What is life?
I was surprised to find out not long ago that biology, the study of living organisms, does not apparently have a clear definition of the concept of life. What is life? What is the difference between a live cow and a dead cow? Surely there is one. It could not be a material difference, because if it was, then we could potentially be able to reverse that material difference back to its original configuration, and thus resurrect the dead back to the living; but this seems absurd.
Could we find the essence of life? A socratic dialogue on this would be great, though I won't mind other forms of discussion.
Could we find the essence of life? A socratic dialogue on this would be great, though I won't mind other forms of discussion.
Comments (417)
The recently dead cow has life. One can isolate a good cell and grow a new cow from it, just not restore the original cow by most definitions of what makes one cow not the same as another.
I am guessing that 'axioms' is synonymous to 'essential properties'? I would be very interested to know what these axioms are, if you ever find them again.
Let X = the body of the cow, and Y = the material thing that gives it life. Then a live cow is X+Y and a dead cow is X without Y. To resurrect the dead cow, we would just need to add the material thing Y back to X to result in X+Y. But this seems absurd. Therefore, Y is not a material thing.
Quoting noAxioms
It is indeed interesting if we are able to do that. What about restoring a live cell from a dead cell?
I'm actually not sure of the extent that a cell has been 'built' from less obviously living parts. As MadFool points out, you run into the borderline of the definition of life.
It could be the case indeed that it is a gradual thing. For my knowledge, would you know what makes viruses a 'borderline case' in contrast to non-borderline cases?
Maybe I am misunderstanding your comment, but as I see it, it does logically preclude a non-material thing:
As far as I know viruses are made up of DNA and a few proteins and lack the other cellular apparatus to be independent living things. So their MO is to hijack the cellular apparatus of other living cells.
A process isn't an ingredient; the function of a material existent is not an added essence, it's a mode of being. Whatever material change in organic material effects a change in function drastic enough to permanently preclude a recovery of that whole of which it's a part is the material difference that makes the difference in terms of life and death. And there need be nothing special about it.
The concept refers to many things with different definitions. Hence the lack of one clear definition.
It used to refer to an assumed essence, élan vital, or spirit, that would fundamentally distinguish living things from dead things. But nowadays it is more often used for a set of capacities which arise from the mechanics of bio-chemistry and characterises organisms which can respond to the environment intentionally. Life can also refer to our given time, as in "My life", and as such include my experiences and effects on the world. Unlike the given time of dead things such as rocks my time is probably shorter, but unlike the rocks I can use them intentionally for constructing buildings or sculptures etc., tokens of life.
I see. And so the DNA, proteins, and other cellular apparatus are the properties that distinguish non-living things and living things (and then the degree of living things). I think carbon is another essential material property of all living things. Now what could be the essential difference between live things and dead things? Say a live virus and a dead one.
Scientists suggest that all life must be able to reproduce, have a metabolism and it must have a form in which it is encapsulated. Fine, but so far the best of efforts have yet to produce life. Another effort, synthetic biologists are trying to put life together from existing parts.
Nether side has any definitive answers at this point, but they seem to be both making progress. In a contemporaneous thread, "How did living organisms come to be? Sophisticat posted a very good summary description of where things stand for those trying to build life from scratch.
The secret of how life on Earth began
I think they may be able to do it, but I don't think they will be able to explain their results objectively, using only a material/objective level of description. I think they will have to develop a subjective explanation (a subjective ontology) to explain the 'vital'/causal aspects of life. Life is a state of matter, but one whose explanation is not reducible to the level of objective ontology description without loss of its 'vital'/causality.
Yeah, I agree that life can be used in all these meanings in every day discussions. For the purpose of this discussion, I would leave out the third meaning "My life" and retain the first two meanings "spirit or soul" and the more scientific "set of capacities", and then figure out which one is closer to truth.
So the living state of an organism is the ability for its primary parts to function properly? Let's say a cell has died because one of its parts has a drastic change in function which is irreversible. Under the above definition, would it follow that the cell would come back to life if the deficient part were to be replaced by a properly working part, like replacing the deficient spark plugs on a car engine? If so, does it follow that there is no difference, with respect to living, between a cell and a car engine?
A difference exists between a flipped coin coming up heads vs. it coming up tails.
There is no separate material that distinguishes the coin in one state or the other.
Therefore the existing difference is non-material.
.
Do you mean to imply that the coin that lands heads-up has acquired an immaterial heads-up spirit or something? I rather think the difference is one of orientation, which is a difference in material state, but not a separate orientation-material that the tails-up state does not have.
Baden's post pretty much said as much.
Thanks for the step-by-step though.
As far as I know the debate on vitalism had more or less dissolved by the 1930s, when there was genetics and a more refined understanding of bio-chemistry.
Quoting Wikipedia
I now see the misunderstanding, in the word 'material'. I understand the word material to mean anything that is observable, or empirical. In that sense, I place matter, energy, arrangements and all the likes in the category of material. As I understand it, you meant only matter when you said "I don't think there is a separate material that distinguishes a live cow from a dead one."
Interesting. This would explain how a living cell is composed of non-living parts, and how it is created in the first place. Does it however explain the difference between a live cell and a dead cell?
Yes, there's no difference except the type of material and level of complexity. Cells are complex biological machines made of organic matter. Cars are simple non-biological machines made of inorganic matter.
OK. There are empirical ways to determine the point of death of something complex like a cow. The definition has changed as technology has been able to resuscitate something that may have passed beyond older definitions of 'still alive'.
None of this really defines what life is. All the cells in a cow might be alive, but something else is still missing if there is no way to restore the cell collection as a functioning cow. There is life in the cells, but the cells do not comprise a life anymore.
An interesting thing to explore. What is the simplest creature that has a 'life', and is not just a colony of living cells? At what point does a zygote attain more of a life than what just a collection of cells have? These are hard questions.
It explains that the difference between a living cell and a dead cell is not fundamental.
It makes no sense to classify swarms of atoms as dead or alive. Whether it makes sense to classify a chemical compound as organic or inorganic seems to depend on the context.
On a molecular level carbon atoms, or hydrogen and oxygen atoms etc., may interact in various ways depending on the circumstances. A change in the environment, for instance, could cause an imbalance in the polarity of the water molecule, which in turn might cause irreparable imbalance or damage on the possibility for other non-living components in the cell to interact with each other. When they cease to interact it makes sense to talk of a dead cell.
I suppose some cells are primary for the life preservation of the organism, and some are secondary. If the secondary ones die, then the life is preserved by the primary cells, and these may even sometimes replace the secondary cells by new ones. But if the primary cells die, then the life cannot be preserved and the secondary cells will soon die thereafter.
One may think of a car engine as an analogy to the living cell. If the air supply, fuel supply or spark plugs malfunction, then the other systems which depend on this one can no longer function either, and the engine "dies". If the life of a simple cell is nothing more than the proper functioning of its parts, then the parallel with a car engine is valid.
This seems to be a good next step to the discussion. I suggest to add the concept of consciousness. If an organism does not an apparent consciousness, say a plant, then there is no reason to believe that the organism attains a life as a whole, as opposed to being a mere collection of living cells.
But if an organism has an apparent consciousness, say a dog, then the truth could be in one of two possibilities:
1. This consciousness is only apparent, and the dog is nothing more than a large system composed of living cells, like citizens in a state.
2. This consciousness is a real thing, and thus a "life" is added to the system. This new life is more than the life of simple living cells, which we have defined earlier as "the proper functioning of its parts".
Thoughts?
A "dead" car engine can be resurrected, not so for a dead organism it seems.
Not sure how you're defining consciousness. I can be rendered unconscious, yet continue to live. So no, consciousness is not what defines me to be alive. You seem to suggest the word to mean a new fundamental ingredient of giving vitalism, which has been covered by the posts of others.
Quoting jkopThe engine could not be resurrected if it were a much more complex thing that, if stopped, fell apart more quickly that it could be repaired.
Actually, my point was the opposite; that just as a dead car can be resurrected by replacing the deficient part, so can the dead cell, by replacing its deficient part. This seems to logically follow from the definition that the life of a simple cell is nothing more than the proper functioning of its parts.
See the comment string here. https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/65014
Consciousness has two separate meanings. One meaning is, as you point out, the difference between being conscious and unconscious, as in being awake or asleep. The second meaning is between a conscious being and a non-conscious being: the fact of awareness by the mind of itself and the world. I was referring to the second meaning.
Quoting noAxioms
How is it that is seems to have a life as a whole, if it has no apparent consciousness? Having apparent consciousness was my reason to support having a life as a whole. What other reasons are there? Note: I am not here including humans just yet, only animals and lower life forms.
The notion of essence is philosophically defunct. We simply do not need to be able to present a definition of life in order to do biology.
The OP appears to be a request for a justification of vitalism - the notion that there is something special about living things. But that's cobblers, too.
So back to what distinguishes a lifeform like a cell from a functioning car...
'Not needed' does not imply 'impossible'. Essences exist, insofar that words point to real concepts, or real objective meanings. If "The notion of essence is philosophically defunct" is saying that words don't have objective meanings, then this statement is itself meaningless; and that is a self-contradiction.
So you want to find essential properties that distinguish lifeforms from non-lifeforms right? How about these:
- can reproduce,
- can grow,
- is made of organic matter (DNA, carbons, proteins ...)
- needs a form of energy
All right, I will up the anti and claim that it is often impossible to identify an essence. I have in mind here the commonplace rejection of the notion posited by Russell and others, but perhaps presented most clearly in Wittgenstein's notion of family resemblance.
I'll follow that by rejecting your notion that words refer to concepts. But more over, that's just not how words work.
I think essences are a particularly pernicious notion, leading to all sorts of bad philosophy, including the conclusion you mistakenly draw that without essences words have no meaning.
Perhaps we might proceed by your addressing a simple question; a child can talk about a tree, without being able to set out any even partial 'essence-of-tree'. How is that possible on your account?
If you listen to young children speak, who are just learning how to talk, you'll hear that they use some words in ways which demonstrate that they don't know the proper way to use the word. They'll use the wrong word. They'll even make up a lot of words because they are repeating sounds, but speaking them incorrectly. Speaking words is not what is at issue here, what is at issue, is speaking correctly.
So when a child talks about a "tree", it is not necessary that the child is using the word "tree" correctly. The child might be referring to a rock or some other thing. So your question should really be, is it possible that a child may talk correctly about a tree without even being able to set out any partial 'essence of tree'? Maybe you use "essence" in a different way from me, but I would say that learning to us a word correctly is the same thing as learning the essence of what is referred to by that word. If one does not learn the "essence", then the individual develops habits which often consist of mistaken use. Therefore to consistently use the word correctly, it is necessary to have some notion of the essence. The better one understands the essence, the less likely one is to make a mistake in using the word.
With respect to the op then, what is being asked is how to use the word "life" correctly.
As to the list, I don't want to be a pain but every one of them is debatable, and it might not be a complete list of necessary traits. A monotheistic god is not alive by the list above since there is no reproduction. If we encounter some huge great immortal intelligence in the galaxy, are we not to recognize it as life because it has no need to reproduce, and no critical parts the loss of which it cannot recover?
So the list above seems to be a list of symptoms, not hard requirements.
Maybe a we will create a truly self-sufficient computer life form that manufactures new members at full size, so no growth, and no organic matter. Many would not regard that as life, so I would like to ask why the list seems to have a geocentric item like that on it? Why must life be sufficiently like us, who just happen to be carbon based which is chemistry well suited to the available components and temperature of Earth.
'Organic' doesn't belong on the list because it is circular. It means stuff created (typically) by life.
What about a virtual life form in the cloud? Are computer viruses life? They meet all the criteria above except organic (being like us).
Needs a form of energy doesn't belong on the list. So does the car.
If learning to use the word "tree" is the same thing as learning tree-essence, then what role is played here by essences? What more are they than the capacity to use a word?
If what is being asked is how to use the word "life" correctly, what is gained by adding the notion of essence?
I say, nothing is gained; we would do better to talk of use, not essence.
Fire fits this list.
Life is an unnatural persistent pattern.
It has have had natural origins of course, but it is not really life until it (via evolution in our case, but not necessarily) becomes something that has no reasonable probability of just accidentally occurring.
Anyway, the definition distinguishes life from fire, and many definitions fail that. I think the computer virus qualifies as much as a biological virus.
As I mentioned, there is a distinction to be made between correct use and incorrect use. So we ought not talk about "use" in general, because the kids use words in all kinds of random ways. If you allow that there is such a distinction, then why not allow that correct use demonstrates the "essence" of the thing?
You seem to allow that there is a correct use of the word "life". What would distinguish between correct and incorrect use of the term if there was no essence to refer to?
But it is not a metaphysical distinction. The correct use of "Metaphysician Undercover" is not a reference to the essence of Metaphysician Undercover.
Do you recognize a difference between the using proper nouns, such as "Metaphysician Undercover", which identify a single object, and the use of a noun which identifies a class of objects, like "tree"? It is only in the latter case that knowing how to correctly use the word is associated with knowing an essence. Knowing how to correctly use the word "tree" requires that one knows what a tree is, and this is the essence. Do you think that one can consistently use the word "tree" correctly without knowing what a tree is?
That's just not true. We all use words correctly without ever setting out exact definitions.
I don't know if the tree fern outside my window is actually a tree, nor if that shrub over there should really be called a tree. That does not men I do not know how to use "tree". Famously, there is nothing that is common to all, and only, fish; and yet, we use the word. That is, it is not possible to set out the essence of "tree" or "fish", and yet the words are used.
Moreover, when an essence is set out it often lead to risibility; so if berries are simple fruits stemming from one flower with one ovary and typically have several seeds, then strawberries are not berries.
Learning what a tree is, is no more than learning how to use the word "tree". On this we might agree, but I will not follow you by adding that there is a metaphysical entity that corresponds to what a tree is.
Clearly, you have stated here that you belief that you could sometimes be wrong in your use of "tree". Remember, what we are discussing is not whether you have the capacity to use "tree", but whether you have the capacity to consistently use that word correctly. Now you've admitted that you might be incorrect sometimes in your use of "tree". Wouldn't that be because you do not know the essence?
Quoting Banno
I agree. In most cases it is impossible to state the essence of something. In these cases it is always possible that one's use of these words might be judged by another as incorrect, even though the first person might insist that the usage is correct. In other cases, such as technical terms, and especially mathematical terms, the essence is well defined, so we don't make those mistakes.
Quoting Banno
The question is not whether there is a metaphysical entity which corresponds to what a tree is, that's not what "essence" is all about. It is a term derived from logic, so it is epistemological, and denotes that there is a correct way of using the term. So if a term has a defined essence, it must be used only according to that essence, in order that it be used correctly in logical procedures, or else mistaken conclusions (due to equivocation for example) will be produced.
It appears like you and I are talking about two different things. You claim that you can satisfactorily use words in daily communication without knowing any essences. I agree with this, because there is no real correct or incorrect way of using words in common communication, it's just a matter of pragmatics, whatever successfully allows you to communicate is acceptable. My claim is that when we are dealing with logical arguments, and mathematical applications, we must designate a correct way of using the words, so we refer to essences. What type of existence an "essence" has is something we shouldn't even discuss until we agree on the need to assume a "correct way of using a word".
Of course not. There is no essence to compare my use to. All there is, is the use to which others put the word.
That's not what it's saying. It is saying that the categories typically referred to by words have fuzzy boundaries. The fact that a category has a fuzzy boundary does not render the category meaningless.
Consider state boundaries. Some are determined by rivers. Yet the exact location of the banks of the river, and hence its midpoint, changes slightly over time. That does not render the notion of states meaningless.
Nor does the fuzziness of the 'tall' category render meaningless, or even controversial, the statement that Michael Jordan is tall.
I'd like to go out on a limb and try to defend the following definition of life: Self perpetuating intelligence. Any and all criticisms would be appreciated.
This definition handily describes all carbon based DNA having forms of life we have actually been able to observe, but more importantly it covers many forms of life we have yet only encountered in fairy tales. The intelligence of single cells and simple multi-cellular organisms like blades of grass stems from the genetic data that governs their structure and ultimately behavior. In a sense genes are able to remember in order to make intelligent decisions about what to do, which is a basic description of intelligence.
By "self-perpetuating" I don't mean "able to reproduce" or "emerged on it's own", but rather that the "intelligence" itself (the complex decision making (involves memory)) is capable of internal development (an increase in complexity). This is what differentiates a smart phone as non-life from mold as life: the mold can evolve and get smarter.
From this, here are some examples of things that qualify as life:
Human consciousness
Grass
single-cells
Mitochondria
"Artificial" intelligence
Intuition tells me that a part of what makes looking at "life" interesting is that there is all kinds of unknown cool crap that it might do in the future. Increases in the complexity of decision making is definitely something that can make that happen.
I assume you are saying that there is no such thing as correct usage. How does logic work then?
I would argue against this "fuzzy boundary" idea. Let's take the example of 'tall'. I propose its essence to be: "that which is greater in vertical dimension, relative to X". Thus MJ is tall relative to the average human being. Remove the words 'vertical dimension', 'greater', or 'relative to X', and we no longer have the concept of 'tall'. But are any of these words unclear?
Almost, but not quite: A fire is not made out of organic matter, because it is not matter at all but energy. Granted, organic matter is one of the causes of fire, but not the thing itself, as an effect is a different thing than its cause.
It is true that my list is only comprised on material properties, and thus is adequate only for material lives such as plants, animals and humans. It does not address possible non-material lives such as angels and God. I suggest to limit the discussion to material life for now. This is only for the sake of taking simpler steps, and not to restrict the whole truth of what life consists of.
Quoting noAxioms
Point taken again. I forgot that in the past comments, I already acknowledged that if the life of a simple cell is nothing but "the proper functioning of its parts", then a car engine fits the definition as well as simple cells. And a car engine cannot grow, reproduce, nor is it made of organic matter.
So the new list for material life is as follows:
- proper functioning of the object's parts
- needs a form of energy
Suffering.
Is hair included in the height measurement? If not why not? If so, does somebody become taller when a puff of wind pushes a single strand of hair up?
Is somebody that is 1 micrometre taller than average tall? What if their excess over the average is smaller than can be measured by any human instrument?
Do a whole bunch of non-tall people become tall when a 2 metre person dies?
Do a whole bunch of tall people become non-tall when a baby is born?
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.”
I will answer just a few of these questions, to keep the comment somewhat short:
Is hair included in the height measurement? Up to you: John is taller than Bob if hair is included. If not, then not. The object whose tallness is measured might lack details, but the concept of tallness is itself clear and does not change.
Is somebody that is 1 micrometre taller [taller] than average tall? Objectively yes, because you even included the word 'taller' in your question. I trust you understand the words in your own question.
What if their excess over the average is smaller than can be measured by any human instrument? You could say the difference in tallness is not perceivable. But perception does not change truth, and thus the tallness of a thing is not dependant on our perception of it.
Do a whole bunch of non-tall people become tall when a 2 metre person dies? As per the essence I suggested, "tallness" is relative to X. So relative to living people, yes; relative to the dead person, no.
Let's generalize: If the statement "the categories typically referred to by words have fuzzy boundaries" were to be objectively true always, then the words used in that statement, and consequently the whole statement itself, have fuzzy boundaries. In other words, we could logically never be certain of this conclusion.
It sure is. At least this life. Some have hope that the next life, still called "life" will be without suffering.
This indeed seems to be the logical conclusion if one is a real atheist. Leap of faith for the win!
Quantum Mechanics tells us that all position measurements, which includes tallness, are probability distributions rather than exact numbers. Under most interpretations of QM there is no such thing as the exact measurement. It would seem to follow that if one wishes to believe in exact boundaries of the 'tall' category, one must adopt an interpretation of QM that assumes the existence of unknown, exact measurements. Does one, for instance, have to be a Bohmian, in order to believe in 'essences' in this way?
Further, even if one could, without ambiguity, define 'tall' in that way, the definition would not be consistent with common use. People do not use 'tall' to describe someone whose height is within one micron of the current live human average.
Quoting Samuel LacrampeHaving fuzzy boundaries does not imply that statements cannot be made with certainty. I think everybody would agree that somebody whose estimated height is greater than two metres is tall, and that somebody whose estimated height is less than 1.5 metres is not tall. So we can make definite statements about such people. It is only about people between 1.5m and 2m that uncertainty arises.
We operate perfectly well every day communicating with each other using concepts that have fuzzy boundaries, because we typically only use words for those concepts in relation to phenomena that lie within the regions of certainty - ie away from the fuzzy region.
No, I am not.
Fire is not just energy; it is a process in which organic matter oxidises rapidly.
Fire fits the list indeed, but I wonder if you could find a satisfactory exception for my definition too:
"Intelligence" (decisions from "memory" (stored data of any kind)) capable of increasing the complexity of it's decision making through unguided or emergent processes.
The first one is the least qualified to be on the list. Sure, humans, but human consciousness does not seem in any way to be a life form. It is not self-perpetuating, and seems to be debatably an effect as much as an agent for decision making. A human is intelligent, not the consciousness itself, unless the consciousness is defined as a synonym for the immaterial entity as dualist commonly use the term, in which case we're not talking about physical life at all, and we have no data about reproducability or capability of increase in complexity
You label the function of DNA as "intelligent.decision making" which stretches the definition of the words. Plenty of complexity there, but does it qualify as decision making?
Kindly comment on my definition of "an unnatural persistent pattern". I had wondered if religion qualified as a life form since it meets a lot of qualifications, especially reproduction. But I decided it was like the fire: It is a process that naturally (inevitably) happens with sufficient fuel laying around and is thus natural, not unnatural. Concerning fire:
Quoting Samuel LacrampeFire is a process, just like life, and I have already stated that life being organic is a circular definition and excludes anything that isn't exactly like us. We want a definition of life, not of Earth life. Fire is not life because it is natural, even though I'm not sure there would be fire at all on Earth if not for the life on which it feeds. Imagine a lifeless Earth. What would burn? Methane is inorganic, but without free oxygen, it's not going to burn.
Quoting Samuel LacrampeAgree to that, but that means consciousness is not life, at least not by material definitions. There can be life without it, and consciousness without life. They're separate things.
Quoting Samuel LacrampeThe first is part of the definition of 'alive', not of life. It need not be an object. Life is a process, and processes require energy, living or not. So I would reject both these items. A clock that has stopped due to lack of winding meets this definition. I like the definition above better (self-perpetuating intelligence).
AI by itself is not necessarily self-perpetuating. They have AI now, but certainly it has not achieved self-reliance. What they often call AI, such as in a self-driving car, is not true AI. It is a straight automaton executing very specific code. Done correctly, the car should learn from mistakes and share that knowledge with the other cars. I don't think it currently works that way.
O.K, let's talk about the brain then, along with it's accompanying nervous systems. The structure of the brain and it's goings on is what produces human intelligence, and we know that as the human brain acquires data it has the capacity to increase in complexity and sophistication in the decisions it makes.
Quoting noAxioms
It must.
Not only does our DNA in fact make decisions for us (like when to mate for instance), but it also uses data it gathers from the environment through trial and error in order to increase it's own internal complexity and sophistication in decision making.
A human is actually DNA's way of making more, and better, DNA.
It's too vague to be understood.
"Life" is any entity capable of intelligent reaction to it's environment.
We still mostly have the problem of defining "intelligence" on our hands, and this is still somewhat vague, but life is vague. If mitochondria is alive, a human cell is alive, and a human brain is alive, what does "alive" mean?
A common denominator I'm interested in exploring is the way that these examples of "life" perpetuate their own existence by recording data to guide their decision making. The mitochondria and the individual cell does it through DNA, and the human brain does it by storing information via connected neurons.
I'm having a hard time finding a good example of non-life which performs this function, or an example of life which does not.
This would only work is intelligent were better understood than life. It isn't.
My point here is not to assist in deriving a suitable definition; that should be left to biologists rather than philosophers. It is rather to make the philosophical point that we do not need definitions in order to talk effectively about things, that for example we do not need a definition of life in order to tell the living from the non-living.
Quoting VagabondSpectreThe brain has no such capacity. A human (or other creature) does, but a brain by itself can do none of this. Don't ascribe life to just one part of the functioning machine. Brains are not life forms any more than a car engine can get me to Chicago. A brain is also not consciousness. The processes of the brain might be, but the processes are not an object, and neither of them is life.
Quoting VagabondSpectreDoes DNA make the decision as to when to mate? I mean, suppose my male DNA was suddenly changed to something else at say prepubescent age 12, let's say to that of a male gorilla or a female human. Would that change the decision? Arguably it would, but most of the physiology of when that change takes place is already there and not really a function of DNA. I'm not enough of a biologist to support or deny the claim.
The DNA is of course responsible for the design of said physiology that eventually makes the actual decision to hit puberty. But the DNA doesn't seem to do the instinctive work, it just hires the contractors that do it.
Decoding the physics and chemistry of human intelligence is well behind other fields of biology, but what about artificial intelligence? Granted we don't have a true one yet, machine learning is already extraordinarily powerful. Would an "artificial intelligence" qualify as a form of life? I would say so, which to me means we need programmers to go with our biologists in search of the definition of life. We aren't in dire need of a rigid or flawless definition, as you say (if there is one), but it's intriguing to see how close we can reasonably come.
Quoting noAxioms
Anomalous "persistent patterns" seems like a broad and rough but fair description that applies to "life", but intuitively life is more than just a complex persistent pattern; it's a particular kind of complex pattern. It's a pattern that, for example, records large amounts of data in hierarchical structures which is used to inform behavior in a way that anticipates it's environment. Life reacts to it's environment with intelligence.
Religion is an interesting metaphor for life (and vice versa) because it shows how complex behavior (self-propagation) can result from recorded data, but the self-proliferation of religion is largely an abstraction of the behavior of already living humans, not strictly behavior of the religion itself (which has no internal decision making property of it's own and is mostly intelligently developed by humans themselves).
Quoting noAxioms
A beating heart is not "life" in and of itself, although the cells which comprise it individually could be considered "alive" and a satisfactory example of "life" (even though removed from their system they quickly die). That said, the brain, along with it's accompanying nervous systems is what connects parts of the machine together. The body is the machine but the brain is the conductor. The brain produces consciousness, and consciousness itself surely qualifies as "life".
Quoting noAxioms
Creating biological "life" is what DNA does and it plays many roles which influence the behavior of the life it does produce. (Sort of how the brain produces consciousness and influences it's behavior). Yes the causal vehicles DNA uses to influence conscious behavior are indirect and not fully understood (especially by me), but the human body does interact with it's own genetic code on an ongoing basis, so it might not be long before alterations to genetic code could cause things like production of the wrong hormones, and undesirable behavior in certain types of cells (increased rates of division for example), both of which could be catastrophic.
You might start inexplicably banging your chest or find that you have mood changes during full moons.
Quoting VagabondSpectreOf what need do we have at all for a definition? Suppose we had a perfect rigid definition. What would benefit from it? What argument (besides "is this life?") would be laid to rest with such a definition at our disposal? It just seems to be an unimportant language issue to me.
Quoting VagabondSpectreThose all seem to be the means to achieve the persistence. If the persistence can be had without data storage, I think it would still be life. Would help if I could come up with an example.
There are plenty of life forms too primitive to anticipate their environment, and they persist more by prolific reproduction than to actually influence behavior.
Quoting VagabondSpectreHuman minds (and eventually written records) are the medium in which religions live, but religions are not humans, and are not objects any more than fire is an object. It does reproduce and evolve, but I decided it was too natural (inevitable) to meet my definition.
The brain has no such capacity. A human (or other creature) does, but a brain by itself can do none of this. Don't ascribe life to just one part of the functioning machine. Brains are not life forms any more than a car engine can get me to Chicago. A brain is also not consciousness. The processes of the brain might be, but the processes are not an object, and neither of them is life.
— noAxioms
Quoting VagabondSpectreI disagreed with this above. You can have either without the other, so they're different things. The brain is just a part, an essential one to a human, but not the only essential one, and certainly not essential to be life, since most life doesn't have one. It can be alive, or can be a dead brain, but it is not itself life.
Quoting VagabondSpectreWe have no clear definition, and DNA seems a tool to perpetuate life, but I would never say it creates it. It seems that at no point is non-life transformed into life by DNA.
Quoting VagabondSpectreTrue that. I'm the first to admit our behavior is more chemical than circuitry. Imagine what the ape DNA would do instead of just the female DNA. :s
I didn't quantify/compare AI with mitochondria intelligence. That's apples to oranges.
Why would a fully functional AI that can think and act on it's own behalf not be considered alive?
Quoting noAxioms
It's about trying to understand what makes life life. The hunt for a sensical definition is tied to our efforts to try and comprehend how and why life does what it does. If we had a better understanding of how carbon based life organizes itself, we might have a better idea of how non-carbon based life might also organize itself.
Quoting noAxioms
Not all life successfully anticipates it's environment, but prolific reproduction as a means of ensuring long term survival does anticipate the environment. It anticipates harsh conditions, and uses numbers as a strategy to overcome them.
Quoting noAxioms
Natural vs unnatural (inevitable vs avoidable) is a red herring loaded with baggage. How can you tell the difference between something that is natural and unnatural? If it happens, we call it natural, unless we really don't understand it, in which case we arbitrarily call it unnatural.
Quoting noAxioms
I said the brain produces intelligence, not that "brains are life". You claimed brains don't produce intelligence, but I contend that they do.
Quoting noAxioms
There might be such a point. When strands of DNA begin to fold onto themselves and create three dimensional structure, it is in the process of turning non-living matter into the beginnings of a living cell.
Yes, I think a fully functional AI is life, and counts as consciousness, but I have a lax definition of consciousness, so its no big feat. Without a definition, it is meaningless to posit if an AI has it.
Of what need do we have at all for a definition? Suppose we had a perfect rigid definition. What would benefit from it? What argument (besides "is this life?") would be laid to rest with such a definition at our disposal? It just seems to be an unimportant language issue to me.
— noAxioms
Quoting VagabondSpectreI doubt much would be related. If religion was considered life, I don't think understanding biology would help understand how religion achieves the natural selection that makes for fit religions. Religion is closer to life than fire (which does not undergo natural selection), but I'm reluctant to submit it as actual life.
Those all seem to be the means to achieve the persistence. If the persistence can be had without data storage, I think it would still be life. Would help if I could come up with an example.
There are plenty of life forms too primitive to anticipate their environment, and they persist more by prolific reproduction than to actually influence behavior.
— noAxioms
Quoting VagabondSpectreDoes the individual do that? Does the DNA anticipate anything? It is admittedly a function of conditions, and thus a reaction to them, but anticipation goes a little too far. Ditto with religion, which used to be evolved for more stable environments, but has seen more instability lately, and thus has selected for more adaptable members, just like humans might be a train wreck example of individual fitness, but our advantage is that adaptability. Pandas are sort of the opposite: perfected for a niche at the cost of almost any adaptability. Surprised they're still around given the recent hits to their environment. Score a few points for cuteness I think.
Quoting VagabondSpectreThere you go destroying my definition. Indeed, it might clarify the definition of life, only by use of a totally baggage-laden word like unnatural. Certainly the word is not something for which there is an definitive test, but I have an attempt: Earth biological life is unnatural since we have found nothing like it thus far anywhere else. Doubtless it is out there, and there's a better than even chance that it came elsewhere than originated on Earth, but it still had to originate somewhere and that seems to be a seriously rare event. Religions on the other hand do not have common ancestry (that I know of) and are likely to have started independently in many places. I'm pretty sure that if it were all wiped out and populations were kept isolated, new religions would spring up in each of the population groups. So that makes it natural. I'm unaware of such experiments being performed, so it is conjecture.
Quoting VagabondSpectreIt seems it is already living at that point, giving rise as to when matter transforms from a floating nutrient to actually part of the living thing. Without that distinction, I don't think we can answer this. With that distinction, we perhaps have a better clue as to what we want to define as life. What percentage of my body weight is actually living material, and how much of it is just stored liquid, food, and other material just being carried around, but not really part of me? I bet there's no clear answer to that.
Not all life has reproduction or self-perpetuation as a goal. Humans can be anti-natalist and also suicidal. Pretty much all standard life we observe does seem organized toward these ends, but that's only because forms of life which do not tend to die out.
All forms of life I can think of somehow record data and use it in their decision making processes, but they do not always make decisions conducive to survival. The virus that changes remains is harder to defeat (that's the improvement; survivability), the inferior viruses which didn't change have long since been dealt with by their host's immune system.
Quoting noAxioms
An amoeba is alive but probably not "conscious". I suppose if we're to consider "consciousness" a form of or a part of life, it must be a different kind than simple forms of life such as bacteria or an unnecessary/optional feature of it. I'm inclined to say that human consciousness (and the goings on of the brain) is indeed a distinct form of life, much like a hypothetical AI.
In the hierarchy of biological life, DNA based life takes solid form at the cellular level, but in multi-cellular forms of life where individual cells are combined in complex systems (such as connected neurons in the human brain), the physical mechanism for sentience and a higher order of life is made possible. The question is: what does human consciousness, an AI, and an amoeba have in common? They all act per mechanisms which incorporate recorded data; it's the operant force behind their innovation and decision making.
I realize that a train track lever also records data (a single bit) and is clearly not life. However, a large and complex enough system of interconnected levers which record large amounts of data in hierarchical structures could in theory produce artificial intelligence, whether by design or emergent through properties inherent in the system. Where in between a single lever and an AI is the complexity or organizational threshold for "life"? I find it an interesting question.
Quoting noAxioms
I'm also looking for such an example, which is what has led me to attempt to defend my general thrust.
