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Good morning, David, (Jane),
By COLIN McGINN
Agency ? Further philosophy and psychology thereof - https://scott-macleod.
especially with regards to consciousness (how to bring together the 1st person and 3rd person views, or the objective and subjective) - with regard to explaining awareness, sentience, feeling, subjectivity (including memories) etc. or to put another way per Chalmers -
"The hard problem of consciousness is the problem of explaining why any physical state is conscious rather than nonconscious. It is the problem of explaining why there is “something it is like” for a subject in conscious experience, why conscious mental states “light up” and directly appear to the subject."
https://iep.utm.edu/hard-con/
https://iep.utm.edu/hard-con/
- and how can a piece of meat have consciousness? per McGinn ... (or be conscious?)
The Mysterious FlameConscious Minds in a Material World
By COLIN McGINN
So intention re consciousness is all a bit squishy scientific-thinking-territory-
From July 12, 2020 -
I was amused at your reply, Ma, to my question: "Have you thought much about agency, philosophically, ... and personally?" -
| Sun, Jul 12, 1:15 PM |  | ||
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"No in answer to your question if it was a question.
Love, Ma"
In many ways, George posited the idea of agency and perhaps in his role as psychiatrist - as a way to help an analysand, some of whom might not be experiencing "the capacity to act," or a kind of freedom to make and act upon their choices - and then in conversation an analysand might think further how they have the capacity to act, and as a beneficial change or outcome.
I suppose writing - the use of language and thinking graphically or symbolically - is emblematic of a kind of great agency. (George didn't publish much at all, one paper in Friends' Journal on "The Separation of Church and State" from 2008 I think). And I recall his focus on too on the significance of publishing or printing in talking with me (and even perhaps regarding the metaphor of people as computers; it was George too that in a way planted the idea in the 1990s, I think, that computers were a great field to get into career-wise - go and become a computer technician would be a pragmatic career-focus - and now I'm continuing to develop my big educational project, as perhaps an idea of expression of my agency). Hmmm ...
Agency philosophy-wise, and personally too? Perhaps (but not yet for me in finding a life partner) ... And for you? Agency for you, David? The capacity to act to find a life partner? And for you, Ma ,and all of us, the capacity to reverse aging with genetic engineering, and to be writing and thinking about agency (philosophically) together when we're 200 years' old? What do you think? :)
Cheers,
Scott
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Dear David, Ma,
As a follow-on re thinking about agency philosophically and personally:
psychodynamic psychiatric thinking posits ego, which Lacan departs from perhaps in part with the 'mirror phase,' (re his 3 registers) - and agency philosophically is a whole other approach to related conceptualizations in part ... but which is significant to the role of the psychoanalytic psychiatrist, especially who is a good learner (like George Alexander MD was), perhaps ... and re his moving on to Lacan MD as a psychiatrist (and as a kind of free thinker) in Lacan's 'return to Freud,' when there's no going back! :) ... the future is ahead (he would quip) ... theoretically perhaps. :)
Scott
https://scott-macleod.blogspot.com/2020/07/andersons-mountain-crown-agency-have.html
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Sunday, July 12, 2020
Hi David, Ma,
Here's a slightly updated version of my email to you just now:
Have you thought much about agency, philosophically, "the capacity to act, and 'agency' denotes the exercise or manifestation of this capacity" (https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/agency/) and personally?
Am recalling and appreciating George Alexander MD's thinking about this (family friend, and brilliant psychiatrist, as well as Lacanian psychoanalyst), and how he with language made abstract ideas helpful and relevant to individuals with whom he was in conversation. There are many folk philosophies that inform otherwise (eg Quakerism and Yoga, and perhaps some underlying Harbin philosophies too ... ie that it's the divine, or ego religiously conceived, that shape people's actions and their ways of being); cultures can do this too, where the group's discourse somehow seems to inform possible actions of the individual. The idea that we have agency - free will, intentional action, - or choice to decide what we want to do as individuals is something that western philosophical thinking in particular seems to make possible in very unique and even sophisticated ways.
Psychiatrically, and psychologically, an individual with their own agency (not informed by a psychotherapist or psychoanalyst) might choose actions that lead to flourishing, or well-being, in conversation with someone, or on their own, because they might have engaged the idea of agency (via words). (And perhaps they head to a good psychiatrist if they aren't making choices that lead to flourishing, or because they're making poor choices, agency-wise, - and leading to a lack of well-being). Language can help - both with a) the idea that we have agency (as one thinks about this), and b) that conversation can open possibilities in ideas about how to develop agency. The Desiderata - https://www.desiderata.com/desiderata.html - as a poem of agency? (Am appreciative too of George explicitly not giving advice, because reasoning-wise, consciously too, and philosophically, to be able to give good advice may entail being in the other persons 'shoes' - which is logically impossible; appreciating that George was both conscious or aware of this, and that he was able to express this (about his logically not giving advice). That said, he as an experienced clinician seemed to be able to 'free up' people's agency, in my experience of him and understanding his thinking.
