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From: minsky@media.mit.edu (Marvin Minsky)
Subject: Re: Thought Question: A kinder and gentler net??
Message-ID: <1995Jan29.223330.864@news.media.mit.edu>
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References: <1995Jan26.015947.22908@news.media.mit.edu> <3geeno$ila@prime.mdata.fi> <3gh2i9$8l6@ixnews3.ix.netcom.com>
Date: Sun, 29 Jan 1995 22:33:30 GMT
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In article <3gh2i9$8l6@ixnews3.ix.netcom.com> gl1@ix.netcom.com (Gene Levinson) writes:
>>Should  we shed our mental pants and compare the size of our 
>>consciousnesses?
>
>Please do. Perhaps we will determine whether you are a weenie. 
>
>> Your tone seems rather
>>harsh, as if the possibility really exists in your mind and it
>>threatens your sense of reality. I am sorry if I upset you. I 
>>thought the speculation not particularly original nor to be taken
>>too seriously.
>>
>>Jan Sand
>>
>Excuse me, but as the person who started an otherwise very stimulating 
>and enjoyable "Thought Question" series, may I point out that this kind 
>of antagonism has no place in a public newsgroup. Take it to email, 
>and/or get alife. I happen to prefer to focus on Marvin Minsky's 
>contributions to the field, and not on the politicization that is 
>destroying places like M.I.T., Harvard, and other high-powered academic 
>centers. 

Thanks, Gene.  Maybe parhaps there was a misunderstanding: 
|  jsand@mits.mdata.fi (Jan Sand) wrote:
| 
| >Well, I thought that is fairly obvious. We do not have to deduce
| >that we are conscious, it is a matter of very direct experience.
| >.... There is a 
| >possibility that you are an idea in an electronic circuit.
| >Don't you have doubts about me?
| >
| >Jan Sand

Then I replied.  Unfortunayely, I used "you" in the following
parapraph to mean "anyone", and apparently Jon thought I was
belittling him rather than all humans, including myself:

| I have.  I do not doubt that you have some direct experience--but I
| don't think that you're very conscious, in the sense of knowing
| much more than that things are happening in your mind.  
| 
| What you're *not* aware of is knowing any significant detail about
| yourself, that is, any more than you know about other people.  (In
| other words, I'm agreeing with the Gilbert Ryle stance.)  You have
| virtually no ideas at all--and those that you have are probably
| wrong--about how you get ideas, what ideas are, where the words come
| from when you speak, how you move a finger, and all that sort of
| thing.  We share the notion that we have something we call
| consciousness that reveals to us a great deal about ourselves, about
| our mind, about our feelings, and so forth--but consdiering that we
| evidently do not have much such ability, one must conclude that
| no such thing that actually corresponds to that myth.

What I meant is that none of us seem to have much idea of what happens
in our minds to produce what our minds do.  Otherwise we wouldn't need
the slow, tedious scientific investigations called psychology and
cognitive science.  Introspection in particular, and consciousness in
general, does not seem to reveal much about ourselves, as Ryle
observed.

Of course, as Jeff Dalton has observed, (1) we do have a certain
amount of 'privileged access' to our won thioughts, but what I'm
complaining about is that they are of very low quality, and scarely
better for practical matters than what we observe about our friends'
thinking.  (That's what I meant bby the Ryle stance.)  Also I agree
that Jeff Dalton's complaint is justified: that not everyone conflates
'conscious' with 'self-conscious' the way I do.  However, I can't see
how merely "being aware" without knowing that you're being aware could
be much of a mystery.  Especially because you could never then assert
that you are aware.  Therefore, that certainly can't be what we're
taking about!


