Donald Hoffman and Conscious Realism
I guess a lot of you will have heard of Donald Hoffman. He's a Californian (natch!) professor of Cognitive Science, whose philosophy is called 'conscious realism'. There's quite a good profile of his ideas in the Atlantic. Here is his TED talk.
So, I have tried to read his technical papers a few times, and listened to the talk. On face value, I am very open to what he seems to be saying, as his philosophy seems to resemble the 'mind-only' school of Buddhism (cittamatra) which I am slightly familiar with, and with which I have an affinity.
Hoffman says that the brain constructs or creates what we understand as 'reality' - that what we think we see 'out there' really is just neural processes. His analogy is that the objects we see around us are like the way we 'interface' with reality, but that they're no more intrinsically real than icons on the desktop of a computer, which aren't actually 'folders' or 'files' but are just symbolic representations that make it easier for us to find and initiate the processes that we want to execute (e.g. typing out a document).
The algorithm that drives all of this is essentially Darwinian, i.e. a product of evolution, which maximises our ability to behave in such a way so as to survive. But part of the consequence of that is that we also screen out a lot of what we don't need to know:
I am pretty drawn to his model, but I'm having trouble understanding it in the abstract - when he gets down to the detail of how agents interact, and how agents can actually merge - looses me there. But in terms of philosophy, it seems very much like the model of Leibniz' 'windowless monads' and also, as I say, it seems to resemble, in many respects, philosophical idealism
Interested to see what others think.
So, I have tried to read his technical papers a few times, and listened to the talk. On face value, I am very open to what he seems to be saying, as his philosophy seems to resemble the 'mind-only' school of Buddhism (cittamatra) which I am slightly familiar with, and with which I have an affinity.
Hoffman says that the brain constructs or creates what we understand as 'reality' - that what we think we see 'out there' really is just neural processes. His analogy is that the objects we see around us are like the way we 'interface' with reality, but that they're no more intrinsically real than icons on the desktop of a computer, which aren't actually 'folders' or 'files' but are just symbolic representations that make it easier for us to find and initiate the processes that we want to execute (e.g. typing out a document).
The algorithm that drives all of this is essentially Darwinian, i.e. a product of evolution, which maximises our ability to behave in such a way so as to survive. But part of the consequence of that is that we also screen out a lot of what we don't need to know:
Evolution has shaped us with perceptions that allow us to survive. They guide adaptive behaviors. But part of that involves hiding from us the stuff we donât need to know. And thatâs pretty much all of reality, whatever reality might be. If you had to spend all that time figuring it out, the tiger would eat you....
Q: If snakes arenât snakes and trains arenât trains, what are they?
Snakes and trains, like the particles of physics, have no objective, observer-independent features. The snake I see is a description created by my sensory system to inform me of the fitness consequences of my actions. Evolution shapes acceptable solutions, not optimal ones. A snake is an acceptable solution to the problem of telling me how to act in a situation. My snakes and trains are my mental representations; your snakes and trains are your mental representations...
I call it "conscious realism": Objective reality is just conscious agents, just points of view. Interestingly, I can take two conscious agents and have them interact, and the mathematical structure of that interaction also satisfies the definition of a conscious agent. 1.
I am pretty drawn to his model, but I'm having trouble understanding it in the abstract - when he gets down to the detail of how agents interact, and how agents can actually merge - looses me there. But in terms of philosophy, it seems very much like the model of Leibniz' 'windowless monads' and also, as I say, it seems to resemble, in many respects, philosophical idealism
Interested to see what others think.
Comments (318)
I tend to agree with the base concept: The world as we see it is effectively mind-derived naive realism, and the thing-in-itself behind snakes and trains bears pretty much unrecognizable correspondence to the 'desk icons' that are our representations of them.
But I draw no dualism conclusions from this. Mind still seems to be a physical process supervening on this thing-in-itself matter. I see no reason to suppose that mind is special in this sense. A machine observer would have the same naive realist view, even if it comes from the biases put there by its programmer instead of evolution. I want to see Hoffman's take on that to see what conclusions are drawn on this front.
From the article linked to in the OP in the Atlantic:
Quoting Amanda Gefter
Hey. Just passing through.
Iâm not yet familiar with his detailed (I presume mathematical) arguments for the convergence of agentsâbut to offer some thoughts. To address the scenario of disparate agents converging into one agent doesnâtâyetâseem to me to be an issue of science or technology. Rather its either one of metaphysics or one of philosophy of spirituality. The quoted example Hoffman gives regarding brain hemispheres I find to be apt. However, it itself is implicitly reliant upon models of mind-brain wherein the sub- & unconscious mind is itself endowed with agencies. For the time being, it can be said that we as a society still have basic disagreements as to whether or not consciousness is itself a metaphysically valid agency or, else, an illusion (either in part or in whole; such as can be readily inferred from epiphenomenalism)âso the issue of whether or not a total mind consist of multiple agencies partly converging into a first-person conscious agency can be very controversial.
For the record, I uphold such a model of mind where the unconscious is itself constituted of at times unified, and at times conflicting, agencies. As only one example, to anyone whoâs ever felt pangs of conscience, you then at those junctures experienced agencies of your unconscious mind other than the agency which you as a first person conscious self then momentarily were; if for no other reason, the intentions of your conscience and those which you then held were not the same. More concretely exemplified, were I to want to take a shortcut but then to feel pangs of conscience informing me its far better not to, the first-person conscious agency which I am yet has the choice between doing what I want or doing what I now feel these pangs of conscience inform me might be the better course of action. Momentarily, this information of my subconscious which we term conscience is not the first-person conscious I which feels, deliberates, and acts. It is instead an agency of my sub/unconscious mind interacting with me, the first-person consciousness, within my mind. More could be elaborated on, but this was offered to illustrate that a mind consists of multiple agencies which can diverge (e.g., you & your conscience) or, elseâas is typical and healthy (the latter, however, being very conditional on the actions being taken)âfully unified into a singular agency that, at such junctures, is undifferentiable from the first person conscious agent's being.
So, yea, this model of mind is itself contentious; weâre habituated to think of the conscious agent as though it were a thing, and object, somehow permanently separated from what is its; namely, the agency-endowed aspects of its mind (e.g., conscience) and its body (e.g. walking while desiring to go to location X), etc. [Personally, its where I find the statement, âthere neither is a self nor not a selfâ to enter the picture ⊠but anyways.]
As to multiple first-person agencies (or selves) converging into one objective, perfectly unified reality of agency, one can find history littered with tales of this: from the Gnostics and their approach of Sophia, to the Neo-Platonists and their notion of âthe Oneâ, to concepts of transcendent convergence with an Abrahamic God/G-d in the hereafter, etc. And, as you know, examples can be found in Eastern traditions as well. In most such systems, there are stipulated to be in-between realms of greater awarenessâdwelling in between our own present corporeal awareness and that of the pinnacle, unified awareness, however it is expressed. But this converging of minds stuff is neither new nor limited to mono-something-theisms; e.g. the Oracle at Delphi supposedly converged with the virgin priestesses there in order for these priestesses to prophesize; Shaman of varying traditions on this planet supposedly converged as conscious agents with everything from spirits and gods to (as was a common case in South American tribes) jaguars. Eah, but this a science and technology forumâso none of this here applies.
Still, notice how the metaphysical underpinnings of physical objects governing the foundations of realityâsomething which weâve now come to communally project upon selfhood as well (the dreaded homunculus argument comes to mind)âfirst needs to be reappraised before this convergence of conscious agents/agencies can make any sense.
As to Hoffmanâs overall views, Iâm generally very sympathetic to them from what Iâve so far read. Though, I should admit, I currently find them metaphysically lacking. Also, the terms used need to be changed or else new terms created for notions such asâto at least paraphraseâ âreality is an illusionâ. In the sense he talks about, it is (or at least I too so affirm); but in the sense of âreality bitesâ, (perceptual, etc.) reality never is illusory. Thanks for linking to him.
Oh, and a shout out to all the UCI-ers out there: see, Ant Eaters can be competitive! [yup, UCI has an ant eater of all things as its mascot]
Does it make a difference in one's reception and comprehension of Hoffman's talk that he talks only about vision? Does his theory work as well when we take the other senses -- hearing, touch, smell, and taste? Is there a difference in seeing a train, and hearing, touching, smelling, even tasting the train? Are smell, taste, touch (including feeling the vibrations of the train), and hearing more immediate, less mediated/interpreted? Certain pollinators can be fooled into 'mating' with a certain orchid because it looks like, and more important, smells like a female.
It can be difficult to explain to a rank novice that the icon on the desktop (screen) is and is not a file. The file is in the box under the desk, and it is just a long string of numbers located on a spinning disk. Before the WYSIWYG interface, people used DOS and there was no illusion that a "file" was sitting "on the desktop". The file was clearly in the box. It was clear that you were asking the computer to fetch it up and display the characters of the file on the screen. (The screen always looked the same, however the print version would look.)
Another situation where "the medium is the message"?
I agree, though I do not at all like it, that "what we sense" (eyes, ears, nose, mouth, skin, body) is not reality itself. Objects are exterior, and especially when we look at them, we are only seeing reflected light from a surface. However, if you hit an object with a stick, it makes a noise which you hear. Then you bite it and you learn more about it's nature--how hard or soft is it, is it gooey, stringy, or solid? You taste it; you smell it; you feel it. If you eat it and immediately vomit, you have learned something more about it. When our brains combine all of our senses to render it's representation, we have come closer to the reality of the object.
Eating the tomato is not like using a WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) computer interface.
Are TED talks having the same effect on people's thinking that PowerPoint is thought to have? All theories are presented in short, sweet punchy form. Jill Bolte Taylor's TED Talk about her massive stroke is quite moving. However, in the book she explained that her experience of having the stroke (which she presented in her TED Talk) wasn't available to her. She reconstructed what it was like with the help of neurologists, psychologists, et al.
Quite understandable. I don't feel defrauded at all. The real story is her 8 year rehabilitation program that enabled her to overcome the massive damage and return to Harvard as a Neuro-anatamist. The punchiness of her talk is, none the less, slightly misleading.
In earlier decades, it was often said of a couple that had lived their lives together began to take on each other's physical and emotional characteristics. One embraced the other.
I think people are spending too much time with their computers and are literally falling in love with them.. At least do some gardening. If you are going to adopt a partner at least have it be a living one.
The problem there is that, if it were an illusion, it would have to be an illusion for someone.
I take your point about the conflict between ego and conscience, however - often subject to it, myself! ;-)
Quoting javra
Don't be too sure. Remember, this professor is from California.
But I still don't get his maths.
Quoting Bitter Crank
I think the more radical point is that 'exterior' is also a perception. I hasten to add, I think it's a veridical perception. But when we do see 'reflected light from a surface' - there's no actual light inside the cranium; light doesn't actually penetrate. The sensory organs process sensations including smell, touch, hearing, and combine them by the process called 'apperception' into cognitive wholes. But these are cognitive events, still.
There has to be a kind of 'through the looking glass' experience to really get what that means, I think.
Quoting schopenhauer1
It's not about 'where it is' it's about 'what's looking'. When you ask the question, who is asking? Who wants to know? You can't get behind it, and you can't explain it.
Well, thinking that I'm getting your vibes: Dude, like, Californians can be totally rad at times. :P Nerdy as some of us can sometimes get.
Hang ten. (Y) ;)
Of course there is no light in the cranium. I don't think I suggested that light penetrates into the back of the brain (or for that matter, the front).
Quoting Wayfarer
I get confused here. Is he saying that the objects that we perceive are no more than pixels on a screen that appear to resemble file folders--but are not?
So if I hear a bell, see a tree, feel a thistle, smell a flower, taste a grape, I am not experiencing bells, trees, thistles, flowers, grapes? I'm just getting good vibrations, per the Beach Boys, and my clever little brain puts together something it chooses to name bell, tree, thistle, flower, and grape? It's possible that I could think I was eating a grape when I was actually eating his red tomato, previously located 1 meter from his eyeball.
If we think there are subatomic particles composing the parts of the atom, and that these parts and the atoms themselves contain forces, and that atoms attach to one another in systematic ways to form molecules, and molecules and atoms line up to form crystals, and so on up to sequoias and whales, are we then to say... that all the stuff is illusory?
Animals (we'll do plants another time) that do not deal in desktop illusions, have to see the real world to survive. The beetles landing on the brown, slightly bumpy, glossy beer bottles are actually seeing brown, bump, and gloss which is what they evolved to see. Flowers that look like like a female pollinator have to really look like one (and smell like it too) or the male bee wouldn't try to mate with it and in so doing, pollinate it.
People do not get bitten by snakes and eaten by alligators in Houston as much as they would if their perceptions and estimations of shape and movement weren't fairly good. (When perception and estimation of shape and movement isn't good, and one is standing in a swamp, one is likely to undergo death in a strikingly unpleasant way -- none of it illusory.)
Even more perplexing- what "is" the illusory? It has to "exist" somewhere. However, there is no answer it seems. There is no theater beyond the neurochemical and neurostructural architecture combined with the body's other constituents. This illusion is somehow shoehorned on with these material causes. What is the nature of this illusion?
