booklogging

Eiser, J. Richard. 1994. Oxford, Blackwell. 0631191291
My main interest in this book was in seeing an account of mind as emergent which also related to the social dimension and took into account developments of thinking in relation to chaos and so on. This the book does. It is occasionally heavy-going for a non-specialist like myself but it is sufficiently interdisciplinary to enable me to grasp the main points most of the time [I think].

The thrust of the book is towards developing a way of conceptualising attitudes but in order to do so we have to take some account of what it is that we do when we think and take attitudes and there are a whole load of philosophical and psychological issues to be taken into account, not to mention what thinking about artificial intelligence means. So there are chapters on the mind-body issue,on identity, on different philosophical approaches [Cartesian, Lockean, Humean etc] all of which are discussed in a wya that gets to the meat of the ideas and doesn't always come up with the conventional answers. there is a consideration of quantum physics mo9stly to gain some feel for whether it offeres any insights that might help, likewise fractal geometry and chaos. In sum the book seems to argue for an approach based on the idea of emergence; that human beings are basically embodied and mind emerges from the massive complexity and parallel processing of our brains and the self-referenetial nature of our thoughts in a social context whihc allows us to model others' minds and refer the modelling to ourselves.

For me it is the latter that makes it really interesting: the important role of the social in forming us as self-conscious subjects. Towards the end of the book there is some discussion about human collectivities in relation to what emerges from the interaction of humans and in the light of an emergent model of intrasubjective mind -is there an inter-subjective mind? The answer seems to be that the human brains connexions are of such an order of magnitude that an intelligence comparable to human is unlikely to emerge. So whatever our 'noosphere' [a term Eiser does not use] may be, or whatever our collectivities might be, they are not conscious in a way comparable to ourselves.

The upshot of this for my work seems to be that it is fair enough to think about the Powers as emergent from human collectivity but not to think of them as having intelligence in a way like humans [perhaps more like jellyfish or squirrels?]. It seems to me that it is possible to see how they might be learning 'organisms' within the terms described in this book: the processes associated with the connexions between individuals and artefacts in their respective environments could form habitual pathways as well as provide feedback mechanisms allowing for adaptation. In this way various nexuses of responses and initated behaviours can arise which would give a collectivity a 'character' and an identity. Overall it may not be as intelligent as its human components but for some more specialised 'tasks' it might be more so.