you dont have access to the > interior workings, you CAN nevertheless distinguish the different laws, and you > can even compare and contrast them: thus you DO have access to the fact that > the current "red" rules are DIFFERENT from the rules of green, and that they are > somewhat more similar to the rules of pink. Doing many athletic or motor tasks > seems to me quite a good analogy: an athlete has no idea exactly what muscles to > put into action in order to accomplish his feat, yet he knows how to do his feat in > different ways. Dance teachers use all sorts of bizarre analogies to coach their > students to move their bodies in certain ways (e.g. todo a "battement de jambe", > you have to move out your foot as though it is a brush, brushing the floor on its > way out). It's no use explaining to a dancer what muscles to use. my reply: See above, also Hutto paper, also earlier stages of the email discussion that preceded this thread. You're really not answering the challenging questions about the physical skill analogy at all. You seem to be saying here that a) colours are distinguished by sensorimotor laws and b) we are able to distinguish colours. We very obviously don't know that we are ongoingly distinguishing them on this basis - and indeed the scientific evidence for this proposition actually seems for the moment to be weak at best. So we in fact don't at all have "access to the fact that the current "red" rules are DIFFERENT from the rules of green," we can just distinguish red and green! Again (again again again): what is the "access" here supposed to be access to? Let me remake the same, clearly still 100% unanswered, point: motor skills clearly amount to the ability to physically do something; though we obviously don't know just what muscles we contract when we carry the actions out, they are identifiable as physical actions! What is the "skill" of seeing the ability to do? I expect the answer goes something like this: the "seeing" or "colour seeing" skill is the ability to carry out actions as a function of the presence in our environment of stuff that is distinguished from other stuff by being in particular sensorimotor relationships to us. But see above. I also strongly recommend that you carefully read the Hutto paper in this context. (Conceivably you could make this analogy run more smoothly by making it with abstract skills, like say mental calculations. ?) aline wrote: > > > it seems to me that part of the confusion comes from the > > > mixing of A- and P-consciousness, > > > then, when Kevin says that "reactivity and heaviness of the > > > steering [... are] aspects of the phenomenology of driving > > > a car", he means that this level is phenomenally relevant > > > (in opposition with lower levels, who have no phenomenal > > > content)... though it could be that this level is just > > > AC-relevant (a level of description!), because the > > > community has words/concepts for them... > > > so, one solution is to propose that phenomenal content is > > > something that is added to AC when exercising a > > > sensorimotor skill, > > > then, only what is accessible to AC can have a phenomenal > > > content, > > > but, since not everything that is accessible to AC > > > possesses a phenomenal content, the two notions remain > > > distinct... > kevin wrote: > yes, I think if I understand you correctly, that this is what I say: PC = AC + exercising a skill > > (although actually in order to let animals have phenomenality I say: > > "feel" = Cog Access of exercsiing a skill > > (this definition requires no self) > > Then, for humans who have selves: > > phenomenal consciousness = self knowing it has a feel my reply: I find all this totally incomprehensible. aline wrote: > > > "It suffices that the perceiver have cognitive access to > > > the fact that particular sensorimotor laws are currently > > > potentially applicable." > > > I would refer to prediction here, > > > what would it be to be "exercising a skill while currently > > > not doing anything" if a prediction? > kevin wrote: > I dont like the notion of preditions which carries the danger of an internal replica of what is being predicted my reply: Why don't SMCs run this danger? aline wrote: > > > about the "presence" of sensation and the fact that they > > > are both under and not under our control, > > > why do you mention this (rather undefined) word "presence"? > kevin wrote: > I think the word "presence is used in the phenomenologist's tradition (Husserl?) to refer to the special aspect of sensations as compared to other mental events. Erik?]]> PaulReeve Wed, 31 May 2006 15:30:50 +0100 http://www.whatfeelingislike.net//tiki-view_forum_thread.php?forumId=2&comments_parentId=0 EdCooke Tue, 30 May 2006 23:45:50 +0100 http://www.whatfeelingislike.net//tiki-view_forum_thread.php?forumId=3&comments_parentId=0 David_Philipona Tue, 18 Apr 2006 11:23:03 +0100 http://www.whatfeelingislike.net//tiki-view_forum_thread.php?forumId=3&comments_parentId=0 David_Philipona Tue, 18 Apr 2006 10:45:25 +0100