Hey, I've got a post that I created years ago, and put up on the old forum for comments, which might be relevant...hang on....
As I say, I wrote that a long time back, I got a lot of growls from Banno, but one of the other posters (can't recall his name, 'metaphysical exorcist' or something) said it was a fair representation of idealism. (I got a lot of these ideas from reading Robert Ornstein.)
Whereas I think we are generally conditioned to be naive realists. In other words, we are predisposed to accept the reality of the 'world of the senses', which is analysed through the empirical sciences (which in turn relies on the amplification of sensory experience through instruments and quantitative analysis). So we neglect or ignore the sense in which we 'construe' the world to be as it is, and so, for us, 'the world' is what is real. But I think what is being said in this thread is causing you to question that.
Quoting Bitter Crank
I don't think it's illusory tout courte, but that its reality is inextricably bound up with your perception of it. So it's not either in the mind, or in the world - our reality comprises precisely the experience of the subject-in-the-world. But notice, I think, the lurking assumption that what this all goes back to, or down to, are atoms. So I would question that, and indeed I think that has been undermined by science itself nowadays. And I think that's why there is a deep feeling of unease in many people, about what we are told is real. The old model of a mechanical universe consisting of atoms being randomly shuffled is dying, but the new is struggling to be born. That's what I think we're considering here.
I'll watch the video when I'm feeling better and give a review (bad day, need something way lighter).
But I did see this similar one recently https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lyu7v7nWzfo and it annoyed me due to how superficial it was. Has anyone read Midgley's" Are You an Illusion?" I haven't but reading the synopsis and the Guardian review, I think the book touches on the same criticisms I would have for that video.
It (the video) was loaded with the naturalist trope about how we should be humble we are just brains, and that consciousness is not special. Hoping the Hoffman video isn't the same.
I accept (and have articulated in the old forum) the idea that "the real physical world" which we perceive is one step removed (at least) and the reality which we construct in our minds, might not be exactly as we think the real world is. It could be somewhat different, but all animal constructions of reality, including ours, have to correspond enough to the real world. Too far from enough, and sensory perception would have failed at the beginning a few billion years ago.
Organisms have to pick up good information to find food and mates, defend themselves, and (sometimes) build a nest, a burrow, or a house. Older and simpler brains evolved to do this. Mechanisms developed to see, hear, smell, taste, and feel. Some animals sense magnetic signals; migrating birds, for instance. Homing pigeons have fairly straight forward mechanisms; one of the two methods employs tiny bits of magnetite in part of their brain. They can sense the pull of very weak magnetic fields. Some bacteria also have this feature, which enables them to align their movement to magnetic fields.
That brains have developed complex mechanisms to accomplish necessary means for the end of survival bothers some people. Upon learning that the brain uses chemicals to effect certain feelings, like love, they jump to the conclusion that the mechanism of oxytocin IS love. Ah, so, just snort a dose of oxytocin and you'll suddenly love... whoever happens to be handy.
The object of one's affection, and the affection and desire, usually come first. The baby is born, the mother takes him in her arms; the baby sucks her breast. Oxytocin floods both their brains, and the father's too if he is on hand. Oxytocin isn't what is happening, it is how it is happening. (and it isn't a forever thing, either.)
So he makes a big thing about reality having no objective features. And that is where he turns into sounding like an idealist, not an indirect realist or pragmatist.
However the semiotic view says there is a real world out there of matter and energy. It is objective, and indeed utterly recalcitrant, in its existence. Then the epistemic cut says there follows an act of translation. With our sensory receptors and habits of perception, patterns of physical energy are turned into informational activity - the signs of our qualitative experience.
Consider an interaction without this translation. Shine some red light on a dead sheep eyeball. All that will happen is that the dead flesh might start to heat up after a while. Energy can make an energetic change and that is as far as it goes. There is no hue to this interaction as such. Saying the light is "red" is a meaningless claim from the point of view of the physics. Red just isn't an objective property of reality while we are talking of it as material being. Whereas light being able to heat up the eyeball is a recalcitrant fact of nature. It just happens.
By contrast, when light falls on a live eyeball, we don't experience the heating but instead the construction of some representational pattern of signs. The visual field is divided in hues, like green and red, that "stand for" some neural circuit judgement about relative wavelength frequency information. Green and red are only fractionally different in wavelength as a physical fact, but are experienced as ontically the exact opposite of each other. It is impossible (in any normal way) for red and green to be found together at the same point of experience. Our circuitry is designed to so that their informational state is signalling one or the other in a logically mutually exclusive fashion.
So the semiotic view is that what we construct is an interpretation of reality where our own biological interests are part of the information that shapes the sign. Evolution doesn't want the sign to be "realistic" in that it is some pure token of the material world - like a reading of a scientist's light meter that wants to give an objective reading of an energy level or wavelength. Evolution wants the sign itself to be a sharply dichotomous judgement.
The receptors have to make a simple decision - say green or say red. Break the complexity of physical energy relations into simple pixels of yes/no acts of discriminative judgement. Then that epistemic cut means we can get on with building up our own fully self interested model of the world.
We have already made the first necessary act of interpretance to separate our interests from the material constraints the world seeks to impose on our physical being. In our little neural cocoon of self interested world modelling, we can then construct a whole realm of plans and ideas founded on our system of sign.
The computer interface analogy Hoffman offers does get at this epistemic cut. Our interests are served by seeing an icon on the screen we can click. We don't want to have to care about all the physical complexity in terms of the hardware actions that a little picture might represent. So when we see a symbol that looks like a floppy disk, what we see is our own desire to save a file. The sign appears to be directly representative of the material,world, yet really it is a fragmentary reflection of our own internal realm of felt intentionality. It is a little bit of us.
The trick is to see how the same is true of all phenomenology, like our experience of hues such as red and green. They are shards of self interested judgement hardwired down at the neurobiological level. Energy and matter are exactly what get left at the doors of perception. Consciousness starts with a logical transformation, an epistemic cut, where a digital decision has got made and now we can talk of a selfish realm of sign.
Gibberish.. as I stated to @Bitter Crank: Even more perplexing- what "is" the illusory? It has to "exist" somewhere. However, there is no answer it seems. There is no theater beyond the neurochemical and neurostructural architecture combined with the body's other constituents. This illusion is somehow shoehorned on with these material causes. What is the nature of this illusion?
True, but the criteria here is 'what works' i.e. what enables survival, getting along, so it's an implicitly utilitarian analysis, isn't it?
Quoting Bitter Crank
It doesn't bother me, but I do ask whether it qualifies as philosophy.
[quote='Adorno and Horkheimer'] "The concordance between the mind of man and the nature of things that [Bacon] had in mind is patriarchal: the human mind, which overcomes superstition, is to hold sway over a disenchanted nature. Knowledge, which is power, knows no obstacles: neither in the enslavement of men nor in compliance with the worldâs rulers... Technology is the essence of this knowledge. It does not work by concepts and images, by the fortunate insight, but refers to method, the exploitation of othersâ work, and capital... What men want to learn from nature is how to use it in order wholly to dominate it and other men. That is the only aim."[/quote]
That is however tangential to the OP.
Quoting apokrisis
The question that can always be asked is how to distinguish between 'the real world out there' and what is perceived as a signal or sign. If what we perceive is truly just a 'signifier' then what we're seeing is not truly objective, but the object as it exists for us. Which isn't to say that it's not real, but it is to question the degree of its reality, or the mode of its reality, independent of our experience of it. That seems implicit to me in the very notion of 'sign', as a sign is something that always requires an interpretation, isn't it?
Hoffman, again:
Again, can't help but be reminded of 'windowless monads'.
Quoting schopenhauer1
Hoffman explains that what we perceive as reality, is not what it seems to be; that what we take it to be, is what evolution has sculpted us to see. 'This illusion' is, therefore, what we consider to be real. It's a radical idea.
You can't have your evolutionary brain cake and eat it too. Either we have a way of ascertaining how the computer creates a desktop interface, in which case it's not all an illusion, or we don't and we might as well be envatted in that desktop.
Bohm2 mentioned Hoffman in a post on the old site about 15-18 months ago, complete with a link to a fascinating YouTube video where Hoffman demonstrated that equations from two different scientific domains (quantum and evolutionary theories?) were the same.
I found the following article to be helpful in providing more information on his Multimodal User Interface theory of perception and Conscious Realism: http://www.cogsci.uci.edu/~ddhoff/ConsciousRealism2.pdf
Hoffman, D. (2008). Conscious Realism and the Mind-Body Problem. Mind & Matter Vol. 6(1), pp. 87â121.
His philosophy is not: dualism, idealism, panpsychism, or physicalism. It does not contradict dual aspect monism, and MUI is consistent with species-specific semiotic modelling. Beyond that, I understand very little.
Because it works?
So there is one side "the physical" and the other "the mental". See diagram below:
neurotransmitters/neuroarchitecture/physiological------------------------------>Qualia/inner experience
Now, how to bridge this gap? Well, a much touted answer is the idea that qualia/inner experience is an "illusion". Now, how this "illusion" came about is not the hard question here. Most people will agree "yeah, yeah, evolution tailored organism's to experience the world in a certain way, yada yada". The hard question is not even whether the physical events of the brain/body CAUSES mental. Most people will agree with that who are good physicalists. Rather, the hard question (for physicalists at least), is how it is that brain/body IS the illusion. "What the hell are you getting at?" you say. Well, the illusion itself has to exist itself. It has to be accounted for. How is it that this illusion of qualia/inner experience IS the neurotransmitters/architecture/body? It's like there is some HIDDEN theater of inner experience that is always in the equation but is never explained away.
There is really nothing groundbreaking here though that he is using mathematics may make it more exciting and palatable for some. He is basically describing a holographic topography of consciousness of stuff out there that consciousness interacts with. However, it is very muddy as he at once embraces a universal consciousness and then denies it in a single breath. So his idea is muddy at best. I just think he is being a coward as he presents a universal consciousness compatibilism type theory. His reward for trying to walk the line is a theory that immediately contradicts itself. Back to the drawing board.
"For the conscious realist, consciousness is ontologically fundamental;
matter is derivative, and among the symbols constructed by conscious
agents.
According to conscious realism, when I see a table, I interact with a
system, or systems, of conscious agents, and represent that interaction in
my conscious experience as a table icon. Admittedly, the table gives me
little insight into those conscious agents and their dynamics. The table is
a dumbed-down icon, adapted to my needs as a member of a species in a
particular niche, but not necessarily adapted to give me insight into the
true nature of the objective world that triggers my construction of the
table icon."
In the following paragraph he writes:
"Conscious realism,
together with MUI theory, claims that tables and chairs are icons in the
MUIs of conscious agents, and thus that they are conscious experiences of
those agents. It does not claim, nor entail, that tables and chairs are con-
scious or conscious agents."
I found Hoffman on the PBS series, Closer to Truth, one of a number of such luminaries and talking heads. What I liked about him is simply that he's not a materialist, and 'the enemy of the enemy is my friend'. I'm hoping that other scientists are persuaded by him, but, myself, I need no persuasion.
If someone doesn't mind sitting through thorough, drawn out presentations which are remarkably perceptive, Stephen Robbins has created a whole series of YouTube videos, but Bergson still stands alone for his penetration of Creative Evolution.
Yeah. Hoffman starts off with his MUI story, and that is reasonable as an analogic account of psychologiocal processes. Then he goes of into weirdness with his conscious realism.
Despite what Hoffman says, the conscious realism part does appear to claim idealism of some stripe. In calling his ontology monistic, he does look to back himself into that.
So in talking about conscious agents everywhere, causing the organisation of being through a sign interface, he might in fact be thinking pansemiotically.
But as I say, he doesn't give himself a working basis of that. There is no clear statement about an epistemic cut that gives you a "duality" of information and matter.
And he never tries to deflate the notion of consciousness as being some kind of unexplained psychic substance. Or rather, MUI would reduce consciousness to a functional process - a system of informational icons for coordinating material interactions with the world - and then consciousness comes back in its "sentient stuff" form in the conscious realism second half of his papers.
So I think he is just confused and falling between various stools.
As an aside, a comment on Bergson by Edward Conze, Buddhologist:
Spurious Parallels to European Philosophy
Quoting apokrisis
He doesn't believe matter is real at all. He says that at several places in the Atlantic article - only experiences are real.
With that said, we have our own creative minds and can do with his ideas as we wish. One can improve on some of his ideas by reading the unreadable Whitehead, or the very readable Rupert Sheldrake. Stephen Robbins stays away from the Elan vital, but does a beyond remarkable job expanding on Bergson's ideas on memory. Of course background on Eastern philosophy also really helps. It's all good, especially if one is open to the possibility of the primacy of the mind.
The Hard Problem, or explanatory gap, can only exist philosophically to the extent that you believe in the metaphysical constructs of both self and world, consciousness and matter. That is, hard dualism arises because the mind and the world are both being imagined in substance terms. They are both kinds of "stuff" - a material stuff and an immaterial stuff. And imagined this way, there seems an over-supply of stuffs making up the one reality. Also there seems no substantial connection - no causal link - between these two kinds of stuff. Being different in kind, how can either act on the other?