Quoting noAxioms
The DNA of the Panda anticipates a bamboo rich environment. The DNA itself cannot perceive changes to the pandas habitat immediately, but through natural selection alone it can overtime, and may come to anticipate a less bamboo rich environment.
Quoting noAxioms
I think I'm most comfortable with defining "life" as a kind of organism, a whole. A n outstretched strand of DNA surely is not alive; it's reduced to it's naked bits, but in a certain environment a greater structure emerges, and with astounding complexity behaves in the kind of ways which we intuitively like to call "unnatural".
Here's the process that I'm describing:
This might be a good candidate to help us approximate that "organizational or complexity threshold" I talked about earlier as it applies to single cellular life.
What benefit accrues in extending the definition of 'life' to encompass artificial intelligence?
I don't see why we could not extend intelligence, consciousness or even personhood and the subsequent legal protections, to non-living things.
Meta might ask "But is a conscious computer really alive"; but my point it that the answer to this question is found not by locating an essence, but by deciding how we want to use the words associated with 'life'.
My original point was to refute the claim that "The notion of essence is philosophically defunct." If the goal of your comment is to argue against my point, then I think you are committing the straw man fallacy, because I agree with everything you say, and it does not refute my point.
I agree that if the measurement is fuzzy, then the conclusion about the object's tallness is consequently fuzzy, but this does not change the claim that "tallness" has a clear essence. This is also proven by what you claimed:
Quoting andrewk
In this case, the data is clear (away from the fuzzy boundaries) and the conclusion is clear. This proves that the essence of 'tallness' is also clear, because if it wasn't, then the conclusion would not be clear, despite having clear data.
not only cannot, but also need not,and indeed should not. Need not because we get by without them; and should not because doing so leads on to hold to certainty that is just not there.
Cool. I did not know that this was a way to determine the essence of things.
Quoting andrewk
Why not? If the premise "object > 1.5 m" is certain, then we can conclude with certainty that the object is taller than 1.5 m. Thus the condition is both sufficient and necessary for the conclusion. How much taller? By the same amount claimed in the premise. What if we are not certain about the premise? Then the conclusion is not certain, but this has nothing to do with the essence.
2 apples + 2 apples = 4 apples. We are certain of this principle. What if we are not certain that we have 2 apples + 2 apples? Then we are not certain that we have 4 apples. But this does not make the principle uncertain.
It is not sufficient. I don't know anybody that would describe a 1.51m human as 'tall'.
I think it would help to read up on the meaning of 'necessary and sufficient'. The wiki article is not bad.
What benefit accrues? The validity of my own particular definition of course! *Badumptss*
Arbitrarily extending word use will accrue no benefit, but I'm more interested in exploring the similarities between things like DNA, connected neurons in the brain, and digital infrastructure. These (complex) systems play fundamental roles in producing what we already do (and would) refer to as life, and while we should not expect the real world to reflect human semantics at every turn ("What's the 'essence' of life?" is an extension of whatever we arbitrarily define life to be) we do have good reason to suspect certain similarities exist between them.
For now, the best description I can muster is that life is an organism composed of hierarchies and networks of individual interacting parts which together comprise a system capable of growing in organizational complexity and anticipatory strength. They're typified by such extreme complexity that classic reductionist approaches to understanding them yield slow and painful results owing to our inability to navigate and track the extreme magnitude of their diverse and diversely interacting parts.
The OP's question "what's the difference between a living cow and dead cow" isn't the most thought provoking, but it does reference something real. The easy answer is that it's brain is no longer able to regulate it's body (or vice versa) or produce it's conscious mind. The possibly insightful answer per the above would be: a cessation of complex and organized interactions between the interconnected neurons in it's brain which no longer produces a sophisticated and emergent "consciousness". A dead cell is a cell whose DNA and various other parts cease to perform the complex and organized set of interactions which once produced it's sophisticated and emergent behavior.
It's not saying a whole lot but it's a start. Exploring "anticipatory power" as a feature of various examples of life while taking into account the complex systems approach to describing them leads to the insight that recorded data plays a fundamental role in the mechanisms which produce that anticipatory power.
I would even go so far as to say that logically, in a world of changing states dependent on causation, predictive power can only come from data reflecting previous and present states which can then be used to extrapolate future states. It might not amount to much, but it seems everything we are want to label "life" does employ recorded data in some form as a necessary part of it's ability to self-organize, anticipate, and successfully navigate it's environment.
I'm a bit proponent of things like this (life, consciousness, other things) not being true or false, but rather a sliding scale. Fire is life, but not much. Religion has more life, and grass even more. A mousetrap is conscious, but nearly as far to the low end of the scale as you can get. Something can be more conscious than a human.
A dualist often interprets that word as a Boolean property: Of having/requiring that dual relationship or not. There is no scale to that unless there is a lesser mind-stuff given to lesser things, sort of like the Aiua in Orson Scott Card's "Children of the mind" (4th book in Ender series).
Quoting VagabondSpectreIt is distinct from life. Something can be conscious but not be life (like an AI that doesn't perpetuate), or be life but not conscious (grass, bacteria). Mind you, I have that lax definition of consciousness, and consider all those things to be conscious, just not as much.
Bad way to start a paragraph trying to work out what else might be life besides Earth biology.
Life is not necessary for said complexity. Consciousness is not a factor at all. Data recording is closer to the mark, but rocks record data, and we've decided rocks are not life (or are at least far less life).
I think the complexity is perhaps relevant to consciousness, but not to life. It matters more how the data is used, and not so much how complex the mechanism is. Yes, Scientific American built a Turing machine from nothing but track levers thrown by passing trains.
Quoting VagabondSpectreA Panda's DNA also anticipates almost zero long term change in the habitat, which is why they're so endangered during the current mass extinction event. Dinosaurs were also sufficiently perfected that they were too slow to respond to a similar event (the asteroid being one of them).
Quoting VagabondSpectreSounds biological, exempting things that clearly are not 'organisms'.
For instance, suppose I was to make a small modification to a human that lets one create with minimum effort a disposable child, something that just splits off with all my education and such, but looks different and lives only a few days. It kills some rival I don't like, and perhaps dies shortly after, perhaps in jail. I am innocent and minus one rival. The legal system would need to adjust.
I am amoeba man, who splits into identical halves. I get a job (and buy a house), then split. Which keeps the job or house? Does the original identity even exist anymore? There can be no legal concept of property ownership to such a being.
A computer virus goes sentient and wants to work with/for us, for pay. We give it legal status, it does tasks and earns wages that pay for consumed resources. It becomes unethical to eradicate instances of it (why, when it can effortlessly reproduce?), but one of them commits a petty crime. Do you incarcerate it? What does that word even mean to an entity living in the cloud? Terminating it seem harsh for the minor offense.
The article was very interesting.
Quoting andrewk
You seem to forget that part of the essence of tallness is to be 'relative to X'. Be specific in the object and in X, and you will obtain a clear conclusion. If you ask "Is a 1.51 m human tall?", a reasonable person will ask "Tall relative to what? To a cat, yes; to a giraffe, no." Then you reply "Tall relative to the average human height, which is 1.5 m". Then the person says "Yes, because if the average human height is exactly 1.5 m, the a 1.51 m human is taller (more tall) than the average human height. 0.01 m taller, to be precise." Once again, the fuzziness lies not in the essence, but elsewhere.
If we don't adopt that departure from normal language use, we have to accept that there are no necessary and sufficient conditions for being 'tall relative to Gunther'. We would all agree that Laxmi, who was most recently measured as 1450mm tall, is not tall relative to Gunther, and that Song Mi, who was most recently measured as 2137mm tall, is tall relative to Gunther, but for people who were last measured with heights in the range of say 1720mm to 1820mm there is a fuzzy boundary, where no agreement could be reached as to whether the person is tall relative to Gunther.
Actually I am prepared to say that. Let's put it this way. Logically, there are only three answers when comparing the height of X and Y:
A. X is taller than Y
B. X is shorter than Y
C. X is exactly equal to Y in height.
If X = 1770.1 mm tall and Y = 1770.0 mm tall, then the right answer is A, not B or C. Logic beats popular opinion.
I'm just pointing out that the intention to procreate or go on living is not present in all examples of life. These examples of life die, but they continue to crop up.
Quoting noAxioms
By "perpetuate" do you mean "reproduce/procreate"?
I don't view procreation as a necessary feature of all "life", although it is widely present because without it life tends to die. By "perpetuate" I originally meant that the ongoing interactions of complex internal structures are themselves what give rise to the on-going process we're referring to as "life". Procreation and replication is only one of many complex behaviors that "life" and it's parts seem to perform.
Whether or not consciousness is a form of life is secondary. The way that that DNA and human neurology both facilitate complex and enduring animated patterns of interacting matter seem eminently comparable.
Quoting noAxioms
I was intentionally referring to life on earth in this case. That said I'm quite willing to throw any hypothetical life form onto my wagon. Even conscious AI's who don't reproduce.
Quoting noAxioms
Rocks are hardly sensitive instruments, let's be honest. And they don't often find themselves organized in a structure where data can be readily recorded and then retrieved using them as a base unit. That said, I can imagine life existing in some form within a vast cloud of rocks floating in space which emerges from repeating patterns of rock collisions and their resulting gravitational fields. Start with a basic pattern that replicates, wait for emergent complexity, and when a complex enough system of rocks begins to anticipate it's environment, I'll call it life.
Quoting noAxioms
Complexity is most certainly relevant to life. Can you fathom any form of life, real or hypothetical, whose internal workings could not be described as "complex"?
Quoting noAxioms
And yet a small percentage of Pandas may survive, and they may be forced to start living on more diverse diets. The genetic data resulting from the long history of panda ancestors eating other things will surely benefit them as they transition into alternative diets over individual lifetimes and over generations.
Quoting noAxioms
I'm using the term organism in a particular sense; an organ (read: organized). A defined system of interacting and inter-dependent parts that cohere to form a whole (a defined boundary, not necessarily a full internal model)
Quoting VagabondSpectreNo. If it can perpetuate without procreation (just be sufficiently immortal), it can be life. Perhaps creation of competitors is not in its best interest. Procreation is just one way to achieve this, and it is a far more efficient way to speed evolution, so that method tends to get selected over the more evolution-resistant method of immortality. It is harder (but certainly not impossible) to make improvements to an individual than to a species.
Yes, life tends to die. Something that is immortal needs a mechanism to ensure survival from major accidents, which are inevitable. There can be no single points of failure.
Quoting VagabondSpectreThey do record data readily. How else do we know the long term history of the planet? Ask the rocks. The information is stored nowhere else it seems. Their lack of USB port to download the information just means you need to learn their language if you want them to talk to you.
Quoting VagabondSpectreWe have not defined life. Banno says fire meets the requirement, and since 'unnatural' was found to not belong in my definition, I think fire is life, just a very trivial form. So there's the example of one not complex, and that lack of complexity is why most don't consider it life. If you don't agree, I think the claim of a requirement for a certain level of complexity needs to be defended.
Fire doesn't seem to partake in natural selection, but nobody has listed that as a requirement. "Sufficient complexity to support natural selection"? That would add the need for data, which your definition had, and mine did not, and which fire seems not to have.
I don't like the word 'intent'. I think bacteria intends to persist no more than does fire.
Quoting VagabondSpectreThe panda is sufficiently perfected for its niche that adaptability is all but gone. It cannot transition faster than its environment is changing, and will likely only stick around in captivity as do so many other sufficiently cute creatures. Possibly not, since they don't seem to thrive well in captivity. A bird of paradise has the same problem.
Quoting VagabondSpectreOK. Is a computer virus an organism? Are there really 'parts' to it? I guess there are, just like there are parts to DNA that serve different function.
The only difference between a computer virus and a biological one is that the former is known to be an intelligently designed thing. That suggests that biological primitives might be as well. Biology seems to have a better than even chance of having fallen here from the cosmos rather than having originated here. If the former, perhaps it was engineered by (as opposed to evolved from) some non-biological predecessor, but then that just defers the origin question further back, asking how those predecessors came to be. Somewhere, something had to happen just by chance, given non-deistic assumptions. Even the ID community has backed off on the life thing. The teleological argument now puts the tunings of our universe at a far lower probability than the odds of life appearing naturally.
We're both operating fast and loose with the definition of life, so let's not forget that all I'm trying to do is compare and explore given examples of "life" to see what similarities there are rather than to qualify individual examples of life from the starting definition.
A human can be both alive and suicidal at the same time; they're not mutually exclusive, which is the minor point I tried to make.
Quoting noAxioms
Here you're referencing life more as I view it. It's a whole, a thing, with continued existence. Procreation is an excellent way for these things to perpetuate their existence across generations, but procreation is an act of life rather than it's defining characteristic. A sterilized gerbil will never reproduce, but it most certainly can be considered alive.
Quoting noAxioms
It has to do with the way the data is organized. The way data in the human brain is organized itself facilitates the mechanical extrapolation and development of consciousness. The way data contained in DNA is organized within the nucleus of a cell is what itself provides mechanical intelligent instruction to the rest of the cell.
Data leftover from the earth's geological history is like parts of story scattered and mixed about. It's there to be remarked upon by discerning minds, but it doesn't do anything otherwise. Data coiled into a strand of DNA and within a cell functions as an instructive data set for a greater machine with the uncanny ability to anticipate it's environment; very different from arbitrarily layered rock. There's more data in the universe than we will ever collect, but what's notable is that we collect data and assimilate into a peculiar kind of organizational structure which we then continuously employ and interact with.
Quoting noAxioms
I'm not asking you to define life, I'm asking you to give me an example of anything which could plausibly be agreed to as life which also happens to be uncomplicated. I don't have a good answer as to why life needs to be complex, it just is. Maybe because simple things never do anything intelligent. I don't know, the answer is complex.
Which is why I'm happy to lay the statement's head in the guillotine and agree to pull the rope as soon as I can find even a single example of life which defies the description of "complex".
Fire is not life, it's a chemical reaction we call combustion. It doesn't anticipate it's environment, it consumes it as fuel. It doesn't display intelligence or behave in a manner conducive to it's survival. It chaotically consumes what is available to it and then is extinguished in a predictable manner.
If you really want to hinge your definition of life on "natural vs unnatural" go ahead, but try actually defining those two terms coherently and you'll see what I mean. The risk of equivocation is too constant with the term "unnatural".
Quoting noAxioms
I would be very interested in associating natural selection with data recording (the relationship between the two notably giving rise to "complexity"), just so long as I can reconcile the idea with human and AI consciousness. Toward that end, perhaps this loop is adequate to describe the way DNA, and both human and AI intelligence learns:
Quoting noAxioms
Here are some of the intelligent behaviors of single-cellular life pulled from wikipedia:
Quoting noAxioms
Many creatures go extinct instead of successfully reproducing long enough to change into something else (when pressures force change). Genepool's learn primarily or solely through trial and error it seems. When something works, variations upon it are then tested (reproduction), when something doesn't work, no variations upon it get tested by default (extinction).
Quoting noAxioms
There are decidedly more differences between a biological virus and a computer virus. By comparison the computer virus is simple and easily understood. some of them might take a team of computer scientists to decipher (and therefore a team of them to make), but their behavior is predictable and within finite bounds. Biological viruses on the other hand already display microbial intelligence beyond the complexity of any computer virus that could possibly yet exist. A sophisticated enough computer virus however, sure, but our computers would need to be much more sophisticated to provide the necessary environment for it to thrive (it would need lots of computing power and space).
I don't think that anything suggests intelligent design though, even the fine tuning of our universe.
A biologist would define life semiotically. That is, a line is crossed when something physical, like a molecule, can function as something informational, like a message.
At the simplest level, that is a bit of mechanism like a switch. A recipe read off a strand of DNA gets made into a molecular message that then changes the conformation of a protein complex and leads to some chemical reaction taking place.
Of course, we then want to think of life in terms of individual organisms - systems that are closed circuits of signals. There has to be some little sealed world of messages being exchanged that thus gives us a sense of there being a properly located state of purpose. An organism is a collection of semiotic machinery talking to itself in a way that makes for a definite inside and outside.
So what that says is even the simplest semiotics already has to make that leap to a holistic complexity. It becomes definitional of an organism that it has its particular own purpose, and thus it individuates itself in meaningful fashion from the wider world. A network of switches is the minimal qualification. And that is why a virus seems troubling. We can't really talk about it as an "it" because it is not self-sustaining in that minimal fashion. It is a bare message that hijacks other machinery.
Computers then fail the definition for life to the degree that they are not organismic. Do they have their own purpose for being - one individuated from their makers? Do they regulate their own physics through their messages? (Clearly not with a normal computer which is designed so the software lives in a different world to its hardware.)
So the semiotic or organismic view defines life and mind fairly clearly by that boundary - the moment a molecule becomes a message. But for that to happen, a messaging network with some closed local purpose must already be in place. To be a sign implies there is some existent habit of interpretation. So already there is irreducible complexity.
This can seem a troubling chicken and egg situation. On the other hand, it does allow one to treat life as mind-like and intelligent or anticipatory down to the most primitive level. When biologists talk about information processing, they really do mean something that is purposeful and meaningful to an organism itself.
'Tall' can still be used as a relation, because saying "Y is tall relative to X" is the same as saying "Y is taller than X". Thus 'tall' and 'taller' have very much the same essence in this case. Also, 'tall' should always be relative to X if we want to say something that is objective and accurate.
Now I agree that in an everyday conversation, people may say "He is tall" (with no relation). In which case, this is more an expression of the subject than a description of the object, and there are indeed fuzzy boundaries to the word. It follows that not all words have essences; but some do, as is the case for "taller", or "tall" when saying "tall relative to X".
I am considered tall (probably over 80% of all humans, so there's one plausible X: a certain unstated percentile of height over some implied reference class), yet the pin-oak in my yard is twice my height and is not tall at all. Different context, so different X, both of them fuzzy in this case. I can't think of a non-fuzzy case where X is not explicitly stated.
Likewise the computer virus seems to be life, living off the machinery, but not containing that machinery itself any more than I contain the machinery to photosynthesize. Fire on the other hand is not life. No semiotics that I can see.
The biologists have a pretty good definition, and it applies to non-biological forms.
I think 'intelligence' is about as fuzzy a term as 'life' or 'unnatural', 'intent' and 'consciousness' and we should avoid the terms. Apo has the right term. Semiotics is the difference between the data in DNA and the data in rocks.
You just described humans. The difference seems again to be the semiotics. Yes, I agree that fire is not life.
This one is pretty cool, bordering on the benefit we get from sex.
Much of your list shows that it isn't entirely remarkable at all that multicellular life forms evolved.
So I am not too fussed about whether to define a virus as alive. It is OK that it is on the margins of the definition in being a genetic fragment that can hijack proper organismic complexity. Problems only arise in thinking that the simplicity of a virus might make it a stepping stone precursor that marks the evolutionary path from the abiotic to the biotic. I mean you wouldn't treat cancer as a simpler lifeform, or an amputated leg.
Then you are self sustaining in the "closed for causality" fashion I specified. You have your own respiratory machinery for burning or oxidating electron sources. You don't hijack the respiratory machinery of plants. You take that intricate living machinery and metabolically burn it. It's usually pretty dead by the time it gets into your stomach. A virus needs a living host. You just need chemical bonds you can crack for their energy.
A computer virus is an analogy for a real virus, but computers - of the regular Turing Machine kind - are nothing like life. As I said, they lack the qualities that define an organism. And thinking in terms of organisms does usefully sharpen up what we - or biologists - mean by life.
Life (like mind) still has echoes of a vitalistic ontology - the presence of some generic spirit that infects the flesh to make it reactive. Talking about organisms ensures that structural criteria - like being closed for causality in terms of embodying a purpose with efficient means - are top of mind. We are paying attention to the process of how it is done rather than treating life as some vague reactive matter.
I wouldn't say a regular computer is alive, but a (true)artificial intelligence that exists within the environment of digital infrastructure (with inputs/outputs) I think would qualify.
I would be interested to hear your thoughts on the abstraction inherent in the semiotic approach versus reductionism as it applies to the study of complex systems. Here's what I mean (and if it makes sense):
I do hold that the general thrust of reductionism (the whole can be described by dissembling it down to it's simpler parts) should apply to even the most complex forms of life, but since the computational requirements for doing so are well beyond the limits of the human mind, we're forced into partially superficial analytical approaches. When we think of computer data as being a 1 or a 0, that is an abstraction of what it really is, which are physical states of sequentially positioned physical memory cells (it's an abstraction that loses no descriptive power though because there are only two states and their only behavior is to switch or be read in a query). It's impractical to build a program by thinking of the physical states of memory cells directly (just as it is impractical to write code in binary directly) and so we abstract basic chunks of binary code as functions or commands in computer language which increasingly becomes more abstract from what it really is: a massive network of two-state switches. The way we program is a compromise on perfection because to program in the base language directly (and therefore with optimal efficiency) would involve too many interacting parts to consciously chart and navigate; a programming language is therefore like an artistic strategy for creating a function..
This affliction seems rampant in our genetic science: the 4 base states of DNA (A-G-C-T) are beyond us as a comprehensible base unit of data, and so we're relegated to identifying "genetic markers" (very long ordered strings of the specific 4 base units) which we reckon are vaguely related to specific heritable traits like height and skin color (and everything else that is heritable and therefore the result of DNA). We see the 1's and 0's of DNA, but it's all gobbledygook until we zoom out and start identifying words whose direct physical effects we then mostly use statistics to guess at.
For now, the art of cataloguing genetic markers and seeing what physical traits correlate with their prevalence in specific organisms is the best we can do to decode the data contained in DNA. It's analogous to a strategy (of prediction), just like coding in a higher language without understanding how the pre-packaged commands actually work.
This seems to be a feature of trying to study any complex system. Take chess strategy as an example: there is an objectively best chess strategy for any given situation, but in order to actually discover or know it analytically would be beyond the computational limits of all human computers and human brains combined. Instead of confronting this irreducible complexity with a reductionist analytical approach, chess players reduce irreducible complexity into stratagems which fall short of perfection.
What I know about machine learning also seems to reflect this reality. We're able to program a machine that's capable of learning in a rudimentary sense, but the network of individual bits of data which emerges within that environment is too complex to itself be consciously understood on that most basic level (as the reductionist approach strives toward). It's only by approximating the behavior and flow of data within such networks as a whole that we can even begin to put together how these data bits actually interact and co-relate in meaningful ways.
I'm very interested to get to the bottom of how anticipatory networks are structured, but I'm worried at that depth the inherent complexity makes the bigger picture impossible to see.
I would suggest that a great deal of the 'talking about organisms' that has been done up until recently, was 'deflationary' in respect to the idea that life itself couldn't be accounted for in purely mechanistic or physical terms. The attempt was to forever banish the ghost (geist, gist) from the machine - but it failed, because there really is an ontological distinction between living and non-living things. And that ontological distinction becomes, in practice, a form of dualism.
The fact that data contained in DNA exists in an environment where it interacts in a complex network (and hierarchy of networks) of interactions (which form a coherent organism), and that this data relates or is pertinent/related to the behavior/internal function of this organism and it's environment is what makes the data different; it's what makes it relevant to consider from the perspective of semiotics in the first place...
I'm not wholly opposed to the use of a word like "unnatural", but it's only as meaningful as we define it, this word in particular because some of it's connotations are quite vague (including some moral normative connotations). "Not typically seen" is a fair enough start, but I do recommend to opt for words like uncanny, singular, peculiar, interesting, or even "cool", if only because they're less easily equivocated with possible alternate meanings. If these are indeed the meanings you intended, then they're not entirely central/helpful anyhow, but they have their time and place..
To sum that up, the reductionist view you just expressed hinges on the belief that the physics or hardware of the system is a collection of stable parts. Even it we are talking about circuits that can be switched, they stay in whatever state they were last left in. You can build up a hierarchy of complexity - such as the layers of microcode and instruction sets - because the hardware operates deterministically. It is fixed, which allows the software to flex. The hardware can support any programme without being the slightest bit bothered by anything the software is doing.
But biology is different in that life depends on physical instability. Counter-intuitively, life seeks out physical processes that are critical, or what used to be called at the edge of chaos. So if you take any protein or cellular component (apart from DNA with its unusual inertness), as a molecule it will be always on the edge of falling apart ... and then reforming. It will disassociate and get back together. The chemical milieu is adjusted so that the structural components are poised on that unstable edge.
And the big trick is that the cell can then use its genetic information to give the unstable chemistry just enough of a nudge so the parts rebuild themselves slightly more than they fall apart. This is the semiotic bit. Life is information that sends the signal to hang together. And it is the resulting flux of energy through the system - the dissipative flux - that keeps the componentry rebuilding.
So computers have stable hardware that the software can forget about and just crunch away. If you are equating the program with intelligent action, it is all happening in an entirely different world. That is why it needs biological creatures - us - to write the programmes and understand what they might be saying about the world. To the programmes, the world is immaterial. They never have to give a moment's thought to stopping the system of switches falling apart because they are not being fed by a flux of entropy.
Life is then information in control of radical physical instability. That is what it thrives on - physics that needs to be pointed in a direction by a sign, the molecules that function as messsges. It has to be that way as cellular components that were stable would not respond to the tiny nudges that signals can deliver.
This leads into the other counter-intuitive aspect of life and mind - the desire for a general reduction in actual information in a living system.
Again, with computation, more data, more detail, seems like a good thing. As you say, to model a physical process, the level of detail we need seems overwhelming. We feel handicapped because to get it right, we have to represent every atom, every event, every possibility. In principle, universal computation could do that, given infinite resources. So that is a comfort. But in practice, we worry that our representations are pretty sparse. So we can make machines that are somewhat alive, or somewhat intelligent. However to complete the job, we would have to keep adding who knows how many bits.
The point is that computation creates the expectation that more is better. However when it comes to cellular control over falling apart componentry, semiotics means that the need is to reduce and simplify. The organism wants to be organised by the simplest system of signals possible. So information needs to be erased. Learning is all about forgetting - reducing what needs to be known to get things done to the simplest habits or automatic routines.
This then connects to the third way biology is not like computation - and that is the way life and mind are forward modelling systems. Anticipatory in their processes. So a computer is input to output. Data arrives, gets crunched, and produces an output. But brains guess their input so as to be able to ignore what happens when it happens. That way anything surprising or novel is what will automatically pop out. In the same way, the genes are a memory that anticipates the world the organism will find itself in. Of course the genes only get it 99% right. Selection then acts to erase those individuals with faulty information. The variety is reduced so the gene pool gets better at anticipation.
So life is unlike the reductionist notion of machinery in seeking out unstable componentry (as that gives a system of signals something to control). And at the "software" or informational level, the goal is to create the simplest possible control routines. Information needs to be erased so that signal can be distinguished from noise. It is just the same as when we draw maps. The simpler the better. Just a few lines and critical landmarks to stand for the complexity of the world.
Sorry for the late response on this comment. It sounds like you have the same position as some of us in this post: that simple life of a thing is nothing but the proper functioning of the thing's parts. It follows that a factory, car engine, or even a fire have simple life. That is also my position for a simple life, like simple cells.
Quoting Cavacava
Why is that? If we are able to produce life from material (matter and energy) only, then life is made of material only. Nothing can be created out of nothing. Note I am not including here a human being, which may not only have a life, but also a soul.
Hi and thank you for your reply. Most of the information I read suggest that the main components of what comprise life will probably have to come together all at the same time in an emergent formation. I think this means that there may be no set formula for achieving life, and probably the zillions of micro chemical/physical events will have to be just so for it to emerge. Scientists may be able to make it, but that is different than being able to explain how it ends up emerging. I speculate it might not be possible to explain.
The kind of computation to which I refer isn't just basic computation; "deep learning" is an example of the type of computation that I would compare to life because the organizational structure of it's data points (a structure which emerges as the machine learns on it's own) is well beyond the complexity threshold of appearing to operate non-deterministically.
What exactly does it mean for a system to behave non-deterministically? The idea that the same event playing out twice could have more than one possible outcome seems to be the gist, and I do understand that capacity for variance is necessary in the processes of life, but I have a hard time accepting what it means for the reductionist in me to assent to that description. I do understand the non-linearity of development in complex and chaotic systems. Events may still be pre-determined but they may not predicted in advance because each sequential material state in the system contains irreducible complexity, so it must be played out or simulated to actually see what happens. (like solving an overly-large equation piece by piece because it cannot be simplified).
Because so many parts of the system are poised to change, it has extraordinary sensitivity, and so it's range of possible outcomes from it's initial states is too vast to consciously reckon. The chaos and instability of simulated neural networks seem to achieve this.
Quoting apokrisis
In a way advanced machine learning such as "deep learning" learning simulates information in control of itself to a high degree. It's possible that we will indeed come up with the design for a learning machine which can become smart enough to take physical control over it's own existence (if we give it sufficient apparatus to do so). Analogies for physical instabilities, controlled by signals instead of chemical nudges, exist readily in the form of the emergent interconnected complexity in the physical network of memory cells (complex/dynamic memory cells themselves being composed of groups of two-state switches), and the complex ramifications that different states have upon various forms of output.
Quoting apokrisis
With calculation and simulation, precision and accuracy (more data) are definitely important, but when it comes to the ergonomics of computer code, it's generally understood that less is more. We try to refine data structure and algorithms to where they achieve better results in shorter run-times. The struggle to write the fastest/most-robust/most secure program is a battle with complexity because there are so many different ways to achieve the same end result (hence the plethora of coding strategies). A smaller and simpler line of code which performs the same function as a larger complicated one is seen as more powerful and more desirable in every way.
When it comes to advanced machine learning, the way finite numbers of memory cells are linked together (and their content) causes the anticipatory strength of the overall AI to grow because the organization of the data itself is growing in complexity rather than a traditional bifurcating decision tree merely growing in size. In this way learning machines do actually simplify and intelligently organize data rather than just collect more of it.
Quoting apokrisis
So far we've only been able to design learning machines which can learn to perform very specific tasks, but the results of their learning make them better at those specific tasks than humans ever could be. They lack certain functions and apparatus that would be required for them to perceive the world around them as an on-going input and react to it as life would (try to survive and thrive mostly) but I think we will eventually get there.
If we built command and control pathways into machines for a sufficiently sophisticated learning AI (one which is capable of more broad learning) which gave it the ability to perceive, manipulate, and learn from the external environment directly, then hypothetically it could learn to become concerned with actually maintaining and expanding it's own existence in every detail.
Quoting apokrisis
A hydraulic piston in a way represents instability; a slight addition of hydraulic fluid expresses itself as drastic change in the overall mechanism. Since there are only two states, this instability is easy for us to understand and make use of. We don't typically build machines out of highly dynamic parts (one's with many internal states and many effects/behaviors) because we're unable to design coherent functions around such complicating variables.
Machines which we build using mostly two-state parts with well defined effects are extraordinarily simple compared to those which seem to emerge on their own (using dynamic parts such as inter-connected memory cells with many states or strings of pairs of molecules which exhibit many different behaviors depending on their order). Even while I recognize the limits on comprehending such machines using a reductionist approach, I cannot help but assume these limitations are primarily owing to the strength of the human mind.
Snowflakes and other crystals build on their "recorded" shape. It's not a bad definition, but I don't think it gets there.
And that's the point I want to make; that when someone provides us with a definition we go through a process of verifying it; but what is it that we are verifying it against? We presume to be able to say if the definition is right or wrong; against what are be comparing it? Not against some other earlier definition, but against our common usage.
And if we already accept that this common usage is the test of our definition, why bother witht eh definition at all?
Edit: Indeed, you seem to accept this in your next post.
So a height can only be given within a certain boundary; as witha ny measure it is subject to error. So A may be 1770.1mm to within 5mm; while B is 1770.0 mm to within 5mm.
Now who is taller? Does that question even make sense?
So my argument is that essential to a semiotic definition of life is it is information which seeks out material instability. It needs chemical structure poised on a knife edge as that is what then allows the information to act as the determining influence. That is the trick. Information can be the immaterial part of an organism that gives the hardware just enough of a material nudge to tip it in the desired directions.
So yes, neural computer architectures try to simulate that. They apply some universal learning algorithm to a data set. With reinforcement, they can erase response variety and arrive at the shortest path to achieve some goal - like win a computer game. There is something life-like there.
But note that you then think that to become more life-like would involve a scaling up - add more information processing to head in the direction of becoming actually conscious or intelligent.
I instead would be looking to scale down.
Your DeepMind is still a simulation running on stable hardware and thus merely software insulated from the real world of entropic material processes. Sure, we can imagine the simulation being coupled to the world by some system of actuators or mechanical linkages. The program could output a signal - like "fire the missile". That could flick a switch that triggers the action. But it is essential that the hardware doing this job is utterly deterministic and not at all unstable. Who wants nukes hooked up to wobbly switches?
So while DeepMind might build a simulation of a learning system that feeds off the elimination of variety - and thus has to deal with its own artificial instability, the catastrophic forgetting problem - it still depends on deterministic devices outside its control to interface with the world. A different bunch of engineers is responsible for fabricated the reliable actuators that can take an output and turn it into the utterly reliable trip of the switch. I mean it makes no difference to the DeepMind computation whether anything actually happens after it has output its signal. A physical malfunction of the switch is not its responsibility as some bunch of humans built that part of the total system. DeepMind hasn't got the wits to fix hardware level faults.
But for life/mind, the organism is sensitive to its grounding materiality all the way down to the quasi-classical nanoscale. At the level of synapses and dendrites, it is organic. The equilibrium balance between structural breaking down vs structural re-constructing is a dynamic being influenced by the global state of the system. If I pay attention to a dancing dot on a screen, molecular-level stuff is getting tipped in one direction or another. The switch itself is alive and constantly having to be remade, and thus constantly also in a state of anticipatory learning. The shape some membrane or cytoskeletal organisation was in a moment ago is either going to continue to be pretty much still right or competitively selected for a change.