Am appreciating, too, the 'problem solving,' Western analytical and philosophical approaches too which George took with conversants - and regarding the human problems and issues that emerge with people. It's a very grounded - re realist - way of thinking, and focusing, too, on the symbolic (rather than the mirror register) per Lacan's 3 registers. Ah language - and agency. (George had a different reading of Lacan than - https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/lacan/ - based on reading primary texts and studying Lacan in depth, but this philosophical article is a fairly, and unusually, salutary writing on or about Lacan's thinking; ah, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:).
What do you think about agency? How have you thought about human's capacity to act - about yours or individuals you know, and consciously? Am seeking to find some examples re Cuttyhunk or DC (or Pgh) for you, for example, to make this personally relevant - and not abstract, - and will let you know if some come to mind. (Acting to find a mate, perhaps, David?)
Consciousness re agency raises a whole series of other questions - and how to make these personally meaningful and relevant are fascinating questions too :)
Warm regards, Scott
5 blog posts in recent years about this:
https://scott-macleod.blogspot.com/2020/07/geomorphology-agency-have-you-thought.html
https://scott-macleod.blogspot.com/2013/12/rosy-faced-lovebird-agency-agent-with.html
https://scott-macleod.blogspot.com/2019/04/eternal-flame-falls-agency-as.html
https://scott-macleod.blogspot.com/2010/10/tibet-valley-digital-communication.html
https://scott-macleod.blogspot.com/2013/10/california-condor-whats-anthropological.html
I experience a kind of agency or freedom when I hear great rock and roll (but haven't thought too much about the agency word in this capacity) -
The Allman Brothers Band - Full Concert - 01/05/80 - Capitol Theatre (OFFICIAL)
https://youtu.be/9b1VlW02L8s
--
- Scott MacLeod
- http://scottmacleod.com
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Jane MacLeod
1:15 PM (9 hours ago)
to me
No in answer to your question if it was a question.
Love, Ma
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Scott MacLeod
1:19 PM (9 hours ago)
to Jane
Ah, ok. :)
Love, Scott
--
- Scott MacLeod
- http://scottmacleod.com
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Dear David, Ma,
- the capacity to act mentally neurally and blissfully (in a way). This might initially and simply involve clicking on the play button of favorite music re agency. :)
But besides the question for whether neural activity involves the capacity to act or not (agency - as 'intentional causation' as well ) ... there do seem to be well-being therapeutic mind-benefits from playing such music (or music which moves you). I won't muse about consciousness or intention philosophically or scientifically here for the time being. What do you think about agency and music which moves you together? :)
Warm regards, Scott
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Friday, July 31, 2020
Could someone be reading my blog possibly? The following from PhilPapers.org about Agency, Consciousness and MUCH more, just popped into my email (and which I'm posting both here - https://scott-macleod.blogspot.com/2020/07/andersons-mountain-crown-agency-have.html - and in today's July 31, 2020 - https://scott-macleod.blogspot.com/2020/07/saxifraga-cespitosa-voila-nicolas-et.html - post):
Jul 31st 2020 GMT
- Where is the Fundamental Disagreement Between Naive Realism and Intentionalism? Takuya Niikawa - 2020 - Metaphilosophy 51 (4):593-610.
- Fully Autonomous AI. Wolfhart Totschnig - forthcoming - Science and Engineering Ethics:1-13.In the fields of artificial intelligence and robotics, the term “autonomy” is generally used to mean the capacity of an artificial agent to operate independently of human guidance. It is thereby assumed that the agent has a fixed goal or “utility function” with respect to which the appropriateness of its actions will be evaluated. From a philosophical perspective, this notion of autonomy seems oddly weak. For, in philosophy, the term is generally used to refer to a stronger capacity, namely the capacity to “give oneself the law,” to decide by oneself what one’s goal or principle of action will be. The predominant view in the literature on the long-term prospects and risks of artificial intelligence is that an artificial agent cannot exhibit such autonomy because it cannot rationally change its own final goal, since changing the final goal is counterproductive with respect to that goal and hence undesirable. The aim of this paper is to challenge this view by showing that it is based on questionable assumptions about the nature of goals and values. I argue that a general AI may very well come to modify its final goal in the course of developing its understanding of the world. This has important implications for how we are to assess the long-term prospects and risks of artificial intelligence.
- What Inference to the Best Explanation Is Not: A Response to Roche and Sober's Screening-Off Challenge to IBE. Marc Lange - 2020 - Teorema: International Journal of Philosophy 39:27-42.
- Brain-to-Brain Coupling in the Gamma-Band as a Marker of Shared Intentionality. Paulo Barraza, Alejandro Pérez & Eugenio Rodríguez - 2020 - Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 14.