So the first step to tackling the Hard Problem is to start to deflate it. One can delve deeper into the notion of substance - as Aristotle and others did - to start to see "stuff" in terms of a systems causality. You can start to see all "stuff" as a process with a functional structure. The question then becomes whether what we call mind, and what we call world, turn out to have a common causal architecture, a common fundamental process.
The Peircean pansemiotic position is that they do. And that commonality of process is semiosis or the triadic sign relation. That involves the "dualism" we need to have anything actually happen - a separation (via the epistemic cut) of a causal realm of information and a causal realm of material dynamics. But semiosis also then accounts for the subsequent interaction of the two species of causality thus divided. Together they make a functional whole with a purpose.
From a scientific point of view, that global purpose is entropy dissipation - as described by the laws of thermodynamics. And that entropy dissipation is then evolutionary. It is shaped by the demand to always get better in terms of its structural organisation. Complexity and mindfulness must emerge if it can locally accelerate the Universe's telic desire for its Heat Death.
Or from a more philosophical point of view like Peirce (when he wasn't being a scientist taking a thermodynamic view), we can talk about existence as the universal growth of reasonableness. The Universe is "mindful" in the sense that it is always growing more fixed and habitual in its ways. The laws - like the laws of thermodynamics - are becoming ever more clearly expressed.
Anyway, the point is that the Hard Problem itself depends on a misplaced concreteness when talking about both mind and matter. It is a hard problem because it is a dualised substance ontology.
Given that our starting point is simple experience, we need to realise that even our notion of "being a conscious being" is a social construct. It is a story we learn to tell to organise our experiences. We reify both the world, and our selves, then wonder why we have this explanatory gap.
Peircean metaphysics in particular seeks to wind all this assumed ontology back to basics. It wants to categorise experience differently. Indeed it begins with the question about the very mechanism by which experience gets categorised - how reasoning might operate as the most general and universal process.
That eventually leads to semiosis with its triadic structure of interpretation, sign and invariance; its dichotomy of information and matter, its ontic foundation in the notion of vagueness, Firstness or Apeiron.
And science is catching up. Semiosis can now be measured. At the physical level, the Planck scale defines the common unit for information and matter. The material cost of one bit of information - or a physical degree of freedom - is precisely defined in a way we can convert between our material descriptions of nature and our information theoretic ones. We can speak of entropy equivalently as either a quantity of material events or a quantity of informational uncertainty. It is part of the maths now.
What is a major new discovery in biophysics is that the same looks true of biosemiosis. There is a particular physical scale - the quasi-classical realm of the nanoscale - where material events and informational uncertainy become intercovertable. They can be quantified in a common coin.
It might have been thought biology was going to be messy in its underpinnings. It would be hard to define a level where physics and chemistry stops, biological organisation gets started. But instead, an actual scale of being has been identified where biological information suddenly kicks in as a thing which could regulate living material processes - all the tiny genetically-coded actions that structure a flow of metabolism and organism building.
So life has a hard lower limit, just like physics has.
Next step might be to find the same is true of brains and neural coding mechanisms. There may be some characteristic scale where neuro-semiosis suddenly kicks in as a hard fact of nature. Or maybe not. Maybe the biophysical limit - the action down there at the nano level of molecular machines - is where "mindfulness" kicks in already. This is a question so new and open, that it hasn't really been considered.
But whatever. The Hard Problem has its bite mostly because folk are used to thinking of existence in terms of a causally disconnected substance dualism. The truck has been driven all the way up a philosophical cul-de-sac and has got stuck.
But science is quite capable of talking a functional process view of existence. And it is already doing this with physics.
The Universe is a dissipative structure doing the second law's bidding. Classical reality is the organisation that emerges out of a more fundamental quantum vagueness or indeterminism. There is a basic "duality" of description anchored by the Planck scale. Observers and observables may seem divided by the quantum "hard problem" of the measurement issue, but now we can in fact quantify both sides of this divide in information theoretic terms. We can unite the divided in terms of holographic horizons, thermal decoherence, entropic forces, and other new-fangled physical conceptions which embed their observers pansemiotically.
Now biophysics has started to find its own ground zero for uniting it and bit, material dynamics and informational constraint. The laboratory equipment to observe cellular machinery on the nanoscale has only been around a decade, so this is all extremely new. And it might take another 10 years for the import of the discovery to become widely recognised.
So we are talking about the difference between a dead philosophical position - substance dualism - and a fast moving scientific project - pansemiosis.
And pansemiosis isn't about solving the hard problem by showing how "consciousness works". That would be to accept the goalposts of a dead philosophy. It is about reconceiving the metaphysical constructs which we would use to organise our experience so that we are no longer dazzled by either the "illusion" of the material world, or the aware mind. As we learn to think differently - existence understood as a common functional process, semiosis - then the old problems that obsessed us will slip away.
We might still have explanatory problems, but they would at least be different ones. Which would make a refreshing change.
I was reading his published papers. The Atlantic article is a gloss.
In his papers, he at least makes a separation between the ontic agnosticism of his MUI argument, and the "some kind of monistic idealism" of his Conscious Realism.
Maybe he just had to say that so as not to come across as a total fruitloop. But still, he himself says you can have one without the other - one doesn't have to lead to the other. And then his conscious realism is left ill-defined in ontic terms in my view.
It could of course be that his mathematics is somehow good for talking about "conscious agents" in some kind of fundamental fashion. That is certainly his claim. He keeps saying he is formalising something in the fashion of Turing's Universal Computation.
I started reading the maths section but it just didn't seem interesting enough to continue. The papers were crackpot enough to put me off the effort by that stage.
I know he is an academic and all. But every kind of bullshit gets published in fringe journals. Life is too short to take everything seriously. And Hoffman's papers have all the hallmarks of an academic crank.
By contrast, Turing's papers are instantly lucid. There is not the same tell-tale floundering about constructing a motivation. Just a quick sketch of some ontic basics and on to resulting mathematical framework. You are not asked to believe anything ontological before getting going. The maths just speaks for itself.
You are trying to put the ghost in the machine. Material and information with purpose are not the mental, they CAUSE the mental. Confusing the map for the terrain. Also, you are possibly reifying information here. Information is just a stand-in for the mental. You are getting mental phenomena from the hidden fiat of your information dynamics.
Quoting apokrisis
This is hidden Cartesian Theater. Essentially, you are saying the same thing as the "illusion" people. The mind is an illusion (e.g. social construct). However, the "illusion" still exists either "to someone" or "somewhere". Whether it is "supposed" to be different than what it really appears, it is there, and must be accounted for on its own terms. There is still the mental picture/reality/construct going on. The appearance is still a phenomena qua illusion.
Quoting apokrisis
I admire your adherence to this mathematical-based theory (information theory/dyanmics what have you). I am not even saying what you are studying or interested in, in terms of the interconnectedness of informational structures is misguided, or "wrong" as far as explaining material phenomena. What I am saying, is that it does not explain away the hidden Cartesian Theater of the illusion. Whether you say it is all really neurons/axions/glial cells/sodium-potassium ion gates/neural networks/outer neural systems (and a million other biological events), or it's really a "triadic sign relation", that is all well and good, but it doesn't explain the illusion qua illusion- only what causes or is causally associated with it.
Similar to this pansemiosis of Peirce is Whitehead's process philosophy. As you know, Whitehead is no lightweight. This guy, along with people like Bertrand Russell and Gottlob Frege practically wrote the modern underpinnings of mathematical logical proofs. He is a legend in the math world. Anyways, even he recognized the seeming intractableness of experience. His process philosophy is in a way an informational theory but one where experience itself is a fundamental unit of the equation. It is not discussed as an "illusion" and then starts to discuss processes underpinning the illusion. He realized (at least how I interpret it), that the illusion itself is still there "somewhere". It still exists. To call something (experience) something else (information) is not really solving the problem.
You are trying to put the ghost in the machine. Material and information with purpose are not the mental, they CAUSE the mental. Confusing the map for the terrain. Also, you are possibly reifying information here. Information is just a stand-in for the mental. You are getting mental phenomena from the hidden fiat of your information dynamics.
This is hidden Cartesian Theater. Essentially, you are saying the same thing as the "illusion" people. The mind is an illusion (e.g. social construct). However, the "illusion" still exists either "to someone" or "somewhere". Whether it is "supposed" to be different than what it really appears, it is there, and must be accounted for on its own terms. There is still the mental picture/reality/construct going on. The appearance is still a phenomena qua illusion.
Similar to this pansemiosis of Peirce is Whitehead's process philosophy. As you know, Whitehead is no lightweight. This guy, along with people like Bertrand Russell and Gottlob Frege practically wrote the modern underpinnings of mathematical logical proofs. He is a legend in the math world. Anyways, even he recognized the seeming intractableness of experience. His process philosophy is in a way an informational theory but one where experience itself is a fundamental unit of the equation. It is not discussed as an "illusion" and then starts to discuss processes underpinning the illusion. He realized (at least how I interpret it), that the illusion itself is still there "somewhere". It still exists. To call something (experience) something else (information) is not really solving the problem.
Matter and information apparently cause it. It is not a picture, or a theatre, or an illusion. It exists "to someone" - another thing that needs fuller explanation. It is fundamental and so not in fact caused by underlying processes (of matter and information I'm guessing).
It still sure sounds like you are saying phenomenal experience is a substance. A stuff that receives impressions in some special way. Drops of experience. A mental stuff.
Perhaps you could have a go at clarifying.
Okay, so we can agree on this. But this is not really something many people who are science-oriented would disagree on. However you go on to contradict what I have stated with a straw man that I did not in fact say: Quoting apokrisis
All I alluded to is that it was fundamental, not necessarily that it is not associated with underlying processes of matter an information.
Quoting apokrisis
I did not say this either. I did not assent to any real label to it, but I do recognize people call it an illusion. The problem is not that people call it an illusion per se, but what they mean by it. What you really mean by illusion is that, although consciousness seems like a fully formed "thing", it is really just an appearance of something else going. I am okay with this interpretation. However, the illusion itself is still THERE. What is the "there" of this illusion? The apperception of many informational parts is still creating this REALITY that APPEARS, a theater of sorts. So we have THERE, APPEARS, REALITY. Whether it is attributed to informational bits does not matter- there is still a there there, even if it only just "appears" to be. In other words, the THERE in the consciousness is intractable, whether one calls it appearance, illusion, or other such label.
Quoting apokrisis
Whitehead called this substrate "occasions of experience" :D.
I'm not one for watching videos myself that I did not particularly assign myself, but I was looking for videos that might explain what I'm talking about more clearly and there was one I found that seemed to be a decent synthesis of many of the ideas I have been discussing in terms of the intractableness of experience. I think you would appreciate it. Can you watch the video and then see if what I am saying makes more sense? Here it is:
I don't see a gap to bridge. Your equation is an expression of Aristotle's form (species-specific genetic predisposition to develop and exercise a particular set of functions) - matter (body) unity which is species substance (dual aspect monism).
Pansemiosis was not devised by Peirce. In fact, 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
In my opinion, pansemiosis is a physicalist device which attempts to reduce "mental" to "physical". However, semantic information is processed by living beings on a psychological level, not by inanimate objects, and not on any other level.
Observe how he uses the behavior of the beetle to show how we could be inaccurately perceiving reality. If we aren't perceiving reality accurately, how do we know that there is actually a beetle there misinterpreting it's perceptions and mating with a bottle? There would be no sense in doing science if we don't have some consistent reality that we share in order to test each other's theories! - and he's a scientist? No, he's a hack.
Yes, we project a lot of ourselves on to what we perceive. Yes, our sensory systems aren't perfect (this is what would be expected by evolution by natural selection - a blind feedback process that simulates selection). But to say that there is no correlation between the degree of accuracy of one's sensory systems and one's fitness is ridiculous.
What does it mean for some sensory representation to be useful? For anything to be useful, there must be some degree of truth associated with it. There must be something about the relationship between the representation and what is being represented that is accurate for it be useful. The beetles' misinterpretation isn't a problem humans have. We tend to not have much of a problem finding mates for procreation. If it does occur, it is the result of being under the influence of drugs, or a mental problem, not a common misinterpretation most humans share - like bent straws in water. But seeing bent straws in water, and mirages, are the result of how light behaves (an external mind-independent process), not a result of our "construction of reality". Because we see light, and not the objects themselves, mirages and bent straws in water are what we should see.
What about when we look at each other? He seems to admit that other perspectives exist independent of his own mind. Why, then is the rest of reality constructed? What is it that separates each perspective from each other, if not space-time?
I enjoyed the video in the manner it poses "new possibilities". It is fitting that Whitehead and Sheldrake are featured in the video, both of whom are heavily influenced by Bergson.
I am not sure I get you as how species substance answers the explanatory gap. I'd have to hear more.