So my argument is that you are looking in the wrong direction for seeking a convergence of the artificial with the real. Yes, more computational resources would be necessary to start to match the informational complexity of brains. But that isn't what convergence looks like. Instead, the technology has to be pushed in the other direction - down to the level where any reliance on outside help for hardware stability has been squeezed out of the picture and replaced by an organismic self-reliance in directing the transient material flows on which life - as dissipative structure - depends.
Life and mind must be able to live in the world as information regulating material instability for some remembered purpose. It has to be able to stand on its own two feet entirely to qualify as life (as I said about a virus).
But that is not to say that DeepMind and neural network architectures aren't a significant advance as technology. Simulated minds could be very useful as devices we insert into tasks we want to automate. And perhaps you could argue that future AI will be a new form of life - one that starts at some higher level of semiosis where the entropic and material conditions are quite different in being engineered to be stable, rather than being foundationally unstable.
So yes, there may be "life" beyond life if humans create the right hardware conditions by their arbitrary choice. But here I am concerned to make clear exactly what is involved in such a step.
Quoting VagabondSpectre
It still needs to be remembered that mathematical chaos is a model. So we shouldn't base metaphysical conclusions on a model without taking account of how the model radically simplifies the world - by removing, for instance, its instabilities or indeterminancies.
So a reductionist takes a model that can construct "chaos" deterministically at face value. It does appear to capture much about how the world works ... so long as the view is grainy or placed at a sufficient distance in terms off dynamical scale. If you average, you can pretend that spontaneous fluctuations have been turned into some steady-state blur of action. So while analytic techniques fail (the real world is still a mess of chance or indeterminism), numeric techniques just take the assumed average and get on with the computation.
So chaos modelling is about eliminated actual complexity - of the semiotic kind - and replacing it with mere complexity. The system in question is granted known boundary conditions and some set of "typical" initial conditions are assumed. With the simulated world thus sealed at both ends, it becomes safe for calculation. All you need is enough hardware to run the simulation in the desired level of detail.
Quoting VagabondSpectre
This is in fact the big surprise from modern biophysics - at the ground level, life is far more a bunch of machinery than we ever expected. Fifty years ago, cells seemed like bags of chemical soup into which genes threw enzymes to make reactions go in desired directions. Now it is being discovered that there are troops of transport molecules that drag stuff about by walking them along cytoskeletal threads. Membranes are full of mechanical pumps. ATP - the universal energy source - is charged up by being cranked through a rotating mill.
So in that sense, life is mechanism all the way down. It is far less some soup of chemistry than we expected. Every chemical reaction is informationally regulated.
But the flip side of that is that this then means life is seeking out material instability at its foundational scale - as only the unstable could be thus regulated by informational mechanism.
If you are at all interested, Peter Hoffman's Life's Ratchet is a brilliant read on the subject. Nick Lane has done a number of good books too.
So there are two things here. You are talking about the modelling of informational-level complexity - the kind of intricate patterns that can be woven by some network of switches regulated by some set of rules. And there is a ton of fun mathematics that derives from that, from cellular automata and Ising models, to all the self-organising synchrony and neural network stuff. However that all depends on switches that are already behaving like switches - ie: they are deterministic and they don't add to the total complexity by "having a mind of their own".
But I am talking about life and mind as a semiotic process where the hardware isn't deterministic. In fact, it mustn't be deterministic if that determinism is what the information processing side of the equation is hoping to supply.
And where are our pretty software models to simulate that kind of world? Or rather, where are our actual "machines" that implement that semiotic notion as some actual device? In technological terms, we can do a fantastic amount of things at the software simulation level. But can we do anything life-like or mind-like at the self-assembling hardware actuality level?
Hell no. It's only been about 10 years that biology has even begun to grasp that this is such an issue.
Because obviously we call for a definition because we want to narrow that common usage in some useful fashion. We want to eliminate some sense of vagueness that is in play by taking a more formally constrained view. And that has to start by a reduction of information. We have to put our finger on what is most essential. Then we have some positive proposition that we can seek to verify (or at least fail to falsify via acts of measurement).
If we accept common usage, then yes, no problem. The usage already works well enough. But common usage is always in question - at least for a scientist or philosopher who believes knowledge is not some static state of affairs but the limit of a shared community of inquiry.
Isn't one of the glaringly obvious points, however, that all machines (and computers) are built artefacts? Every single one, there is no exception. So even where the mechanist and computational allegories for living systems stack up, there's absolutely no explanation for how such machines and computers could be spontaneously formed; whereas that seems an obvious attribute of characteristic of living systems, which not only spontaneously form, but also spontaneously develop to higher levels of complexity.
There is no such thing as "common usage", you are making an unjustified generalization. I use a word the way I want to use it, you use it the way you want to use it, and each time one of us uses it, it is used in a different way from the last time.
The "test" of a definition cannot be a referral to "common usage" because I will refer to usage which supports one definition, and you will refer to usage which supports another definition. What good will that do us? I will insist on using the word one way while you will insist on using it another. To be useful in any sort of logical proceeding, or argumentation, a definition must be based in agreement.
"Common usage" is a just fiction. It implies that there are some sort of agreements, or conventions, which create this commonality, but none exist. Therefore the claim that there is such a thing as "common usage" is a misleading deception. There are no agreements behind "common usage", and any claim of convention is fictitious. So there is nothing to conform that usage and therefore no formal commonality. Reference to "common usage" is reference to a non-existent entity and utterly useless.
If you want to say something useful, then bring up some examples of usage. That is real "common usage". But each example will be different from the last, so to produce any sort of generalization will require a synthesis of essential features from each of those instances of usage.
I think the appropriate question is, could viruses replicate sans life? As far as I know the answer to that is 'no'. They might exist, like the Andromeda Strain, floating around in interstellar gas clouds, but until they encounter a living, breathing host, they can't actually do anything. So whether they're alive can remain a moot point - they're dependent on living organisms.
He said...
Quoting Banno
But any biologist would tell him that is ridiculous. :)
So a computer virus would be life, but not necessarily alive. A full self-contained machine-organism responsible for all aspects of maintenance and persistence I guess would be alive. Suppose we dropped such entities on a planet without biology, and they lost their original task and just evolved from there. They'd eventually evolve to wonder about their own origins and would consider it obvious that at some point a most basic form was a spontaneous accident.
Quoting WayfarerHumans also cannot replicate sans life. We have much more of the machinery of replication built into us, and are 'alive' in the sense that we function in some entropic way. But I am just as dependent on the external machinery (or at least the byproducts of it) as the virus. Apo did point out a clear distinction of dependence on the machinery itself vs us being dependent on the byproducts only.
I see. So scientists may agree on the direct cause of the creation of life, that is, the right ingredients at the right settings, but may differ on the explanation or cause of that cause. And the reason is the high improbability for all the conditions to be just right, is that correct?
From this information, I see only two logically possibilities for the original cause:
1. random event from nature, despite the improbability
2. not-random event, that is, intelligent design
The answer in this case is unclear, but the challenge lies in the data, not in the essence of the word 'tall'. Here is the proof: Remove the fuzziness from the data, say A is 10 m tall to within 5 mm, and B is 2 m tall to within 5 mm. Who is taller? Clearly A.
Your case gives an unclear answer, and my case gives a clear answer. The only difference between the two cases is in the data, not in the essence of 'tall' because the same essence is referred to in both cases. Therefore that cause of the unclearness is in the data, not in the essence of 'tall'.
Yes, that's my position and I doubt life as a non-random event. I think life must be a potentiality of matter, to be alive something must have a form that separates it from its environment, a way to reproduce itself and an active metabolism...spores, virus and whatever that do not have active metabolisms, can only be said to be potentially alive, until they are revived, my opinion.
Life is the property of a living thing which distinguishes it as alive rather than not alive; if it has life it is alive. Would could you possibly mean by "the virus has life, but it is not alive"? That seems completely contradictory.
I personally suspect Earth life originated elsewhere and fell from the cosmos, but that doesn't solve the problem, it just gives you a lot more diverse places and conditions where the original improbable dice roll came up lucky, and was perhaps more probable.
Perhaps, as Cavacava points out, it is the difference between potentiality and actuality? This would differentiate a virus from a cell, and still differentiate a virus from a rock, as the former has potentiality and the latter has no potentiality.
A dead cow in a field is an example of life, but is not alive. A live cow might still be created from one, but not the same cow. My clock is alive, but is not life. Alive just means the parts are currently operating (not broken, and not completely dormant). It is a fuzzy definition of 'alive', sure. You might choose to apply the term only to a life form (cow) that might be dead or alive, but the term seems to work for non-living things.
Not if the designer is God, the uncaused causer. But I agree that we should apply occam's razor and postpone this hypothesis until all the simpler hypotheses have been refuted first.
As for having more probability outside of the cosmos hypothesis: Is that realistic? My understanding is that the laws of chemistry are called laws because they apply in all environments, not just in an earthly environment.
None of this makes any sense to me. How is a dead cow an example of life? It was alive, but no longer is, so there is no life there. It is not an example of life. How is your clock alive? Alive means to have life, to be living, it does not mean to have working parts. That's a nonsense definition of alive.
What do you mean by "the term seems to work for non-living things"? Do you mean that it works for the purpose of assigning "alive" to non-living things. But that's nonsense. What's the point in having a definition which works for creating nonsense?
I don't think so. A virus couldn't replicate outside a host, in that sense is dependent on there being host organisms in order to replicate.
Just define virus as the infected cell - the whole thing of the living highjacked organism turned into a viral factory. Then the inert DNA particle we traditionally identify as an individual virus is the virion - the transmitted genetic package much like a bacterial plasmid or eukaryote sperm.
Quoting apokrisis
What's the issue with viruses? Why would one not consider a virus to be a form of life?
Quoting noAxioms
I agree that there is an issue with functioning parts, but a living thing does not have to have its parts functioning in order to be actually alive. Parts can go into a mode where they have the potential to be active, but are not active at the present time. So a seed is generally considered to be alive, though it is not active, it is in a state of suspended activity.
But since a seed is spawned from another living being, the question would be at what time does the seed become a separate living being, and cease being a part of the other living being which spawned it. And if this question cannot be answered, the assumption that there are separate, individual living beings is thrown into doubt. It may not be that we are really separate beings from our parents and our children.
Quoting Samuel Lacrampe
Living things have different potentials, and the potentials need not be active all the time, yet these things are still considered to be alive.
Again, the issue that I raised was Banno's claim we can determine such questions without a definition which captures the essence of what makes the actual difference.
Clearly common usage finds viruses a confusing border-line case. And a tighter definition in terms of infected cell vs inert particle then focuses the debate in useful fashion. It offers the sharper ontic boundary we seek when we can contrast virus and virion.
...again, there need be no essential features.
That's only if the claim that there is such a thing as "common usage" is a justified claim. But as I explained, to create such a generalization, to support this notion of "common usage", requires determining the essential features of all the many different instances of usage. If there is no such essential features, there is no such thing as "common usage".
How do you deter min that you have collected all the "essential features of all the many different instances of usage" in order to show that you have correctly identified the essence?
By looking to usage.
Essences beg the question. It's use all the way down.
You don't, and can't, identify such an essence. That's why I claim that "common usage" is a fiction. You can look at all the different instances of usage all you want, and identify similarities, but this still will not provide you with the basis for a generalized "common usage".
And yet you previously claimed:Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
So from where do you derive whatever you call the "essence"?
The same old pragmatic one. We can measure the truth of what we claim to believe.
Meanwhile on Mars we are looking for "signs of life". IF we can not decide what life is here, THEN how will we know that we have, or have not found life on Mars -- or on one of the moons of Saturn, or anywhere else?
All, or most all life on earth does, but MUST all life on earth utilize RNA and/or DNA? Suppose we found "something" that didn't seem to be a machine (it's soft and squishy) moving around and, after taking it apart, we discover it doesn't have RNA and/or DNA? Could it be life? How would we recognize "life" without DNA or RNA?
Or, back on Mars let's say it's not moving, is hard and kind of dry, does seem to have a lot of organic compounds (like proteins), and seems to have a particular shape (like, there are a dozen of them and they all look alike). The objects seem to be annoyingly and persistently indifferent to us.
How would NASA go about deciding that they were or were not "life"?
Or, let's say that on one of the wet moons of Saturn a nano-probe finds some stringy fibrous stuff in the liquid (whatever the liquid is) that seems to be slightly reactive (it twitches when a light passes through it). There's no DNA or RNA in it. Does that mean it's just some sort of mineralized fiber floating around?
It seems like NASA is looking for what we have here (don't know how they could do otherwise).
But if an essence is understood to be the necessary and sufficient characteristics, then it is not extensible in this way.
The scope of what is considered to constitute an organism.
It sounds like you are asking what is the use of finding the essence of words? It is very useful when it comes to validating or refuting an argument. For an argument can be refuted in three ways:
1. Finding ambiguity in the terms used
2. Finding a false premise
3. Finding a logical fallacy from the premises to the conclusion
Knowing the essence of words is needed for 1 and helps for 2.
With a tighter biophysical definition of life, we would measure for evidence of an entropic flux being regulated by replicating information, and not merely the presence of information produced by replication.
So rightfully, the virion is not alive by this definition. And this definition captures the metaphysical essence of what it takes to be "alive" - metabolism+replication.
I'm baffled by what you seem to find so baffling about this. You seem to have embarked on some anti-essentialist rant without thinking the issues through.
Is there some reason a sharper definition of living doesn't make a difference when it comes to viruses? You are implying that is your position. So in what way do you mean?
The common folk may indeed think a viral infection is an evil humour or malignant spirit as a conventionalised alternative. But would you still want to insist it is linguistic usage all the way down or would you instead want to suggest there might be some actual fact of the matter?
Let's take care not to confuse meaning and essence. Sure, looking to the meaning of the words used in an argument is important, as you say.
What I am objecting to is the notion of an essence, as it is usually construed.
Where do you look, in order to determine that metabolism and replication are necessary and sufficient for life?
Presumably, at things that are alive.
It follows that you already know which things are alive before you set out this posited essence.
And indeed, most competent speakers of English will be able to tell what is alive from what is dead without reference to metabolism and replication.
That is the entirety of my objection to the framing of the question "What is life?" in terms of essences.
Uh, yeah. Just like folk once knew the mountains and rivers and stars were alive.
Quoting Banno
Yup. And even merely as an epistemological point, that is trite.
So as humans we always find ourselves in the middle of some pragmatically-justified linguistic usage. Words work to structure our ontological expectations. Whatever follows is merely a more telling refinement of our language. That's obvious.
But the issue at stake is the goal of inquiry - and whether it has some direction that ultimately targets ontological reality in an essentialist fashion.
If you believe knowledge is merely socially constructed belief, then whatever stories we make up are whatever stories we make up. Refining our terms is not going to lead to any ultimate truths about existence.
But science does ask after the abstract essence of things because historically it does appear to get us closer to the facts of the matter. This may be indirect realism - as science also understands it is modelling. But at least its a realism that can hold its head up by neither being naive, nor collapsing into solipsism.
As usual, your approach appears to leave you being simultaneously naive realist and transcendent solipsist. Not a good look.
Yep, it's a simple point. So why all the fuss?
Quoting apokrisis
So you say. Naive realist I'm fine with; but what is a transcendent solipsist?
New Zealand River granted Legal Rights as Person
You seem to forget what you were originally trying to argue....
Quoting Banno
Clearly you now accept this was confused as we do seek definitions that introduce new measurables.
Our earlier "common usage" definitions come into question particularly when we come up against borderline classifications - like: "is a virus alive?". The vagueness or uncertainty we feel when answering is a sign that we now need to sharpen our definition by suggesting some new symmetry-breaking or dichotomous fork in the road by which we can measure what is what. An infected cell goes down this path to join the living, the virion fragment goes down the other path to join the class of the not alive, or whatever.
So we want to know as usual when facing indecision, what counts as the essential difference? What is the difference that makes a difference. And so, what were all the in fact inessential differences that might have been clouding our earlier "common usage" conception?
You talk as if you can know the world without making measurements. One only has to look and one sees (ignoring the fact that seeing the world is the forming of a phenomenological state that is our interpreted sign of the noumenal - we can't in fact sneak a peek directly).
What does he think about essences? I can't say I've paid any attention to your discussions with him.
For now I'm nonplussed that you think what I was saying in some way implies that a definition cnnot be improved. So I don't know what to make of the following:
Quoting apokrisis
This is not in contrast to what I have suggested; but I think it is in contrast to the notion of an essence, immutable and eternal, which seems to be what Meta has in mind.
Perhaps we have three views: Meta advocating essence as a real thing that we can set out in terms of the necessary and exclusive attributes; you, with some notion of an asymptotic essence that we can approach but never quite reach; and I, with the view that essences best ignored in favour of the examination of language use.
Just trying to make sense of your objection.
As I explained earlier, there is no "correct" or "incorrect" to word usage unless we are talking about logic. And since "essence" is an aspect of correct usage, we only have essence in logic. So "essence" is a logical principle. When I explained that I was talking about epistemological principles here, you seemed to ignore that part of my post. I assumed you were to lazy to read my post, and I dropped out of the conversation.
Quoting Banno
You derive the "essence" from studying the named object. Propositions of that essence are made, and when they are agreed upon we have acceptable premises for deductive logic. With deductive logic we can relate that object to other objects which have a defined essence. Without this defined essence, deductive logic is useless because there is ambiguity as to what the words refer to.
Quoting Banno
As I told you earlier in this thread, I don't think of essence as an ontological entity, I think of it as an epistemological principle. I believe there is a large difference between the form which an object has, and the form which is understood by the human mind (and this understood form is what we call its "essence"). That is why human minds, and consequently "the essence" of objects is often mistaken. Without this separation there is no way to account for error. So every object has a form which is proper to it, and this is independent of the human mind, which itself assigns a form to the object as its "essence".
Quoting Banno
That's about it, essences are language conventions. But, as I've been arguing in this thread, we can only assume the existence of such conventions where they actually exist. In common usage there are no such conventions. So we cannot refer to "common usage" as a premise for logical procedure. We need agreement on firm definitions (essences) to proceed with logic. Therefore we must get beyond common usage to produce some agreement before we have any sound premises for logical process.
This is clear evidence that you didn't read my post, and that's why I dropped out of the discussion back then, it appeared like you only read the first sentence, and responded to that. What would be the point to me wasting my time?
I take a broadly Peircean or systems view of essence. So it is real enough as the formal and final cause of being - the constraints or habits that shape material being. What's the great difficulty exactly?
Perhaps your misunderstanding is the reductionist one of thinking the essence of things is some mysterious substantial property hidden within - like a spirit stuff. Have you studied metaphysics much?
The problem being that you refuse to examine how language is used in deductive logic. If you would get over this refusal, you would see that examining language use, and ignoring essences, presents a contradictory proposition.
I simply cannot get away from the idea that the material instability you describe (providing a mechanism for information to express through) is actually deterministic causation expressing itself in a complex way which only gives the appearance of indeterminacy.
The "wobbly switch" is an interesting concept, but I view them foremost as "sensitive switches". There is some unreliability in these switches (and in channels of data transmission/expression), but at the very least they have consistent rates of failure. Although the pseudo-randomness of these unreliable switches can be incorporated into the functions of the data directly, (innovating new data through trial and error for instance (a happy failure of a set of switches)) at some level these switches must have some degree of reliability, else their suitability as a causal mechanism would be nonexistent.
Computers already do account for some degree of unreliability or wobbliness in their switches. They mainly use redundancy in data as a means to check and reconstruct bits that get corrupted. In machine learning individual "simulated neuronal units" may exhibit apparent wobbliness owing to the complexity of it's interconnected triggers or owing to a psudeo-random property of the neuron itself which can be used to produce variation.
Biological life is mechanism all the way down (in scale) is something which I fundamentally agree with, but the further down we go, the more different the mechanisms become (from the overall organism) until we reach points of abstraction which then test the limits of observation.
At the top of the hierarchy of networks of interactions would be an organism like a human. As we zoom into the body, multi-cellular structure gives way to single cells and inter-cellular mechsnisms, which then gives way to intracellular mechanisms, then to the mechanisms of DNA and RNA, and then to the molecular and atomic world.
The physical laws of atomic and molecular systems are what governs the behavior large complex molecules such as DNA which forms the base unit of data in the semiotic exchange that you're identifying. We could seek to understand individual genetic molecules as complex and emergent behavior resulting from physical laws of it's sub-mechanisms, but that doesn't add anything to the semiotic description of life in the same way that individual physical switches in computer memory do not add to a similar description of a hypothetical learning (and sentient) machine.
Consider the hierarchy of mechanisms found in biological life: DNA is it's base unit and all it's other structures and processes are built upon it using DNA as a primary dynamic element (above it in scale). A human mind with it's interconnected neurons uses the neurons themselves as a base unit upon which conscious thoughts are produced (through layers of complex connections and hierarchical networks no doubt). In a hypothetical truly sentient and learning computer, the acting base-unit which gives rise to semiotic exchanges isn't the binary bit, it's specific clusters of connected bits which produce the dynamic "simulated neuron" where all relevant data to the functions of the AI are actually stored. Like the human mind and also DNA, sentient machines have a "base unit of data" (apply charity here) which although itself is composed of smaller bits and smaller mechanisms, does not carry any semiotic meaning from the interactions of elements beneath it's own scale. The complex hierarchy of biological life that is built upon DNA is by far more stunning and complex than human consciousness or a true AI (body and all), but minds composed of hierarchical networks and layers of interconnected data are directly analogous to the physical hierarchy of mechanisms found in biological life which stun us so profoundly, wobbliness included.
I'm not sure where this puts our disagreement (if we indeed have one). I suppose my main difficulty is assenting to indeterminism as a property of living systems for semantic/etymological/dogmatic reasons, but I also cannot escape the conclusion that a powerful enough AI built from code (code analogous to DNA, and to the structure of connections in the human brain) would be capable of doing everything that "life" can do, including growing, reproducing, and evolving. Specifically the self-organizing property of data is what most interests me. Natural selection from chaos is the easy answer, the hard answer has to do with the complex shape and nature of connections, relationships, and interactions between data expressing mechanisms which give rise to anticipatory systems of hierarchical networks.
Indeteminism is a property of matter, as Heisenberg showed when he discovered the uncertainty principle. Nothing anywhere is fully determined or deterministic, I think the only motivation for believing that it is, is to escape the anguish of uncertainty.
Well there are two levels to the issue here.
What I was highlighting was the surprising logic (for those used to expecting a biological requirement for hardware stability) that says in fact life requires its hardware to be fundamentally bistable - poised at the critical edge of coming together and falling apart. That way, semiotics - some message - can become the determining difference. Information can become the cause of thermal chaos becoming more efficiently organised as an organised dissipative flow.
So regardless of whether existence itself is "deterministic", biology may thrive because it can find physics poised in a state of radical instability, giving its stored information a way to be the actual determining cause for some process with an organised structure and persistent identity.
Then there is the question of whether existence itself is deterministic - or instead, perhaps, also a version of the same story. Maybe existence is pan-semiotic - dependent on the information that can organise its material criticality so that we have the Universe as a dissipative structure that flows down an entropic gradient with a persistent identity, running down the hill from a Big Bang to a Heat Death.
I realise that metaphysical determinism is an article of faith for many. It is part of the package of "good ideas" that underpins a modern reductionist view of physical existence. Determinism goes with locality, atomism, monadism, mechanicalism, logicism, the principle of sufficient reason. Every effect must have its cause - its efficient and material cause. So spontaneity, randomness, creativity, accident, chaos, organicism, etc, are all going to turn out to be disguised cases of micro-determinism. We are simply describing a history of events that is too complicated to follow in its detail using some macro-statistical level method of description.
So we all know the ontic story. At the micro-scale, everything is a succession of deterministic causes. The desired closure for causality is achieved simply by the efficient and material sources of change - the bottom-up forces of atomistic construction.
Now this is a great way of modelling the world - especially if you mostly want to use your knowledge of physics to build machines. But even physics shows how it runs into difficulties at the actual micro-scale - down there among the quantum nitty-gritty. What causes the atom to decay? Is it really some determining nudge or do we believe the strongly supported maths that says the "collapse of the wavefunction" is actually spontaneous or probabilistic?
So it is simply an empirical finding - that makes sense once you think about it - that life depends on the ability of information to colonise locations of material instability. Dissipative structure can be harnessed by encoded purpose, giving us the more complex phenomenon we call life (and mind).
And then determinism as an ontic-level supposition is also pretty challenged by the facts of quantum theory. That doesn't stop folk trying to shore up a belief in micro-determinism despite the patent interpretive problems. But there are better ontologies on the table - like Peircean pragmatism.
In brief, you can get a pretty deterministic looking world by understanding material being to be the hylomorphic conjunction of global (informational) constraints and local (material) freedoms.
So when some event looks mechanically determined, it could actually be just so highly constrained that its degrees of freedom or uncertainty are almost eliminated.
Think of a combustion engine. We confine a gas vapour explosion within some system of cylinders, valves, pistons, cranks, etc. Or a clock where a wound coiled spring is regulated by the tick-tock of a swivelling escapement. A machine can always just spontaneously go wrong. The clock could fall of the wall and smash. Your laptop might get some critical transistor fried by a cosmic ray. But if we are any good as designers - the people supplying the formal and final causes here - we can engineer the situation so that almost all sources of uncertainty are constrained to the point of practical elimination. A world that is 99% constrained, or whatever the margin required, is as good enough as ontically determined.
So that would be the argument for life. Molecular chemistry and thermodynamics doesn't have to be actually deterministic. It just has to be sufficiently constrained. The two things would still look much the same.
But there is an advantage in a constraints-based view of ontology - it still leaves room for actual spontaneity or accident or creative indeterminism. You don't have to pretend the world is so buttoned-down that the unexpected is impossible. You can have atoms that quantumly decay "for no particular reason" other than that this is a constant and unsuppressed possibility. You can have an ontology that better matches the world as we actually observe it - and makes better logical sense once you think about it.
Quoting VagabondSpectre
See how hard you have to strain? Any randomness at the ground level has to be "psuedo". And then even that psuedo instability must be ironed out by levels and levels of determining mechanism.
But then why would life gravitate towards material instability or sources of flux? It fails logic to say life is there to supply the stabilising information if the instability is merely a bug and not the feature. If hardware stability is so important, life would have quickly evolved to colonise that instead.
My ontology is much simpler. Life's trick is that it can construct the informational constraints to exploit actual material instability. There is a reason why life happens. It can semiotically add mechanical constraints to organise entropic flows. It can regulate because there is a fundamental chaos or indeterminism in want of regulation.
Quoting VagabondSpectre
Yep. Computers are machines. We have to engineer them to remove all natural sources of instability. We don't want our laptop circuitry getting playful on us as it would quickly corrupt our data, crash our programs.
But biology is different. It lives in the real world and rides its fluxes. It takes the random and channels it for its own reasons.
You then get the irony of neural network architectures where you have fake instability being mastered by the constraint of repeatedly applied learning algorithms. The human designer seeds the network nodes with "random weights" and trains the system on some chosen data set. So yes, that is artificial life or artificial mind - based on pretend hardware indeterminism and so different in an ontologically fundamental way from a biology that lives by regulating real material/entropic indeterminism.
Quoting VagabondSpectre
But you went sideways to talk about DNA - the information - and skipped over the actual machinery of cells. And as I say, this is the big recent revolution - realising the metabolic half of the cellular equation is not some kind of chemical stewpot but instead a highly structured arrangement of machinery. And this machinery rides the nanoscale quasi-classical limit. It sits exactly at the scale that it can dip its toe in and out of quantum scale indeterminacy.
This is why I suggest Hoffman's Life's Ratchet as a read. It gives a graphic understanding of how the quasi-classical nanoscale is a zone of critical instability. You get something emergently new at this scale which is "wobbling" between the purely quantum and the purely classical.
So again, getting back to our standard ontological prejudices, we think that there are just two choices - either reality is classical (in the good old familiar deterministic Newtonian sense) or it is weirdly quantum (and who now knows how the fuck to interpret that?). But there is this third intermediate realm - now understood through thermodynamics and condensed matter modelling - that is the quasi-classical realm of being. And it has the precise quality of bistability - the switching between determinism and indeterminism, order and chaos - that life (and mind) only has to be able to harness and amplify.
It is a Goldilocks story. Between too stable and too unstable there is a physical zone where you can wobble back and forth in a way that you - as information, as an organism - can fruitfully choose.
So metaphysics has a third option now - which was sort of pointed to by chaos maths and condensed matter physics, but which is all too recent a scientific discovery to have reached the popular imagination as yet. (Well tipping points and fat-tails have in social science, but not what this means for biology or neuroscience.)
Quoting VagabondSpectre
This just sounds terribly antiquated. Read some current abiogenetic theorising and the focus has gone back to membrane structures organising entropic gradients as the basis of life. It is a molecular machinery first approach now. Although DNA or some other coding mechanism is pretty quickly needed to stabilise the existence of these precarious entropy-transacting membrane structures.
Quoting VagabondSpectre
I do accept that we could construct an artificial world of some kind based on a foundation of mechanically-imposed determinism.
But my point is that this is not the same as being a semiotic organism riding the entropic gradients of the world to its own advantage.
So what you are imagining is a lifeform that exists inside the informational realm itself, not a lifeform that bridges a division where it is both the information that regulates, and the persistent entropic flux that materially eventuates.
My semiotic argument is life = information plus flux. And so life can't be just information isolated from flux (as is the case with a computer that doesn't have to worry about its power supply because its humans take care of sorting out that).
Now you can still construct this kind of life in an artificial, purely informational, world. But it fails in what does seem a critical part of the proper biological definition. There is some kind of analogy going on, but also a critical gap in terms of ontology. Which is why all the artificial-life/artificial-mind sci-fi hype sounds so over-blown. It is unconvincing when AI folk can't themselves spot the gaping chasm between the circuitry they hope non-entropically to scale up and the need in fact to entropically scale down to literally harness the nanoscale organicism of the world.
Computers don't need more parts to become more like natural organisms. They need to be able to tap the quasi-classical realm of being which is completely infected by the kind of radical instability they normally do their very best to avoid.
But why would we bother just re-building life? Technology is useful because it is technology - something different at a new semiotic level we can use as humans for our own purposes. So smart systems may be just smart machines ontically speaking, not alive or conscious, but that is not a reason in itself not to construct these machines that might exploit some biological analogies in a useful way, like DeepMind would claim to do.
Quoting VagabondSpectre
As I say, biological design can serve as an engineering inspiration for better computer architectures. But that does not mean technology is moving towards biological life. And if that was not certain before, it is now that we understand the basis of life in terms of biophysics and dissipative structure theory.
Hu?
But now we have to figure out what "hu" means in some private language. Guesses anyone? Could it be...
A masturbatory exclaimation? Well, quite possibly. So not hu? but hu! ;)
So there is nothing here to stop out common use of "life" being extended - indeed, I have several times explicitly said that definitions can be extended.
Can you explain what Meta meant? Is he just claiming that deductive logic relies on explicit definitions? What is it that I am missing?
O:)
This is exactly why we need to find the essence of a living being! With this precedent, what is to stop anyone else from granting human rights to any other objects? Note, I am all for protecting nature, just not to the level of granting human rights.
Yeah. Except rather than extended, they need to be differentiated. And so they can no longer be shared - being a new choice.
This goes back to what seems your fundamental misunderstanding about language use. A word does not have a definitional essence in as ostensive sense. It instead functions as an apophatic constraint on uncertainty.
So a word like "life" or "cat" is already extended in that it covers anything even vaguely living or catlike. The word, as a sign, points not at some definite collection of particular instances and nothing beyond that. It instead constrains our understanding in some generalised way that could be cashed out in any number of restricted sense. Many of which will be differences that don't make a difference.
So if I am talking about some cat, it could be large all small, black or tabby, male or female, etc, unless I feel the need to specify otherwise, adding more words and thus more constraints on your state of interpretation.
Thus there is some essence in play - the purpose that is my communicative content (as much as that is ever completely clear and not vague to oneself, even in some propositional statement). But the word can't carry some exact cargo of meaning from me to you. All we share is some history of learning to have our uncertain interpretations constrained to be near enough similar while still remaining creatively open-ended.
The advantage of my semiotic or constraints approach is that it accounts for how meaning can be formed and conveyed without something specific, particular or actual existing by way of a referent. I might actually have in mind a black, male moggy. You might have in mind a tabby female. But it doesn't make a difference until it makes a difference.
And that view has important consequences for truth theories, among other things. It also should explain why definitions matter as the way to bring out putative differences. We can't actually be agreeing in some positive fashion - as opposed to some accidental and undisclosed fashion - unless we have discovered and articulated a possible point of disagreement.
This cat we are talking about - what's its colour, age and gender? Let's see if we still have the same referent in mind. And if it doesn't matter, then it is not essential. The essence remains at the greater level of generality which is simply what we mean by "cat".
So the existence of essence is demonstrated by applicability of generality. Reference can be open-ended or "already extended" because - dichotomously - it is also anchored by an apophatic generality. We know that cats aren't dogs or fungi or rocket-launchers as those other general alternatives are ruled out by some abstracted cat-essence.
And while common usage does seem to get catness by perceptual abstraction (some acceptable combination of traits), science can pin that down with greater ontological rigour. It can say that evolution actually does create genetic lineages - actual constraints encoded in genetic information. So we can start to measure cat-ness in a way that can be quantified as some distance separating cats and pumas, and then more generally, leopards and panthers (although confusingly - hu! - leopards are phylogenetically panthera rather than leopardis).
