Tuesday, May 14th at 9am Pacific Daylight Savings Time
Guest Speaker: Eugene Subbotsky, Reader (Emeritus) Lancaster University, UK
Contact Francine Smolucha at lsmolucha@hotmail.com for the ZOOM link.
Summary: Two studies will be presented that investigated children’s and educated adults’ attitudes toward the idea that humans could be a simulation by some kind of a Supreme Programmer. It is argued that the sheer imagining the almighty Supreme Programmer implies the idea that such a programmer must exist in external reality. Psychological, but not logical, barriers that made most participants strongly resist this idea will be presented and tested empirically.
Reading: An excerpt from Eugene’s forthcoming book The Magic of Living Consciousness: Wonders of the Mundane, to be published this June by Palgrave.
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On May 21, 2024, at 11:12 AM, mike cole <mcole@ucsd.edu> wrote:
One of the many interesting issues that Eugene raised in his talk is the evidence from Brain-Computer Interface (BCI) studies. Examples include people with artificial limbs picking up a glass of water and many more. It is said that these phenomena show that BCI enables people to carry out their intentions. It is also said that this works by people seeing the glass of water, forming an intention, and that this psychological process is sufficient for the person to carry out the intended action.
I queried chatai about the relationship between an intention and imagination. The answer is below.
mike
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Intentions and imagination are closely related but distinct cognitive processes.
The relationship between intentions and imagination lies in how they interact to shape behavior:
Overall, while intentions represent the conscious commitment to pursue specific goals, imagination provides the cognitive tools for envisioning, planning, and adapting to achieve those goals effectively.
Mike
Thanks for your thoughts. I agree with the distinctions between intentions and imagination you highlighted. On top of that, distinctions may be provided between imagination and thinking, intentions and will, etc. From my perspective, these distinctions are important RATIONAL CONSTRUCTIONS (RC) applied to LIVING CONSCIOUSNESS (LC), or if you want, some kind of SCAFFOLDING that allows us to meaningfully REFLECT on the LC by using our OBJECTIFIED CONSCIOUSNESS (OC). We have to build the RC in order to put our intuitions about our LC in the flesh of words and concepts, with the aim to REFLECT on our LC and COMMUNICATE about our LC with others (and here your beloved CULTURAL FACTORS come into the play).
However, our intuitive observation of our LC tells us that the RC is an artificial SCAFFOLDING that can be demolished, and what remains is our bare LC – the magical ability of our inner mind to adopt any of the mentioned RC depending on current circumstances, which we can only speak about metaphorically rather than in rational and logical terms. One metaphor that I like is a polyhedron, with each facet representing imagination, will, perception and other RCs; you can’t eliminate any of its facets without changing the whole polyhedron. But this metaphor is still too rationalistically biased.
Another metaphor I used in my previous presentation is a multiheaded monster, that displays its heads depending on which of them is needed in current circumstances, while other heads lie hidden but ready to be used when appropriate. In your terms, you can call it ‘reciprocal relations’. For example, if you, when eating a tasty meal on a veranda of a respectable restaurant, see in the garden a smelly corps of a dead animal, you may experience the feeling of disgust, and in this particular manifestation of your LC sensation (smelling the foul odour), perception (seeing the corps), thinking (finding a proper word for what you are seeing), imagination (imagining that you are eating this corps), affect your intention (to stop eating}, will (rejecting the intention to stop eating) and all other manifestations of your LC, but the “head of the monster’ that you are experiencing at that very moment is the unpleasant sensation of disgust, with other “heads” hidden in the subconscious.
It is the LC, and not any of the RCs, that I have been studying in my recent experiments and presenting in books, how it works and how its work can be described in theory and used in practice. It is the LC that helps a disabled parson to move a prosthetic hand via BCI, and not intention or imagination, although we need these terms in order to rationalistically grasp the magical effect of LC on the physical matter (the brain EEG). It is the LC that in my last presentation I attributed to the Supreme Programmer.