Yeah it is interesting. Actually, I was more impressed by David Chalmers, David Ray Griffin, and Galen Strawson. Also, the use of John Searle in terms of posing the questions and framing some of the objections was pretty neat too. It was actually Sheldrake and Dyson at the end where I thought it fell a bit flat. I am not as versed in the free will debates at the quantum level, so perhaps that is why I am disinterested. It also seemed a bit too much of a stretch. Searle does have a point- how is it that the indeterminancy of the quantum level is left at higher orders but not the randomness? The main thrust was so apokrisis and others can see what the pansychists and property dualists are getting at. Essentially, you cannot take the experience out of the equation, especially by just calling it an illusion. The illusion is still "there" and needs to be accounted for. There is a field/theater/appearance/reality that is playing out- whether socially constructed, informationally constructed, or both. This field/theater/appearance IS a phenomena. The phenomena cannot be immediately deflated to the causal constituents (information/physical systems what have you) without actually understanding what the phenomena is in and of itself. If you say the phenomena IS the physical system, then you have some explaining to do of how the illusion of experience IS the physical system without simply describing the physical processes over and over again, as if that is answering the question of how it is one and the same.
With these authors you have to go to the source. Modern authors totally mangle the ideas in their desire to walk the line between what is academically acceptable (they want to preserve their careers) and what the original authors were presenting. Sheldrake it's the exception. He had no problem calling a spade a spade. So much so that a Ted sponsored talk was banished by the Ted powers to be under pressure from the "scientists" who control the board. As unintended consequences will have it, thanks to the controversy, the video had received over 1 million views.
https://youtu.be/JKHUaNAxsTg
I think that this is the kind of statement you're referring to:
Quoting Rich
Actually that is a bit of an exaggeration. His big idea is 'morphic resonance' - that nature forms habits (an idea found also in Peirce.)
I know. I'm still waiting for your definition of "mental" or "experience" or "consciousness".
You seem to be circling in on "field/theatre/appearance/reality" now. So the usual representational and homuncular story of an inner picture or display. Except it is also a field - a substance.
That is why I say your position is too confused to make any serious reply. You are mixing a little bit of everything going.
The problems of representationalism are as well traversed as the problems of substance dualism.
Sure, the pictures in the head story makes at least one good point. There is a disconnect - an epistemic cut - where what we experience is not the thing-in-itself but our constructed impression. An appearance, a display, an illusion, a hidden theatre, a virtual world, etc, etc. But then that very idea just pushes the experiencer of the experience to yet another remove. In seeming to account for how mind and world can be separate - one is the map, the other the territory - it then creates the mystery of who is then experiencing the map, watching the theatre, appreciating the appearance.
So that is what a triadic semiotic approach - an enactive or modelling relations approach - tries to fix in a formal fashion. In simple terms, the map side of the equation has to become "self-experiencing". That is, the self is also what the mapping produces in dynamical or process fashion. A sense of self, a point of view, is what emerges as the other half of the same act of discrimination or sign mediation.
In a sensory deprivation tank, we lose our clear sense of self very quickly. We have to be acting in the world so as to be constructing the actual experience of being a self (as that which is not then "the world"). It is this emergent and dynamical nature of selfhood, of being an observer, that any "better theory" of consciousness has to be built on.
So consciousness is not a monistic stuff, nor a dyad of world and image, but a triadically irreducible relation - a modelling relation in which sign-making results in a lived co-ordination between a "self" and its "world". The actual world is then only experienced through the lens of this selfhood. All that is felt is the world's invariant or recalcitrant being - in opposition to the freedom and creativity of the interpreting "self". All we are psychologically interested in is the limits the world can impose on actions, so we can know what limits to push.
It is a simple thing. The most naive theories of consciousness see it as 1 stuff. More standard psychological theories see it as 2 realms - a picture and the world that is pictured. But modelling relation or semiotic approaches see it as an irreducible 3. And now we are talking about a causality of self-organising emergence.
Dual aspect monism simply collapses the triadic systems-style causal explanation that Aristotle was aiming for. Substantial being is the intersection of formal habit and material potential. So yes, there is a resulting unity of "stuff" that emerges. But "mind" and "world" - as formal habit and material potential -go into its making. They are not the dual aspects that emerge from it. They are the contrasting species of causality - constraints and degrees of freedom - that produce concrete being in systematic fashion.
Dual aspect monism just starts with substance as unexplained fundamental stuff and then claims it has two different faces - the material and the experiential. It is not a causal story of nature at all.
Aristotle was proto-semiotic in talking about how substantial being is causally emergent from higher level constraints on lower level potential. Two complementary aspects of causality result in a state of in-formed matter.
Quoting Galuchat
Peirce didn't have to coin the term because semiosis was itself already "pan" in his metaphysics. It is a distinction that Peirceans would want to make now because it is just obvious to theoretical biologists in particular that life and mind are semiotic processes. There is no problem at all on that score. Where it then becomes controversial is whether chemistry, physics and material existence itself is properly semiotic in its origin, as Peirce argued.
In the modern view, for a mindless cosmos to be modelled in terms of a self-organising semiotic process, it would have to implement this epistemic cut between information and matter. The scientific model of physical reality would have to be one based on the universality of semiosis as its causal machinery.
So that is why we would add pan- to -semiosis these days. It is to distinguish weak semiosis - the kind we have no problem at all with - from Peirce's far more radical metaphysical project.
Quoting Galuchat
You accept the weak form and reject the strong form. And yet quantum theory says the epistemic cut - the issue of observers and measurements - is fundamental in some causal fashion. Thermodynamics also has discovered it describes an epistemic cut. Information is now taken to be as fundamental as matter in describing nature.
Also note that you are using a computer information processing analogy to describe semiosis. You talk about "semantic" information (how homuncular!) being processed by "living beings" on a "psychological level". So on one level, you accept a mechanical model of causality - a calculation machine. On another, you simply claim in tautological fashion the existence of mind - a realm which somehow gives mechanical action its meaning, its life, its "feeling of being something that it is like to be".
This is dual aspect talk of course. You take two notions of substantial being - matter and mind - then mix up the terms of both throughout the same sentence and sit back satisfied, hoping no one notices that you simply dualised your terminology, buried your presuppositions in a flow of doubled-up words.
Again. It was semantic + information, living + being, psychological + level. Do you see the verbal trick you played even on yourself?
It is like all the varieties of panpsychism. The aim is not to explain nature's duality (as semiosis does via the epistemic cut, the modelling relation) but to bury it deep in language and hurry on, feeling that because it can be spoken, it is thus explained.
Sounds like an incontinent mental patient with vertigo. ;)
Interesting fact - in translations of the early Buddhist texts, the term 'self-and-world' is frequently encountered where one would expect to see the word 'self' or perhaps 'mind'. I interpret this to mean that in that cultural context, there was much less of a sense of the 'otherness' of the world from the self which I think is innate to more modern mindsets.
Quoting apokrisis
Maybe it's more an epistemic matter than an ontological one, i.e.more about the nature of knowledge than the nature of matter. Thorny question, I know.
Quoting apokrisis
However it is somewhat harder to see how that applies to physics and chemistry - that's where pansemiosis looses me.
It's thorny because quantum theory says it cannot be merely an epistemic issue. It has to be an ontic strength problem.
That is why folk feel it is legitimate to argue for almost anything that seems to sidestep the observer issue, like hidden variables determinism or many worlds realism.
The alternative is then a nice rational approach to observer-created reality, such as Peircean semiotics.
Quoting Wayfarer
Don't worry. It loses pretty much everyone. And as far as explaining life and mind, it only has to apply at that level.
But really, it is already mainstream physics. Quantum interpretations are increasingly comfortable with the idea that puzzles like complementarity and uncertainty boil down to the questions that reality could even ask of itself. In the end, a single act of measure can't go in two opposite directions at once. And so the classical constraint of uncertainty has an ultimate limit on its efforts to achieve counter-factual definiteness.
See for instance news just in - https://phys.org/news/2017-09-entanglement-inevitable-feature-reality.html
Anyway, quickly, living semiosis is semiosis internalised to an organism. A cell or body has internal coding machinery - receptors, membranes, genes, neurons - to act as the informational constraints that shape up physical processes or material flows.
Then pansemiosis - or semiosis at the physico-chemical level of "dumb matter" - is external semiosis. It is the wholeness of the context that forms the constraining state of memory which then gives shape to the particular dissipative actions and flows within it.
So with bodies, the information is trapped inside by a coding mechanism. With worlds, it is the fixed history of the past itself which is this running memory. The necessary information bears down from outside every individual material event.
This is a big difference of course. But also it does then allow us to track how life and mind arise in terms of organismic causality. The interpretative sign relation remains the same. It is just that there is this clever flip from the memory, the information, being always at a larger physical scale than the material events, to it instead being shrunk and made tiny enough to fit inside some dissipative flow itself.
A cell is its own wee universe with DNA sitting inside a whirling blizzard of metabolic activity, pulling all the strings.
Yes! But that is MY point!
Quoting apokrisis
You lost me. The only thing I got from this is that there is a triadic process that creates experience. Why is THIS triadic process so different than any other triadic process? At that point, wouldn't any old triadic process then create experiential qualities? Obviously not, because that would be dangerously close with panpsychism.
Quoting apokrisis
You have to explain what you mean by discrimination and sign mediation. Explain it, don't repeat the same language. Also, you use the term "emerges". That to me sounds like you just hid the Cartesian Theater in the "emerging" process. This "steam" of emerging ectoplasm (the illusion) comes out of the right amount of sign-signifier-referent- material-form process compilation.
Quoting apokrisis
You finally said something interesting (which doesn't get across with much of your self-referential language and snarky comments). Freedom/creativity is oddly a part of Whitehead's philosophy as well. You may have some common ground there. How is it that freedom against an invariant world looks like green, feels like this or that? AGAIN, wouldn't OTHER processes then be in the same boat? What is this extra "illusion" built into specifically this semiotic process? After all, it is a PAN-semiotic theory- indicating that essentially it is all the same bits of information being processed in the same manner. Yet this one gives rise to the very experience which is used to understand the other processes..hmm.
Pretty good compilation. I liked Sheldrake's comments on Whitehead, about 'the past' being fixed and 'the future' as the realm of the possible, and how that maps against the 'observer problem'.
I don't like the attempt to locate 'mind' as a property or attribute of fundamental particles. I don't think mind is ever known as an object; mind is always 'what is knowing' not 'what is known'.
Quoting apokrisis
Seems to imply that the universe is a living thing.
Quoting apokrisis
A microcosm, right? There's a lot of that kind of thinking in hermeticism.
Why do I have to explain everything to you when you won't explain anything to me? I keep asking you to say what you really mean by a term like mental. I even helpfully supply you with my view of the differences between the monistic and dyadic ontologies you appear to be mixing up.
Now you simply again reply in terms where you talk about representational analogies - a theatre - or an ontological substance - steam, ectoplasm ... which is then (cue representational analogy) the "illusion".
So sure, I could waste a lot more time explaining a triadic sign relation approach to you. But if you keep just telling me it sounds like disguised monism/dualism to you, then that confusion remains all yours. You haven't yet figured out the ontic difference between treating consciousness as a substance vs as a representation.
That is why I urge you to have a go and defining "the mental" cleanly. You will see more plainly how you are dancing between monism and dualism - using each to criticise the other - and never actually starting to understand a triadic view of ontology.
Quoting schopenhauer1
This quote above explains what is wrong with your theory. You are in fact, running dangerously close to panpsyhcism and you don't even know it. If you answer one way you are a protoexperientialist (a more sophisticated form of panpsychism), if you answer another way, you have illusion. See here: "How is it that freedom against an invariant world looks like green, feels like this or that? AGAIN, wouldn't OTHER processes then be in the same boat? What is this extra "illusion" built into specifically this semiotic process?"
Although I would mention Peirce insisted on the creative spontaneity of semiosis as a process before Whitehead and others. It is an essential part of anyone's holistic view. Although creativity doesn't then mean "conscious". It means that existence is founded on basic indeterminism - what Peirce called tychism in opposition to the synechism or continuity of constraints.
There is a subjective inner experience of what it is like to be something. No other process- triadic or otherwise causes this quality except this one. The "theater" is the inner experience. If you want to say all triadic processes have the same quality but to a lesser extent, then you are a panexperientialist. In other words, every triadic process is its own theater I would guess. But no, you are going to equivocate the triadic process for other things which you will use the same language but different results. Again peculiar.
What good causal objection is there to there being something that it would be like to be in a modelling relation with the world? It would have to feel like something surely? Or can you give some good reason why this modelling, this sign processing, can't be experiential?
Sure, no computer processing doing information processing would have this lived experience quality. We can point to a computer's physical disconnect from real life. All it needs is its umbilical cord that plugs it into a wall socket. In sits blindly in its little world.
But a neural network type computer starts to seem something different. It in fact has a semiotic architecture. It works by learning to anticipate the world. And surely there must be something that it is like to be anticipating the world the whole time? Even if a neural network so far is not even at the level of a cockroach so far as its complexity goes.
Anyway, you get the idea. If there is anticipation-based world modelling going on which is based on maintaining a fundamental distinction between "self" and "world", then why shouldn't that action, that process, be felt in exactly those terms? At exactly what point in the analysis does being experiential seem to drop out of the equation?
Incorrect. Dual aspect monism: form+matter=substance (i.e., genetic predisposition plus living matter produces a living being having a set of powers).