It is actually very important that - from Aristotle on - we seek to name the forms of the natural world in this essentialist fashion. The subsumptive hierarchy always seemed completely logical. And so it was discovered to be. Evolution reads like a forking tree of differences that made a difference because something must divide one species from another at the level of actual historical information. We don't just socially construct the meanings of words. We can hope to asymptotically approach the world's essential divisions by seeking out the constraints that got refined by differences that made a difference.
What about the predictability of the moon's orbit around the earth?
At the Newtonian scale, how can indeterminacy be observed?
I think this kind of thinking has had a disproportiantely large influence on post-Enlightenment thought. A lot of people still think like that - but Heisenberg (et al) showed that at the most fundamental level, it simply isn't so. Uncertainty and the probablistic nature of physics really does torpedo that. (That was subject of a lot of philosophical debate in the early 20th century by the likes of Arthur Eddington, Enst Cassirer, not to forget Heisenberg himself, and also Niels Bohr (who incorporated the ying-yang symbol into the family Coat of Arms.))
That is what allows for the element of creativity, of serendipity, of things that just happen for no apparent reason. Whereas Western culture seems to retain a belief that at bottom, what is real are 'bodies in motion' that are determined by physical forces. But physics itself has shown that really, in the memorable phrase by James Jeans, 'the universe is more like a great mind than a great machine'.
Stop there. I don't disagree with that. Of course words do not have an "essence in an ostensive sense". While I don't much like your use of "apophatic constraint', I don't see that what you are suggesting differs in any substantive way from what I have proposed.
What you call a constraint on a definition I would describe as an additional term, changing the application.
So quolls are referred to as tiger cats. They are marsupials. We had one a year ago that would come once a month and have takeaway chicken, curtesy of my coop. When the Girl said things like "That cat took another chook last night", the meaning was clear.
But one might add to the definition of cat "...and is not a marsupial", thus ruling out the use of "cat" to refer to quolls.
Sure that "apophatic constraint" works for certain purposes, but it rules out a useful way to use the word "cat"; it would be improper to say that one use was "the correct use of cat".
There is no essence of cat here; only different uses.
I gather from the parenthetic comment that you are yourself not too happy with this terminology.
So let me prod that a bit: What is the "communicative content", apart from the utility of the conversation?
I prefer my precise terminology. It makes it clear that adding constraints is the subtraction of possibilities. We are talking about the intersection of sets, not the union of sets - if one must resort to set theoretic talk.
Your way of putting things is ambiguous. The change could be either logical-or or logical-and.
Quoting Banno
Cute story but full of holes. Just look how fast you slid from "tiger cat" - a common colonial term - to "cat". So quoll might equal tiger cat as a valid translation between mispronounced aborigine and settler coinage. Both would point at the same animal. But to call a quoll or tiger cat a cat is another whole can of worms.
The quoll is "sort of like a cat, but not really". We would have to be appealing to some more general notion of the essence of catness to create a union of two sets of observations. So rather than getting more precise - adding constraints to produce an intersection - we would be relaxing constraints to produce a union at a higher level of generality. It is the more abstracted essence of catness that we must have in mind to justify this turn of speech.
So sure, the correct use of "cat" is flexible. We can step back to higher generality in a way that allows union operations - hey, quolls are rather cat-like in look and habit (or more like cats than rabbits, goats, chickens, and other animals we know from our homeland). Or we can add constraints to do the opposite. We can talk about all the cats that are also marsupials - and find the intersection is in fact the null set.
Language is great because it doesn't get too caught up in levels of generality and particularity. Although it does of course employ pronouns and qualifiers (like -like and -ness and -icity) to add this logical distinction as necessary.
But still, the Peircean approach does see the metaphysical essence of things as speaking to their formal and final cause. What unifies particulars is their purpose and rational organisation. So quolls would be like cats because the same body form is good for the same purpose, the same ecological niche. There actually is something in common that we might want to capture as a general X-ness. The needs of a small nocturnal carnivore is a constraint that acts on the genetics of both.
So "apophatic constraint" doesn't in fact rule out the creative use of language. Instead it underpins it. And this is how I know you don't actually get it. It is only this kind language use that remains open-ended even when constraints are combined. Constraints merely limit proper interpretation.
If we are talking about black cats, we might still be speaking of Miles Davis. "Black" and "cat" can have a whole host of associated meanings according to the communicative context. This essential open-endedness of a sign is not a problem unless you are wedded to a clunky set theoretic view of meaning where words must refer to some definite collection of things. Constraints can only reduce uncertainty, they don't ever eliminate it. That is why Peircean logic employs vagueness as a modality. It explains the inherent flexibility with which even the strictest syntax determines meaning. Semantics is irreducibly open-ended - yet also perfectly ameniable to being apophatically bounded.
Quoting Banno
There was a spelling mistake there. I meant communicative intent and not communicative content.
So again this relates to the Peircean view that essence is final cause or the purpose that shapes things. And the parenthetical point was the positive assertion that even speakers may be vaguer than their rather definite sounding speech acts imply.
Speech is a creative act and syntax imposes apophatic constraint. We simply have to eliminate a lot of possible qualifications and hesitations we might have in mind to actually say something out loud in a communally acceptable fashion. And in contrary fashion, stating something aloud gives a proposition a crispness that may suddenly make us feel we are thinking with wonderful clarity now. We got our meaning exactly right. We were vague, but now we are not. Our intent is clear to us too because of the way grammar eliminates imprecision ... apparently.
Indeed; that is quite on purpose, so that it corresponds to a conjunctive or disjunctive normal form - as any definition must. But of course we can specify the OR- or the AND-, so need be no ambiguity: AND NOT marsupial.
First off, as a curtesy, let's avoid phrases like "...you don't actually get it"; To my eye, you don't actually get it, either. That's rather the point of having a conversation.
Secondly, amI right to detect a normative approach to language here? For you, is there a correct way to use words? Is seeking more and more constraint a good thing?
But we are making progress. So essence is final cause or the purpose that shapes things. It should be fun to fill that in a bit. Purpose for whom? The speaker, or their communicative intent? The community? Some transcendent mind?
Quoting apokrisis
Yeah, I got that in my notification. The fact is, that Banno's claimed "examination of language use" is very selective. There is a refusal to examine how language is used in deductive logic, where unambiguous definitions (essences) must be adhered to, or else the logic is rendered useless. Banno just insists that we should refer to "common" use.
It is possible that we might examine numerous instances of "common" use, in the method of Platonic dialectics, to determine if they all have something in common. From this we could synthesize a definition (essence).
Quoting Banno
Correct, and doesn't a definition give one the essence of the thing? You may have an aversion to the word "essence", but your "common use", which is full of ambiguities and equivocations is quite useless for any deductive logic.
Quoting apokrisis
Where information begins to regulate chaos is the semiotic ground level (how that base dataset first emerges aside), but there's no difference in practice between "pseudo-randomness" and "actual randomness". Indeterminism as a property of a system is indistinguishable from looking at an open system without understanding the nature of the energy which flows into or out of it. Given that life is an open system, and that the dissipative structures to which you allude depend on an influx of energy (in order to resist the second law of thermodynamics), where does hard indeterminism actually benefit the model?
Dissipative structures and engines are great for modeling the energetic batteries of life which keep the complex structures in shape and interacting, but the self-organizing property of the data itself is what most fundamentally interests and astounds me. Dissipative engines and structures which hold back life from reaching states of thermodynamic equilibrium are required for it to perpetuate, but they aren't the fundamental processes I'm interested in. The electron transport train is what keeps life warm so to speak, but the self-organizing property of life's data goes beyond that to provide innovative direction well beyond mere random variance. True or pseudo randomness may be involved at some base levels, but as you say, tiers of informational networks constrain such uncertainty (or incorporate it at a base level) and refine it into something not random, but anticipatory.
Life as a dissipative system is a useful description that helps us understand why we don't breakdown in entropic heat-death, but it doesn't do a whole lot to help us understand the complex organizational structures (the data) which yes exploit disspitative engines, but then use the energy they get from them to expand and increase their own sophistication and anticipatory power.
Quoting apokrisis
If we boil this down, life is self-organizing information (and consumes energy to do it, and so requires abundance of fuel). If we forget about external power input as a part of AI as an organism, or we include power generation (and self-maintenance) as a function of a sufficiently advanced computer-AI organism, then it would also seem to fully qualify as a dissipative system. It's electron transport chains are much more uniform (where ours incorporate peculiarly designed (naturally evolved) bucket lines of diverse carriers), but the feat of informational self-organization which these electrons fuel is the same kind of complexity which I thrust as most central to the behavior of life.
Most of the complexity in such a computer AI organism is contained in the structure of it's data networks (and it's inputs/outputs), where the complexity of biological life is spread out across a diverse ladder of interacting parts (which can also be considered a part of/expression of data contained in DNA). Learning digital information networks are also physical structures which give rise to physical complexity that can rival the complexity found in nano-scale biological machinery. Even though it all exists materially as stored charges (what we abstract as bits), the connections and relationships between these parts can grow in complexity by more efficiently utilizing and ordering it's bits rather than by acquiring more of them (although more bits doesn't hurt).
We don't have an AI yet capable of taking control over it's own existence (in the way that biological life does as a means of perpetuation), but I think that chasm is shrinking faster than most people realize. Simulations aren't real in the sense that their products are abstract representations of real things, but what happens when the simulation looks back at you, starts asking questions of it's own, and starts thinking? It's not a simulated thought, it's that self same property of information/informational structure somehow giving rise to spontaneous anticipatory sophistication we typify as intelligence. It cannot be explained solely as a dissipative system or as the direct mechanisms through which information expresses (wobbly switches), it is rather a feature of the structure and content of the data itself, like a pattern which builds upon itself to achieve greater depths of complexity (and function).
What I'm interested in specifically is how the structure of information guides it's own development toward more sophisticated and anticipatory formats. Evolution through successive trial and error is a major help toward understanding where the DNA and other biological mechanisms of biological life get their anticipatory power, and it can perhaps be useful for understanding how a mind emerges from neurons (both biological and digital minds), but it doesn't quite shed any detail on what these regimes and structures actually look like.
I think that to us humans there will always be de facto indeterminacy primarily due to limits of measurability and the physical horizons of knowledge they imply. Heisenberg didn't prove indeterminacy, he proved uncertainty inherent in certain kinds of measurements.
If the true quantum realm cannot be physically accessed, then any of it's internal goings on might as well be their own separate universe, and all we see are the peculiar phenomenon that those goings on manifest as at larger scales and groupings of matter (I.E, particle-wave behavior and the collapse of it's wave-like properties).
Indeterminism is an epistemic reality of human knowledge, but not necessarily a property of the physical world.
I'm not particularly math or physics-literate, but looking at it from a simply logical perspective: if some hidden, more fundamental, thing efficiently causes a particle to decay, then would that not beg the question as to what determines the hidden cause? This would then seem to imply either
-an infinitely regressive series of ever more fundamental materially efficient causes
-true spontaneity and randomness at the 'lowest' level
-or a most fundamental "primary uncaused cause".
It would seem, since there will necessarily always be a level below which we cannot penetrate, that we will never be able by any empirical investigation to definitively answer the question as to which of those alternatives obtains. So, it would seem that the alternative is to either sit on the fence or choose based on personal intuition or preference.
Personally, I find the idea of an infinitely regressive series of materially efficient causes to be the least coherent or intelligible alternative.
But consider the context. Until that discovery was made, the atom was assumed to be the fundamental ground of physical reality. Not everyone assumed that it was, but it was certainly central to a lot of philosophical materialism. It lives on in the term 'fundamental particle'. But Heisenberg's analysis showed that the basic idea of 'fundamentalism' didn't necessarily apply to material particles. So it throws open the whole question again, what is the basic nature or ground of reality?
I bet if you asked the proverbial man in the street what everything is composed of, the answer will be 'atoms'. But if atoms are not fundamental - then what is? Furthermore the related discovery that the act of observation has a causal influence on the outcome of an experiment opens the door once again to philosophical idealism.
I say all this, because many of your remarks above seem to accept the reality of determinism, however I am trying to show that the grounds for such thinking have been undermined by physics itself.
Can you explain to me what exactly you refer to with the word "information"? The reason I ask is that there are generally two ways of apprehending this term. In one sense, when we interpret some display of existence, we derive information from this interpretation. In that sense, information only exists within a mind, produced by the interpretation. This is how many people think of "meaning". In another sense, "information" is the thing independent from the interpreting mind, the thing which is being interpreted. In this sense, there are patterns of existents, and these patterns are said to be "information".
From your use of the term, it appears like you use "information" in the latter sense. It is patterns existing independently from any mind which might interpret these patterns. But if this is the case, then isn't "self-organizing information" rather nonsensical? The term "information", used in this way implies necessarily, organized patterns in existence. If there is no organized pattern there is no information. So "self-organizing information" implies organized patterns which have caused the existence of themselves. Doesn't that seem nonsensical to you? Imagine the existence of an organized pattern. Can you make sense of the notion that this organized pattern caused its own existence?
Yes, any tale of efficient/material causes suffers from infinite regress. Hence the need to posit an "unmoved mover" of some kind to ground being.
One way to do that is to argue the unmoved mover exists in some foundational sense - like a creating God. But that begs a whole bunch of questions - like who made Him.
So my own Peircean preference is to put the unmoved mover at the end of things - as the limit on being that development asymptotically approaches. That is formal/final cause is Platonically what "drives" existence - except it not a drive but the crystallisation of some "always necessary" state of global constraint.
So formal/final cause is immanent and emergent - the regularity that results when everything tries to happen, but almost everything then is going to be self-contradicting and thus self-cancelling. If you can go left, you could have gone right. If you could be positively charged, you could be negative. And so as existence tries to express every possibility, it quickly reduces itself to some tiny organised arrangement of that which survives self-negation. A standard quantum path integral or sum over histories ontology in other words.
That then puts at the beginning - as the initiating conditions, or the material/efficient cause - a state of pure potential or indeterminancy. A Peircean vagueness, firstness or tychism. A sea of unbounded spontaneous fluctuation - sort of like a hot big bang.
So quantumly, as you approach the Planck scale that defines the Big Bang state, you do find that measurement loses its purchase on events and you are just left with "infinite fluctuation" as the answer to your questions about "what exists". The initiating conditions are not some unmoved mover, but the opposite - the unboundedly moving. The radically unlimited. And thus the purest stuff - a vague everythingness - that is exacly what logic requires as a precursor "state" for any immanent emergence of self-negating limits.
I just mention all this as there is a fourth metaphysical option which gets beyond the problems presented by the others you mention. And it checks out scientifically - or at least that is what all the quantum evidence, dissipative structure theory, and condensed matter physics should by now suggest.
So why does the particle decay spontaneously? If you look at it from this constraints based view, the particle is not some stable thing that needs a nudge to fall off some shelf. Instead it is already a bagged-up mess of fluctuations - a locally confined state of excitation. It seethes with necessary nudges. And it persists undecayed due to some wider environmental constraint that imposes a threshold on it just popping off right now. So there is a constant limitation (from a stable classical environment) on its decay that keeps it in existence - with a constant probability that that threshold gets breached by some "lucky" fluctuation among an uncounted number of such fluctuations that characterise the "inside" of the particle.
Thus when we talk about the essence of a fundamental particle, it is really the environmental limits being imposed on a wild or vague state of material "everythingness" that define it. Its formal/final causes. And at the abstract level, that environment is mathematically described in purely formal terms - the self-limiting ways that a symmetry can be broken. Symmetry modelling speaks to the simplest possible options that would give matter some dichotomously definite identity - like spin left vs spin right, or break positive vs break negative.
So in this view, the Cosmos as a whole would be a general symmetry breaking in which a vague everythingness became organised into some more limited state of definiteness by become crisply divided against itself - exactly as Anaximander outlined it at the dawn of recorded metaphysics.
The unmoved mover is the simplicity of form that lies at the end of the trail (the Heat Death that is entropy's self-made sink). And the initiating conditions is the very possibility of a material fluctuation (without yet a direction or relative value). All that had to happen was a formless everythingness that negated itself to leave an irreducible residue of somethingness - which in the case of the Heat Death is a spacetime dimensional void filled with the least possible energy, just a blackbody thermal sizzle of quantum fluctuations now with a temperature of (asymptotically) zero degrees.
The way I'm usually referring to information is in the sense of physical data contained in particular arrangements and regimes of interaction between matter and energy. Meaning can be entirely abstract. I'm not interested in information as the thing being interpreted, but rather a given data structure/set as the thing doing the interpreting (of incoming information/data).
"Self"-organizing information might be slightly deceptive phrasing. I'm not looking for an un-caused cause. Complex structure and patterns can grow in size and complexity from a basic set of simple and well defined rules which cumulatively adds complexity the longer they exist. Complex states far into the progression of a given system depend on and can be informed by previous and less complex states of that system and it's inputs. It is specifically the function of data left-over from previous states/inputs informing (giving rise to apparent anticipation) the progression of the system toward more complex states of being which I would illustratively describe as "self-organizing".
Still struggling with how this is not simply nihilism, but I'll keep reading......
Quoting VagabondSpectre
Nevertheless, I think any information whatsover must mean something, or bear meaning, or have meaning - otherwise, how is it information? 'Meaning' and 'information' aren’t synonyms, but they’re joined at the hip.
I've already said that these are two different issues - that the Comos itself might be indeterministic or vague "at base", and that life requires material indeterminism as the condition for being able to control material flows.
I think both are true, but I am arguing for them separately.
Quoting VagabondSpectre
Now you are conflating material states and information states. We might model material states as "data", but that doesn't mean that entropy is just information.
Instead, the big deal in modern science is we can translate between matter and information using a common unit now. We can count both in terms of degrees of freedom. But that doesn't make them the same thing. Instead, they are opposite kinds of things (atoms of matter vs atoms of form). So there is a subtle duality that we shouldn't ignore by a conflation of terms.
Quoting VagabondSpectre
Again this lumps levels that I want to keep apart. Dissipative structure occurs in non-living systems - like the atmospheric convection cells that are the weather. So we have to be able to distinguish the informational extra that life brings to harness dissipative structure towards private ends. The weather serves no higher person than the second law. Life is still ultimately entrained to the second law but also does form its own local purposes. And that is information of some new level of order. Which is in turn a significant enough disjunction to needs its own terminological distinction.
Quoting VagabondSpectre
But again you are ignoring the evidence that life is fundamentally different in seeking hardware instability of a kind that permits its informational control to exist. Digital hardware is just basically different in that it depends on instability being engineered out. Computers don't create their own steady-state environments. They have to be given them. But life does create its own steady-state environment. It makes them. So apples and oranges in the end.
Quoting VagabondSpectre
Again, my argument is that the chasm is not shrinking at all. There is no trend towards hardware designs with inherently unstable switches rather than inherently stable ones. Computing remains defined by its progress towards a lack of entropic limits on computation, not its steady progress towards computation that is entropically limited.
So to sum up, I don't have a problem with the idea that computation can add another level to human semiotics. We can express our desires to build these kinds of "thinking machines" because for us it is meaningful.
But it is another thing to think we are moving towards artificial mind or artificial life. And I just raise that new point about hardware instability as another definitional reason for how far we are from what we tend to claim about what we are doing in our computer science laboratories right now.
Why does it have to be not nihilism? My argument is that the goal of the Comos is entropification. Then life and mind arise to accelerate that goal where it happens to have got locally retarded. So life and mind are the short-term cost of the Cosmos reaching its long-term goal.
That's not just nihilism - the idea that our existence is cosmically meaningless. I am asserting we exist to positively pick up the pace of cosmic annihilation. So super-nihilism. :)
Because it means the long-term goal is non-existence. And hihilism means literally 'nothing-ism'. It is one of the lurking maladies of the day (as Nietzsche correctly foresaw) - nothing is ultimately real, nothing really exists. IN saying that, I am on board with a large percentage of what you write (well the parts I understand) but I think this particular point reflects a gap or hole in your metaphysics. (Mind you I know it's a deep and difficult issue.)
Apart from the apparent Nihilism in this perspective, it begs a diminutive ignorance on our part. Or in other words we soon regress into a primitive embryonic life form in an insignificant minuscule swamp in a far of corner of a vast, even endless cosmos in which super life, super minds, even Gods play out inconceivable entropic games and we are hopelessly ignorant, naive of what is actually going on.
What is required for deductive logic is that the use on the left be the same as the use on the right.
Quoting apokrisis
Unless hard material indeterminism is indeed what you're arguing for (switches of un-caused wobbliness) I would happily abandon my disagreement that indeterminism is a requisite for life (I can just substitute material indeterminism for material sensitivity). I prefer pseudo randomness if and when unpredictability need be incorporated into the mechanisms of life because it does the same job without added spookyness.
If so, then our remaining disagreement concerns the comparability of a hypothetical AI organism to familiar biological organisms. If not, then I'm still not grasping how or why material instability to the point of hard indeterminacy functions as a control path for the expression of stored data or is a necessary element in dissipative structures. I see material instability as being useful (but hard to design with because it is so dynamic) in the various mechanical processes of biological life, but there's no difference between a fundamentally sensitive/wobbly switch and a group of interconnected un-wobbly/unsensitive switches whose overall output is itself wobbly.
Your objection to my argument for a hypothetical AI organism as life might depend on whether or not you think hard indeterminism is required for life or the organization of dissipative structure/engines (which drive entropic flux?), so I'll wait for clarification on this before trying to go any further.
P.S I do think we more or less agree though that there is some sort of "informational-extra" which binds dissipative engines into a greater system which fuels all the mechanics of biological life, including the on-going maintenance, development, and reproduction of "the data" itself. It's precisely that informational extra that I too want to distinguish from all the other rudiments of life.
As if syntax were semantics.
I've been using the words information and data loosely because in a way that's what I'm interested in investigating.
When you look at a photograph on a computer screen, you're seeing a representation of data contained in light that came from the real world; the information conveyed by the image on your screen reflects real world data. How it actually gets that way though entails many transformations and what we might refer to as abstractions between the original existent data and the stored representation that reflects it. When I try to talk about "stored information" what I'm attempting to describe is material structure storing complex real-world information by abstracting it (transforming it via some consistent principle) from real world input into something less fleeting (something which can then be refined and acted upon).
I equivocate between information as an abstraction between physical states in a complex system because they are mathematically equivalent. The physical state of your computer monitor showing an image containing details of the real world is composed of an ordered grid of pixel positions with three associated numbers representing light intensity (RGB light). This grid of numbered triplets is itself composed of a long string of 1's and 0's. The string of 1's and 0's is an abstraction representing arrays of ordered memory cells where the 1's correspond to the "on" states and the 0's correspond to the "off" states.
It's a similar story from the business end of the camera (or digital scanner): data-bearing-light enters a lens which focuses it onto an array of light sensing elements which detect the various intensities of red, green, and blue light at given points on the array. These individual elements then deliver an electrical output that gets abstracted into a numeric value that represents the intensity of a given light at a given pixel position. These various numeric triplets are then stored in a particular order which creates the abstract matrix which constitutes the information that comprises your computer image. The state of a given memory array is a physical arrangement of matter which stores some kind of data in an abstract form (which can then be somehow recalled for later use).. This is the kind of data required for the complex hierarchies of networks of data that I'm interested in.
Newtonian physics carries on working. Uncertainty inherent at the quantum scale collapses and gives way to classical particle behavior at the larger scales. It may be that the universe does behave in some fundamentally undetermined ways, but we have a hard time identifying them, we can never make sense them, and we can never prove hard indeterminacy experimentally. A probabilistic collapse of uncertainty in particle-waves isn't exactly indeterminism.
Perhaps this whole universe you are referring to is just some fabricated sideshow, or less? People who consider transcendent realities look to the bigger picture in the realisation that in some sense that bigger picture is in the here and now.
But it also takes many abstractions and transformations to see it as a photograph. I mean, show a photograph to a dog (whether on a screen or hardcopy), and the dog will smell it, and because it doesn't smell like anything interesting, the dog will not respond to it; it won't recognize it. (Sometimes my cat used to watch tennis, but I'm sure it's because of the apparent movement of an object going back and forth, which is the kind of things cats can 'grok'). It's the human mind which not only transformed the image into bits, then pixels, in the first place, but then also comprehends the image that it has created and recognises it as an image.
So I think what any physicalism wants to say is it that it is the bits or pixels which are fundamental, and the mind then interprets and abstracts meaning on the basis of what it sees. That is undoubtedly true, but there seems to me a lot of ambiguity sorrounding which level is actually the fundamental or foundational level. If 'the meaning' is in some sense fundamental then it seriously challenges physicalism - which is exactly why, I think, Apokrisis' style of semiotic analysis and the rest, has suddenly become such a big deal.
The wave-function collapse is the single greatest philosophical/metaphysical issue arising out of modern physics. Ironic, considering how strongly positivists had hoped that physics would once and for all drive a stake through the heart of metaphysics.
Perhaps you were not looking for an uncaused cause, but that's what you described. When you introduce "a basic set of simple and well defined rules", then you assume information which is outside of the "self-organizing" system. You avoid an uncaused cause by positing a set of rules. But by doing this, you have changed the description of the thing (life). It is no longer "self-organizing information", it is now described as a capacity to follow some rules. And since the rules must exist as some form of information, now your described thing (life) must have the capacity to interpret information.
Do you agree, that your self-organizing thing requires these two things for its existence, a set of rules, and the capacity to interpret rules? There is one other thing which I must add though, and that is the will to act. Rules and interpretations of rules do not create any organized structures without the will to act according to the rules.
Quoting Banno
Sure, I agree Banno. Logic is basically rules, and the symbols used need not symbolize anything at all. But even in saying that the use on the right must be "the same" as the use on the left, you are invoking an essence. Notice, that by your description, one is on the right and the other is on the left, so they are clearly not the same usage. Yet you give yourself the right to assert that the use is the same. You do this by dismissing this difference between right and left as accidental, and your claim that the usage is "the same" is only supported by the assumption that it is "essentially" the same.
Here's the classic example of "essence" in use in deductive logic:
p1 all men are mortal
p2 Socrates is a man
c Therefore Socrates is mortal.
Notice that p1 sets out an essential aspect of "man", and that is "mortal". In order for the logic to work, it is necessary that all men are mortal. if mortal is not essential, then not all men are mortal, p1 is false, and the following logic is meaningless.
Computers can translate one language into another without any actual understanding of language.
To a computer the data (a greek text in this example) is abstract (in fact it's meaningless because computers aren't alive) but it can still act on and compare that abstract data to other abstract data and achieve stunningly accurate translations. This would be like a human translating one language to another without having a single sweet clue what either languages mean, and relying purely on examples of known accurate translations (which are also not understood) to do it. It would be a mess of abstract and meaningless symbols.
If meaning exists anywhere, it would definitely be within written language, which exists as an abstract property of certain arrangements of matter. Light bouncing off of objects and entering our eyes contains data pertaining directly to it's source or the object it last bounced off of, but we need a complex brain to transform and arrange the data in a way that makes sense to our minds; it's meaning is something that conscious intelligence gets out of the data; the act of interpretation itself. A computer which can work somewhat objectively in translating languages or a camera which takes a picture and records light data are not aware of the meaning contained within the data they manipulate and store, but they somewhat objectively work with that data none the less in a way that retains meaning.
To me this implies that meaning is something contained within data, and it can only be gotten at by something which has the intelligence to consciously interpret it with some kind of intention rather than merely transforming the data. The way new data fits in to a the complex data structure of a mind I reckon has something to do with where meaning comes from. Cameras have no data structures capable of interpreting anything about the data they record in terms of meaning, and an unthinking translation program doesn't primarily fit new data into a complex (thinking) network, it primarily abstracts new deparate and discrete data packages from packages of old data and some relatively basic rules of operation.
I would say meaning is information which exists inside of a mind capable of perceiving it. In a way they're the same thing, but maybe that's like saying the shape of a raindrop is the same as gravity + aerodynamics.
I'm no positivist prepper, but I would say I've got a few choice stakes laying around...
Like most things we'll probably all have to settle for an unsatisfactory middle; some things determined, some things not. Reality is a bullshitter.
In respectable times, if any of our intellectual children brought home a particle-wave, the look we would give them would be so stern that they would suddenly annihilate each-other and collapse into non-existence, as things of course should be :D
The basic rules of the system (physics) guide the apparent self-organization of the system. So it's not really "self-organizing" it's just that we're recognizing certain behaviors of certain arrangements of matter (which through basic rules) produce a pattern of interaction that exhibits more complex behavior as a whole than the bits following simple rules that comprise it.
All I need is a first cause, or a first state, and then complexity emerges from that:
You are simply identifying use and token. They are not the same.
Is it really a fourth option, or just essentially an elaboration of the second option I listed?
So this is syntax and not semantics.
A computer can mechanically map a set of constraints specified in one language into the same set of contraints specified in another. A faithful translation like this is semantics preserving. The constraints would still serve to reduce a mind's uncertainty in the same fashion. "Cat" and "chat" can mean the same thing in different languages because they are both verbal signs meant to limit their users to some common viewpoint, some common state of anticipation, of the feline variety.
So - in Chinese Room fashion - machines can be constructed that "make the same interpretations" as we would, without having the faintest possibility of being minds that actually understand anything. The ability syntactically to manipulate signs in a "proper" fashion isn't actually functioning as a constraint on informational uncertainty in the machine. The machine has no such information entropy to be minimised. And it is that kind of information which is the semantic "data" that matters.
Again, you are thinking that computers are doing something that is mind-like. And so it is only a matter of time before that gets sufficiently scaled up that it approaches a real mind. But syntax can't generate semantics from syntactical data. Syntax has to be actually acting to constrain interpretive uncertainty.
It has to be functioning as the sign by which a mind with a purpose is measuring something about the world.
So syntax operates only as the interface between mind and world. It is the sign that mediates this living triadic relation.
If I hear, or read, or think the word "cat", I understand it as a constraint on what I expect to experience, or imagine, or anticipate. I am suddenly feeling radically less uncertain or vague in my state of mind (it is now concretely infused with cat expectations). And so it can become a meaningful surprise that the critter I've just seen raiding the chicken house turns out to be a quoll. What I took to be the sign of a cat can return the truth value of "false" ... sort of, as the quoll is a little cat-like in its essential purpose, etc.
A computer could be designed to simulate this kind of triadic relation. That is what neural networks do. But they are very clunky or grainy. And getting more biologically realistic is not about the number of circuits to be thrown at the modelling of the world - dealing with the graininess of the syntactic-level representation - but about the lightness of touch or sensitivity of the model's interaction with the world. And so again, it is about a relation founded on extreme material instability.
The more delicately poised between entropy and negentropy - falling apart and becoming organised - these interactions are, the more semantic information they contain. It is no surprise if a mechanical switch is still in the same position half an hour later, or a week later. That stability is engineered in. But if that switch is an organic molecule in constant thermal jitter, then the persistence of a state has to be deliberate and purposeful - maintained by an interpretive state of affairs that is holistically larger than itself.
So any AI or AL argument based on "more circuits" is only talking about adding syntactic capacity. To add semantic capacity, it is this triadic or holistic semiotic relationship that matters. And it is "more criticality" that would be key to that. Which is not something to be added in fact. It has to become foundational to the very notion of a circuit or switch. The machine-like stability is something that has to be removed from the very stuff from which you are trying to construct your AI or AL.
Again, this is not an easy argument to track as neural network approaches do try to simulate critical behaviour. That is why they are good at some tasks like pattern matching. But there is a big difference from faking criticality with software that runs on completely mechanical hardware, and actually doing what life/mind does, which is to exist in an entropically open relation with the world. Semantic information has to be organising the state of the hardware from the ground up. It has to run native, no emulators.
And biophysics has arguments that only a certain kind of organic chemistry is the "right stuff" when it comes to creating this kind of living and mindful "machinery". AI/AL would have to be the same protoplasmic gunk from the ground up. Silicon and electricity are simply the wrong stuff for biophysical reasons.
Electricity is extensively utilized by living things. Brains use it.
It is different in that it explicitly embraces the holism of a dichotomy. It says reality is the result of a separation towards two definite and complementary poles of being - chance and necessity, material fluctuation and formal constraint, or what Peirce called tychism and synechism, that is, spontaneity and continuity.
So you can't merely elaborate chance or fluctation to build a world. Instead, the world emerges by the dialectic which separates chance fluctuations (like a particle decay) from the global constraints (like the experimental conditions that specify the observational context for said decay).
So that is how quantum theory works. On the one side (inside the deterministic wavefunction description of a quantum system) you have all the indeterminism. A purity of spontaneity or uncertainty. Then on the other, you have the determining context - the observer's world - that serves to fix the wavefunction and thus give the quantum probability its very certain measurement basis.
Thus if we are talking ontically - taking quantum theory as our cue - then the particle decays because its probability space was shaped a certain way. And by the same token, that wavefunction defines some scope of pure and unreachable uncertainty. True spontaneity is being manufactured - by virtue of the dialectic or symmety-breaking which is the other side of things, the determining of an observational context.
How could we talk about particle decays in the dense heat of the first instant of the big bang? In a thermal chaos without clear divisions, there is nowhere to definitely stand so as to be able to see something else definitely happen. The hot fog has to dissipate for events to become either classed as deterministic or spontaneous. You need a dark, cold void for it to become a thing that a particle has not decayed and so to have a statistical history that says something about the degree of spontaneity exhibited by the fact of its decay.
So it is not just an elaboration of the claim that nature is fundamentally indeterministic. When considered in full, the argument is really that both spontaneity and its other emerge as crisply definite via a process of dialectical development or symmetry breaking. So quantum weirdness is a thing - only because local classicality is also a thing. And they both become more of a thing together as the cosmos expands and cools.