It would be interesting to hear how preschoolers, older children, teens, and adults would explain the appearance of Misha, my Russian Blue cat. Would they offer realistic explanations or suggest something magical (other worldly)?
When Misha was found in a field of tall grass, she would have been three weeks old because she wasn’t walking yet and her ears were soft and round (not pointed).
Realistic explanations:
1) Abandoned by her mother. Why was she alone? She didn’t wander off because she couldn’t walk yet.
2) Was she snatched up by a hawk or eagle and then dropped.?
Magical explanations:
1) I always wanted a Russian Blue cat but they are very expensive and I only take in strays. Dreams can come true; when you wish upon a star . . .
2) left in the field by an angel, fairies, a flying saucer ?
Eugene presented his subjects with a Great Wizard and asked if he could materialize.
Could a Great Wizard make s cat materialize?
In my perspective, the Great Wizard has unlimited powers and can materialise anything physical, including the cat. But that would be Shrodinger’s ‘dead cat’. In order to make that cat alive, the Grate Wizard had to blow life in the cat’s body, by sharing his or her own Living Consciousness.
I suppose that children may explain Misha’s appearance mostly rationally, at least this follows from the recent Paul Harris’s presentation.
It is more interesting for me how you explain Misha’s appearance. Do you think that the Great Wizard left Misha in the grass for you to find, or you prefer to think that seeing Misha in grass was a chance event? In my view, both explanations refer to the supernatural, because both the divine provision and chance event have no a rational explanation.
to Eugene for a stimulating presentation!
I want to focus on the comments made following the presentation:
1) Tara Ratnam’s email to xlch-x quite rightly marveled at the science and engineering of a robotic arm moved by the thoughts of a disabled person. I think that Peter Smagorinsky’s allusion to Vygotsky’s contrast of human vs.bee invention is relevant. For humans the robotic arm was first a concept in the imagination before it became material. (I first wrote “real”, rather than “material”. It seems to me that things imagined are real. An hallucination is real.)
1) Gillian McNamee raised the issue of methodology by pointing to the one-on-one nature of the interviews as contrasted with what the questions might have yielded if posed to the subjects in a group, referencing Vivian Paley’s facilitation of dialog between students in her teaching.
2) I certainly missed the precise issues raised by Vera, but I think one of them centered around the language of the questions, especially in regards to cultural presuppositions in the vocabulary. I myself was struck by the word “magic”, which I associate with DISsimulation (slight of hand) that creates the illusion that the performer has violated natural “laws” and with “the willing suspension of disbelief” that accompanies the reading of fiction. Eugene, if I understand him, uses magic to refer to a process that has not yet been explained scientifically. There’s plenty of that out there.
3) The importance of the arts in imagination, and vice versa, is obvious, as Eugene emphasized during Q&A. Francine added the ethical dimension. I think of those as complementary, just as science and the arts are. I do not believe that any branch of science is value free.
Thanks for these considerations. Just a little correction: the bee (spider) vs a human architect distinction belongs not to Vygotsky but to Marx. And of course this contrast is important, since the point of my presentation was to examine how we can use our imagination in order to explore the existential problem of the origins of our body and mind, contrasting naturalistic explanations, religious explanations and psychologically rational ones. A bee doesn’t have imagination and for it this existential problem doesn’t arise.
You rightly pointed out to the fact that the word ‘magic’ in English has two connotations; stage magic (mostly used) and supernatural magic (rarely used). It is the supernatural magic that is the way our Living Consciousness works (see my response to Mike’s distinction between intentions and imaginations).
And you are right about the complementarity between science and art. Both science and art originate in our Living Consciousness, through magical thinking, but then go diverging ways: art — to implementing magical thinking in poetry, fiction writings and paintings, and science to converting magical thinking into Rational Constructions (scientific concepts, logical reasoning, etc), thus killing the creative imagination but gaining the strength and stability of the “natural laws”).