I reject pansemiosis as category error. Its acceptance requires the use of metaphorical explanations, which have no scientific or philosophical value.
Yes. That is the debate within the semiotics community apokrisis and I have been referring to. http://biosemiosis.blogspot.co.uk/2008/07/re-pan-and-bio.html
It's a fair question. I have obviously not used the term "dual aspect" as it is traditionally used in philosophy of mind, but have applied it to Aristotle's formula for substance. So sue me.
I think Aristotle had an intuitive sense of genetic predisposition, and that his psuche ("the form of a natural body that has life") is the constraint which causes the development and exercise of a set of species-specific powers (including not only psychological functions such as perception, but also locomotion, homoeostasis, fine motor skills, etc., in short: everything that a being does).
Weird.
Ah, the neuro brings with it the Cartesian Theaters.
Quoting apokrisis
Ah TRILLIONS of connections is where that elusive Cartesian Theater lies now. So it's neuro-transimtters and trillions of connections in triadic format that IS experience. I see. So the quantity of physical connections and the fact that it is neurons with axions, cell bodies, dendrites, carrying molecules of neurotransmitters, and the whole neurobiological package- these are the reasons why THIS triadic process is equivalent to the Cartesian Theater of experience? So, simply making sure the material is neuron-type in composition and the quantity is sufficiently in the trillions, that this triadic modelling is experiential and other triadic modelling is not experiential? Odd. Why cannot it be a matter of degree. Perhaps millions of connections, and other composites produce a lower degree of experience? Why cannot it be a matter of difference? Perhaps experience exists in other models but it is so different and unknown, that we cannot say much other than it exists as experiential in some way in terms of being a part of the modelling process, just like THIS modelling process. Somehow you always have a ghost in the machine lurking around and popping up when it is most convenient. The Cartesian Theater is hidden somewhere- you just have to tease it out to realize you are hiding it. So far you have hidden it in quantity, material-type, the concept of "emergence" and various others.
This is an engaging introduction to semiotics, written by an acknowledged leader in the field (cheers, darthbarracuda): Sebeok, Thomas A. (2001). Signs: An Introduction To Semiotics. Canada: University of Toronto Press.
https://monoskop.org/images/0/07/Sebeok_Thomas_Signs_An_Introduction_to_Semiocs_2nd_ed_2001.pdf
Yes, materialists always hide their Designer in Very Big, Very Complex, and Very Long Time. But despite the bluster, there remains zero evidence that conscious can arise magically from matter. It would indeed be a miracle. It is as one scientist confessed at the beginning of the video you linked to: He is a scientist, he wants to believe, he has to believe, for the sake of science it has to be. Out of the mouth of babes,it is all faith. Nice video. I bookmarked it for this confession alone. Must have been a weak moment.
So to claim that brains aren't responsible for consciousness is now a crackpot view. Pass the tin hats.
It's true that if brain anatomy has been injured, or brain physiology is not functioning normally, psychological function will also be abnormal. That is a causal relationship. However, the fact of neuroplasticity provides sufficient reason to reject epiphenomenalism. In other words, physical and mental conditions and activities have mutual effects.
This is evidence of correlation, not necessarily of causation. In other words, is it neurophysiological activity which causes recognition, or recognition which causes neurophysiological activity?
So, Donald Hoffman says, "Despite substantial efforts by many researchers, we still have no scientific theory of how brain activity can create, or be, conscious experience. This is troubling, since we have a large body of correlations between brain activity and consciousness, correlations normally assumed to entail that brain activity creates conscious experience. Here I explore a solution to the mind-body problem that starts with the converse assumption: these correlations arise because consciousness creates brain activity, and indeed creates all objects and properties of the physical world."
It's just the last clause of his last sentence that I'm currently struggling with.
Thanks, started on that, it looks very engaging. I also read the first half-dozen posts in the blog you linked to.
Quoting schopenhauer1
I think this 'Cartesian theater' is one of Dennett's ideas, isn't it? I agree with him that it is a very poor depiction or analogy for the nature of mind, but I also don't know how many people really hold to it. I certainly don't think it's anything like what Descartes himself would have thought.
**
I would like to take a step back and compare what I understand as Hoffman's basic contention with other philosophical models. He is, after all, saying that in some profound way, existence is not what it appears to be; that things we take to be real, are actually what he calls 'icons', which we as a species use to navigate the 'lebenwelt' (in Husserl's terms) of human existence.
If I am correct in that description, then it can be said that in some respect, Hoffman is harking back to the traditional philosophical distinction of 'appearance and reality', albeit in a very contemporary way. This is after all what allows him to make such apparently radical assertions as this:
Now on face value, this is an outlandish statement - this is why, I think, Apokrisis said that Hoffman is a crank. But I think it can be interpreted in accordance with the above distinction between appearance and reality in such a way that it isn't quite so outlandish as it seems on face value.
What I think he's saying, is that 'classical objects' are not real in the sense we take them to be real. To borrow some Buddhist analysis: objects are not 'self-existent', or 'real from their own side'. The Buddhist Madhyamika view, is that the reality that objects have, is imputed by us, and is contextual; that things don't have inherent reality, they are not real in their own right, but are real in a given context; their reality is imputed and dependent on causes and conditions. (This is the basic idea behind the Buddhist teaching of ??nyat?.)
So a Buddhist would agree that objects are unreal, but not unreal in the sense of merely or simply non-existent (like optical illusions or fictitious creatures). Things are real in their own context and dependent on the causes and conditions which give rise to them, but they have no ultimate reality (svabhava). So they have a degree of reality. Now, I don't think that current philosophical lexicon allows that anything can have a 'degree of reality'; things are either existent, or not *. Whereas, I think some schools of philosophy can differentiate between 'what exists' and 'what is real' (which, I recall, is a distinction that Peirce recognises, but few other recent philosophers do.) Hence Hoffman is obliged to say, in the above quote, that classical objects 'don't exist', whereas a Madhyamika analysis might say: they exist, but they're unreal.
---------------
* This, in turn, goes back to Duns Scotus and his doctrine of the 'univocity of being', which marked the end of the so-called 'great chain of being', which underwrote the notion of 'degrees of reality'.
Yes I agree. That is why the story has to be foundationally triadic. There must be the two things of a separation of causality, and then the third thing which is their interaction.
And neuroscience has no problem with this. It already says that neural firing may be a physical process, but what is "really going on" is an informational process. Or taking the even more sophisticated view, the whole is a semiotic process, a sign relation. Or to borrow from psychology, we are talking about an enactive or ecological process. Mind is not epiphenomenal but just what it feels like to be a model in interaction with a world, really doing something.
Quoting Galuchat
The simple answer is that at the informational level of analysis, the causation is holistic - a systems mix of top-down constraint and bottom-up construction. So asking which causes which is just a bad reductionist question. It takes both in interaction for some particular state of experience (or modelling) to emerge.
And then in this representationalist account of perception formation, the physiology falls out of the picture. The information process paradigm makes that clean divorce between the software and the hardware. So physiology simply supports the computations and - by design - plays no causal role in shaping them. It is the logic of the program which dictates the play of the patterns.
But as I say, the semiotic view of neuroscience takes the next step - the same as biology did to get rid of the mysteries surrounding the mechanisms of living processes. We can get rid of the lingering ghost in the machine, the elan vital, in the same fashion.
So this is where the epistemic cut of biosemiosis comes in. The whole point of the informational processes is to be in active regulation of physical processes. A computer may have a hard divorce between information and matter - hence computer analogies adding fuel to the Hard Problem bonfire - but organisms are all about the pragmatic interaction between information and matter.
This is the paradigm shift with enactive/ecological/embodied approaches to perception. The mind is all about regulating material processes, entropic flows. Consciousness is what it is like to be not just some pattern of information, but to be information doing stuff. It is all about the feeling of being intimately connected as a "self" with a point of view, some interest, that serves to control a world of physical events as much as is possible.
Nothing can make sense about the mind/brain connection until you actually stop thinking that this is the fundamental issue. You have to get past the monism of good old fashioned theism - a belief in inhabiting spirits. Then you have to get past the dualism of good old fashion computationalism - all the representationalist psychology where there is a mysterious self passively watching an inner theatre neural display. You have to arrive finally at a triadic sign relation ontology which speaks to the conjunction of model and world.
And that is precisely what Peircean metaphysics embraces. It is based on there really being degrees of concrete or crisp existence. At a deeper level, things are vague or begin in Firstness. Anaximander started metaphysics rolling with the same idea - the Apeiron.
So the lexicon certainly exists. But as we know, it is not a mainstream approved mode of thought. Reductionism rules. And so vagueness or degrees of reality are standardly treated as being just a matter of observer ignorance or uncertainty, not a genuine ontic issue.
Russell made the famous case for this. Imagine a badly blurred photograph of Mr Jones. Well, the image is vague it seems. It could be Mr Smith or Mr Patel if we squinted. Yet still, points out Russell, the image itself is some definite set of marks. So the vagueness is epistemic - about what we can know - rather than the photograph itself being physically indeterminate.
So you are always up against this attitude. And even when quantum indeterminism showed up, the mindset remains to demonstrate that any vagueness or degrees of reality are only an epistemic issue, not something to do with reality itself.
But anyone dealing with emergence in nature has less of a problem. It starts to become obvious that emergence means starting out actually vague and then approaching counterfactual definiteness or concreteness "in the limit".
Did you even read what I wrote? I was suggesting just that.. It is YOU who are not accepting your own logic to its ultimate conclusion, which is that ANY modelling can be experiential. See what I said above:
Quoting schopenhauer1
Yes I think he did, but what's funny is Dennett himself does exactly what he accuses others of. The Cartesian Theater, the way I'm using it is the experiential inner world of the thinking/feeling/sensing self that is unexplained for its existence and is often smuggled into the equation (hence the "hidden Cartesian theater).
I was more specific. It is not modelling per se - as that is the representational story of computational information processing and Cartesean theatres that I have criticised. It is the modelling or sign relation of neuro-semiosis - a more advanced notion which you show no evidence of understanding as yet.
Actually pretty close to what is happening. What can be said it's that there exists a field that behaves in a certain manner depending upon different conditions. In itself, it is nothing.
When viewed as a reception/transmission vehicle for the mind, then it's value take shape. In it as itself, it is nothing and despite materialist fantasies it doesn't magical take on human characteristics. It needs the mind just as a TV needs the TV studio transmission. By itself, the TV is a dead box which if course can be made even deader it the wrong person starts tinkering with it without understanding what is going on. There are no humans hidden in the TV set.
The quick answer is that I am talking of a neuro-semiotic process of modelling the world in a self interested way.
â apokrisis
Ah, the neuro brings with it the Cartesian Theaters.
And so just in saying that, we can see that there is active modelling going on. And why would we not expect modelling - of the vast complexity of a brain with trillions of connections, and plugged into real-time action - should not "feel like something"?
â apokrisis
Ah TRILLIONS of connections is where that elusive Cartesian Theater lies now. So it's neuro-transimtters and trillions of connections in triadic format that IS experience. I see. So the quantity of physical connections and the fact that it is neurons with axions, cell bodies, dendrites, carrying molecules of neurotransmitters, and the whole neurobiological package- these are the reasons why THIS triadic process is equivalent to the Cartesian Theater of experience? So, simply making sure the material is neuron-type in composition and the quantity is sufficiently in the trillions, that this triadic modelling is experiential and other triadic modelling is not experiential? Odd. Why cannot it be a matter of degree. Perhaps millions of connections, and other composites produce a lower degree of experience? Why cannot it be a matter of difference? Perhaps experience exists in other models but it is so different and unknown, that we cannot say much other than it exists as experiential in some way in terms of being a part of the modelling process, just like THIS modelling process. Somehow you always have a ghost in the machine lurking around and popping up when it is most convenient. The Cartesian Theater is hidden somewhere- you just have to tease it out to realize you are hiding it. So far you have hidden it in quantity, material-type, the concept of "emergence" and various others.
You keep repeating what the modelling relation approach explicitly rejects. If you want someone to defend representationalism to you as an ontology, you need to go elsewhere.
You aren't getting the point.. willfully perhaps.
You are just bad at making your points. You can't explain what your own words like "mentality" might mean in terms of their ontic commitments. And you are unwilling to even have a go at answering the same kind of questions you demand of others.
You ask why should an active modelling relation feel like something? I reply why shouldn't it? If you haven't got the flexibility of thought to even try to see an issue from its reverse perspective, then the problem is only yours. You disqualify yourself from proper discussion already.
Another clarification that might help here is that I have been trying to address the philosophy of mind issue of "strategies of explanation". So that is a meta-level discussion. Then there is also the scientific project that would cash out some actual strategy. But to follow that, you would need to have an understanding of the relevant literature.
So sticking to strategies of explanation, I've showed how it breaks down into three levels of increasingly sophisticated inquiry. Stage 1 is thinking consciousness is a monistic spirit stuff - substance ontology. Stage 2 is dualistic representationalism - information processing ontology. Stage 3 is triadic semiotics - sign relation ontology.