OK, I can agree with that. Although I would have called the poles 'materiality' and 'thought'.
That's a vague claim. Modern biophysics would agree that electron transport chains are vitally important as "entropic mechanism". But even more definitional would be proton gradients across membranes. It is those which are the more surprising fact at least.
So it is the ability to separate the energy capture from the energy spending - the flow of entropy vs the flow of work - which is the meaningful basis of life.
We can talk of a machine being driven by energy - because we are there to turn it off and on. But life has to build in that semiotic difference at the foundational level, down at the nanoscale, where a separation between entropy production and negentropic work has to be maintained via a physical or chemical difference.
So again, silicon/electrons is just not that kind of stuff.
It's all use. You are mistakenly attempting to separate token from use, as if it is not a form of use.
I have great difficulty with this. Matter does not follow rules. We have laws of physics which describe the way that matter behaves, these are descriptive laws. They are not prescriptive laws which are telling matter how to behave. We do not seem to know why matter behaves in such regular ways which can be described by descriptive laws, but it requires a far stretch of the imagination to say that matter behaves like it does because it is following rules. Doesn't it require a mind to follow rules?
It's not vague. Neurons communicate with muscles, for instance, by electric discharge. Look into it. It's fascinating stuff.
Quoting apokrisis
There is passive transport across cell membranes, yes. There's also active transport.
Quoting apokrisis
Obviously mechanisms can store energy... so I'm not sure what you mean.
Quoting apokrisis
Could be, but it's not obvious. Science fiction writers have long imagined silicon-based life forms, silicon and carbon being similar. And as I said, living beings on earth utilize electricity. That's basically what we're looking at when we do an EKG or EEG.
You mean acetylcholine discharge? The muscle fibres know to contract because they get given a molecular message?
And even if you are getting into the controversy of direct "electric synapses", it is still not about the conduction of an electrical current but a wave of membrane depolarisation - Na+ ions being allowed to flood in through the molecular machinery of membrane pores before being pumped out again to maintain a working gradient.
So everywhere you look, you see semiotics at work - messages being acted upon as the way the hardware does things - not some simple current flow which has been modulated to carry a "signal" as a physical pattern.
Think about it. A radio broadcast is modulated frequency. It encodes music and voices in a physical fashion that is simply a sign without interpretance. That pattern then drives some further set of amplifying circuitry and loudspeakers at the receiver end. So no matter how complicated or syntactic the physical pattern, zero semantics is happening as it flows. There is no "communicating".
Biology is the opposite. The physics and the message are an interplay happening right where it all starts. The circuits are alive because the flow is a process of communication. The two sides - the electron transfers that drive the production of waste, and the proton gradients that do the meaningful work - are strictly separated so they can also crisply interact.
So when you talk about "electrical discharge", that again sounds like you being vague so as to avoid getting into the complex semiotics that is actually taking place.
Computers have electrical circuits. Humans have electrical circuits. So hey. Life is just chemistry and mind is just information processing. [Pats small child on the head and walks away.] :)
Quoting Mongrel
Fiction writers can take poetic licence with science. Science will point out the critical differences between silicon and carbon.
Like the weakness in bonds that means you couldn't make large complex organic molecules. Or the unsuitablity of silicon for redox metabolism as its waste electron acceptors are not a gas like CO2 but instead silicon oxides.
And you imagine having to excrete sand rather than CO2 which just leaks out of a cell.
So your objection is all based on silicon+electricity being the wrong stuff in the sense of being the wrong electrochemical stuff. Do you not get that the "wrong stuff" is about it being the wrong stuff in lacking a potential for semiotic mechanism?
Even if silicon life was limited by molecular complexity and also energetically constrained by the need to excrete solid waste, it could still exist - if it could implement actual nanoscale communication across an epistemic divide. Or be a semiotic "stuff" in other words.
Depolarization down the axon. It's tiny amounts of electricity, but then so is CMOS.
Cool. I never understood that before.
Only if the rule is only influencing and not compelling. If a rule is only influencing, then following it is a voluntary act of the mind. But if compelling, then the object does not need to have a mind. We are influenced by man-made laws, and it is our voluntary choice to follow them or break them. On the other hand, our bodies (and all mindless objects with a mass) "follow" the laws of gravity because they are compelling laws, and we cannot help but fall from the sky to the ground. All laws of physics are compelling laws.
It's often referred to as the neuro-endocrine system because the two function pretty thoroughly as a team in governing the body.
I will think you will find that is BS. Triggering a gland is different from triggering a muscle. Even if "electrical discharge" is involved in neither.
So just like botox and muscles, there is a reason why endocrine disruptors are chemicals like dioxins or plasticisers that mimic biological messages. It is not stray EM fields you have to worry about - even if the folk with tin-foil hats might tell you otherwise.
Electrical discharge along axons precedes the release of acetylcholine. I'm not sure why you're denying that. It's a science fact, dude. :)
I believe you're suggesting that only a particular kind of material can be organized as a living thing. And this is somehow related to your understanding that life involves signs in a way that non-life does not. Eh.. I was an electronic engineer for 10 years. I've been a nurse for 10 years. Not exactly an expert in either domain, but I know the basics. As it happens, I worked on telecommunications signaling equipment, so I know something about electronic signs. We call a thing a sign because of what it means to us. The dark clouds are a sign that it might rain.
The clouds are signaling. Are they alive? If not, why not?
Generally, the only two places where sign-like functionality seems to be fundamental is in living things and mental operations - life and mind. In the inorganic domain, there doesn't seem to me to be anything 'semiotic', but I would be happy to be corrected if I'm mistaken.
You can dude all you like. But action potentials are not electron discharges.
Ion flow regulated by voltage-gated channels are electrical in that a change in membrane potential at a point does cause a change in protein conformation causing a pore to open. So a changed potential is a signal which the pore mechanically reads to continue a chain reaction of depolarisations.
But sodium channel blockers don't stop electrons flowing across or along membranes, do they? They block the ability of pores to respond to the signal of a potential difference.
And in describing the machinery of neural signalling, the striking fact is not the electrical gradients (why would it be?) but the intricate semiotics of messaging involved.
Quoting Mongrel
And I've written books on neuroscience.
Quoting Mongrel
It's not just my understanding.
Just keep making random shit up.
This really doesn't make sense. Laws of physics, such as "the laws of gravity" are all man-made laws. They are generalities produced by logic, which describe the ways that things behave. They don't compel things to behave in the described way. The rule follows the behaviour, as a description, not vise versa.
Can't go along with that. Gravity was around long before anyone was there to describe it. Sure, the description is a human invention, but not the fact. It is true that the 'laws of physics' are 'compelling' in a way that 'rules of behaviour' are not, insofar as one cannot avoid falling if pushed, but one can avoid paying one's taxes. It's true, but it's not especially relevant.
The issue here is that we haven't found any thing in nature which corresponds to "the laws of gravity". So we cannot claim that there is some natural "laws of gravity" which are compelling objects to move. The laws of gravity are abstractions made from the movements of objects, they are not abstractions made from the cause of this movement. So we cannot claim that the "laws of gravity" refer to that which causes, or compels objects to move in that way, because it does not.
That is true, and a consequence of the use of the term 'laws', as discussed in Nancy Cartwright's paper No God, No Laws. But nevertheless it is the case that Newton's laws do enable the making of extremely accurate predictions about the behaviour of objects, without which a lot of what we take for granted in day to day life would not be possible.
The accuracy of prediction is not what is at issue here. The claim was made that matter follows rules, and this is what allows for the apparent self-organizing of living beings.
This is what Vagabond Spectre said:
Do you see the problem here? We have no precedent whereby we can say that matter is capable of following rules. But Sam L. responded with the claim that matter follows the laws of gravity. That's why I pointed out the category error. The position being argued by VagabondSpectre, and apokrisis as well for that matter, is completely supported by this category error. Simply stated, the error is that existent material can interpret some fundamental laws, to structure itself in a self-organizing way. it is only through this error, that supporters of this position can avoid positing an active principle of "life", and vitalism.
Matter follows a set of physical laws which govern it's behavior is another way of saying "there is consistency in the way matter behaves".
The way matter happens to behave allows it to combine into complex forms whose behavior is an amalgam of the behavior of it's more basic parts.
The basic rules are self-evident brute facts of reality. So when you say "existent material can interpret some fundamental laws", that's a more or less accurate way of saying that matter behaves with some consistency. (I.E: electrons will only exist in certain orbits around atomic nuclei, molecular bonds will only form between certain atomic structures, material texture is an expression of molecular structure (and pressure/temperature), gravitational forces are proportional to distance and mass, light can only be absorbed by substances at certain frequencies/light energy quanta, etc...)
When you have enough of these "rules" which "govern matter" (whether the laws are modeled from matter or matter is modeled from laws doesn't make any difference, we're inexorably trying to describe behavior we observe; laws bend to fit the behavior of matter, not the other way around; the "laws" are just our models.).
I don't think we can split these(I'm treating "materially" in its broadest terms). This is because as I see it the reality is likely to be more subtle than the logic of these scenarios which is to simplistic and two dimensional. So the reality may well be more regressive, spontaneous and uncaused than is conceived of, while not in any way individually describable, or discernible by either.
There is a more subtle rendering of this notion in which "infinity" is read as without ends, or bounds, rather than a strict infinity, which itself is a human invention and susceptible to simplistic logical abstraction. Also "materially" can be treated as any form, or kind of extension in any manifestation in any realm, or dimension.
So it can be rewritten as,- an endless, or unbounded causal regression in any medium, or phenomena of extension in which a causal chain is manifest, while having some causal link to the world we find ourselves in.
Etc.
That's all fine, so is there a "unity", a "singularity" in The Big Bang Event
I realize that traditional computation is not analagous to a mind, but normal computation is not what I'm suggesting might be able to make the matter-mind leap from arbitrary mechanical abstraction and transformation of data to semantic/meaningful/anticipatory interpretation of it.
For example, I say: think of a cat, and hypothetically connected neurons which store the associated syntactic data (memories/images of cats, experiences with cats, the label "cat", and all their associations) start firing, and somehow from the interplay of these recorded and associated data sets emerges a more meaningful interpretation, which represents thought in a conscious mind. I don't pretend to know how living minds work, but I'm willing to experimentally presume that their construction involves data storage mechanisms and complex regimes of continuous and internal data exchange, refinement, and external input/output.
You said that computation doesn't produce a steady-state system, and typically it doesn't. But does the mind produce a steady-state? I would say yes and no given the presumption that connected groups of neurons have persistence in some aspects of their structural networks (the neurons and connections approximating "cat" has somewhat coherent or permanent internal structure AFAIK), but parts of neuronal networks also exhibit growth and change overtime to such a degree that the dynamics of the entire system also change. When strictly doing computational work there's no benefits from erecting a steady state because the data exchanges we're looking to make are well defined and finite, but if we're looking to simulate, then a steady state of data interaction/processing is exactly what occurs. Simulated or artificial neural networks can be trained from various inputs to detect something specific by feeding it specific information/data (like image data or sound-wave data), and I presume this must be analogous to the way that the brain physically transforms stimulus into coherent data. The ongoing exchanges that occur over such an artificial network simulate approximate steady states.
We could train a single artificial neural network to recognize "cats" (by sound or image or something else), and I'm not suggesting that this artificial neural network would therefore be alive or conscious, but I am suggesting that this is the particular kind of state of affairs which forms the base unit of a greater intelligence which is not only able to identify cats, but associate meaning along with it. What I'm suggesting is that a sufficiently large collection of interconnected neural networks which could then be trained by visual, auditory, and other sensory apparatus (detecting the external world in real time) might be able to learn, behave, and communicate (within the allowable physical parameters defined by it's output apparatus) in many of the same ways that human minds presently do. It might require a grossly large or grossly compact computer to achieve this level of simulation, but once we achieve it we're going to be left with no choice but to consider it a mind.
Is the brain not just a wet computer which simulates our own minds?
Quoting apokrisis
I still don't understand why life and mind needs to be built on fundamental material instability or it ain't life/mind. The mechanisms of biological life are very delicate, I get that. I get that life "seeks out" (read as: evolution exploited) material instability because materially unstable parts are easier to affect/manipulate, but as such material instability is a feature of biological life because biological life slowly evolved and overtime incorporated what was readily available to be incorporated: the materially unstable.
The main material instability in digital infrastructure is the switch like property of a memory cell. 99% of the complexity of computer operation is located in the complexity of the way these memory cells connect together. Yes a truly learning and sentient machine would behave in a deterministic fashion, but it would be unpredictable, it would demonstrate intelligence, communication, grasp of meaning, it could even have values of it's own if it were given biological imperatives. It's internal computations would involve unguided emergent complexity that we're incapable of deciphering. In short it would exhibit all the traits required to create the illusion of free-will, such as creativity. It might even think it's alive and claim to have continuous conscious perception.
I know why biological life needs extreme material instability, but do minds need it?
There would be a unity or symmetry. That is implied by the fact something could separate or break to become the "mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive" two.
But the further wrinkle is that the initial singular state is not really any kind of concrete state but instead a vagueness - an absence of any substantial thing in both the material and formal sense.
This radical state of indeterminism is difficult to imagine. But so are many mathematical abstractions. And it is a retroductive metaphysical argument as we are working back from what we can currently observe - a divided world - to say something about what must have been the undivided origins.
So note how our universe is limited to just three spatial directions. Going on the "everythingness" argument, there seems no reason that before the Big Bang symmetry breaking moment, when a vague everythingness was constrained, this would mean the pre-Bang was infinitely dimensional. Anything happening, bled into an unlimited number of directions. And so nothing could really happen.
There are good arguments for why the only stable arrangement of dimensions is three. Forces like gravity and EM dilute with the square of the distance. In a universe of less dimensions, force would remain too strong. In more dimensions, it evaporates too fast. So we can argue that there is something Goldilocks about three dimensionality as having the best balance if you have to build a spacetime that is a dissipative structure, expanding and cooling by a steady thermal spread of its radiation.
So from that, you can imagine the pre-bang state being simply radiative fluctuations that instantly thermalise. Every attempt at action gets swallowed up instantly as it is draining in infinite directions and not taking its time spreading out and thinning inside three dimensions.
The Big Bang is thus more of a big collapse from infinite or unbounded directionality to the least number of dimensions that could become an eternal unwinding down towards a heat death.
The details of this argument could be wrong of course. But it illustrates a way of thinking about origins that by-passes the usual causal problem of getting something out of nothing. If you start with vague everythingness (as what prevents everything being possible?) then you only need good arguments why constraints would emerge to limit this unbounded potential to some concrete thermalising arrangement - like our Big Bang/Heat Death universe.
The problem is more that you are anthropomorphizing matter, in imagining that it would have to be able to "interpret' a law in order to be able to act in accordance with it. Even humans are capable of acting in accordance with laws without being able to interpret them; or even necessarily knowing they are acting in accordance with some law.
I see what you are saying now. Laws of physics are statements and math formulas that predict the behaviour of objects. These objects are compelled to forces, such as gravity, but not laws, such as the laws of gravity. Therefore mindless objects indeed don't "follow laws" in the sense that they are caused or motivated by them to behave in their predictive ways.
With this clarification, it seems there is not much in common between human laws and laws of physics. The two types of "laws" have completely difference essences.
The problem is that indeed the "map is not (is never) the territory". So our idea of infinity is not infinity, our idea of the continuum is not the continuum, our idea of the world is not the world, and so on. But, despite the fact that when we attempt to address these metaphysical issues we are always, as Wittgenstein says "running up against the limits of language", we can only think in the terms of what we are capable of thinking, and speak in the terms of what we are capable of saying, and any purportedly greater reality beyond our possible understanding is of no use to our discourses if we cannot say what it is.
I do indeed see the problem - it is reductionism, pure and simple.
Quoting VagabondSpectre
But, as Apokrisis has shown in great length and detail, you can;t get from physical laws to life by way of a linear progression. 'The laws of matter', qua physical law, just don't cut it. What you're unconsciously doing is attributing what was formerly thought to be 'divine law' to 'physical law', which is the fundamental basis of materialism.
I might also mention by way of a footnote, that questions such as 'how life began', although they're central to the cultural conflict between science and religion in the West, are not considered significant by Buddhists, who don't premise their discipline on the idea of finding an origin or first cause. As far as Buddhists are concerned, debates about what came before the big bang, or such matters, are categorised as being like the asking of questions about 'who shot the poisoned arrow' that you have been struck by, instead of seeking treatment and cure.
My position on the laws of physics is that - to avoid any mystery - laws are "material history". Laws are simply the constraints that accumulate as a system (even a whole Universe) develops its organisation.
So that is how something global can be felt locally. The Universe has crystalised as some general material state. And that constrains all local actions in radical fashion from then on.
This again is a big advantage of turning the usual notion of material existence on its head.
The usual notion is that existence is the result of causal construction. First there was nothing, and then things got added. So that implies someone must have chosen the laws of nature. There was a law-giver who had some free choice and now somehow every object knows to obey the rules.
But a Peircean semiotic metaphysics - one where existence develops as a habit - says instead everything is possible and then actuality arises by most of that possibility getting suppressed. So the universal laws are universal states of constraint - the historical removal of a whole bunch of possibility. The objects left at the end of the process are heavily restricted in their actions - and by the same token, they then enjoy the equally definite freedoms that thus remain.
That is what Newtonianism was about. The motion of massive bodies is universally restricted so that it is only free, or inertial, if it is constant motion in a straight line or spinning on a spot (translational and rotational symmetry is preserved). So it is extreme restriction which underpins extreme freedom - the inertia that means a mass has some "actual physical properties", like a quantifiable position and momentum.
So laws are a mystery in a "something from nothing" metaphysics. There seems no reason for the rules, and no connection between these abstractions and the concrete objects they determine.
But a constraints-based holistic metaphysics says instead that laws are simply historically embedded material conditions. History fixes the world in general ways that then everywhere impinge as constraints on what can happen. But in doing that, those same constraints also underpin the freedoms that local objects can then call their own.
One of my bits of folk wisdom is that 'the order of nature' is one thing, but 'the nature of order' another question altogether. In other words, science can clearly exploit the order of nature by discovering regularities and making predictions on that basis. But that has lead many people to assume that science somehow can explain those very same regularities, when really why there are such regularities is beyond physics - it's a metaphysical question
But that natural order is explicable in terms of an accumulation of history if we understand the mechanism of the critical phase transitions.
So it is like our Universe being now in its water phase where before it was gaseous. Being watery imposes all sorts of material constraints that we can describe as "the laws of nature". But we can also understand why that is the case if we know about the gaseous phase from which water condensed. We can see how the world was once "a lot less lawful" and so how constraints got added.
This is why modern physics and cosmology is so focused on symmetry and symmetry-breaking. That is a mathematical strength metaphysics of phase transitions. It describes in a generic fashion what must have been the case before to get what is observably the case after. Or indeed, what we could hope to observe again if we got matter in an accelerator and heated it up enough to reverse the breakings.
I see what you mean, but I had the impression that there were many very large conceptual problems already with the standard model and what if anything is beyond it. But that is also besides the point in some ways - there is a lot of very precise predictive abilities that have real consequences arising from 'observing regularities', but speculating about why there are those regularities, is still a different kind of activity to utilising them. (Rather a positivist point, perhaps.)
The argument then is nature arises the same way. To the extent it is the constraint or erasure of "every possible action over all possible dimensionality", it would find its way to the same mathematical outcomes. Simplicity will out.
So the standard model has "problems" in that it in fact gives a completely mathematical reason why there are quarks and electrons, for example. One is the result of the "eight-fold way" of breaking SU(3) chiral symmetry (the strong force). The other is the result of breaking the SU(2) symmetry of the weak force - the Higgs mechanism explaining how the four-fold way of SU(2) becomes completely broken down to the ultimate simplicity of U(1), the simplest possible kind of particle spin that is the electron with its electromagnetic field (or neutrino, without).
So the standard model is a stellar success. But having understood the lowest energy modes, we still need to discover the original more complicated initial symmetry that the whole of the Universe might have cracked with its 3D Big Bang. The "problem" is that there are a lot of candidates, such as SU(5), SO(10) and E(8). And to test the different ways of crumbling this "supersymmetry" into the simpler bits that make our observable world - SU(3) and SU(2) and U(1) - we would have to be able to detect the various other particles that the different candidate Big Bang symmetries predict.
So we could test for SO(10) say. It would have its own characteristic zoo of high energy particles (or excitation modes that exist because the "cosmic plasma" can still ring in a really complex higher dimensional way, and not just the much cooler and simpler way of a quark or electron).
Thus the Standard Model accounts for the observed world with mathematical simplicity. It already proves that nature shakes itself down to be as simple as organisationally possible. It arrives at the simplest shapes - just like the Platonic solids.
But the difficulty is to be able to make observations that then limit the earliest symmetry breaking - the configuration which was at the start of it when all forces (including maybe gravity) were "facets" of some still quite hot and multi-directional "vibration", and so still liable to spew out all sorts of weird higher-symmetry particles along with the much simpler ones that eventually came to dominate in a cold/expanded world.
As such, the Standard Model is hardly a failure or in crisis. It stands above everything in science to show we have got creation's basic shtick right. Given the practical impossibility of doing experiments at Big Bang energies, we might hope to use pure maths to discover the foundational symmetry. Like string theory tried, we might just be able to figure it out by mathematical reasoning. This is still promising, but of course string theory resulted in an almost infinite number of initial symmetry conditions. And it doesn't yet have any definite mathematical reason to pick out just one. And experiment may never come to the rescue as we are essentially asking about what happened "just prior" to the Big Bang itself.
So in just 500 years, science has managed to explain the stuff out of which everything observable has been made in terms of Platonically-necessary and maximally-simple mathematical principles. Pretty remarkable.
And yes, there is still the issue of the physical constants. But at worst, that just means there are as many universes as there are different values for those constants (the majority of which would then be unstable and rapidly inexistent anyway). So the formal framework would still be the same - there can only be some "simplest symmetry-breaking" when it comes to the maths. But every survivable arrangement of constants to scale the coupling strength of forces, and masses of particles, would survive to create a larger multiverse zoo of outcomes.
On the other hand, the constants of our Universe might turn out to be as mathematically necessary as everything else. And why not? Is there some good apriori argument against it?
But either way, you can see how maths might describe the Universe if both are the product of "sums over possibility". In each case, we can start with an everythingness that is every possibility. Then because much of that everythingness is then going to be parts contradicting some other part (like positive annihalating negative), pretty much everything falls away until we are only left with the simplest possible forms of organisation - the symmetries and symmetry-breakings which maths describes and the Universe physically embodies.
Now I think the reason that this seems backwards is because nowadays it is naturally assumed that intelligence is a result of evolution. It's not something that appears until the last second, in cosmic terms, so intelligence itself is understood as a consequence. Whereas in traditional cosmology the origin of multiplicity is the unborn or unconditioned which is symbolised in various (and often highly divergent) ways in different philosophical traditions but which, suffice to say, is depicted as in some sense being mind-like. Of course that is deprecated nowadays because it sounds religious.
Quoting apokrisis
I don't know. For every answer, there are many more questions. Remember this article? It ends
This is the so-called 'nightmare scenario' which seems to be worrying a lot of people considerably more than yourself. (Might be a career opening there, 'philosophical counselling for physicists undergoing existential crises' ;-) )
Again, this is why machines and organisms are at different ends of the spectrum (even if it is the same spectrum in some sense).
So it is because biology can stabilise the unstable that it can easily absorb new learning. It is already a system of self-organising constraint. So it can afford to accept localised perturbations - new learning - without a danger of becoming generally destabilised.
Machines by contrast are only as stable as their parts. They have to be engineered so their bits don't break. Because if anything important snaps, the machine simply stops. It can't fix itself. Some human has to call in the repair-man with a bag of replacement components.
In machine learning - even with deliberate attempts at biological designs like anticipatory neural nets - this lack of the ability to stabilise the unstable shows in the central problems with building such machines. Like catastrophic forgetting. The clunky nature of the faux organicism means that a learning system can keep absorbing small differences until - unpredictably - the general state of coherence breaks down.
A human brain can absorb an incredible variety of learning with the same circuits. A machine's learning is brittle and liable to buckle because the top-down stability only reaches a small way down. At some point, human designers have to introduce a cut-off and take over. Eventually a repair-man has to be there to fix the breakdown in foundational hardwared stability which the computer still needs, even if it has been pretending in software emulation that it doesn't.
Quoting VagabondSpectre
And this is always the engineer's argument. If I can build just this one simple stable bit - the cat pattern recognition algorithm - then that gives me the stability to add the next level of computational complexity. Eventually we must replicate whatever the heck it is that life and mind are actually doing.
But this line of thought is fallacious for the reasons I've outlined. By continually deferring the stability issue - building it in bottom up rather than allowing it to emerge top-down - the engineer is never going to arrive at the destination of a machine in which all its stability comes top-down as stable information regulating critically unstable physics.
Quoting VagabondSpectre
OK, you get that information is so immaterial that it can't push the world very hard. So to have an effect, it must find the parts of the world which respond to the slightest possible push. It needs to work with material instability because it itself is just so very, very weak.
Right. That entropic equation is then only definitional of life/mind as a central logical principle. It explains life/mind as semiotic mechanism. It show how the price of informational stability is material instability. It is a trade-off - a way to mine a world that is overall rather materially stable by comparison.
So the definitional strength argument is that life/mind is semiotic dissapative structure. Its essential characteristic is that it takes advantage of this particular informational stability vs material instability trade-off.
Quoting VagabondSpectre
Yep. So you can accept biology is semiotic dissipative structure, but you think intelligence or even consciousness is something else - like really complex information processing. The biological or hardware side of the story can be set aside. Computers just deal with the informational realm of symbol manipulation. Syntax can do it.
But my argument is that all biology is regulated by information. There is "mind" operating even when it is just genetic information and not yet neural information. The genes are an anticipatory model of the organism. The neurons then put that model of "the organismic self" in a larger model of "the world".
And we can see how that world modelling depends on instability at its very interface between self and world. Sensory receptors wouldn't be sensitive unless they as unstable as possible. They have to be set up as switches that only respond to change in the world. And which stop responding as soon as the change stops. We don't hear the humming fridge because our neurons have already got bored with it. It is only if the fridge stops - data disappears - that they wake up again.
So minds don't need the world to be unstable in the same way. Perception isn't metabolism. Although the way we think is focused on the affordances of the environment. We are evolved to look for the causal levers by which we can move the world with the least effort. So it all comes back to an economy of control. It is great that the world is also materially stable - we don't have to worry about controlling its existence. We can build a house of solid foundations - or a computer with sound engineering - and then just get on with living and dealing with the surprising. Mental instability is reserved for creative problem solving - not being so fixed in our habits that we can't try new smart ways to regulate the world with the least effort.
And then to be able to have this kind of sensitivity, that has to be built in from the ground up - from the level of individual sensory receptors.
So it would only really be from the next level up - the sociocultural one - that we get that biological story of informational stabilisation in search of material instability to regulate. A society depends on a bunch of people who might go off in any direction, yet the lightest touch can keep them all bound in some common direction. Just wave a flag - the simplest signal - and the group will follow.
Again, this has implications for machine intelligence. If DeepMind is not good at having friends, being inspired by leaders, a natural at working in a team - all because it also has all the opposite potential of being moody, going off message, generally getting chaotic - then how is it ever going to simulate any actual human? A machine by definition is engineered for stability. Instability is the last thing we would engineer into DeepMind - or at least the kind of relationship instability that is critical for humans who are social creatures.
And all our science fiction gets that. Machines are inhuman - the misfit dynamics of teamwork is the last thing they get. They are never in on the jokes, just tagging along with the human gang in bewilderment. Where there is no risk of individual instability, there can be no reward of collectivised stability. Humans by contrast live on a constant knife edge of fractiousness vs compassion. The smallest social thing can tilt them. Which is ... why humans are so fantastically controllable. Just wave a flag, say thank-you, hoist a finger, or offer any other gesture of minimal effort. The results will be hugely predictable. Behaviour is simple to co-ordinate when there is semiosis to regulate the instability and tilt it in the right general direction.
Maths is the science of patterns. It is our modelling of pure form. So maths remains just a model of the thing in itself and not itself the thing.
So I am not making an actually mystic Platonic point. In fact, our mathematical models are generally terribly reductionist - bottom up constructions with numbers as their atoms. So Scientism rules in maths too. But also, to be able to create these reductionist models - of forms! - maths has to be able to think holistically. So the informal or intuitive part of mathematical argument - the inspiration that makes the connections - does have to see the big picture which then gets collapsed to some more mechanistic description. That is how mathematical thought ends up with equations.
Quoting Wayfarer
But I am not saying one has to come before the other. Rather both reflect the same process - a summing over everything to discover what doesn't get self-cancelled away by the end. So the first place it has to happen is out there in the real physical world. It starts as ontology. But then epistemology finds itself having to recap the same developmental process - because that just is the essence of development as a process.
So the surprise is that nature is a process. People normally think of it as a thing - an existence rather than a persistence. And then the process of modelling the world could only develop via the same logic. So that is why maths and reality look like mirror images. Each is a process - one ontic, the other epistemic.
This is the basis of Peircean metaphysics - the reason why we might call the cosmos semiotic, or - your favourite - consider matter as deadened mind.
Quoting Wayfarer
As we have always agreed, Eastern metaphysics thinks this same general away about existence as a developmental process. Before the mechanistic mode of thought arose (to organise societies by democracy and law, then to harness the world with machines), everyone could see the natural logic of "dependent co-arising" as the basis of any metaphysics.
And as long as you say intelligence rather than consciousness, then yes, it is quite possible to place that there right at the beginning in some true sense. To me, intelligence means formal and final cause - the having of a purpose and then the organisation that results to achieve it. And even if it is just the second law - a driving desire to entropify which then results in the particular mathematics of dissipative structures - then even scientists are saying that intelligence or intent was there from the start with the Big Bang.
It's not maths, per se, but 'the reign of quantity' - that only what is quantifiable is to be considered. And the placing of mind among the 'secondary qualities' - that is the fatal mistake.
Quoting apokrisis
Analogous to fingernail and hair clippings - the detritus of past vitality.
Quoting apokrisis
No argument from me there!
Yes I know it is difficult to imagine, personally I would pull away from the focus on some kind of radical indeterminism as is implied by the great intensity and pressure etc which we are presented with by astrophysics for example. Yes there may have been some almighty squeezing, forging at the beginning of the known physical universe. But this may only be a requirement of forging such concrete stable substance in which we find ourselves. Also it isn't actually addressing anything necessarily fundamental about our existence, or existence in general. But rather it is simply focusing on physical conditions. (Note, I am very much a materialist, just not in the narrow terms of physical matter).
I am with you in regards of the physical material, space, time and three dimensions etc, which is well described by science.
Agreed, but the reason I asked the question about a unity is that it brings us to a set of conditions for which science and maths, even perhaps logic is blind and mute. There must be something going on in there which we are far from understanding. However, I don't think we necessarily should try to go there to solve any questions about our origins. As I said, it might simply be a means of forging dense physical material, the origin might be found elsewhere in which such extreme conditions are not required.
This why the seeker turns to intuitive systems of progress. To literally grow into the knowledge, rather than to work it out.
Clearly this is an unacceptable use of the word "govern". That's why I am trying to keep things clear here, to avoid such ambiguity. There is consistency in the way matter behaves. There are laws of physics which describe the way matter behaves. But obviously these laws do not govern the way matter behaves.
Quoting VagabondSpectre
No, this is false. It is one thing to say that matter behaves with consistency, it is quite another thing to say that matter "interprets" laws. The latter implies that matter has the capacity to apprehend the meaning of things. There is no indication that matter has the capacity to do this. That's an unsupported materialist assumption.
Quoting John
For matter to act in accordance with a physical law is one thing. For a human being to act in accordance with a governing law is a completely different thing. That they are different is evident from the fact that if matter is seen to behave other than in the way that the physical law describes, it is evidence that the law needs to be altered, but if a human being acts in a way other than the governing law prescribes, this is evidence that the human being needs to be altered. To equivocate between these two very distinct uses of "laws" is a mistake.
Quoting Samuel Lacrampe
That's exactly what I am arguing, and I think it's a very important point to keep in mind in any metaphysical speculations.
Quoting apokrisis
I think "material history" is very ambiguous. Human beings have a "history" because they record events, and this record acts as a way of remembering. But the record needs to be interpreted. It is useless without the means of interpretation. We could say that the geological formations of the earth provide us with a material history, but that "history" is really dependent on the interpretation.
We interpret such a material history with the use of the laws of physics. The laws are the tool of interpretation. To say that the laws of physics act as constraints in any way other than as constraining the minds of the interpreters, of this history, is simply mistaken. What you imply is that someone was following (being constrained by) the laws of physics when creating the geological formations, recording history in this way. But those geological formations were created prior to human existence, and therefore prior to the laws of physics, so this is actually impossible.
Quoting apokrisis
If you want to turn the notion of material existence "on its head" you need to develop sound principles. You cannot expect to turn something upside down and have it stand alone on its head, without providing some support for it. It wasn't built to stand on its head, so if you turn it upside down you need to create a new foundation for it, to support it.
Quoting apokrisis
This is a totally unfounded use of "habit". "Habit" generally refers to the tendencies of living beings. Any habit is just a tendency, and it may be broken at will, by the living creature. Therefore we cannot produce a "law of physics" from a habit, because we do not observe the necessary consistency, due to the will which breaks the habits. So it is also a mistake to say that the laws of physics could refer to habits, because we know that habits are a type of thing which cannot be modeled by laws of physics.