- Throwing Spatial Light: On Topological Explanations in Gestalt Psychology. Bartłomiej Skowron & Krzysztof Wójtowicz - forthcoming - Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences:1-22.It is a well-known fact that mathematics plays a crucial role in physics; in fact, it is virtually impossible to imagine contemporary physics without it. But it is questionable whether mathematical concepts could ever play such a role in psychology or philosophy. In this paper, we set out to examine a rather unobvious example of the application of topology, in the form of the theory of persons proposed by Kurt Lewin in his Principles of Topological Psychology. Our aim is to show that this branch of mathematics can furnish a natural conceptual system for Gestalt psychology, in that it provides effective tools for describing global qualitative aspects of the latter’s object of investigation. We distinguish three possible ways in which mathematics can contribute to this: explanation, explication and metaphor. We hold that all three of these can be usefully characterized as throwing light on their subject matter, and argue that in each case this contrasts with the role of explanations in physics. Mathematics itself, we argue, provides something different from such explanations when applied in the field of psychology, and this is nevertheless still cognitively fruitful.
Jul 30th 2020 GMT
- Agency in Mental Disorder: Exploring the Connections. Matt King & Joshua May (eds.) - forthcoming - Oxford University Press.How exactly do mental disorders affect one’s agency? How might therapeutic interventions help patients regain or improve their autonomy? Do only some disorders excuse morally inappropriate behavior, such as theft or child neglect? Or is there nothing about having a disorder, as such, that affects whether we ought to praise or blame someone for their moral success or failure? Our volume gathers together empirically-informed philosophers who are well equipped to tackle such questions. Contributors specialize in free will, agency, and responsibility, but they are informed by current scientific and clinical approaches to a wide range of psychopathologies, including autism, addiction, Capgras delusion, Tourette syndrome, personality disorders, depression, dementia, phobias, schizophrenia, and obsessive-compulsive disorder. These conditions exhibit a diverse array of symptoms that can contribute quite differently to blameworthy or praiseworthy acts.
- The Nature of Truth (Second Edition). Michael Lynch, Jeremy Wyatt, Junyeol Kim & Nathan Kellen (eds.) - forthcoming - MIT Press.
- (Counter)Factual Want Ascriptions and Conditional Belief. Thomas Grano & Milo Phillips-Brown - manuscriptWhat are the truth conditions of want ascriptions? According to a highly influential and fruitful approach, championed by Heim (1992) and von Fintel (1999), the answer is intimately connected to the agent’s beliefs: ⌜S wants p⌝ is true iff within S’s belief set, S prefers the p worlds to the ~p worlds. This approach faces a well-known and as-yet unsolved problem, however: it makes the entirely wrong predictions with what we call '(counter)factual want ascriptions', wherein the agent either believes p or believes ~p—e.g., ‘I want it to rain tomorrow and that is exactly what is going to happen’ or ‘I want this weekend to last forever but of course it will end in a few hours’. We solve this problem. The truth conditions for want ascriptions are, we propose, connected to the agent’s conditional beliefs. We bring out this connection by pursuing a striking parallel between (counter)factual and non-(counter)factual want ascriptions on the one hand and counterfactual and indicative conditionals on the other.
- The Role of Consciousness in Free Action. Philip Woodward - forthcoming - In Joe Campbell, Kristin M. Mickelson & V. Alan White (eds.), Wiley Companion to Free Will. Wiley.It is intuitive that free action depends on consciousness in some way, since behavior that is unconsciously generated is widely regarded as un-free. But there is no clear consensus as to what such dependence comes to, in part because there is no clear consensus about either the cognitive role of consciousness or about the essential components of free action. I divide the space of possible views into four: the Constitution View (on which free actions metaphysically consist, at least in part, in phenomenally conscious episodes of a special sort), the Causal-Dependence View (on which free actions are necessarily caused by conscious episodes), the Counterfactaul-Dependence View (on which free actions necessarily counterfactually dependent on conscious episodes of certain types), and the Independence View (on which there are no necessary dependence-relations that hold between free action and conscious episodes). After surveying recent empirical literature that purports to show that consciousness plays a smaller role in generating action than is usually supposed, I conclude that it is plausible that free action depends on consciousness in two ways. First, free action causally depends on consciousness control. Second, free action counterfactually depends on the agent's being responsive to certain reasons.
- Technological Innovation and Natural Law. Philip Woodward - forthcoming - Philosophia Reformata.I discuss three tiers of technological innovation: mild innovation, or the acceleration by technology of a human activity aimed at a good; moderate innovation, or the obviation by technology of an activity aimed at a good; and radical innovation, or the altering by technology of the human condition so as to change what counts as a good. I argue that it is impossible to morally assess proposed innovations within any of these three tiers unless we rehabilitate a natural-law ethical framework. And I offer some moral starting points within such a framework, in connection with innovations of each of the three types.
- The Selection Problem for Constitutive Panpsychism. Philip Woodward - forthcoming - Australasian Journal of Philosophy.Constitutive panpsychism is the doctrine that macro-level consciousness—that is, consciousness of the sort possessed by certain composite things such as humans—is built out of irreducibly mental (or proto-mental) features had by some or all of the basic physical constituents of reality. On constitutive panpsychism, changes in macro-level consciousness amount to changes in either the way that micro-conscious entities ‘bond’ or the way that micro-conscious qualities ‘blend’ (or both). I pose the ‘Selection Problem’ for constitutive panpsychism: the problem of explaining how high-level functional states of the brain ‘select’ micro-conscious qualities for bonding or blending. I argue that there are no empirically plausible solutions to this problem.
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