Then a separate issue is this constant demand of "explain it so I can understand why it feels like what it feels like". We can have a meta-discussion about whether science should even do this. Science is the business of explaining through sufficiently abstract generalities. Like laws or mathematical forms. If we say a ball rolls due to Newtonian Mechanics, we don't expect to get what it feels like to "be in motion".
The explanatory strategy of science is based on ... modelling. It objectivises and constructs a third person view.
Well, reductionist science certainly does that. A holistic or systems science approach - one that attempts to include subjectivity, meaning, interpretation, purpose, observers, etc, in its larger triadic model - does then have a chance of starting to say something about why it feels like what it feels like.
Even Hard Problem promoters like Chalmers agree that we know a lot about why it feels like what it feels like from neuroscientific explanations. Why is drunkenness what it is? Why do visual illusions have their particular quality? Why are the objects we see made artificial sharp by Mach bands around them, or organised by Gestalt effects?
It is just that Chalmers then calls these easy problems. The game is to raise the bar until it reaches the eternal self-referential metaphysical question of "why anything?". Why should anything be anything, let alone green be green, or the Universe a something rather than a nothing?
Fine. That is another meta-level discussion we can have. It seems obvious that science - and reason itself - can't deal with any question rationally unless it can define its counterfactuals. So the issue is as bad for philosophy as it is for science.
As you can see, there are a variety of meta-issues that lie at the back of any discussion about the best strategies of explanation. You can't just plunge into things in confused fashion. Otherwise only confusion results.
But that is my point.. Why shouldn't a modelling relation feel like something? Then you throw in the word "neuro" and "trillions" and that is supposed to answer why this triadic modelling is different from all other triadic-modelling and hence gets to be the "what it feels like", while others do not. It seems like you are not getting the implications of your own theory. There is no X time when "experience" happens.. The modelling IS the experience, thus either ALL modelling is experiential or none of it is.. Well which is it? If you say only THIS modelling is experiential, your hidden theater comes into play- an irrevocable split between mind/body (your hated duality) then comes into play (whether you like it or not). Is it hidden in neurons, the quantity of neurons? "What" is this illusion?
Quoting apokrisis
Who said I used Newtonian notions to explain this? Straw man.
Quoting apokrisis
Yes, and I too agree that the easy problems are answerable with science. I never said differently either, and have emphasized that throughout this and other threads on the topic. So, yes, why is it that there is a "feels like" aspect to some modelling and not others is a great question, and Chalmers is willing to say that it is fundamental to the universe- possibly the modelling itself is somehow experiential.
So you agree with me that it prima facie should? You might have to quote me the bit where you say it was also your point.
Quoting schopenhauer1
That is a leap that you make, not me.
Is there some other triadic modelling that is different here? It would help if you could reference what you have in mind.
As to neuro and trillions, the point there is obviously to remind that there is a definite ground zero so far as the coding aspect of semiosis goes. This is about neurons in particular as the informational medium, not genes or words. Neurons do have particular qualities that justify talk of "neuro-semiosis".
And then trillions of interconnections is relevant because this is an emergent ontology. You need large numbers to get the kind of useful complexity I am talking about. A few neurons might make up a rather deterministic or robotic circuit. But a lot of them will start to show collective behaviours. This is a familiar concept now from the study of dynamical systems.
So you seem to be latching onto trigger words without understanding the context in which I would use them.
I never just throw things in. ;)
Quoting schopenhauer1
Again, you just don't appear to understand the difference between a triadic modelling relation and a dualistic computer model. One is properly connected to the world - it has to learn by doing. The other ain't. It has to be programmed and then at best runs a virtual simulation.
I fear if you can't keep these different concepts separate in your head by now, you never will.
Quoting schopenhauer1
I can happily accept that you personally don't think scientifically about these things. But what I said is science does.
Quoting schopenhauer1
It would be a big advance to be able to say a particular notion of modelling - neuro-semiosis - does a good enough job at explaining the issue of "feels". Far better than Chalmers own half-hearted suggestion of dual aspect monism where mind is a property of information (rather than matter).
It would be victory for the triadic view. Wave goodbye to substance monism and information processing dualism.
But neuro-semiosis itself couldn't be "fundamental to the Universe". It is instead only something rather specialised - part of the emergent level of complexity we call biological life.
The pan-semiotic story is the one that talks about the Universe in a fundamental metaphysical fashion. And I have no problem with anyone labelling that a highly speculative inquiry. It is still more philosophy than science.
And either way, the pan-semiotic thesis itself stresses the huge divide between the physico-chemical level of semiosis and the biological one.
As I explained to Wayfarer, for physics, all the "mindful" informational constraints are external to the play of the material dynamics. A tornado arises because of a larger context of thermal gradients making up that day's weather.
But life and mind are the trick of being able to code for that kind of contextual information - form a memory using a symbolising mechanism like genes, neurons or words - and so take ownership of top-down causality as something packaged up and hidden deep inside.
So pan-semiosis is far from the silly mysticism of pan-experientialism or pan-psychism. It includes in formal fashion an account of exactly what changes in the transition from material systems to living systems.
We all know there is a difference. Pan-semiosis is about putting a finger on what that actually is in the most general metaphysical sense.
Something to do with meaning, one suspects.
Quoting apokrisis
Still struggling with the meaningfulness of tornadoes, or any sense in which they embody the meaning that seems intrinsic to organisms.
Precisely. So it gets at final cause - that which is the meaning of being, the reasons why things even are.
And it is non-mystical in that hierarchical grades of meaning can be defined. There is a natural gamut of complexity from physical tendency to biological function to psychological purpose.
Quoting Wayfarer
A tornado is meaningful in the context of a weather system striving to equilibrate its thermal differences. So it is meaningful in terms of meeting the goals of the Second Law of Thermodynamics.
Again, there is nothing essentially mystical about this. It is just about bringing all of nature under the same general umbrella of Natural Philosophy.
Reductionism appeared to drum finality and meaning out of our scientific account of nature. Holism and systems science have been trying to bring it back in. Pan-semiosis would be a particular formalism for achieving that. Hence why a lot of scientists have gotten keen on Peircean semiotics.
I get that, but what I don't get is the gap between 'bio-' and 'pan-', still. I can see that, given DNA, then something language-like exists. But how the 'spontaneous process of nature' - such as tornadoes, or undersea vents, or whatever - gives rise to that is still, I think, a mystery. I'm not pitching for any kind of ID, but I strongly suspect some manner of 'top-down causation', whatever that turns out to be. You see, this is where I think Peirce's rather Platonic theism is a factor; I think he would have assumed something very much like the Neoplatonist 'mind', and I don't know if that has been preserved in the translation to modern biosemiotics.
The answer is that physics takes an information theoretic view of causality these days. That is what folk are really talking about with things like the holographic principle, event horizons or light cones.
So the coding, the memory, the bits, are written into the spatiotemporal structure of the Universe itself. Of course each bit is some material degree of freedom - a particle in some state. But collectively, all those "bits of stuff" count as information, a generalised context that impinges on whatever is happening at some spacetime locale, shaping it as a physical state of constraint.
Think of the standard example of a magnetised iron bar and the way the information that is the global magnetic field keeps all the local dipoles aligned. It is about granting collective activity full status as being ontically real - a real top-down cause that cements a generalised tendency.
'Written', eh?
Thales thought magnets were ensouled.
This is the trouble with this kind of talk. It is without sense but the lack of sense takes a bit of fine surgery to unpick. That's why we need Wittgenstein - a real one, with objective, observer-independent features 'n' all.
I have yet to see any discussion of consciousness take into account attention and how it is a key constituent of consciousness. The feeling of looking at things in your mind is simply the distinction being made between different degrees of amplified sensory signals. Our attention is what "looks at" the other constituents of consciousness by amplifying certain sensory signals over others as it pertains to the present goal. Certain areas of consciousness are clear while others are more fuzzy and faded, with the clear areas being what we are currently attending (looking at), as opposed to the fuzzy faded stuff, which is what we aren't looking at. The feeling of "what is like" is simply the attention turning back on itself.
My underline. P 13 of this article.
You are conflating the "what it feels like" with the substrata. You said earlier:
Quoting apokrisis
There is a "something of what it's like" to experience green. That is the crux of the argument. It is the nature of the "something of what it's like" to experience green. If you do not like the fact that philosophy deals with metaphysics, that's your problem there. It is a legitimate philosophical question to ask what the nature of this "illusion" of experience is. It may not be a legitimate scientific question, you are right, but I never claimed it is or that it should be.
As things stand, each person perceives and understands Donald Hoffman differently, which is different from how he perceives himself. That is why people disagree. There is no objective observer, not even Hoffman himself.
Quoting Cuthbert
Probably so, but everyone perceives it differently.
So, mind is a feeling? Is this a general definition of mind, or just a definition of human mind?
I agree that it's problematical. But then, try defining 'mind'! As he points out, the 'mind-body' problem has been going around in circles for centuries.
Quoting Galuchat
The brain is an 'imputed object' - what we really know of the brain is our 'experience of the brain', the same as any 'classical object'. As @Cuthbert notes on the previous page, this undercuts our instinctive and closely-held belief in the 'mind-independence' of objects; we firmly believe that objects - brains, atoms, or any other kind - are 'there anyway', and that our experience of them simply reports what is there. That is essentially derived from some form of representative realism, which is deeply engrained in Western thought. Hence the derision when it is challenged.
Hoffman is arguing that, whilst there is a reality that is 'there anyway', that reality is never what we actually encounter; or rather, our encounter with it is always given in terms of species-specific representations, which are primarily shaped by evolution. (Although, as I mentioned, I am dubious whether this can be said of pure maths, but that's a separate question.)
So when he says 'consciousness creates', what I take that to mean, is that he is referring to the way consciousness integrates all of the momentary impressions, sensations and judgements into a cognitive whole, one aspect of which we then designate as 'an object'. We're unaware of this cognitive process as it's going on, because it's by definition unconscious, beneath the threshold of conscious awareness, but giving rise to our experience of the world. I think it's basically Kantian in that sense, and also quite compatible with Buddhist philosophy of mind.
Yeah. Hoffman says to solve the problem of consciousness, we must get rid of the world. So onwards to idealism. And then the handwaving about conscious agents that he says saves him from solipsism.
However, there are very broad areas across which we do indeed find common experiences, which is essential to science. Imagine if every experiment yielded different results for Bob than for Alice. Indeed science, language, maths, and so on, are constructed on shared definitions and common elements of experience.
Where you see the real fragmentation is in respect of questions which are not amenable to quantitative analysis - questions of taste, value, and social mores.
Quoting apokrisis
No, only a mistaken conception of it.
No. Read what he says again. Because "regular physics" can't seem to account for brains with minds, we should disbelieve that it does account for worlds with material structure, like brains. We should now start over by positing "generalised consciousness" as an explanation even of material structure. And then, hey guys, this is how it all works ... mumble, mumble, mumble - networks of conscious agents!!!
Classic crackpot reasoning.
John Bell (of Bell's Theorem) coined a phrase for this: Good enough for all practical purposes (FAPP). That is, if we limit the observation for what it's essential, it is good enough. I ask for a one foot piece of longer. It's it good enough. Yes. Is it exactly one foot? Well then we get into all kinds of issues.
Similarly, with Hoffman. If we limit ourselves, we can reach some consensus. What color is his hair? What did he say? What did he mean?? It can vary.
As for science. Well tolerance of variances and what makes consensus is truly all over the place and is greatly affected by biases and of course money. I read the actual studies and it is amazing how wildly different results can be, if for no other reason than it is almost impossible to replicate - and in any case it is almost never done. But this is a matter for philosophical explorers to discover for themselves.
In some cases, great precision is sought, as in the case of particle location in the early 20th century. And what they found was that it was impossible to find, hence we must settle for good enough FAPP. If there is a real object out there (and I believe there is) each person will necessarily see it differently because we all occupy a different point of perception. Or we can say the experiment is constantly changing.
Hoffman is saying, however, that we should consider consciousness as fundamental and irreducible, which apparently is becoming a more popular conception of the nature of the universe.
All due respect, there is a change in perspective required. You're arguing from a position of dogmatic realism. The indignation you're expressing is because that is being challenged.
Quoting Rich
That would also seem to be convergent with the idea of science as falsifiable hypotheses. But I am not dismissive of science, as you seem to be. Whatever veridical truths science arrives at must be respected by philosophy, otherwise that philosophy cannot endure.
The problem with Western culture is that it tries to define everything, or everything deemed worthwhile, in scientific terms - if you can't measure it, it isn't real. But one can acknowledge that as a profound error, whilst still respecting science.
Science is one data point but like any data point, the source has to be considered. To my mind it had been so polluted my money it is no longer trustworthy. That is not too say that v there may not be some laboratory experimentalist somewhere slaving away trying to find something new (as I do in my own way) but I have learned that anyone who has an idea that may disrupt the huge money interests will be quickly be labeled a "crackpot" and disenfranchised (luckily it may be able to actually still hear these new ideas in YouTube). It would be unwise in the world we love in today to trust anything coming out of an industry that had become totally beholden to big money. It would be like someone trusting someone in the banking industry. Neither holds the merit it once enjoyed maybe 70 years ago.