Quoting apokrisis
This is clearly a mistaken metaphysics. Laws are created by human beings. The laws of physics are generalizations produced from observations. What they represent is inductive conclusions. The laws of physics act as constraints toward further logical proceedings, as premises and fundamental principles for deductive proceedings. It is a mistake to assume that laws of physics represent real constraints acting within the physical world because we know that inductive logic is fallible. The fact that many inductive conclusions turn out to be misleading is evidence that we cannot claim that inductive laws of physics represent anything real within the world. The reality of the laws of physics is that they are tools to aid us in understanding, they are not representative.
Life is different for each species, but generally, it is the condition extending from cell division to death, characterised by the ability to metabolise nutrients, respond to stimuli, mature, reproduce, and adapt to the environment through semiosis.
For human beings, it is the condition extending from fertilisation to death, characterised by the ability to metabolise nutrients, respond to stimuli, be aware, mature physically and mentally, reproduce, and adapt to the environment through human semiosis.
As previously mentioned, it can also mean the duration of something's *existence.
I'm desperately trying to understand your argument (that the machines we build cannot be minds or that the machines (learning machines) we currently build are no where near approaching or approximating minds), but that understanding continues to elude me.
You point out that machines are stable in their individual parts which ensures stable and predictable outcomes, and generally this appears true, but ANN's are themselves built from what amounts to simulated instability in individual neurons which embrace chaotic interaction. A single simulated neuron can exist in a ridiculously large number of different configurations defined and determined by it's weighted connections to other neurons. This gives a single neuron the ability to dynamically influence and be influenced by networks of other neurons in steady-state like informational exchanges that manage to consolidate anticipatory power. Catastrophic forgetting demonstrates this instability very clearly in that such simulated neurons aren't stable enough in their environment to retain what sub-networks have learned because learning new tasks overwrites and destroys critical elements of the psychical network that comprised previous predictive models. (I think it's fair to point out that forgetting - usually not catastrophic - occurs in the human mind as well, perhaps due to similar causes). This is an engineering problem that might not be without possible solutions.
The bottom up stability found in the mechanisms of biological life doesn't exactly get carried across the matter-mind threshold in human minds. An individual cell pulls itself together, cleans itself, generally governs itself (as a physical expression of recorded information and rules of interaction) and also dismantles itself too when it's lifespan is done. That is very impressive, but how does this kind of bottom up stability contribute to the robustness of conscious human minds?
I do understand what you mean when you say there is "mind" operating even before the formation of the brain in a biological organism (you're speaking of DNA as an intelligent and anticipatory force, a description I agree with), but this primordial genetic mind is necessarily separated in many ways from the mind produced by interactions in biological brains. The genetic mind is able to build a brain and program certain autonomic functions (unconscious or hard-wired parts of the brain) and define the basic rules of the system (like the behavioral traits of neurons), but when the brain actually swings into function, the genetic mind can only sit back and watch as it's physical creation records and refines it's own networks of information and generates a mind which exists symbiotically with, but distinctly from, the genetic mind.
So in a way we can both assent to the idea that minds can be intelligently designed so to speak (DNA designs the brain), but what I'm specifically having a hard time with is how our current attempts at simulating minds are as far off base as you say they are? In other words, why is data stored and manipulated by artificial neural networks not analogous to the way biological neural networks also store and manipulate data in participation of creating human intelligence and mind? Hurtles such as catastrophic forgetting are to me indicators that we're not designing neurons and the basic principles of the system intelligently enough to sufficiently increase mental stability (compared to how intelligently DNA can build a brain). I see the recent successes in the anticipatory strength of these models as evidence that ANN's are in fact doing something similar to the biological neurons they loosely imitate.
What am I not understanding? What will prevent us from making progress on solving the top-down stability from fundamentally unstable parts dilemma?
Hardly. I've already clarified that laws describe behavior. How we informally use words for convenience hardly amounts to "materialist assumption".
Yes and that very mistake was yours. It's amazing that you now turn and around and emphasize the very point I was making against your position as if I had not made the point at all. You were equivocating in saying that matter had to be able to interpret a law in order to "follow" it, as we might say of a human that follows a law
No I don't equivocate. As I explained, only human beings "follow laws" whether they are following governing laws, or following laws of physics. I strongly affirm that matter does not follow laws.
You are creating a figure of straw, if you assert that when it is commonly said that matter follows laws, the implication is that matter is somehow interpreting laws. To say that matter follows laws is to say nothing more than that it acts in accordance with them.
So the issue is not can we make conscious machines. It is how will computational machinery expand or change humanity as an organism - take it to another natural level.
It is still the case that there are huge fundamental hurdles to building a living and conscious machine. The argument about hardware stability is one. Another is about "data compression".
To simulate protein folding - an NP-strength problem - takes a fantastic amount of computation just to get an uncertain approximation. But for life, the genes just have to stand back and let the folding physically happen. And this is a basic principle of biological "computation". At every step in the hierarchy of control, there is a simplification of the information required because the levels below are materially self-organising. (This is the hardware instability point seen from another angle.)
So again, life and mind constantly shed information, which is why they are inherently efficient. But computation, being always dependent on simulation, needs to represent all the physics as information and can't erase any. So the data load just grows without end. And indeed, if it tries to represent actual dynamical criticality, infinite data is needed to represent the first step.
Now of course any simulation can coarse grain the physics - introduce exactly the epistemic cut offs by which biology saves on the need to represent its own physics. But because there is no actual physics involved now, it is a human engineering decision about how to coarse grain. So the essential link between what the program does, and whether that is supported by the organisation that results in an underpinning physical flow, is severed. The coarse graining is imposed on a physical reality (the universal machine that is the computer hardware) and is not instead the dynamical outcome of some mass of chemistry and molecular structure which is a happy working arrangement that fits some minimum informational state of constraint.
Anyway. Again the point is about just how far off and wrongly orientated the whole notion of building machine life and mind is when it is just some imagined confection of data without real life physics. What is basic to life and mind is that the relation is semiotic. Every bit of information is about the regulation of some bit of physics. But a simulation is the opposite. No part of the simulation is ever directly about the physics. Even if you hook the simulation up to the world - as with machine learning - the actual interface in terms of sensors is going to be engineered. There will be a camera that measures light intensities in terms of pixels. Already the essential intimate two-way connection between information and physics has been artificially cut. Camera sensors have no ability to learn or anticipate or forget. They are fixed hardware designed by an engineer.
OK. Now the other side of the argument. We should forget dreams of replicating life and mind using computation. But computation can take human social and material organisation to some next level. That is the bit which has a natural evolutionary semiotic logic.
So sure, ANNs may be the architecture which takes advantage of a more biological and semiotic architecture. You can start to get machine learning that is useful. But there is already an existing human system for that furrther level of information processing to colonise and amplify. So the story becomes about how that unfolds. In what way do we exploit the new technology - or find that it comes to harness and mould us?
Agsin, this is why the sociology is important here. As individual people, we are already being shaped by the "technology" of language and the cultural level of regulation it enables. Humans are now shaped for radical physical instability - we have notions of freewill that means we could just "do anything right now" in a material sense. And that instability is then what social level constructs are based on. Social information can harness it to create globally adaptive states of coherent action. The more we can think for ourselves, the more we can completely commit to some collective team effort.
And AI would just repeat this deal at a higher level. It would be unnatural for AI to try to recreate the life and mind that already exists. What would be the point? But computation is already transforming human cultural organisation radically.
So it is simply unambitious to speculate about artificial life and mind. Instead - if we want to understand our future - it is all about the extended mentality that is going to result from adding a further level of semiosis to the human social system.
Computation is just going to go with that natural evolutionary flow. But you are instead focused on the question of whether computation could, at least theoretically, swim against it.
I am saying even if theoretically it could, that is fairly irrelevant. Pay attention to what nature is likely to dictate when it comes to the emergence of computation as a further expression of semiotic system-level regulation.
[EDIT] To sum it up, what isn't energetically favoured by physics ain't likely to happen. So computation fires the imagination as a world without energetic constraints. But technology still has to exist in the physical world. And those constraints are what the evolution of computation will reflect in the long run.
Humans may think they are perfectly free to invent the technology in whatever way they choose. But human society itself is an economic machine serving the greater purpose of the second law. We are entrained to physical causality in a way we barely appreciate but is completely natural.
So there are strong technological arguments against AI and AL. But even stronger here is that the very idea of going against nature's natural flow is the reason why the simple minded notion of building conscious machines - more freewilled individual minds - ain't going to be the way the future happens.
Are you sure it's not more a matter of your desperately trying to avoid its conclusions? ;-)
What I assert is that it is wrong to say that matter follows laws, because "follows" implies that one is prior to the other. In this case it is implied by the word "follows", that laws are prior to matter. But clearly human beings create the laws, and this is by following the activities of matter. So laws really follow matter.
Therefore my claim is that to say "matter follows laws" is not the same a saying matter acts in accordance with laws. In fact, I assert that to say "matter follows laws" is not just an ambiguous way of speaking, it is misleading, deceptive, and false.
Welcome. I agree that things made of cells are living things. But why is that the case? What makes a cell a living thing, and anything simpler than a cell a non-living thing (I assume you agree with the latter phrase too)?
Quoting Galuchat
This may answer my previous question. But would that not make a fire a living thing much like a cell? Note, this seems to be the position of some people in this discussion. I am on the edge on that one; and yet I cannot seem to find a clear difference between a cell and a fire.
Quoting Samuel LacrampeFire seems not to meet the last one. I don't particularly agree with the list, since I can think of exceptions to the other four items, but semiosis alone seems not enough. I have bailed on attempting to define an essence, and leave it a call to be made on a case-by-case basis. Undoubtedly we will not always recognize life when encountered, and will classify some things as life that really shouldn't be.
If digital computation requires infintie data to represent actual dynamical criticality (particular physical states and the laws of physics as they are?), don't human minds also need infinite data to do the same? (if so, where do human minds get that infinite data? If not, please disregard)
I can assent to your description of biological life as organized data expressing through material/chemical control channels (the semiotic bit) which maintains, reproduces, and develops itself by intelligently sequestering/creating dissipative engines (the thermodynamic facilitators of perpetual work (including semiotic work?)), and I'm well with you that we're far from reproducing or imitating that level of dynamic self-organizing complexity (in particular, the bit about how biological life builds it's own physical structure from the ground up and how it tends to rely on the non-grainy laws of physics themselves to provide the rules of interaction), but do human minds also exploit physics such that the data stored within them benefits from non-grainy amplifiers (adding NP potential) and such epic and far-reaching bottom up stability?
You've convinced me that DNA based biological life is nowhere near analogous to our highest hopes for ANN's, but you're also convincing me that human consciousness (and the functions of the data contained within the brain) is likewise not analogous to it's genetic underpinnings. Like ANN's, the human mind requires an external intelligence to step in and provide arbitrary instruction to ensure stability and proper function. DNA does this by governing the production and physical effects of some hormones which can also function as neurochemicals...
You mention that a camera cannot learn, but neither can an eyeball. Biology designed better and better eyes through natural evolution, and we design better and better cameras as our understanding grows. As far as data input goes, there's no necessary difference between incoming signals from a biological eye or a mechanical/digital one. In fact, digital eyeballs would probably be far superior to our own. Light enters our eyes and gets focused by the lens onto an membrane/array of light sensitive cells which individually form the pixel of our vision. There's not an infinite amount of data contained in light, and even if there were our eyes only imperfectly capture a finite amount of it at a certain refresh rate. Data being fed into a real brain from an eyeball cuts the connection between physics and information in the same way an artificial camera does because they both turn them into abstract and finite electrical impulses.
I am genuinely trying to grasp how your argument applies to a hypothetical ANN but not the human brain, but given that it is only the growing intelligence aspect of life which I am interested in as a defining feature, to me the fact that genetic biology can utilize the physics of protein folding to essentially encode unfathomably complex data isn't necessarily an issue because these basic biological mechanisms don't directly participate in the processes of human intelligence (they merely underpin it as it's designer and maintainer). The base informational units of the human mind appear grainy, finite, and cut off from physics in the same way the base units of digital information are.
An extremely powerful anticipatory model capable of real-time reaction, (something DNA is poor at) is like a tool that DNA creates for it's own benefit (our brains). DNA puts it's life in the hands of this more useful anticipatory model because letting it direct the whole leads to long term success. If and when we create ANN's with far more anticipatory power than humans, what we might see when we step back could be something not unlike a how a bunch of like minded cells all organize around the maintenance of this one more powerful anticipatory system. (side note: the processor of genetic diversity flows through death and reproduction where successful reproduction (over the long run) is what represents a successful model). So the more powerful and reliable learning machines become, the more humanity will come to rely on them for top down guidance (because we will be more successful in doing so).
I don't expect us to try and install emotional intelligence as an operator of AI's or stick them in human-like bodies (why re-engineer the wheel? Although we will want them to recognize human emotion), instead we will manipulate their base structure in order to guide them toward the completion of tasks we desire (much like how DNA does that for human minds via pain/pleasure/instinctual drives). I can't think of how we might go about doing that just yet, but I also cannot understand why not.
https://www.nasa.gov/vision/universe/starsgalaxies/life%27s_working_definition.html
Especially the first question to Dr. Cleland.
Why do you think that a cell is the simplest possible living thing?
Quoting Samuel Lacrampe
Why would you think that a fire metabolizes? Metabolism is clearly defined as what living things do. What "metabolism" refers to is confined to the activities of life. I do not think that a fire is a living process. But metabolism, as a release of energy by an organism, also has a flip side, which is the storing of energy, best exemplified by photosynthesis.
"For example, a crystal can grow, reach equilibrium, and even move in response to stimuli, but lacks what commonly would be thought of as a biological nervous system."
Lack of something serving as a nervous system is what disqualifies a crystal as life. Hmm...
Anyway, the article is about the theory of what life is, but only one question touches on that, the other ones being about the origins of the one example we know. Dr Cleland hits on many of the points discussed in this thread, and warns against any hard criteria to use in the identification of life since it seems pretty easy to come up with a counter-example of any rule. My favorite quote is her last one:
"Merely defining "life" in such a way that it incorporates one's favorite non-traditional "living" entity does not at all advance this project."
I think I have observed that. Several of us have tried to pinpoint an essence, and the attempts indeed seem not to have advanced the project. I notice Dr Cleland does not offer even a hint of a description of this scientific theory of life. We need one, but we don't have one, and probably cannot have one until we have several other examples under our belt. Our current same size of 1 is insufficient.
Quoting Wayfarer
In which she criticizes the term 'definition' of life, as opposed to 'scientific theory' of life. Asking for a definition is not to ask what the thing is, but merely how the word is used in one particular language.
I need to remember that in other discussions.
All the properties mentioned previously (needs energy, can grow, can reproduce, adaptability, ...) are all means to the end of self-sustainability. None of these means appear to be essential because one mean may work for one thing but not another (at least in theory).
On an unrelated note, this marks my 100th comment. I am treating myself to a cookie.
By the definition of the term itself: the smallest structural and functional unit of an organism. With this definition, if we were to ever find simpler organisms than our currently known cells, then these would also be called cells I think.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Yeah I agree. As such, metabolism should be excluded from the essence of living things because it presupposes it. We can replace it instead with "interaction with environment, either input or output".
Yeah I admit I don't understand what the term "semiosis" means (process that involves signs?).
Quoting noAxioms
This may be the end result. But at least I think I can prove that the essence of life exists:
- Either a being is a living being or a non-living being. It cannot be both.
- There exists an instance where a being is clearly labelled as living and another instance where a being is clearly labelled non-living: e.g. a dog and a rock.
- Therefore a separation/border exists between the two labels, which is the essence. Its location may not be clear, but it must exist.
Human beings formulate laws, and we don't know for sure whether those formulations reflect actuality in any absolute sense.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
I think you are quibbling over different senses of "follows". Nature either invariably and absolutely acts in accordance with laws, or follows laws, or it doesn't. In either case what those laws are, where they "come from"; what their ontological status is; is a whole other (I would say ultimately undecidable) question.
http://www.astro.iag.usp.br/~janot/aga0316/artigos/DEFINING%20%20LIFE.pdf
Can we do better than just trade insults? I put the case that biology succeeds despite not having a hard definition of the essence of life. And further that this is a case in point of the philosophical notion that such essences are fraught. This is not to say that seeking to set out the various items at the boundary of the living and the non-living is not a worthwhile exercise.
What counts is not whether a prion is alive or no; but getting an accurate description of what it does.
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/1349/wittgensteins-mysticism-or-not-
A fine example of how we can get on doing things without having explicit, hard definitions of essences.
I think that definition of "cell" is outdated, and maybe based in misunderstanding. Isn't there many smaller active units within the cell?
Quoting John
Yes, so you agree with me, human beings create laws. You can call it "formulate" if you like.
Quoting John
Unless you can demonstrate that there are some laws which are not created, or formulated, by human beings, (perhaps they were formulated by God?) then you should accept that it is very clear that nature does not follow laws. Nature existed long before human beings, and "follows" implies necessarily, posteriority. If you think that I am quibbling about senses of "follows", and believe that there is a sense of "follows" in which the thing being followed is not prior to the follower, then please explain
Cannot agree with it. The line is fuzzy, so something can be questionably on either side.
Don't understand this one. A rock is not a dead dog, and would a dog not qualify as life if I could not produce a dead one?
If you mean a dog is living compared to the rock, the label seems to have already been applied for the rule to have meaning, so it does not help narrow the essence you seek.
For any rule, it seems to take little effort to conceive of an exception. The conclusion seems to be a theory that avoids strict rules.
Definitions are never going to be hard if they have to track the crossing of some critical boundary. It is always going to be the case that the line between non-life and life is going to look hazy under the scientific microscope.
So that is why your problem with metaphysical essence is so misguided. You think the essential difference has to be marked on reality as some binary borderline. On this side life, on the other side, not-life. And the arbitrary nature of such lines on a map are obvious.
So yes, biology succeeds because it finds the essential in generalties - the constraints that speak to global or top-down formal/final causes.
You are imagining the search for essence to be the search for local material/efficient causes - the usual atomist/reductionist approach to understanding "the real". And that then leads to a crazy "natural kinds/rigid designator" style essentialism. That is what promotes the argument that the stuff on one side of a material border must be "non-living", the other side "living", thus provoking a metaphysical implosion and logical crisis.
But once you accept that generals are real, formal and final cause exist, existence itself is simply a state of constraint on foundational vagueness, then the problem of "essence" goes away. We know we are trying to talk about different kinds of hylomorphic substances - different forms of material constraint. So it something globallly functional rather than locally material that we mean to pick out as defining the boundary between living and non-living matter.
So that is why the semiotic approach to definition works. And is the one that theoretical biology keeps picking out, as your reference confesses...
So life is different in that it localises formal/final cause. It is organismic in being able to remember the negentropic shape that is its entropic advantage.
Non-living matter does not have this internal model of itself. Non-living matter is regular and self-similar only due to global information, or pan-semiosis.
Dissipative structures do seem lifelike. A tornado seems to chase its way across a plane of temperature gradients, sustaining its vortex by "eating" the differences. Physico-chemical nature is ruled by all sorts of such growth and entropification processes. They have common forms - like vortexes and fractals. And they have a generic purpose - as encoded in the Laws of Thermodynamics. So - like even fire - they are sort of life-like ... in being pan-semiotic, or constrained in a global fashion by formal/final cause. But then the ability to internalise this kind of information - form a self-organising model of "self" - marks a functional crossing of a boundary.
But again, if we are to put this under a microscope - ask about life as a natural kind - then we have to actually understand the question we want to ask from nature's own point of view.
The whole point is the functional "having of a self-describing model" - the internalised information that is captured by a whole array of semiotic machinery, but principally genes, neurons, words (and now numbers). So life is semiotic modelling - internally generated constraints over less constrained non-living physico-chemical entropic flows. And now at the material borderline things look hazy because life only needs a stochastic cut-off point between what it - it itself - defines as living vs non-living, self vs non-self, regulated vs haphazard, meaningful vs meaningless.
That is, in being a system able to interpret the differences that make a difference, the system defines its own border of indifference. We humans can stick life under a microscope and complain that this borderline looks hazy to us. But so what? In the "mind" of the organism, it has set its own probabilistic threshold in terms of what is "good enough" as the constitution of its material/efficient self. It has an idea of its formal/final essence. And that is what it is busy living out as an entropic process.
So essence is use. ;)
It is just that life is in fact defined by making essence personal. Essence for the physical world is its global identity in terms of formal/final cause. And essence for the biological world is information that is internalised to "a self". It is a local capacity to add constraints or bounds on entropic activity.
I personally don't feel much need for "essence" as a term. It suffers from the substantive confusion I outlined. Substance was a theory of metaphysical hylomorphism - a "four causes" story about how formal/final cause acted to constrain material/efficient degres of freedom. But then along came atomistic reductionism - in competition with Platonic religious spiritualism. That produced the familiar modern confusion of a sustance dualism.
Folk had to pick a side. Either reality was just material/efficient cause, or there was this other mystic stuff call formal/final cause. And Fregean logical atomism picked its side, pretty soon ran into a ditch, and was left to walk away from its own smoking wreck, muttering bitterly about nothing being certain except that if logical atomism couldn't make metaphysics work, that proved no-one could make it work.
Meanwhile Peirce had already sketched out a much bigger four causes metaphysics that explained the hylomorphic divide in terms of semiosis. Instead of a mind-matter divide, he provided a sign-matter bridge. And now modern thermodynamics is cashing that out in information theoretic terms. We can actually make scientific measurements on both sides of the sign-matter division in terms of entropy or fundamental degrees of freedom.
And as I've pointed out, definition is theory plus measurement. Definition can be precise to the degree we can make exact measurements of what we claim to be believing. The metaphysics of the modern information theoretic approach at last does give us a fundamental measurement basis. And so biology -
already a very recent discipline - has started to really move in the last 30 years.
Quoting apokrisis
So if we set aside for the moment your misguided assessment of modern logic, do we actually disagree on anything of substance with regard to what one does with definitions? It appears that we both reject the classical definition of essence as setting out necessary and sufficient conditions, and that we both prefer to speak in terms of what is done with the definiendum.
The difference seems to be that you continue to call this use, the "essence", while I don't.
That is really interesting information Banno - rolleyes....
Quoting Banno
Thanks for again illustrating the narcissistic essence of life and mind. Whatever else you don't know, you know you are right and all that remains to be determined is how everyone else is wrong. Anticipation-based world modelling in a nutshell.
Get back to me if you have some more interesting reply to my arguments than that. Clue: four causes.
Quoting apokrisis
Small steps, then - in this, is it that there is a distinction between the living and the non-living, and our task is to identify it; or is it that what we are doing is settling on when we might best use the words "living" and "non-living"?
The first is what I would call looking for an essence; the second, looking at use.
The first, obviously. Clearly there is a distinction between living and non-living, and being good philosophers, we have a desire to determine this distinction
Logically, we will never be able to agree "on when we might best use the words" until we determine that distinction.
It is possibly an old definition. At any rate, it is the simplest thing that I know to be living with certainty, and so it is a starting point in the discussion. As we get closer to the essence, maybe the title of the simplest living thing will shift.
If I use the word "cat" successfully - in ordinary language - it means we agree on some interpretation of a sign. And if there is semantic vagueness, I could draw you a picture of my conception, or point to some "actual cat" - perhaps point to that lion sitting over there on a mat, and say "except a lot smaller and friendlier, without the mane, etc". A whole lot of further measurables to constrain your state of conception.
So on what side of the concept-percept or model-measurement divide does the semantic essence reside? Is it the theory that defines the cat, or the acts of measurement? Or the two functioning reliable/usefully/pragmatically together - over time? That is, the formal/final cause - as captured by the model - is coupled to the material/efficient cause, as captured by the acts of measurement (or the physical fact of "the sign of the thing" being triggered, so to speak).
So we start in good Peircean fashion with an epistemology that is personal and covers pragmatic ordinary language use. We all have our private interests and can define our languages of thought. When I see cats in a "perceptual fashion", I might have all sorts of feelings of cuteness and loveableness. But you might look at them with fear, loathing or even indifference. We each come at the world through our own lens of self-interest, our own story of individuated self and private arrangements of purposes or desires.
But when semiosis, through the syntactic machinery of speech, lifts such mindfulness to a communal level - humans as socially constructed creatures - then of course private meanings have to be now shaped by some common purpose (a group or cultural identity). And that means they must have a common form - the constraint of a common response to hearing a word like "cat" used "the right way".
So there is an ideational essence of catness - the one that functions at the cultural level of mindfulness to act as the tacit model of what sufficiently conforms to our contraints-based definition of "a cat". And yes, that definition certainly seems hazy. It sort of includes quolls ... or tiger-cats. But that is no big deal. That is how constraints are meant to function - limiting the variety of semiotic interpretation to the point of indifference.
There might still be further differences if we were to get out our metaphoric boundary atomising microscope - like the three-legged cat - but they don't in fact make an essential difference. At least within some community of ordinary language speakers (as opposed to the good folk running the local cat fanciers show who reject both the quoll and the three-legged critter you turned up with at the competition).
So right. That establishes the epistemological side of the argument for "essences" as being the information that constrains interpretive uncertainty. And clearly such definitions of essence are loaded with self-interest. That is why they speak to formal/final cause as it plays out in minds. The essence includes our reason for looking at the world in some particular way. It is not necessarily a fact of the thing, just necessarily a fact of the pragmatic relation - the fact that speaking this way achieves a (communal) purpose in terms of interacting with the noumenal world (the thing that is resistant or causally "other" to our wishes - the material/efficient causes that we are seeking to control, in short).
If you are with me this far - grind, grind, grind - then you will have already remembered how Peircean metaphysics then flips epistemology into ontology.
If we now want to answer scientific/metaphysical strength questions about natural kinds or essences - talk about the facts of the thing-in-itself, with no distorting human lens of self-interested speech - then we have to have a model of how the physical world is itself a mind doing semiosis. We have to be able to find a way to model formal/final causes "for real". And that is when we start to focus on how nature is in general a self-organising entropic habit. It is modelling itself into existence via acts of measurement.
So now the essence of a cat is whatever a cat genome says it is. To the degree the genome cares about the details. Then the essence of this cat here is whatever its neural or other developmental information has to say about the matter - to the degree that information sweats the fine print. Is the three legged cat still a cat? As far as the three-legged cat is concerned, probably yes. And probably functionally for other cats who come across it.
And then - if we can keep careful track of the information that stands for what is essential and necessary in terms of some individuated identity, not merely accidental or arbitrary differences that don't make a difference - we can cross the boundary between life and non-life to continue to put a finger on natural kinds or essences when talking about non-living systems, like weather patterns, plate tectonics, or stars.
So for you, as an instinctive reductionist, the issue is wherever does essence get to enter the picture? And for me, as a holist, the question is turned around so that it is wherever does essence get squeezed out? If we are now talking about ontology - the real world - what is it like for it to be at its least mindful or purposive, its most accidental or meaningless?
So we are chalk and cheese. My way sees nature as a unity. Even epistemology = ontology in rigorous fashion. Your way always leads to a division - and a division that doesn't even dare speak its own name at that. This is why your arguments always end up as muffled transcendence while claiming the cover of commonsense realism.
Look, he exclaims, the cat is on the mat. If everyone's head turns and nods in agreement, honour is then satisfied. Meaning is use. Syntax is sufficient to demonstrate coordinated behaviour. Actual private semantics be damned as unreachable metaphysics.
Philosophy by dog-whistle. It's just so seductively simple. And just so metaphysically wrong.
A thing can be on either side but not both at once. If p is true, then not-p is false, and vice-versa. This applies to all p, including the term "living" even if we have not found the essence yet. This means that the line separating the living and non-living things must a clear one.
Quoting noAxioms
I mean that a dog is clearly labelled as a living thing, and a rock is clearly labelled as a non-living thing. You misunderstand the point. It is that there are things that fit in each label.
Quoting noAxioms
What do you mean by rule? Essential properties? Can you prove that for any rule there is an exception? That statement seems to be a self-contradiction. Anyways, my argument proves that the essence exist, it does not attempt to find it.
thanks for your time, Apo.
There is disagreement within the semiotics community whether the field should include physiosemiotics and, by extension, pansemiotics (which would presumably include physiosemiotics and biosemiotics), or be limited to biosemiotics http://biosemiosis.blogspot.co.uk/2008/07/re-pan-and-bio.html
Can you give me a general definition of "mind" which is consistent with "how the physical world is itself a mind" and the human mind? Presumably, this definition would be consistent with current work in physiosemiotics and psychosemiotics.
Why would you want to practise metaphysics by modeling the physical world as a mind? With such an unreasonable starting point you have very little hope of producing a reasonable metaphysics. That's the sort of metaphysics which gives "metaphysics" a bad name, inclining people to disregard real metaphysicians.
I picked two easy ones on purpose, to show that there exists data on both sides. Your comment again misses the point of my argument that claims that the essence exists, not that it is easily found. I agree that it is hard to label things like viruses, but that is because the essence has not been found yet, not because it does not exist. And the essence must be clear because of premise 1.
Quoting Samuel LacrampeThat postulate presupposes the conclusion. Any proof based on this is begging.
Premise 1 is not based on the conclusion, but on the law of non-contradiction: the two propositions "A is B" and "A is not B" are mutually exclusive. This is known with certainty even if we don't know what A and B mean.
I agree that pansemiosis is still a speculative thought. Does it add anything or systematise our thought in any new useful way? And clearly it is a big difference that the interpretance forming non-living being is information outside that being, not information internalised as a model.
So as I said about a tornado, it seems rather lifelike as it rages about a landscape. But it is being sustained by boundary conditions, not by any internal model that makes it a self with some degree of autonomy.
But on the other hand, it feels important to shake up physicalist ontology rather boldly - to show that it is just as weird to call physics a matter of "material" as it is to call it "deadened mind".
Yes, one could arbitrarily make up such a rule, and then be able to classify anything as life or not-life, but what has that proven? That is not the essence of life, it is just an arbitrary rule that sorts things into two buckets. It does not prove the existence of an essence.
The issue I suppose is that there's no good grounds for discerning when semiosis does and does not occur such that such that I can be satisfied a sufficiently sophisticated artificial neural network doesn't constitute a self-organizing semiotic system.
Information acting intelligently is at the heart of my interest in comparing ANN's to biological life. DNA has the ability to intelligently build itself from the ground up as information existing in a physical form and manifests it's expressions (the meaning of it's data; the semiotic bit) through very direct physical/chemical interaction with it's environment. Conscious brains however don't have this ability; to DNA, a brain is an artificial computer that it constructed and maintains as a tool to process external stimulus for it's own benefit.
Apokrisis argument is that biological life perpetuates itself at the most fundamental levels by governing dissipative structures: intelligent data governing engines of the dissipation, but human minds themselves cannot readily be described as dissipative systems/structures. All the dissipative structure of human minds could be abstractly looped through the things minds do to keep their bodies alive, but it's all fed back into and reliant upon the dissipative engines governed by DNA, not the mind. We eat and breathe, but to a mind digestion and energy dissemination within the body (and eventually the brain) is automatic and inexorably governed by DNA and the intelligent expressions contained in it's data, not data contained in the mind.
I'm with Apokrisis that we're not about to stumble onto materials which are so perfect that intelligent computers just start building themselves out of it in a way that can compete with things like cell-division, but biological minds don't build their own housings either, only the software which runs on them constitutes the self-organizing property of human minds.
So my conclusion is that there's something inherently lacking in the semiosis + dissipative structure description of life as it applies to conscious minds. In human minds it appears to be strictly semiosis (interactions of data producing intelligence) which is their main feature, while actually governing the engines which resist thermodynamic equilibrium at a fundamental level is entirely left up to the genetic mind. A dissipative system is a great description of biological organisms because the description is true from a thermodynamic perspective, but all the interesting complexity still seems to be locked up in the semiotic bit. I want to understand how semiosis originates and sequesters dissipative structures toward it's own final causes in the first place, and so far the only explanation offered for this is that fundamental material instability/indeterminacy allows data to exhibit intelligent behavior. But how does data contain intelligence? That's what I'm focused on, and is the basis for my comaprison of learning artificial neural networks to human brains and intelligence, and to the anticipatory intelligence contained in genetic data (whose form is far more impressive because it is self-building in addition to self-organizing).
If laws are purely formal, then they don't reflect anything real about nature. To my way of thinking, it would only be under this assumption that it could rightly be said that human beings "create" laws.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
That's a ridiculous claim: I don't need to demonstrate that laws are not formulated by humans; it is unarguably the case that they are. The metaphysical question is as to whether the laws we formulate reflect a reality which is independent of our formulations. You would need to show that our formulations don't reflect any such reality in order to prove that they are merely created by human beings.
We say that streams follow their courses, and yet the courses are not prior to the streams, but are created and modified by them.
In my opinion, the best neuroscience model of the mind is Karl Friston's Bayesian Brain approach. And that does describe it as a semiotic dissipative structure - http://www.fil.ion.ucl.ac.uk/~karl/The%20free-energy%20principle%20-%20a%20rough%20guide%20to%20the%20brain.pdf
The mind as informational mechanism is all about reducing the uncertainty that a physical/material world has for an organism. So it is all about modelling that is intimately tied to physical regulation. And that is why a lack of such a tie makes artificial intelligence so impoverished - unless it is, as I argue, tied back into human entropic activities as yet a further level of semiosis.
I agree and have often said it: what is missing is mind. Science as it is now practiced is constitutionally incapable of incorporating mind, having gone to great lengths to exclude it from its reckonings. So attempts to explain the basic nature of mind within the framework of science are invaroably procrustean in my view.
That's a bit harsh when science is all about placing empirical or observable constraints on metaphysical speculation. So the observer is included within the very epistemology of science - as the viewpoint which is to be constrained in some pragmatic/semiotic fashion.
So you are criticising that science does not explain mind. But science exists to shape the mind. It is the reasoning mind in action with the benefit of a sharper method of practice. You want mind incorporated as a scientific output, when it is instead incorporated as the input - a way to refine the modelling that minds are there for.
Now science can also produce theories of mind. A model of semiosis is a model of modelling. And forming a modelling relation with the world is what minds do. And it seems obvious that to be in such a modelling relation ought to feel like something. I mean logically, why would it not? Why would we expect being in a lived, intimate, modelling relation with the world to be simply zombie-style computation and not some particular expectation-driven point of view?
So sure, mind science isn't moving towards the discovery of some kind of "mind stuff that lights up with consciousness" - a good old reductionist story of a dualistic mental material with awareness as a property. But mind science already can give a quite reasonable semiotic explanation for "qualia" as what it is like to be in a modelling relation that forms signs of things.
CogSci had a computational or representational view of consciousness as some kind of data display or abstract symbol processing. But neurocognition has gone back to a more organismic or gestalt psychology understanding of mentality as being "ecological". This makes counter-intuitive but accurate predictions about modelling having the purpose of minimising the physical surprises that the world can impose on the mind, rather than the mind having some need to completely simulate the physical world as some mental simulacrum.
Minds are maps of territories, so they are all about turning messy reality into some simple arrangements of signs, like the lines on a scrap of paper that simply represent in compact fashion a way to get about with the least effort or even thought.
So in that sense, science is mind. It is map-drawing taken to another level of simplified habit. What you complain about as a bug - the vast reduction of information that science achieves in forming its models of the world - is its semiotic feature. To be more scientific is to be more mindful - if being a mind is about reducing the physical world's capacity to surprise or confound us to the bare minimum.
Right, the laws don't reflect nature, they reflect the inductive conclusions of human beings, therefore the correct interpretation is that human beings create the laws.
Quoting John
That's not a relevant issue, it's a misguided question. The laws are created as tools, they assist us in what we are doing. Would you ask the metaphysical question of whether hammers and saws, and other tools "reflect a reality which is independent of our formulations" of these tools? The laws, as tools are produced to aid us in our activities, so if they reflect anything, they reflect those activities. Doesn't it seem like nonsense to you to ask whether these tools reflect a reality which is independent from us, when they are produced for the purpose of being used as tools, by us?
All this is nothing more than baseless assertion. How do you know that the so-called laws of nature do not reflect any reality beyond that which you purport to be merely constructed or inferred by humans?
I've described what the laws are, inductive conclusions, which are used as tools, by human beings in their activities. Whether or not some of these laws might reflect reality is irrelevant, because even if they did this would not imply that reality follows the laws. The reality does not follow the reflection. That's the point, we cannot say that the reality follows the laws, because it does not, even if the laws reflect the reality. So to say things like reality is constrained by these laws, is pure nonsense.
I honestly find it hard to believe that the law of non-contradiction, typically seen as the first principal in metaphysics, is itself dependant on the existence of essence of things. In fact, the strength (or weakness depending on the case) of pure logic is that it contains no substance, only variables (A, B, X, Y, ...). Furthermore, it seems like an easy cop out for someone to dismiss a logical argument simply on the grounds that he does not believe in the essence of the terms used. Could you unpack this 'bald' example if possible?
Quoting noAxioms
I think it still does due to premise 2. Here is an analogy: We know country X exists because we know someone from country X. We also know country Y exists because we know someone from country Y. This is enough to deduce that a separation or border exists between countries X and Y.
Quoting Samuel LacrampeWhat's this got to do with it? For one, the existence of a person who is "from" (born in? Raised? Citizen?) country X is not proof of the continued existence of X. Furthermore, the logic made no statement that all countries occupy disjoint geographical regions (and there are indeed counter examples), so no conclusion about their separation can be drawn at all.
My example was for one hard or fuzzy fact, like a person is from X, or a person is not from X. The law of contradiction can only be applied if there is an absolute (hard) criteria to determine "is from X", whether or not you want to invoke the word 'essence' in all that. If no absolute criteria is known (fuzzy fact), then you can't invoke the law of contradiction to prove that there is in fact an absolute criteria.
Why is it important? You've never answered that. Suppose we find something that most people agree is life. What then? Does it require a plaque? Does it become a crime to wipe it out (genocide), or interfere with it (prime directive)? There are no such obligations right now, so it isn't important, at least not yet.
About this one: No 'essence' (in quotes because I dislike applying the term here) has been established, so the example is not a clear one. There are those that have argued on these forums that rocks are an example of life, or that dogs are not. I may not agree with these positions, but I have no rule which I can apply to prove either of them wrong.
I disagree. The only criteria is consistency in A and consistency in B in the law of non-contradiction. You don't need to find the real essence of "bald" but merely need a consistent definition, such as "no hair anywhere on the head". In this case, "I am bald" and "I am not bald" are mutually exclusive. Therefore only consistency and not the essence in the terms is needed to apply the law of non-contradiction.
Quoting noAxioms
I used the word 'separation' loosely. The separation can be disjoint and yet still a separation.
Quoting noAxioms
Your statement is circular.
Quoting noAxioms
Are you asking why finding the essence of life is important? I personally find the topic interesting; that is why I am here. Why are you here if you don't find the topic important?
Well, it is now, because of developments such as semiotics in biology (and also developments in physics). But if you suggested to many typical scientists that 'the observer is included' they would look sideways at you, to put it mildly. 'Scientific realism' is the view that what the scientist sees is 'observer -independent' - that is what 'objectivity' is thought to consist of. So you're seeing that, but thousands wouldn't.
Quoting apokrisis
I don't believe that science exists to 'shape the mind' - unless you're talking about psychology and psychiatry (and even then...) Certainly the kinds of neural network approach, and indeed the whole discipline of biosemiotics, emulates important aspects of the mind - it was the failures of earlier models that lead to such developments as you say. But an emulation or simulation is still that, it's not the reality.
What do you mean by intimately tied to physical regulation (in ways that ANN's cannot be)?. Sensory input is used and encoded by existing ANN's to construct predictive models easily describable as information networks that reduce Frinston's free-energy, they just aren't sophisticated or robust enough to be handed the real-time wheel of their own destiny. Frinston is attempting to gain insight into the nature of how data-networks carrying out semiotic exchanges encode and learn in the first place. That they learn and communicate intelligently is itself the mystery he seems to be investigating, which applies to learning ANN's somewhat equally.
The human mind as a dissipative structure resisting uncertainty in statistical modelling is quite different from biological organisms as dissipative systems resisting thermodynamic equilibrium. The power to resist the second law (steady-state) in the latter is analogous to the power to resist surprise in the former. The power to resist surprise is what the genetic mind, the human mind, and an artificial mind all have directly in common. Resisting surprise from a statistical modeling perspective is fundamental to intelligently sequestering and exploiting engines of dissipation to resist thermodynamic entropy in the first place.
So as I said about a tornado, it seems rather lifelike as it rages about a landscape. But it is being sustained by boundary conditions, not by any internal model that makes it a self with some degree of autonomy.
Any description of mind which uses psychological terms only as metaphor (e.g., accept, desire, rage, self, autonomy, as above) is inadequate, leading to confusion rather than clarity.
An accurate description of the human mind can be constructed using both physical and non-metaphorical psychological terms. I am not aware of any such description of an inorganic mind. Can you elaborate upon your general definition of mind to provide one?
That's what I think, to say that a tornado rages across the land with the desire to destroy is simply metaphoric. And to do honest metaphysics by assigning the attributes of living things, such as intention and habit, to inorganic systems is a mistake which will only lead to confusion. Anaximander's "Nous" was long ago dismissed because it was inadequate as a metaphysical principle.
I said it seems like it rages ... and then specified why that could only be anthropomorphic projection because there is no internal semiotic model in play.
Hu?
Not familiar with "Nous"? How could that be the case when, from your writing, it appears to be your first principle of metaphysics?
Sorry, my mistake, it's Anaxagoras who assumed Nous. The Nous is the mind which orders all the parts of the cosmos to behave in an orderly fashion. That's what you describe when you say that the universe follows final cause (the intent of a mind), and inanimate things behave according to habits (actions resulting from a mind).
How so?
Interesting yes, but the topic can be discussed without needing to know that there is or is not an actual 'essence'.
Correct. So my use of "mind" is clearly deflationary. Especially as I am explicitly generalising it to semiosis, or sign rather than mind. Semiosis is mind-like - in being the mechanism or process by which formal/final cause are understood as immanent in nature. So the Cosmos is thermodynamic. It is ruled by emergent self-organisation. And thus it has a teleology - the desire to maximise entropy. All material existence - including living and mindful creatures - are entrained to that universal purpose.
But immanent constraints are looser than transcendent laws. They only limit freedoms to the degree that any differences make a difference. And so the Cosmic level purpose - of achieving entropification - is highly attenuated, especially on very short spatiotemporal scales at which humans engage with the world. It is only in the long-run that human intelligence must be found to have accelerated the cosmos's grand entropification project.
Now the point in contention here was the difference between biosemiosis and pansemiosis. And a critical difference is one of scale. Physics would say the critical scale for semiosis - as in the collapse of the wavefunction, the symmetry-breaking represented by the Big Bang - would be Planck scale or the scale of the fundamental quantum action. However biophysics has recently found that for life and mind - biological processes - the relevant symmetry breaking scale is instead much greater. It is the nanometre scale of the quasiclassical. The tipping point where sign relations can kick in is the poised point, the zone of critical instability, that lies energetically between the quantum and classical scale.
Oh, this thermal region also has to be in a body of water. You also need the right chemistry - water being a solvent of complex molecules and so providing the material base of some actual instability. Things are actually building up and breaking down within a complex medium.
So life and mind are different in that they rely on there being these further "accidents" of nature not foreseen by a purely physical level of semiosis.
Once the Universe, in its Bang state of being a bath of radiation, cooled/expanded enough to undergo a succession of phase transitions, it had the crud of massive atoms with their classically described motions condensing out and starting to do their own semiotic thing, with their own new laws. And after stars made heavy elements, you had the production of watery planets, you finally arrive at the rather accidental looking conditions for organic chemistry, and so organic life and mind as the highly complex avatars of the Second Law.
So while in a general sense, there is one principle to rule them all - pansemiosis in the general thermodynamic sense of a dissipative structure - it is also clear that biosemiosis is a whole other story in that it requires its own quite different quasiclassical scale of critical instability, and that in turn is quite narrowly defined in terms of its material conditions.
However this is like nous in granting mind - the power of self-organising purpose - to the cosmos. And it is kind of dualistic in granting fundamental reality to a realm of sign or symbol, as well as matter or physics. But - as I understand it anyway - it is critical that nous is immanent and not transcendent. It is not about some spirit or external hand acting on an inanimate and purposeless world. Instead, pansemiosis is a theory of immanent self-organisation - the taking of habits that forms a cosmos obeying its own accumulated laws.
I will now add an old post from PF that explains the recent biophysics that now directly supports the biosemiotic side of this argument....
This looks like a game-changer for our notions of “materiality”. Biophysics has discovered a special zone of convergence at the nanoscale – the region poised between quantum and classical action. And crucially for theories about life and mind, it is also the zone where semiotics emerges. It is the scale where the entropic matter~symbol distinction gets born. So it explains the nanoscale as literally a new kind of stuff, a physical state poised at “the edge of chaos”, or at criticality, that is a mix of its material and formal causes.
The key finding:
In brief, as outlined in this paper - http://www.rpgroup.caltech.edu/publications/Phillips2006.pdf - and in this book - http://lifesratchet.com/ - the nanoscale turns out to a convergence zone where all the key structure-creating forces of nature become equal in size, and coincide with the thermal properties/temperature scale of liquid water.
So at a scale of 10^-9 metres (the average distance of energetic interactions between molecules) and 10^-20 joules (the average background energy due to the “warmth” of water), all the many different kinds of energy become effectively the same. Elastic energy, electrostatic energy, chemical bond energy, thermal energy – every kind of action is suddenly equivalent in strength. And thus easily interconvertible. There is no real cost, no energetic barrier, to turning one kind of action into another kind of action. And so also – from a semiotic or informational viewpoint – no real problem getting in there and regulating the action. It is like a railway system where you can switch trains on to other tracks at virtually zero cost. The mystery of how “immaterial” information can control material processes disappears because the conversion of one kind of action into a different kind of action has been made cost-free in energetic terms. Matter is already acting symbolically in this regard.
This cross-over zone had to happen due to the fact that there is a transistion from quantum to classical behaviour in the material world. As the micro-scale, the physics of objects is ruled by surface area effects. Molecular structures have a lot of surface area and very little volume, so the geometry dominates when it comes to the substantial properties being exhibited. The shapes are what matter more than what the shapes are made of. But then at the macro-scale, it is the collective bulk effects that take over. The nature of a substance is determined now by the kinds of atoms present, the types of bonds, the ratios of the elements.
The actual crossing over in terms of the forces involved is between the steadily waning strength of electromagnetic binding energy – the attraction between positive and negative charges weakens proportionately with distance – and the steadily increasing strength of bulk properties such as the stability of chemical, elastic, and other kinds of mechanical or structural bonds. Get enough atoms together and they start to reinforce each others behaviour.
So you have quantum scale substance where the emergent character is based on geometric properties, and classical scale substance where it is based on bulk properties. And this is even when still talking about the same apparent “stuff”. If you probe a film of water perhaps five or six molecules thick with a super-fine needle, you can start to feel the bumps of extra resistance as you push through each layer. But at a larger scale of interaction, water just has its generalised bulk identity – the one that conforms to our folk intuitions about liquidity.
So the big finding is the way that constrasting forces of nature suddenly find themselves in vanilla harmony at a certain critical scale of being. It is kind of like the unification scale for fundamental physics, but this is the fundamental scale of nature for biology – and also mind, given that both life and mind are dependent on the emergence of semiotic machinery.
The other key finding: The nanoscale convergence zone has only really been discovered over the past decade. And alongside that is the discovery that this is also the realm of molecular machines.
In the past, cells where thought of as pretty much bags of chemicals doing chemical things. The genes tossed enzymes into the mix to speed reactions up or slow processes down. But that was mostly it so far as the regulation went. In fact, the nanoscale internals of a cell are incredibly organised by pumps, switches, tracks, transporters, and every kind of mechanical device.
A great example are the motor proteins – the kinesin, myosin and dynein families of molecules. These are proteins that literally have a pair of legs which they can use to walk along various kinds of structural filaments – microtubules and actin fibres – while dragging a bag of some cellular product somewhere else in a cell. So stuff doesn’t float to where in needs to go. There is a transport network of lines criss-crossing a cell with these little guys dragging loads.
It is pretty fantastic and quite unexpected. You’ve got to see this youtube animation to see how crazy this is – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y-uuk4Pr2i8 . And these motor proteins are just one example of the range of molecular machines which organise the fundamental workings of a cell.
A third key point: So at the nanoscale, there is this convergence of energy levels that makes it possible for regulation by information to be added at “no cost”. Basically, the chemistry of a cell is permanently at its equilibrium point between breaking up and making up. All the molecular structures – like the actin filaments, the vesicle membranes, the motor proteins – are as likely to be falling apart as they are to reform. So just the smallest nudge from some source of information, a memory as encoded in DNA in particular, is enough to promote either activity. The metaphorical waft of a butterfly wing can tip the balance in the desired direction.
This is the remarkable reason why the human body operates on an energy input of about 100 watts – what it takes to run a light bulb. By being able to harness the nanoscale using a vanishingly light touch, it costs almost next to nothing to run our bodies and minds. The power density of our nano-machinery is such that a teaspoon full would produce 130 horsepower. In other words, the actual macro-scale machinery we make is quite grotesquely inefficient by comparison. All effort for small result because cars and food mixers work far away from the zone of poised criticality – the realm of fundamental biological substance where the dynamics of material processes and the regulation of informational constraints can interact on a common scale of being.
The metaphysical implications: The problem with most metaphysical discussions of reality is that they rely on “commonsense” notions about the nature of substance. Reality is composed of “stuff with properties”. The form or organisation of that stuff is accidental. What matters is the enduring underlying material which has a character that can be logically predicated or enumerated. Sure there is a bit of emergence going on – the liquidity of H2O molecules in contrast to gaseousness or crystallinity of … well, water at other temperatures. But essentially, we are meant to look through organisational differences to see the true material stuff, the atomistic foundations.
But here we have a phase of substance, a realm of material being, where all the actual many different kinds of energetic interaction are zeroed to have the same effective strength. A strong identity (as quantum or classical, geometric or bulk) has been lost. Stuff is equally balanced in all its directions. It is as much organised by its collective structure as its localised electromagnetic attractions. Effectively, it is at its biological or semiotic Planck scale. And I say semiotic because regulation by symbols also costs nothing much at this scale of material being. This is where such an effect – a downward control – can be first clearly exerted. A tiny bit of machinery can harness a vast amount of material action with incredible efficiency.
It is another emergent phase of matter – one where the transition to classicality can be regulated and exploited by the classical physics of machines. The world the quantum creates turns out to contain autopoietic possibility. There is this new kind of stuff with semiosis embedded in its very fabric as an emergent potential.
So contra coventional notions of stuff – which are based on matter gone cold, hard and dead – this shows us a view of substance where it is clear that the two sources of substantial actuality are the interaction between material action and formal organisation. You have a poised state where a substance is expressing both these directions in its character – both have the same scale. And this nanoscale stuff is also just as much symbol as matter. It is readily mechanisable at effectively zero cost. It is not a big deal for there to be semiotic organisation of “its world”.
As I say, it is only over the last decade that biophysics has had the tools to probe this realm and so the metaphysical import of the discovery is frontier stuff.
And indeed, there is a very similar research-led revolution of understanding going on in neuroscience where you can now probe the collective behaviour of cultures of neurons. The zone of interaction between material processes and informational regulation can be directly analysed, answering the crucial questions about how “minds interact with bodies”. And again, it is about the nanoscale of biological organisation and the unsuspected “processing power” that becomes available at the “edge of chaos” when biological stuff is poised at criticality.
The problem I see, is that you are attributing life-like features, terms used to describe the characteristics of living beings, properties which are only known to exist as attributes of living beings, to the inanimate "Cosmos". Do you not see that this is unreasonable? Or do you apprehend "The Cosmos" as a living being?
Quoting apokrisis
I conclude that your metaphysics is essentially pantheistic. The Cosmos is a living god. Do you agree with this assessment?
Of course not. It makes a change from calling life and mind a physical machinery.
I thought you were the one who believed in all the spooky transcendent shit - God, freewill, prime movers. My way of speaking is faithful to the immanence that is the founding presumption of the natural philosopher.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
As I say, it is essentially pansemiotic rather than pantheistic or even panpsychic. So no, this ain't about gods or minds or anything that requires hard dualism. Semiosis is how physicalism can enjoy all the benefits of dualism without any of its mystic-mongering and question-begging.
As I have been arguing, existence is the product of the dynamic duo of matter and sign (or matter and symbol). And part of the big shift in the physicalist mindset needed to understand this pansemiotic metaphysics is that matter can't be regarded as inert or passive. This deal only works if matter has critical instability ... and relies on semiosis or habit-taking to grant it the stability of informational constraint.
The fact that pansemiosis is the case is pretty much proven by the thermodynamic/information theoretic turn that modern physics has had to take. The same general theory - of information entropy - now describes both sides in the one coin of measurement. We can measurably talk about the same thing when talking about physical uncertainty and mental (or rather message) uncertainty. That is Gibbs vs Shannon entropy.
So pansemiosis is the completely scientific resolution of the ancient dilemma. Yes, the Cosmos has a Mind. And if that sounds whacky, well sorry but this is what we actually mean in terms of modern physical models based on the interchangability of H and S measures of information entropy. We can now talk about particles and brains in the same essential language.
But you attribute to the inanimate universe, properties which only living beings are known to have, things like mind, intention, and habits. I'd call this a category error. We have a well structured division between living and non-living which is completely respected within the scientific disciplines. You don't hear physicists talking about particles behaving as they do because they have habits, or engineers referring to the second law of thermodynamics as the intention of the Mind of the Cosmos
Quoting apokrisis
Yes that does sound a bit whacky. You have taken metaphysics back to its primitive beginnings, to pre-Socratic times, prior to two and a half thousand years ago. It's a good idea to study these ideas for background information, but to adhere to these severely underdeveloped principles, well that's a serious regression. Have you no respect for the advancements made by metaphysicians between then and now? In particular, I refer to those advancements which have created the categories of animate and inanimate things.
It doesn't in any direct way. We got side tracked by you claiming that the essence of A and B must exist for the law of non-contradiction to be applicable. I refute this by claiming that we only need consistency and not essence for it. If we agree to this, then my first premise in the argument to prove that essences exist stands: "Either a being is a living being or a non-living being. It cannot be both."
Quoting noAxioms
Maybe "circular" was the wrong word; my bad. Nevertheless, it sounds like you demand to know X in order to prove X using the law of non-contradiction. But if X is known, then it must have already been proven. A valid proof implies a logical proof. A logical proof implies that is passes the law of non-contradiction.
I am amazed. Only philosophers could come up with such conclusions.
Quoting noAxioms
A fair point. It is tough to explain but here goes. I invoke Aristotle's theory of abstraction: We all have in ourselves the implicit knowledge of terms such as 'living' and 'non-living'. This is so by our years of sense observation of the world. This implicit knowledge is what enables us to use the terms correctly in everyday language, even if we don't have the explicit definition of all the terms used. Thus a 10-year old can have a meaningful conversation without ever having read a dictionary. Finding the essence of terms is simply acquiring explicit knowledge based on our implicit knowledge. I think our implicit knowledge that a dog is living and a rock is non-living is pretty grounded.
Or, by straining out all the mystical-sounding bits, and replacing with the newly-devised scientific-sounding bits, which serve the same purpose, but come without the encumbrances and baggage of old-fashioned metaphysics (of the kind that good ol' Uncle Charlie was fond of when he'd had a few too many ;-) ).
Define inanimate. What is its essence? :)
First, there’s a distinction between a) physical life and b) a set of non-physical, mystico-poetic concepts of life—such as “I only feel alive when […]”, “they’re dead inside”, or things like “the hills are alive with music”. Not that the second concept of life doesn’t have value to the human condition—and I believe it is itself worthy of contemplation and debate—but it doesn’t correlate well with the reality of life as it pertains to the physical world.
Secondly, an idea that seems to me both commonsensical and indisputable: Physical life can be defined by the ‘essence’ of metabolism. Metabolism always minimally consists of respiration, which can be either aerobic or anaerobic. Respiration always entails the conversion of nutrients or, in the case of anaerobic respiration, inorganic matter into cellular energy. Metabolism is a vital principle to everything known to be negentropic and is absent in everything known to be entropic. The breathing of multicellular organisms via lungs is for respiration at a cellular level, though other multicellular organisms, such as plants, respire in the absence of lungs. That stated, the multicellular organism engages in its own metabolism and the individual cells of its body engage in their own cellular metabolism.
One can then bring this hypothesis of life being defined by metabolism back into the realms of mystico-poetic ancient concepts: ancient concepts of soul—such as anima and psyche—are almost always founded on the process of breath. Breath is what we do to engage in metabolism, this so as to sustain our negentropy. This process of respiration now better known to us via science can readily translate into what was once termed soul—again, such as in anima or psyche ... from which we also now have the terms animate and inanimate. To be clearer, in this interpretation the soul is not the breath that occurs but that intangible holistic aspect of being which produces the occurring breath. When that which produces the occurring breath is no longer present, the being is no longer living but dead—and its physical matter changes from being negentropic to being entropic. (Though, granted, this interpretation likely won’t make much sense to at least those who interpret soul through an Abrahamic lens, be they theists or not.)
Once one gets into notions such as that of the anima mundi, or more modern variants of it, one again slips into obfuscation between metaphysics and metaphor: the world, for example, doesn’t engage in the process of breathing so as to sustain its own negentropy. That stated, I don’t believe concepts such as the anima mundi—or some of its modern variants—are necessarily false; but, for example, the anima which would be addressed is clearly something different than the anima which pertains to animate beings.
The tangential about the soul aside, as concerns the hypothesis that the essence of physical life is defined by metabolism—something that dogs do and rocks don’t—it’s an opinion I currently fail to find any fault with.
That I couldn't describe the difference between animate and inanimate, in a way which would be acceptable to you, doesn't ,mean that there isn't such a difference. It could mean that I don't know the difference, and it could mean that you are obstinate.
Quoting apokrisis
Why does this need to be an "idea"? Many of the activities of living things are of the nature of trial and error. Trial and error requires the will to act, but it does not require an idea of what success consists of. The will to act is most often driven by indeterminate feelings such as hunger, and these feelings cannot be classified as ideas. It is not necessary to assume an "idea" as the motivation behind the desire to act.
In many metaphysical stances, immateriality "enters the picture", as the immaterial cause, the will. Yes, we are lead to acceptance of the immaterial, through the existence of ideas, as ideas are evidence of the immaterial, but "the idea" is denied active status, and therefore causal status in the world, by the well established principles of Aristotle. Therefore the idea cannot have "actual" existence in the real physical world, its existence is confined to the minds of living beings.
So as metaphysicians we are forced to seek the means whereby that which is immaterial acts within the physical world, and this is the will. The will, as the immaterial cause, is something completely distinct from the idea. And as I described above, the will to act, as a cause of activity, is not necessarily guided by ideas. We feel the will to act, motivating us through indeterminate feelings. The rational mind attempts to put a halt to these motivating feelings with "will power", allowing ideas to intervene as guidance.
Quoting Samuel LacrampeLet me try this logic out. Suppose I try to nail down the essence of 'cute'. I pick an arbitrary way to sort things into two heaps: A thing is cute if it masses more than a KG. So I am cute, but this pebble is not. There is at least one thing in each heap, therefore there must be an essence of cute. Somehow the proof seems invalid. Your 'bald' criteria (admittedly not the actual essence) is more a description of alopecia, not bald.
That X exists, not that it is known. If it doesn't exist, then there is no definite is-life or not sorting, and your first premise fails. Not talking about our ability to know or not, but an actual indeterminate state of some thing being life or not. Without the essence, there is no fact of the matter, and no contradiction by something being in that questionable state.
Quoting Samuel LacrampeAnd we have but one example from all our sense observation. Our implicit knowledge concerns only that one example. Intuitions will not serve us for the general case as we attempt to recognize the second example.
Read the NASA link that Banno posted. Dr Cleland speaks speaks directly about this. We are unconcerned with the 'definition of life', which would be a description of how the word is used in our language, and by said 10-year-old. What we're seeking in this thread is what she calls a "scientific theory of life" which seeks to define a set of rules for the more general case. Common language usage is of zero importance to what NASA does.
I notice that in that article, no attempt is made to set out any rules or traits or other progression towards this essence.
The fields of ethology, comparative psychology, sociobiology and behavioural ecology are beginning to provide a common framework for understanding animal and human minds based on behaviour.
Apokrisis provides compelling explanatory metaphors to assert the existence of physical mind using semiotic terms based on physical behaviour.
Is it possible to extrapolate a definition of inorganic mind from what we know about organic minds using functional and/or semiotic terms without resorting to metaphor?
The reference to reproduction appears to allude to biological fitness. Still, for a given to have biological fitness, it must first be living. Life, of itself, is not defined by its replication—though replication is an empirical reality of life. But consider an organism that has never reproduced during the entirety of its lifespan; it would hold no biological fitness but would yet have been alive. And, at least as concerns humans, biological fitness seems to be lacking in some ways: Michelangelo had a far more significant impact on our species—on how our species has adapted to environment—than any contemporary that gave birth to say over twenty offspring. This obviously addresses replicability of phenotype and not of genotype.
On a different note, fire both replicates and releases energy—but it does not metabolize (hence does not engage in respiration as part of a metabolism). We can metaphorically describe fire as alive but it is not—it is not negentropic.
Also, as you likely well know, the process of metabolism is far more complex than a simple, linear chain reaction. It requires a type of holistic interaction, and integration, on the part of that which metabolizes—be it a bacterium, a plant, or a human. This holistic interaction—together with all that it entails—is what Francisco Varela termed autopoiesis, i.e. self-generation. There is a bridge between autopoiesis and mind: to metabolize is to, in part, a) delineate self from non-self via behavior and b) to act and react relative to context in manners that best sustain the negentropy of self (one, for example, must find ways of obtaining that which is required for the releasing of energy). So, the autopoiesis of metabolism could be argued to imply some form of at least rudimentary mind—this as some of Varela’s crowd do uphold. While metabolism unfolds on a physical plane, autopoiesis can be contemplated on a metaphysical plane. The latter, in turn, could then be potentially applicable to the Cosmos. But I as of yet haven’t thought out this perspective of the Cosmos’s autopoiesis in what is to me a satisfactory manner--this to have any informed opinion.
[It’s interesting to me that while the Latin term for soul is anima, mind is termed animus. Both anima and animus refer to the same underlying process that facilitates breath. Again, given our modern knowledge, this addressed underlying process is respiration, an essential aspect of metabolism. And metabolism, as just mentioned, can tie into Varela’s et al.’s concepts of autopoiesis and mind.]
This consensus by most biologists is most likely real. Still, some burgeoning fields of biology do uphold plants to have intelligence and, therefore, plant-minds.
An internet search on “plant intelligence” brings up any number of articles on the subject. An easily appraised example—because it is so visual—is that of what is commonly known as the “dancing plant”. You can find videos of it on youtube. Its leaves will move in response to sounds in timespans that make the motion visible to us. The big deal is multifaceted: its mechanisms for the perception of sound are a mystery; then there’s the reaction aspect: why and how do individual leaves move in certain ways when sound is present … say, as compared to all its movable leaves moving at once in response to sound? But other harder to visualize examples of what some uphold as plant intelligence abound. I more recently saw a documentary where, as far as I recall, a certain tree species in Africa was discovered to collectively kill off herbivores that ate its leaves during times of drought: when its leaves were over-grazed it reacted by a) increasing the tannins it otherwise naturally produced, now to the point of lethality, and b) appearing to somehow convey information for an increase in tannin production to nearby trees of the same species.
Plants are weird lifeforms, though. For example, their selfhood as unique beings is poorly understood (if at all ever philosophically contemplated): such as when one root system gives rise to what above ground appears as multiple individual plants. Is it one lifeform or many that are intertwined?
I’ve mentioned this only because I’m in favor of upholding plant intelligence: imo, if it’s alive, it has some form of mind. This gets back to metabolism and autopoiesis as mentioned in my previous post. But I’d welcome learning of alternative definitions of what mind minimally is.
So the LEM applies to inanimate, but not to animate? Interesting.
It's not a living thing. Inanimate means not living. You could, if you want, say that the tornado is animate by some other definition of "animate", but then we're not talking about the same thing. I'm talking about the difference between living and not-living. What are you talking about?
Quoting javra
Apparently, trees send within themselves, electrical messages, similar to the nerves of animals but they travel much slower. They are communicate through there roots and networks of mycelium which intertwine with the roots
In science, talk about any quality ceases to be metaphor to the degree the quality can be measured or quantified. And my pansemiotic argument is that the two sides of hylomorphic nature - its informational form and its material dynamics - can be measure in the one shared coin of information (canonical degrees of freedom).
So metaphorically, Shannon information is "mindful" and Boltzmann/Gibbs entropy is "material". And the two can be brought together in a common semiotic framework such as Stan Salthe's infodynamics - https://www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol7/iss3/art3/
The idea is that all existence can be understood in terms of a systems ontology. That is, everything is a case of downwardly acting constraints shaping upwardly constructing degrees of freedom. And so we have Peirce's triadic system of interpretance. The constraints are Shannon information. The degrees of freedom are Boltzmann entropy. The message of one acts on the uncertainty of the other to create a substantial world.
This general pansemiotic framework thus allows you to talk about dissipative structures like tornadoes or the Cosmos itself in terms of the "mindful" constraint of "material" freedoms. There is a common coin of measurement - Planck-scale bits of information. Or to dig deeper, there is a canonical scale of (quantum) indeterminacy - ie: Apeiron, firstness, vagueness - that constraints collapse to classical actuality (the definite microstates that thermodynamics counts).
So pansemiosis has become a pretty concrete proposal for a generalised metaphysics in that it ties any talk of mind - or matter - to a more foundational notion of being ... bits of information. And then even the bits of information are explained in terms of emergence or symmetry breaking, the collapse of indeterminism.
People think they know what they are talking about when they speak dualistically about mind and matter. However the purpose of science is to inquire rather deeper into the true nature of existence. And so it is no surprise if this folk ontology distinction - the oh so familiar Cartesian framing of the question - will come out sounding very different once science has been used to precisify our concepts in ways that actually make them measurable.
So autopoiesis was great - back when mainstream biology was doing the opposite of undercooking the dynamical or developmental aspect of life. After DNA was discovered, the self-model became the big deal. And autopoiesis was one of the many responses, tugging at the mainstream's sleeve and saying, no guys, hang on a minute.
But still it remains the case that both information and dynamics are required to explain life and mind (as well as "inanimate, because lacking a self-replicating model" dissipative structure). So a balanced definition of life - such as to be found in the works of Rosen, Pattee and Salthe - stresses the complementary duality of metabolism and replication, or the material processes and the informational constraints.
I’ve come across similar information in passing—though I haven’t paid close attention to it. Apparently the consensus is that it’s a plant’s roots which most likely serve as the decision center of the plant.