Science is no longer a process of discovery, instead it has become goal seeking.
Quoting Wayfarer
It is because the science industry nowadays controls the educational process, and this is what is drummed into everyone from elementary school. It is not an accident. There is a mega industry that is being protected and watchdogs everywhere to protect it.
Of course I say a change in perspective is needed. And it is not so simple as replacing one species of substance monism - material realism - with another, conscious realism. Dogmatic idealism is indeed much worse than dogmatic realism as at least (reductionist) realism gives us useful theories of the world. Idealism just waves its lofty hand at everything and merely aims to "explain it away".
A crackpot thinker is anyone who fools themselves into believing a non-explanation is better than a real explanation. Just call existence a hologram, or a simulation, or a mental field, or whatever. Create a word that might sound as if its stands for a real idea, then look satisfied.
That is what Hoffman does with "conscious agents". It is meaningless hand-waving once you stop to ask what that could actually mean.
Yep. It's a conspiracy. Pass the tin-foil hat.
How deep do your own convictions run in practice? What do you think the respective mortality rates are?
The U.S spends twice per capita on medicine than other developed nations with the absolutely the worse life expectancy. And it should be noted the same in European countries alternative modalities such as homeopathy and acupuncture are covered by insurance. Science changes as it crosses the ocean. An interesting phenomenon to observe.
Would you submit your fate to these representatives of a corrupt materialistic metaphysics or seek treatment from someone expert in adjusting faulty holographic consciousness fields?
As for the mind healing itself, that is precisely the only thing that actually heals. It takes lifestyle changes, good food, good water, proper movement, low stress. The World Health Organisation agrees. But, with that said, if you wish to fill your diet with drugs, it is of no mind to me. I take care of my family. No illnesses, no physicians.
A good philosopher is observant, has developed good intuition, and questions everything. No stone left unturned. This is evolution.
Anyway, in today's news:
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2017/09/insys-fentanyl-mccaskill-investigation/
I really don't think he's a crackpot, but I too am struggling with this concept of 'conscious agents'. I can see how consciousness creates or constructs experience, but I'm really not getting how objects themselves are 'complex dynamical system of conscious agents'. But having opened this particular can of worms, will persist for a while.
Anyway, it is good at least that you might live consistent with your theories. That way they will certainly be put to the test of real life.
Quoting Rich
Yeah, but those are physical things that we all agree are the way to help prevent disease getting started.
Biology - being semiotic - is self-regulating. It has an immune system that knows what is "self", what is "other", at a molecular level. So it can self-repair if it isn't overloaded by attacks on its system. And I have no quarrel with the idea that the modern consumer lifestyle - lived at a pace to suit an economic system predicated on free growth - isn't very healthy. Even if people in developed nations in fact live longer because they can also afford clever medical interventions to keep failing bodies on the road.
Perhaps not. But science does have social standards around these kinds of things. So in that context, that is how I would judge him.
And I would admit that within computer science, Hoffman would get more of a shrug. Computer scientists are used to making sci-fi like claims about what they can deliver with technology. The field has its own norms on this score.
Quoting Wayfarer
Well please tell me. I thought most people would say consciousness IS the experience. Or maybe the experience of the experience. But how could it be the cause of the experience? What does that mean?
We didn't have a bottle for 30 years. Recently, I took about 6 over a two day period. Probably didn't need two, but I figure aspirin had been around for 150 years. I would rather have the natural form though, not synthetic. My wife had no need. Other than this, the closet pharmaceuticals is in Walgreens. BTW, I stopped drinking coffee which I started drinking after 35 years. That was the problem. No doctor needed.
Having studied health for 35 years, I've concluded the the mind permeates the body and if conditions are present, the mind will heal itself one cell at a time, which kind of gets us back on topic. The trick is one had to be very astute in understanding causes am having patience. The good physicians of old, the ones I grew up with and barely ever saw, understood this. The result is a very healthy mind/body that heals on its open. I treat all drugs as toxic.
It's really not that difficult. We are conscious, we are active, therefore we are conscious agents. The conscious agent decides, chooses; one's own actions. Where do you find the mysterious handwaving?
Yeah but Hoffman appears to be saying that what we perceive to be the objects of experience - the metaphorical table of philosophical debates - are really a 'complex dynamical system of conscious agents'. That's what I'm not getting.
The philosophy I'm developing intersects with Hoffman's in some respects, but that particular claim is a bit of a show-stopper, I'm afraid. However I have an open mind, I am going to read some more.
Where does one start? :)
Perhaps here. With your version, what happens when your conscious choice about the facts of reality conflict with my choice as a fellow agent?
(Sorry for butting in, please carry on.)
Objects are themselves conceptual, so they are a product of, created by the complex dynamical system of conscious agents.
Quoting apokrisis
Then we have no agreement. I conceive of the object in my way, you in your way. The object is as it is to me, and it is as it is to you (model-dependent realism). Some process philosophers will deny that there even are any objects.
When we agree, concerning what is and is not, we can create objects. When we do not agree, all we have is processes which have varying descriptions depending on one's perspective.
But this seems to entangle two causal metaphysics in illegitimate fashion. If it is about the material facts of evolution and genetics where a mental model is being selected for its fit to a world, then that world is a reality standing beyond some species of agents.
As I say, I am OK with the first MUI bit of Hoffman. He says that is compatible with a realist interpretation. But then it is the attempt to jump to an idealist ontology - conscious realism - that it all falls apart.
So if we, as Homo sapiens, are forming a collective "MUI reality" by being conscious agents, rather than by being forced to adapt physically to a physical reality, then how does that work exactly? How does it fit in with lions and every other creature forming a different reality, not just a different interpretation of the one reality?
I'm sure another handwaving answer could be created. But that is how it goes with crackpot theorising. The need for further outs keeps multiplying as soon as you try to take the "theory" seriously.
By contrast, a good theory of reality does the opposite. More and more gets explained as you take it seriously and try to poke holes in it.
So now the focus switches to agreement. Private wishes are not good enough. It has to happen that we desire the existence of the same object for it to be the case.
So right now I'm wishing you have no keyboard. I'm imagining that pretty hard. Did it happen?
It is not a matter of wishing, it is a matter of believing, that is what conceptualization consists of, deciding what is. If you believe that I have no keyboard, then obviously, for you I have no keyboard. Perhaps you believe I am posting through some other means, voice recognition?
As a theory, realism removes that kind of problem. The world is what it is, and then I am free to act and make choices or form beliefs within those constraints. There is nothing further to have to explain about you being in the same position.
But once you start down the crackpot road, the inconsistencies just keep multiplying at each step. You are now arguing for beliefs we can't not believe, choices we can't in fact make, etc.
But he seems to be saying objects consist of conscious agents - that objects are constituted by conscious agents, not that objects are constituted by the perception of them by conscious agents. You see the distinction? It seems very like panpsychism, but then he denies that, also. Complicated.
Quoting apokrisis
But he covers this in the paper attached to his Wikipedia profile here. He talks about the 'hypothesis of faithful depiction' which he says is behind realist cognitive models. He gives an example from a standard textbook:
I think the realist view is that the domain of perception - the world we see - is the real world, and that the only questions that can be asked are about how we see it (cognition and epistemology) or about what it consists of (ontology). But there is an assumption behind that stance, which is the sensory perception is basically veridical, that it is of things that exist independently of it. That is what Hoffman is questioning. Now, for you, as a naturalist, that completely undermines the basic premise of your outlook - that sensory perception is indeed veridical - so I understand it is deeply counter-intuitive. But one issue with realist theories is this: how do you get outside the perspective disclosed by your viewpoint, to compare it with the purportedly observer-independent reality? If you could compare it, then you wouldn't need a perspective, but if you can't compare it, then all you have is a perspective. That is one of the many criticisms of the so-called 'correspondence theory' which is inherent in realist metaphysics.
Also Hoffman also denies being idealist:
So he doesn't deny that there's an objective or mind-independent world; he simply denies that this describes the nature of experience (and therefore knowledge derived from experience.) He says that his theory accounts for the nature of knowledge and experience in such a way that it is consistent both between different subjects, and within itself; so more a 'coherentist' than a 'correspondence' theory.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
But, sometimes you can be wrong. George and Alice can have a theory about, I don't know, 'how to mix rocket fuel'. George's attempts, however, never actually work, either he blows himself up or it fizzes out. Alice, meanwhile, has now been abducted by Kim Jong Un and forced to work on his rocket program - because her method works. That's not simply 'disagreement', it is supported by facts, by outcomes.
And he also says the conscious agents are constructing MUI icons. So no "objects", just their signs ... that somehow then have a background of process that actually, really, executes the necessary functionality.
Nothing adds up. That's my point. He says this is not idealism, or panpsychism or anything else. But then it also sounds just like that.
Hence my conclusion. He is another of many crackpots. Even university departments are full of them.
Quoting Wayfarer
Yes, that is a valid criticism. And the first thing they try to disabuse you of when you start studying perception and psychophysics. It is routine science itself.
Quoting Wayfarer
Only if you never take a blind bit of notice of anything I have ever said. But carry on....
OK. I had interpreted your frequent appeal to 'immanence' to imply that you believe the fundamental organising principle, whatever that might turn out to be, is something that in principle can be understood within nature itself. Whereas those of a generally idealist turn take that fundamental principle to be transcendent, so not knowable directly, but which, however, is the source of the intelligibility we see in nature.
Quoting apokrisis
Not sure I agree, but I do see your point.
And that is why materialism becomes inadequate. You need pansemiosis to deliver the "other" of general laws and constraints. You need information as a real causal thing to complement matter as the other real causal thing.
Why always retreat to pansemiosis as if it were some type of panacea when it is apparently only capable of defining conscious experience as a feeling, and the human mind as a feeling with memory? These are obviously incoherent conceptions.
So it's more or less Berkeley's subjective idealism without the God part. He doesn't think he needs the God bit.
Your scientific knowledge base is (at least) extensive, and your scientific understanding is, in many respects, profound. So, I suspect that you are more than capable of providing a comprehensive definition of "conscious" and "human mind" without using figurative language. That exercise could be instructive for everyone, and beneficial to the progress of this discussion in particular.
I have been working on an over-arching model of cognitive, social, and moral psychology for a number of years, and use this forum to test propositions and concepts; mostly with positive results which cause me to make modifications at both conceptual and model level.
For example:
1) My current working definition of human mind is: the set of conditions experienced, and functions exercised, by a human being which produce personal and social human behaviour, and
2) My current working definition of mind is: the set of conditions experienced, and functions exercised, by a psychophysical being which produce personal and social behaviour. This is intended to comprehend animal minds. I am undecided whether or not plants have minds. If I remember correctly, Javra thinks that is the case.
It would be great if pansemiosis could produce a general definition of mind which applies to both inanimate objects and living organisms, and a definition of human mind which takes psychology (the relevant scientific discipline) into consideration.
I don't see your point. The choices you have made have lead you to believe that I have a keyboard. The fact that you haven't the will to go back and analyze the correctness of all these choices, giving you the option to change your mind about this, does not mean that you do not have the choice to do so, it means that you do not have the will power. And if you had the will power to go back and doubt all these choices which factor in to you believing that I have a keypad, and you still choose to believe that I have a keypad, then the very fact that you've done this is evidence that this is a choice you have made.
Quoting apokrisis
I really don't understand why you don't apprehend this as a choice. The only reason you are saying that it's a choice "we can't in fact make", is because it is a choice you have already made. Nevertheless, you still have the option to doubt, reassess the choices you have already made, and perhaps change your mind.
Quoting Wayfarer
I see the difference but I don't see it as panpsychism. I see the existence of an "object" as dependent on justification. Justification is the means whereby we agree on things. So numerous conscious agents together, in agreement produce an object. This is a form of "objectivity". An object is conceptual, and me conceiving of something does not, in this perspective, produce an object, although if we have agreement amongst us we have an object due to this objectivity. This justification, and agreement can stand as the basis for the objectivity of knowledge. So for instance, if you take the mathematical objects, they do not exist as eternal objects in the platonic sense, they are created by human beings in conception, justification, and agreement. This form of "objectivity" allows for objective knowledge without the need for independent Platonic Forms as "objects".
Quoting Wayfarer
If we adopt this perspective, how I interpret what Hoffman says, we have to be careful about creating ambiguity between different senses of "objective". If he claims that there is an independent, "objective reality", then this reality is not objectified by the existence of objects, because objects are created by conscious agents. So it is more difficult to escape idealism than he may claim. If he claims that independent reality is objective, he needs some form of justification for this, and will end up with a different sense of "objective" which is not grounded in the usual realist claim of independent objects, but some other form of grounding.
Quoting Wayfarer
Yes, this is a very important difference, one which we should all come to respect. If we say "truth" is what human beings agree on, the accepted knowledge of the day, then we are really saying that every statement which is justified is true. Objectivity in knowledge is produced by justification and agreement. But if we respect the fact that even widely accepted knowledge may end up being wrong, then we look for something else to ground "truth" in, and this is what exists independently of human beings. So if we claim that there are "objects" which exist independently, we need to support this position. We need to find the physical basis of "an object". What does it mean to be an object, existing independently from how we as human beings are perceiving the world. Modern science, relativity theory, and process philosophy, all tend to lead us toward the conclusion that objects are produced by human perception. So if we want to maintain the realist assumption of real independent objects, we must find the physical basis for this assumption.