Yes, it's very telling. It tells me that you are being obstinate.
I just told you, inanimate means not-living. What more are you asking for?
I'll repeat myself:
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Your metaphysics denies the difference between living and not living, so no matter how I define this difference you'll simply reject it in favour of your metaphysics. What's the point?
Accounts such as those of Evan Thompson in the book Mind in Life (2007) have it otherwise.
Quoting apokrisis
If you are addressing nucleic acids replication, isn't nucleic acids replication part of metabolism to begin with? Such as in the production of proteins, etc. It is as far as I know.
Makes it sound as though you are addressing reproduction in general. But, then, mules would be non-living organisms by definition--to list just one example.
There's a book by a German forester Peter Wohlleben, called "The Hidden Life of Trees". It's quite interesting, with reference to numerous scientific studies. He considers the root system to be the tree's brain. There are many exchanges between the roots of different trees, carried out through mycelium which live in a symbiotic relationship with the trees. There is evidence that the trees communicate.
I call obvious BS. You don't have one. So there is not even a definition of yours to accept.
I follow Aristotle's description which is mostly accepted by modern biology. Life is defined by the potencies of the living being, from the simplest, the power of self-nourishment, through self-movement, to the more complex, sensation, and intellection.
Does it not have its own form of nous - its reason for being - under Aristotelian hylomorphism? Is it not Platonically necessary as the indeterminate chora to accept the impression of the eternal ideas?
Remember it was you who brought up the distinction between animate and inanimate. And you are proving my guess that it was an empty distinction as you can't now define what you actually mean by things that lack animation.
Of course Thompson defends autopoeisis. This is a contentious issue with two sides. And it is not that autopoeisis is wrong - it accounts for dissipative structure level self organisation. But the criticism is that it doesn't adequately define life, which has the extra thing of an epistemic cut to separate the self (the auto) from the production (the poeisis) in proper semiotic fashion.
The battle does still rumble on in the background for some - here are papers from both directions...
https://biologyofcognition.files.wordpress.com/2008/06/autopoietic_mr.pdf
http://www.orgs-evolution-knowledge.net/Index/DocumentKMOrgTheoryPapers/HallNousala2010AutopoiesisCognitionKnowledgeSelfSustainingOrganizations(final).pdf
Quoting javra
I'm addressing what I've been addressing all along - the separation of the model of the self from the production of the self in organisms. Now we can call those the replication and the metabolism, so long as those terms are understood in this generic sense. More precise to me would be Pattee's distinction between rate-independent information and rate-dependent dynamics.
So you are getting bogged down by particular expressions of informational control - the functional ability to repair cellular processes, or reproduce individual cells and whole organisms, or to enter into the evolutionary race first by the free exchange of genetic fragments and eventually via whole genome replication.
But I am talking about the code-matter duality at its most general or abstract level as understood within theoretical biology.
And some of the new points I mentioned - given the excitingly rapid advances being made at the moment - were the proof that there is a thermal quasiclassical zone where this kind of semiosis can physically take place, because that is the scale where material dynamics is so critically poised (between autopoeietic remaking and thermal dissoloution). And so in turn organismic information can tilt action in directions of "its own choice" from safe in its haven of DNA and other information capturing mechanism.
So the point of that is we don't just have to talk about high level functional concepts like replication and reproduction. We can talk about this infodynamic duality right down at the nanoscale level of the molecular machinery. We can see that definitional distinction in action down there - where life really begins.
The confusion arises from your criticism of metabolism being the essence of life; more specifically, from your statements that there is a duality between metabolism and replication required for life to obtain. With my justifications previously expressed, I still find reason to uphold that metabolism is a sufficient definition of life (granted that it includes the self-generation of the metabolizing self which, in part, requires nucleic acid replication, obviously).
The code-matter duality you address was for me something removed to the barebones hypothesis I’ve put forward. And you have yet to make the case that life requires something other than metabolism--whatever the metaphysical underpinnings of metabolism might be.
In truth, to my knowledge, one of the harshest criticisms of autopoiesis regards its implied metaphysics of causality: autopoiesis is impossible within a system fully comprised of efficient causation. Nor can it be stated to be causally indeterministic. And teleological causation on its own seems insufficient to explain it. But this metaphysical topic regarding non-classical forms of causation (here: the origination of effects) seems best suited to a different thread.
Eppur si muove. (Galileo intended this for planet Earth, but the quote also works for life’s movements via self-generating, negentropic, holistic, metabolic processes)
Obviously, metabolism being unstable, it needs the further thing of a stabilising overlay of informational machinery. I think you are presuming that other aspect of a living system as part of your understanding of metabolism rather than breaking it out explicitly.
Quoting javra
Yep. Metabolism + repair. You can have a metabolic network of components and processes. But the components don't last so some higher level memory must know how and when to replace them. Which is where a hierarchical or semiotic modelling relation is required. It is the instability of the metabolic parts that require some longer term machinery to provide the stability.
No, that's not true. You ought to make yourself more clear. What you asked of me was to define "inanimate". That I did. Now you add a subject, which is "matter", and make "inanimate" a predicate. So you are now asking for the essence of matter which is inanimate. I now need to produce two distinct definitions, one for "inanimate", and one for "matter".
Quoting apokrisis
You have now completed your change of subject. The subject is no longer "inanimate", which is what you first asked me to define, the subject is now "matter". You appear to be suggesting that there is no such thing as inanimate matter, that all matter has inherent within it, properties of animate being, such as mind and intention. But this is not at all necessary to the concept of matter. "Matter" is a concept which accounts for our observed temporal continuity of existence. In Newtonian physics its essential property is expressed as inertia. Aristotle posited "matter", in his physics as that which persists, does not change, when change is occurring. Form is what is active and changing. With the assumption of matter, Aristotle could coherently talk about a changing object as continuing to be the same object despite changes to its form.
There is no need to assume that matter must have any properties of life. So long as the concept of "matter" provides us with the principles of temporal extension, there is no need to assign "life" to that temporal extension. In modern physics, "energy" has replaced the concept of "matter", because Newton's expression of "inertia" as the essence of matter replaced Aristotle's expression of "temporal continuity". These two are incompatible because Newton allows that inertia may be changed with force, while Aristotle does not allow that matter can change.
Since Newton's concept of matter replaced Aristotle's, there was a new need for a concept to account for observed temporal continuity. This need was filled by the concept of "energy" which now provides us with the principles of temporal extension. But there is no logical necessity forcing us to assume that energy must be living. So we have two distinct forms of temporal extension, living and not-living. Therefore we have two distinct classifications of matter and energy, living matter and energy, and inanimate matter and energy. There is no reason to conflate the two because that is simply category error.
So I don't know why you're so hung up on "inanimate". It's very simply "not-living". The more relevant question is the one of the op, what constitutes "living". If one is wrong in their determination as to what constitutes living, then that person might also be wrong when they come to designate something as inanimate. But there is no need for an extensive description of "inanimate". It is just everything which does not fulfill the conditions in the description of what it means to be living.
Is it possible to extrapolate a definition of inorganic mind from what we know about organic minds using functional and/or semiotic terms without resorting to metaphor? — Galuchat
I'll take that as a "No".
Your explanatory metaphors may be compelling, but until they are translated into the specialist vocabulary of each particular science, and your concept of pansemiosis is accepted as an overarching principle, they are of no scientific value.
Can empirical examples of the first devoid of either of the latter be provided?
I gave a lengthy answer. You can pretend I didn't if you like.
So inanimate is a category? But it lacks a definite essence? A tornado can move, grow, die, dissipate energy, sort of like something animate, but we can't yet put a finger on why it is in fact inanimate?
Sounds legit.
Groovy; so then there’s no disagreement that metabolism—again stated, regardless of its underlying metaphysics—serves as the essence by which life is defined.
Now it is clear how boundary condition information or habits of interpretance impinge on material organisation in animate systems. That information is encoded locally by membranes, receptors, genes, neurons - a range of physical structures that deal in messages or signs.
But it is not so clear how the laws of the universe are encoded. Except that there is a striking shift happening in fundamental physics where information itself seems to have substantial existence. Cosmology is understood via the constraints of holographic boundaries or informational event horizons. Quantum collapse is understood via the thermal decoherence of information - again a limit imposed by the constraints of a context.
And generally, all inanimate systems - especially those that grow, move, self-organise and self-optimise to meet the global purpose of the second law - can be understood as dissipative structures. Which means they must be informationally negentropic to be able to maintain the entropic flows that sustain them. I mean, keep them inanimately alive. :)
So you are welcome to argue against that speculative metaphysics. But it does require you to be able to define what you mean by inanimate. As current physics has radically redefined what it might mean by inanimate.
Glad to have sorted this one out then.
As to the metaphysics of what life is, from past discussions I presume you already know we disagree—mainly in the metaphysics of causality and selfhood. We reduce things to different holistic properties.
Sure biology is different from chemistry in some fashion we would want to pin down.
Now either one can argue that the differences are somehow metaphysically accidental - so life is "metabolism" or dissipative structure with a bit of extra DNA organisation - or one can take the view that there is a metaphysical strength difference worth noting here. And that is the hylomorphic position I take - information or semiotic constraint being as fundamental to being as material action.
To be honest, I can't remember what holistic properties you reduce things to. Was it God or spirit or some other kind of mystical transcendent cause?
Certainly, I choose the semiotic approach precisely because it is a holism which is immanent and natural. You have an ontic dualism in sign vs matter. And yet you also have the causal machinery to connect the two sides of the equation.
This is why it is important that physics has just found itself describing the world pansemiotically - as in reaching an equivalence at the fundamental level between Shannon uncertainty and Boltzmann entropy. My metaphysics isn't handwaving. It is the new universal basis for the scientific measurement of nature.
I noted before, the root of the term 'animate' is 'anima' , which is literally 'breath'. So in traditional metaphysics the defining feature of life is 'breath', which doesn't seem too far off the mark.
Quoting apokrisis
What's the significance of 'dissipative'?
Quoting apokrisis
What about providing a basis for values? I can't see that falling out of what you say. What if what gives rise to life is tendency towards novelty or new kinds of experience? I mean, aside from 'semiosis', your basis for life still seems essentially inanimate.
It gives a naturalistic and immanent basis to value or purpose.
Your other choices are then either the arbitrary or nihilistic answer given by regular materialism, or the transcendent and mystic answer given by the many varieties of religious/romantic belief systems.
I of course have explained many times how both materialism and mysticism are in fact disguised dissipative structure. They both are simply reflections of human social entrainment to the desires of the second law of thermodynamics.
Quoting Wayfarer
The same structure or pattern or organisation is sustained by its production of entropy. So it exists because it can waste.
Where in the great anthropological variety of transcendent belief structures and moral values am I going to find "the right one"?
And then, to tackle the OP, what is the value of being animate vs inanimate? Is one better than the other, more foundational than the other? What exactly is your argument?
That's like asking, what is it about the destructive power of atomic weapons, or the invention of biological or chemical weapons, that convinces us that science is beneficial for mankind?
Quoting apokrisis
That is something each has to decide, and it's a risk. We might get it wrong, and that is part of what we have to deal with (which is one of the lessons from existentialism).
It is one thing to see 'the creator God' as a cosmic demiurge or super-engineer. What I take to be the inner meaning of the Christian tradition, is that the 'source of being' is actually within ourselves. Humans are in some real sense a replica or epitome of the Universe itself, and contain within themselves the source or ground of being, which is what has to be discerned through self-enquiry (although that does sound much more neo-platonist or Vedantic, which is not coincidental.)
That's what I disagree with, and I think is unreasonable metaphysics. I think there is no reason to believe that physical systems, which are commonly considered to be inanimate, can be said to act through a mechanism of semiosis. Do you believe that a tornado practises semiosis? I think that this is totally unfounded, and therefore your dissolution of the division between animate and inanimate is also unfounded.
Quoting apokrisis
That a system may be modeled as a dissipative structure does not justify the claim that this system practises a mechanism of semiosis. There is a huge gap here which you seem to totally ignore, but it threatens to drop me into the abyss. So I'll just stay clear, and let you pretend that the gap is not there.
Fair enough. But then that is the essence of the scientific method. Have a guess and see how it fares in terms of inductive confirmation.
That is Peirce's epistemology in a nutshell. And then that was his pansemiotic metaphysics - his definition of the summum bonum as the universal growth of reasonableness.
So while as usual you are keen to frame me as dealing in Scientism to legitimate your transhuman perspective, when you have to make sense of your own ontology, it winds up sounding classically semiotic.
Thus yes, we both reject the idea of an engineer God. And humans are somehow - naturally - a deep reflection of the form of existence at the cosmological level. Which is the thesis of pansemiosis. The difference is that pansemiosis also makes sense as actual scientific inquiry now. We have begun to talk in constructs that we can physically measure.
I said what I believed is that a tornado is the product of semiosis. As a dissipative structure, it is formed almost entirely by constraints outside of itself. It has no self-stabilising level of memory. So it can't "practise" semiosis.
So my ontology both picks out the critical difference and yet still speaks to the semiotic commonality.
For you, there is an abyssal gap perhaps. But that is simply the product of you not reading what I actually say.
Which is why I say yours is an engineering perspective. And that's not 'framing you for scientism', as you openly acknowledge being physicalist.
Whereas, part of what is lost with religion is a consciousness of 'the immeasurable'.
At this point, I part company at 'pan-semiosis', as I think that illegitimately takes aspects of Peirce's philosophy, which was overtly idealist, and then substitutes what he meant by 'mind' with the second law of thermodynamics. It's ahead of materialism, but it's still physicalist.
That's what comes from reading too much Pattee, and not enough Sebeok.
It's disingenuous to tout pansemiosis while ignoring psychosemiosis and disparaging aspects of cultural semiosis.
I also would be very much interested in an explanation of how informational constraint and material dynamic combine to form human value systems, not!
In view of the above, it seems prudent that I elaborate upon my definitions of life to include (N.B. the following examples of definition, not argument):
Life
1. The condition extending from cell division to death, characterised by the ability to metabolise nutrients through semiosis.
2. The duration of an organism's existence.
Natural Life
1. The natural condition extending from cell division to death, characterised by the ability to metabolise nutrients, respond to stimuli, mature, and adapt to the environment through semiosis.
2. The duration of an organism's natural existence.
Human Life
1. The natural condition extending from fertilisation to death, characterised by the ability to metabolise nutrients, respond to stimuli, be aware, mature physically and mentally, reproduce, and adapt to the environment through human semiosis.
2. The duration of a person's existence.
Artificial Life
1. The artificial condition extending from cell division to death, characterised by the ability to metabolise nutrients through semiosis.
2. The duration of an organism's artificial existence.
These are dependent upon the following definitions:
Artifice
Human design.
Nature
The universe unaffected by human beings.
Hence, I would be inclined to classify mules under artificial life, or life which exists by human design, or plan. As well as that condition which obtains when unresponsive human beings are placed on life support machines in hospital.
If the semiosis which creates the tornado is external to the tornado itself, then it doesn't fulfill the conditions of "living", which I described earlier, as self-actuating.
And, if the universe itself, as an object, is such a dissipative structure, it would require a semiosis external to it, to produce it. Do you not see this as a serious problem for your metaphysics? You claim to have a metaphysics of immanence, yet your dissipative structures always require an external semiosis for their existence.
Quoting Galuchat
Worker bees serve as another example of life that does not reproduce. Less genetically predetermined but nevertheless real is the non-reproduction of most wild canids that are not themselves alpha mates.
Would such examples then not constitute natural life within this system of classification?
Noted. Thanks very much; will drop "reproduce" from Natural Life definition.
Biology is replete with its own intense philosophical questions. Such as in questions of identity as pertain to the underlying given(s) whose preservation matters to the sustainment of life in general. We typically think in terms of individual lifeforms. Yet many individual lifeforms depend upon a biological context of species. Hence, one can easily take the perspective that a species’ preservation is paramount in relation to that of one of its individual members. And a species preserves itself via a gene pool comprised of all individual reproducing lifeforms of the species. But then individual species—much like individual genes—are human devised abstractions that no longer neatly correlate to reality once the details are gotten into (obviously when addressing what we conceive as closely related species; for example, such as when the offspring of two species can itself successfully reproduce [as one example, this has recently happened on the East Coast of North America between coyotes and wolves, in part due to scarcity])
Eh, for those who are interested, this line of philosophical thought addressing biological themes can extend in myriad ways.
Basically, however, wanted to acknowledge the importance of reproduction to the continuation of physical life in general. This, again, while denying reproduction to be an essential property to individual life.
Still, imo, to better understand the metaphysical significance of biological reproduction (where one so inclined to enquire) it is good to first understand that reproduction is not essential to the presence of individual, naturally occurring, physical lifeforms.
Please don't hesitate to share any further insights you may have. My intent is that these definitions become formal domain ontology (information science) classes (fields in a relational database). Thanks again.
There is, of course, the caveat of the limitations of the human perspective. Along with this any mature philosophy ought to factor in the possibility that human experience is a construct, a confection hosted by a reality of which those humans are not aware.
As any mature philosophy would.
I have pointed out before that there need not be a difference of opinion between the philosopher and the mystic when it comes to metaphysics. The mystic realises she is wearing blinkers, surely philosophers do also.
Though I'm for some reason weary of unnecessarily stirring up more waters ... My current thoughts concerning semiotics are in some ways at a crossroad. I can somewhat expound on the primary problem I see, but can’t yet be of much help as concerns any resolution.
On one hand, both physically and metaphysically, I find reason to uphold that meaning (hence signs) can only occur within lifeforms. On the other hand—again, both physically and metaphysically—I find reason to speculate that there is a hidden cline that bridges the behaviors of inanimate matter and animate matter: thereby resolving how life evolved out of nonlife.
I note that both positions, however, require a distinction between life and nonlife.
As concerns semiotics applicable to replicating nucleic acids, when the latter occur as parts of a metabolizing system it is, imo, the anima of the metabolizing system that is endowed with meaning and meaning recognition—not the individual physical components of the metabolizing system when taken in isolation form the holistic process of metabolism (again, else conceived, from the respective anima).
So, in agreement with commonsense, an isolated strand of RNA is not itself alive, though it consists of organic matter, and so is not itself endowed with any awareness—thereby making it devoid of inherent meaning and meaning recognition. In the fields of semiosis this is often termed an umwelt, loosely definable as “a self-centric body of meaning regarding i) a self distinguished from non-self and ii) this same self’s context”. A metabolizing system, which empirically minimally consists of a living cell, does however have an umwelt—and thereby does engage in semiotic processes.
But again, this is at a crossroads with the hidden cline of behavior between nonlife and life which, for example, is required to explain how life could have developed from nonlife. The pansemiosis which Apo likes to address is one approach toward eventually discovering what this hidden cline is. And in this pansemiosis view isolated nucleic acids do engage in semiosis—as do individual rocks.
Still, I again note that—in keeping with the themes of this thread—there is a ‘crisp’ distinction between life and nonlife. (Physically addressed, it can be pinpointed to the presence of metabolism—which is a holistic process that some specify as autopoietic).
The same generalized crossroads regarding semiosis can be addressed from the vantage of species. A given species is not of itself an awareness-endowed being … but concepts such as those of pansemiosis would take into account the manners in which species interact, etc.
So, though likely not of much help, these are my basic current views regarding semiosis and life.
For human beings, that model consists of physical objects (phenomena) and mental objects (noumena). For other organisms, it may consist of other things. There may even be more than just physical and mental things (unless you think that homo sapiens is the apex of evolutionary development and that its mind will never comprehend things which are currently unknown).
I think it's presumptuous to say: life evolved from non-life, or noumena arise from phenomena, either vice versa, or that both arise from something else entirely. Peirce held that phenomena and noumena are two aspects of one substance. I don't know enough to say even that, preferring to maintain my species-specific common sense, and only say that physical things and mental things exist.
Von Uexkull and Peirce never knew of each other's work, but Umwelt explains why Peirce could say, "...the entire universe...is perfused with signs, if it is not composed exclusively of signs", and why Niels Bohr could say, "We are suspended in language in such a way that we cannot say what is up and what is down." Because for human beings, that is how we interpret the world: through signs, language being a sign system. For human beings, there is no other reality but that which human sentience and awareness impose upon us.
Pansemiotics, being the study of everything semiosis, should not be relevant only to physics, but also to all other sciences (including psychology and sociology), as well as to culture (the mindset and products of a social group).
Also, semiotics should not be interpreted, or elaborated upon, within, or communicated from, the context of any single scientific discipline, but rather serves to interpret and elaborate upon all scientific disciplines.
Since semiosis is sign processing (i.e., sign interpretation and modelling), I find it difficult to conceive of semiosis as anything other than an awareness process. Endosemiotics employs the signal aspect of signs to explain physiology. I think this may be a metaphorical application (i.e., a category error, as previously noted). And biosemiotics seems to rely on the premise that living matter is different from non-living matter to explain biology and zoology. This also may be a category error.
So why would I use the term "semiosis" in my definitions of life? Because "semiosis" is a term that's understood (if not universally accepted) and used within the field of biology (which is best suited among the sciences to define "life"), and is general enough to include endosemiosis, psychosemiosis and cultural semiosis.
I can only confidently place the functions of interpretation and modelling within an awareness context (i.e., one where perception, cognition and intuition occur), and so hold that semiotics applies exclusively to mental (not physical) things.That said, I would be interested in any functional explanations which connect thinking with non-thinking, and living with non-living, domains (much as chemistry provides a functional connection between other natural sciences).
Quoting Galuchat
As to my presumption that life evolved from nonlife, if I’m allowed to indulge in my own metaphysical views for a moment: I should first say that this supposition is, for me, of secondary importance to the system of metaphysics I’ve been working on. I’m for now strengthening its foundations, as time allows. Yet, inevitably, two systems of objective reality result from it (given that objectivity can, in part, be loosely translated into impartiality): one that is equivalent to what we term the physical (and phenomenal) world, and a second that is metaphysical (and purely noumenal), which, among other parallels, can be likened with Aristotle’s teleological cause. While it is the latter type of objectivity that is pivotal to this philosophy as a whole, the latter’s presence entails a) the presence of the former and b) that the former physical objectivity is the closest mutually shared reality we hold in our proximity to noumenal objectivity. Thus, as always, the very conclusions of the philosophy I’m working on entail that what our physical world informs us of at a macro-scale (thing such as laws of nature; as compared to the way that particular leaf over there just moved due to wind) can unveil truths that—given our current subjective biases—bring us closer to the stated noumenal objectivity. It may be of help to mention that our physical world, in this philosophical approach, is metaphysically understood as an intersubjective reality equally applicable (or equally real) to all co-existing awareness (including, for example, that of individual, metabolizing/living cells)—and, thereby, necessarily consists of givens such as space, time, and representations relative to, and equally applicable for, multiple awareness-endowed beings/selves. Overlooking the details of all this: Then, while some inferences of science (such as the way the universe will end) can be understood as our best, collective, bias-endowed guesswork, other inferences of science (such as that physical objectivity clearly informs us that physical life on this planet is predated by a time when no life occurred) can, I believe, only be interpreted as what is most objective in relation to life’s presence relative to our current understanding. Again, given the very tenets of the metaphysics I’ve working on, this objective appraisal that life evolved from nonlife—were it to be properly understood philosophically—would better enlighten us toward obtaining states of awareness in closer proximity to an eventual awareness of what noumenal objectivity is [In case this may be of interest, this noumenal objectivity would not be nothingness but something more along the line of infinite awareness devoid of boundaries (such as those that phenomena impose)]. Now, no expression can be considered perfect (e.g., to accurately and fully convey to all possible audiences that which is intended); but, if the gist of all this is roughly understood: this stated metaphysics then entails that there should objectively be a bridge between the behaviors (and properties) of inanimate matter and animate matter. But I as of yet have no cogent understanding of what it might be.
That stated, a philosophical skeptic as I am, I’m of course aware that mistakes of reasoning might have been made somewhere along the way.
Quoting Galuchat
Agreed.
Quoting Galuchat
Again agreed. As to my own reasons for the supposition that there is a connection between the two, they consist of my metaphysical justifications for presuming that life evolved from nonlife, as previously mentioned. Though, again, I currently lack knowledge of any functional explanation for such a connection.
Why would you assume that life developed from non-life? Don't you agree that there doesn't seem to be any evidence to support this assumption? If we do away with this assumption then we don't have to bother seeking degrees of existence between non-living and iving. This whole line of investigation, which seeks to determine these missing links, degrees of existence between non-living and living, is fueled by this belief that life developed from non-life. But this belief is unsupported, because there is no evidence of these missing links. Why not dismiss this as misdirected speculation?
In principle, I’ll answer my own metaphysical justifications by referring back to my last post—a loose outline of my justifications though it is. But to elaborate a bit, that life evolved out of nonlife is again only a secondary philosophical concern for me. This much like what type of solar systems exist beyond our own is for me of secondary concern to the nature of meta-ethics (which very much encapsulates value-judgements; which in turn informs politics and economics, this among other things devoid of which the existence of NASA would not be possible). The same overall importance is given to the issue of life evolving from nonlife being secondary in comparison to the nature of life and awareness itself. And my beliefs are clearly not those of physicalism.
As to the issue of evidence: In one line of argument, it consists of the same evidence that dinosaurs existed, or that saber-toothed cats existed (still can’t figure out how they could capture any prey with those teeth … but our reality evidences that they existed all the same), or—to be more fastidious—the same evidence that three generations ago existed. The metaphysical and epistemological justifications can become both debatable and difficult in their details, but, via one allegory, even if the world started last Thursday all evidence would yet indicated the existence of a last Wednesday as well. Last Wednesdayism would in turn indicate the existence of a last Tuesday, so on and so forth. What is today has a history in what was yesterday. Though an indirect answer, I hope this made some sense.
On the more empirical side, in review of what is likely already known, we have evidence that life once existed in the Precambrian period via fossils of very tiny creatures (one with five eyes on an otherwise bilateral body—which is about as alien a biological symmetry relative to what’s been on the planet since as one can get). Then we have no physical evidence of life on Earth prior to this. How did this Precambrian life on Earth appear? One could extrapolate a meteor or comet of some type which brought it over to Earth from somewhere else. But, even then, given the history of the universe which physics attests to, there was a time in the history of the universe when life was not possible … such as before the atoms required for organic molecules existed.
Due to this evidence, I uphold that physical life evolved from nonlife. But again, not due to or via a system of physicalism.
This may be true as far as the inferences of human science (an intersubjective enterprise) are concerned, but it says nothing regarding the cause of life (which is a different question altogether), and does not rise to the level of objectivity. In fact, it cannot even rise to the level of pan-species intersubjectivity, because the way each species interprets the world is limited by their own biologically-specific responsiveness/sentience/awareness. In other words, intersubjectivity only happens within species, not between species.
However, I am interested in concepts somewhat related to your noumenal objectivity, such as collective consciousness/unconsciousness (albeit types of human intersubjectivity).
Even if one’s definition of “intersubjectivity” would have it so, there yet occurs overlap in umwelts between species. As one example, no relation between a predator and prey, where the first chases the second and the second eludes the first, could make sense without this overlap in umwelts. This overlap, for example, will minimally regard the presence of the same solid ground underfoot, given that both predator and prey are mammals (OK, excluding bats, dolphins, etc.). Those organisms that can sense gravity will all have their own subjective awareness of gravity; they will thereby have a shared awareness of the same force external to them such that they act and react in accordance to it; yet, a plant’s roots don’t follow gravity due to the sensory apparatus of an inner ear, and so the quality of the awareness of the same external force will significantly differ between a plant and a mouse, for example.
Whatever this common awareness of external realities between differing species may be termed, it does occur. The result is that all life acts and reacts to the same external (or non-self) reality which we term the physical world … they do this in different ways with different qualia but the external reality is nevertheless singular relative to all life.
Yet, obviously, no two species have the same capacities for awareness of external realities. And if it needs to be stated, the total sum of information and meaning that a fish’s reality consists of is vastly different from that of a bee’s (etc.). But, then again, no two individual humans share a perfectly identical body of perceptual understandings and meanings. Yet we all address (else, act and react relative to) the same physical world … even if it is metaphysically conceived by us through the lens of some objective idealism, Maya, or something else of the like.
That there was a time on earth when there was no life, prior to the time that there was life, is not evidence that life developed from non-life. That certain life forms existed prior to human beings is not evidence that human beings developed from those life forms. If I was born before you, would you accept this as evidence that you developed from me?
It is the demonstration of continuity between those ancient life forms and human beings which serves as evidence that one developed from the other. It is a demonstration of temporal continuity from Tuesday to Wednesday which serves as evidence that Wednesday developed from Tuesday. In the case of non-life to life, there has been no demonstration of such a continuity, and therefore no evidence.
Intersubjective: of, or pertaining to, the common interpretation of context which presupposes communication between individuals.
Intersubjectivity is a shared understanding based on a common sign system, not on a common environment. This is how science can be a global enterprise.
What alternative(s) are there to explain life’s appearance given a time when life did not physically exist?
Quoting Galuchat
As per wiktionary, it can also mean: (1) Involving or occurring between separate conscious minds. (2) Accessible to or capable of being established for two or more subjects.
In academia, the term has any number of related definitions. And it is in the wiktionary sense that I’ve addressed it. If you disagree with wiktionary's definition, a) why do you find wiktionary mistaken, and b) what term do you then sponsor to address the two meanings wiktionary offers?
In choosing to use a particular definition for a word (and words do have different meanings, depending on context), I prefer to use a definition which is sympathetic to the relevant field(s) of study, Wiktionary notwithstanding (as in deferring to biology for a definition of life). N.B. Wiktionary's first definition of life includes the word "reproduction".
Which relevant scientific discipline, or academic area of study would limit the meaning of intersubjectivity to those listed on Wiktionary? And if a scientific or academic definition is not listed on Wiktionary, is it invalid?
Wikipedia has a relevant article on intersubjectivity.
The evidence is that life did not physically exist on earth. How do you know that life did not come from somewhere other than earth?
MU, I’ve already addressed this possibility. The following is from what I previously posted to you:
Quoting javra
So the question I last placed stands despite us not knowing whether or not life first - else, independently - appeared on planet Earth.
You should clarify your statement. Physics does not attest to a time in the universe when life was not possible. This is not physics, but speculative cosmology, metaphysics. And if you're going to insist on the claim that physics attests to a time in the universe when life was not possible, it's just as valid to say that physics allows for the possibility that life came from another universe. But I really don't believe that we have a very accurate representation of the history of the universe right now.
Indeed your proof is invalid because it is not commonsensical to label you as cute and to label the pebble as not. It would only be valid, and thus match my argument, if you found a particular that fits into the category 'cute' that everyone (or close to) agrees with, and found for another particular that fits outside of the category of 'cute' that everyone agrees with.
Better example: A hamster is cute. A math exam is not. Therefore the essence of 'cute' exists.
In the absence of evidence, explanations come from imagination, creativity, and propositional attitude.
If it's the concept of noumenal objectivity you want to strengthen within the framework of your metaphysics, the only question I have is: on what basis, if not current science?
On a scientific (i.e., biological, psychological, and sociological) basis, I have no problem describing noumenal subjectivity, and intra-species intersubjectivity. But I'm not aware of any evidence to support inter-species intersubjectivity, much less noumenal objectivity.
However, that's not to say that it cannot be formulated on a different (i.e., unscientific) basis. For example, you could formulate noumenal objectivity on a spiritual, mystical, religious, theistic, or some other, basis.
You just seems to be asserting that every adjective or noun in the language has an essence, and the proof you give is needless given that assertion.
Essence or essential properties: properties critical to the meaning of a term, such that if they were to be removed, then the term would lose its original meaning. Example: essential properties of a triangle: 'flat surface' + '3 sides'. If the surface is not flat, it is not a triangle. If the surface does not have 3 sides, it is not a triangle. Conversely, 'red' is not an essential property, because a red triangle remains a triangle if the redness is removed.
Quoting noAxioms
I am not certain, but I think not every term has an essence. It appears to be the case for slang words such as "it sucks" or "he is a jerk". We can test the term by attempting to find a particular that fits into the category of the term that everyone agrees with, and another particular that fits outside the category.
Quoting noAxioms
Why? The proof would be needless if no one questioned that essences exist, or if it was self-evident; but that is not the case.
Anyway, you seem to be driving for the language definition of 'life' (or the language 'essence' of anything else), which is pretty easy since there is but one example, and you're related to it or not. The way the word is used in common language is of no use when trying to decide if something new is life or not.
You seem to be thinking of material things as something that would be static rather than dynamic, and you seem to be ignoring relations. A living cow and a dead cow are functioning differently. The material in question is in different processes and relations in a living cow. To be living, an organism has to be undergoing certain processes (such as metabolism, homeostasis, etc. as I mentioned above).
Not 100% has to agree with it, for I am sure there exists outliers, but they would be just that: outliers. The requirement can be called 'common sense', 'every day language', or 'right opinion'. Exceptions, by definition, would fall into outliers.
Quoting noAxioms
If not that, then what else could be used as the foundation to determine if something new is life or not? A majority rule on arbitrary opinions? I am hoping for something objective.
A good point. There is a misunderstanding in the word 'material'. I use the term in the general sense that includes not only matter but also energy, processes, and in short anything that can be observable or empirical. Thus the processes you speak of fit into the category of material things that give life, labelled as Y. If these processes can be restored, then we could logically (in theory) restore Y to X and thus revive a dead cow.
To bring you up to speed, some people did not disagree with the X+Y reasoning, but only in the claim that it seems absurd. Thus they believe that life Y is a material thing, and that, indeed, we could logically restore life into a dead cow given sufficient technology.
My view as well is that life--and everything else for that matter--is a physical or material thing.