Using Bohm's Interpretation, not Copenhagen, we have real world that mind is actually viewing. But the real world may be nothing like the image we see just as a hologram is nothing like the image that we see when the reconstructive beam is passed through it. The mind does a transformation.
Many minds will see approximately the same thing, because the brain which is creating the reconstructive is approximately the same, but also different. Different enough in perspective and construction that each mind will perceive something different.
These images permeate consciousness throughout a living organism.
Where Hoffman totally falls apart is where he waffles between conscious agents everywhere and declaring in the same breath not everywhere. Admittedly even Bergson had troubles with this, but he did provide some details by declaring matter as the Elan Vital (mind) moving in the direction against self- organization/creativity.
Finally, the YouTube video where Hoffman presents his mathematics (skip to 27:20):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6eWG7x_6Y5U
Physics from Consciousness (skip to 34:40): the equations for Conscious Agent Asymptotics and Free Particle Wave Function are the same.
https://youtu.be/RtuxTXEhj3A
That doesn't mean I dismiss the problem of "raw feels" or qualia. It is just that I don't think that is the correct explanatory target. Once you know enough about how the brain executes any function, you can see why it has the particular qualitative character that it does. Mach bands is a good example.
But the question of "why any qualitative character at all - when perhaps there might be just zombiedom?" is the kind of query which already reifies awareness in an illegitimate way. It turns it from being the consequence of a process (a modelling of the world which prima facie ought to feel like something) to being a state of being, a kind of extra glow or ghost or spirit, that then appears to deserve an explanation in terms of being "a fundamental stuff or realm".
To think the Hard Problem actually makes sense is to have already concluded consciousness is an ontic "simple", against all the scientific evidence that it is what you get from an unbelievably complex and integrated world modelling process.
And this approach is familiar to any biologist. Folk used to believe that life must be the result of a ghost in the machine. Life had to be a simple, some kind of fundamental spirit or force of animation. But biology got to work and dispelled the mystery. The body is not exactly a machine. However once we see it as a semiotic relation between information and matter - genes and chemistry - then we can see we are talking about a self-creating process. Rather than life, we are talking about lively. Instead of seeking an explanation of what special thing makes inanimate flesh light up with "life", we understand that it is the unbelievably complex and integrated process that adequately accounts for the flesh being what we would then call "alive".
So that is why I take the approach I do. The metaphysics that worked to fully account for life should also continue on to account for mind. The Hard Problem - which is tied to a metaphysics of simples - just doesn't have the bite that people so easily presume.
So I am starting with the belief that awareness is the outcome of a certain species of systems complexity. And the way to explain that causally is to identify the essence of that complex process. What in general is the organisational trick that explains what the brain is doing in its now vastly elaborated way?
To answer that, one has to look to what metaphysics and science has to say about complex systems. Most of science, and even philosophy, is strictly reductionist. It breaks the complex world down into simples. Which is fine as part of the story, but also limited. Then there is a long tradition of holism or organicism. And that shows reality to be irreducibly complex. Even when things are made as simple as possible, they are still complex in terms of their essential structure of relations. Nothing is atomistic. Everything starts as already a process, some basic kind of relation.
One can start with Anaximander, the first true metaphysician. Apokrisis of course was his term for the "first process" - dichotomisation or "separating out". Then there is Aristotle with his four causes, his theory of hylomorphism, and the true start of systems thinking. Hegel and Kant got it. Then Peirce really managed to crystalise it. And finally the systems approach has become increasingly concrete and mathematically definite through the last century of scientific modelling.
So the basic trick of life and mind is that it is a particular kind of complex organisation - a modelling relation (as the mathematical biologist, Robert Rosen, defined it). Stan Salthe and Howard Pattee are then two of Rosen's circle who fleshed out a full understanding of what this means through the 70s and 80s under the general banner of what was hierarchy theory then. A connection got made to the new thermodynamics of dissipative structures (the follow-on from Prigogine's far-from-equilibrium open systems).
Salthe coined the idea of infodynamics. Pattee really sharpened things with his epistemic cut. And then this particular group of systems biologists heard about Peircean semiotics - which had pretty much been lost until the 1990s - and realised that they were basically recapitulating what Peirce had already said. So as a group they did the honourable thing and relabelled themselves bio-semioticians.
There were other allied groups around. Dozens of them. I was part of Salthe and Pattee's group - having looked around and found they were head and shoulders above the rest. But there were plenty of other important theoretical circles, like second order cybernetics, or generative neural nets, or complex adaptive systems, or dissipative structure theorists, or general system theorists, or .... well really, dozens and dozens.
So what is really the story is that there is a systems perspective. Instead of life or mind being ontic simples - animating spirits - they are understood in terms of a particular species of complexity. And the job is to seek explanations in those terms. Once you get that and start looking around, you find there are a whole range of people and groups who have been feeling the same elephant. They might all use different jargon. But they are arriving at the same kind of insights.
Again, this is only my perspective, but I find Peircean semiosis is the best way to zero in on the esssence of systems causality. It has a set of features I could list. And indeed I am always mentioning them.
But for now, in this thread, the key point is why I reject the usual demand of "answer the Hard Problem". Framing that as the crucial question is already to presume that the answer has the form "consciousness is an ontic simple, a substance". It gets to be like being asked "when did you stop beating your wife?".
The proper question we ought to be asking is what kind of fundamental system or process is a brain (in a body with a mind)? That is, we know the brain with its embodied modelling relation with the world is a really complex example of living mindfulness. It meets your working definition in terms of "the set of conditions experienced, and functions exercised, by a psychophysical being which produce personal and social behaviour."
But boil down an actual human that has grown up as a set of interpretive habits in the world into the simplest description of the trick involved, and you get the general thing that is the irreducible triadic relation described by Peircean semiosis.
And I also put all my money on this being a pan-semiotic deal as fundamental physics is arriving at the same irreducible triadic process as the causal explanation of how existence itself could come to be. A story of constraints and degrees of freedom emerging from the symmetry-breaking of fundamental indeterminism.
Or going right back to Anaximander, the dialectical process of apokrisis which organised the formless and boundless chaos of the Apeiron.
You seem to be saying contradictory, or at least unfounded, things here: that "consciousness integrates all of the momentary impressions..." and that it is "by definition unconscious". Is it consciousness if it is unconscious? And if even that is not contradictory and it could be, if it is unconscious, then how could you know that it is consciousness doing the integrating?
But that is common knowledge. You yourself are not conscious of the fact that your perception is a stream of momentary saccades which the mind then integrates into a simple unity. Think about 'the blind spot' - I'm sure you know that there is a simple experiment you can perform that shows that there is always a spot in your field of vision that you don't see. But you don't notice you don't see it until you perform that experiment. (Blind spots are also fruitful metaphors in philosophy, see for instance this title by mathematician/philosopher William Byers.)
There are many such processes that give rise to what we call 'normal consciousness'. But until we pay attention to what constitutes normal consciousness, then it is, well, just normal. It has a taken-for-granted quality that it would never occur to us to question. But after all, 'philosophers wonder at what men think ordinary', and a major part of that is becoming aware of the constructed or conditioned nature of consciousness.
Anyway, the upshot of that is that this is the sense in which I say the mind 'creates the world'. There are mental factors or attributes that lie behind or underneath our conscious experience, that shape and fashion our conscious experience, but are not themselves disclosed by it (which is the meaning of 'transcendental' in Kant and Husserl.) That doesn't mean that my individual mind, the tip of the iceberg that constitutes my conscious or discursive awareness, creates the literal physical universe, but that 'mind' provides the cognitive and intellectual framework which constitutes the world I live in (c.f. Wittgenstein 'I am my world'.)
But you see the point. Consciousness ends up being conscious of how it must be the product of unconscious processes. A gap that was being filled can be noticed under special controlled circumstances. The believable explanation is then in terms of some straightforward realist account of the structure of the eye and the role of anticipatory neural processes.
So what consciousness discovers is that it is these anticipatory neural processes that must be causing it. When the processes are absent, there is a blind spot. When they are acting, there isn't - there is a consciously experienced filling in.
As usual, talk of consciousness as an ontic simple implodes as soon as you give it a slight push. The fact that "everyone knows" that there are unconscious processes behind conscious experience should give the game away. The process is the thing, and talk of "consciousness" as the thing is the reification of that process.
You have misinterpreted the point. The 'blind spot' was simply for illustrative purposes - the actual processes involved are of far greater depth and subtlety than that. 'Man, know thyself', is the point.
Quoting apokrisis
In Pattee's The Physics and Metaphysics of Biosemiosis there's a useful passage about the 'epistemic cut', which I think shows that Pattee acknowledges that he can't really dissolve dualism so easily.
So here, he seems to be asking, how did the separation between 'observer and observed' originate? Because this is implied in the very origin of life itself.
He goes on:
My underline. Now it would seem to me that if you wished to declare the problem solved, or dissolved, then you would have to have solved this problem. And I think the gap in your account is that pan-semiosis itself can't be established without some concept of 'mind' already in play, because if there's semiotics involved, there must be signs and interpreters. And where do these come into play outside living organisms?
You're looking for an explanation that still comes out of physics:
Quoting apokrisis
Whereas, I doubt the explanation is within the purview of the sciences.
My point was that we can uncover the fact that there are underlying processes. Indeed it is common knowledge as you say. And so after that, treating consciousness as not being about those underlying processes becomes bullshit. The burden shifts to having to justify why there might be anything extra to say.
Quoting Wayfarer
Pattee rightly points to the crucial question. But also he didn't accept Peirce's approach - the logic of vagueness - as the way to deal with the issue. That is the further step that Salthe takes.
Nevertheless, I've gone off Hoffman a bit. It's not that I don't agree with his basic point about the primacy of consciousness, but it's more that I think he's tendentious - he's decided on what he believes and then supports in what may well add up to pseudo-scientific terminology. (I don't know for sure, as I'm not well versed enough in maths to judge it, but that's my intuitive feel for it.)
I both agree and also again make the point that this is really saying "nature" and "mystery" themselves form a dialectical construct. They are a thought made concrete by creating a convincing opposition.
So the "eternal dilemma" is that if there is something definite and unmysterious, like a nature that exists, then logically - by the accepted convention that is dialectical reasoning - there must be its "other" of a mystery which is "why even that existence".
So the issue becomes whether there really is a problem, or the problem is the logic we feel so compelled to apply ... in metaphysical analysis.
Clearly my answer is that it is analysis that is the problem. You need to have also a logic capable of synthesis.
Hegel made the same mistake as Aristotle in how he approached a logic of synthesis. They didn't quite get it. But Peirce - through his logic of vagueness - did.
So Peirce at least offers a metaphysical logic that can - in the mode of scientific reasoning - do the most to minimise mystery. The story of nature can never be absolutely certain. But a logic of vagueness (a triadic sign relation logic) can minimise that uncertainty the best of any logical approach.
Quoting apokrisis
The problem is that "the world", "complexities", and "systems" are all things created by the mind. Now you're trying to turn this around, and claim that the world, and complex systems create a mind. So you have now committed the error of being twice removed from reality, which Plato warned us against. The conscious mind creates "the world:, then claims that this world created the conscious mind. So the conscious mind, in this representation is twice removed from reality as the thing created by the world, instead of the thing which creates the world.
So your perspective is no further along than Plato's people in the cave. Instead of looking directly at the mind, to know and understand the mind itself, you are looking at the world which the mind has created, and trying to understand how this world could have created a mind. Misunderstanding is therefore inevitable.
Yeah. But that epistemic problem is accepted as the starting point of pragmatism. That is the bleeding difference here. Pragmatism doesn't pretend to do more than organise experience in a way that minimises our uncertainty and so warrants our beliefs.
We make ontic commitments as abductive hypothesis. And then we believe them because they work so far as we can judge.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Well in fact it is.
Then pragmatism cannot provide the basis for any serious ontology because it does not give mind its proper priority with respect to reality.
Quoting apokrisis
I don't think so. Ontologically it is the very same position as those cave dwellers, a complete misapprehension of reality.
This was my first reaction. He tries to hard to be acceptable to academia. But who can blame him considering what academia (dominated by materialists) had done to everyone who has dated challenge the supremacy of materialism-determinism. They positively crucify everyone who introduces a concept that is not hard-circuited.
As a result, the whole presentation feels almost apologetic in characteristic. I prefer the way Sheldrake treats his inquisators and taunts then for their clownish antics. But by far the most awesome dissection of the question of perception has to be Stephen Robbins's. It's dry, but extremely precise and actually provides a true model using Bergson's insights as the core. Truly way ahead of their times.
You don't seem to realise how anything you might say here is already trapped inside a language game.
Quite true, if you believe in the idea of language games. But it's quite obvious that we can think and act without using any language. So the mind is not trapped by these language games, as many believe it is.
I'm an animal, aren't you?
You're misunderstanding: I'm not arguing that we know, or are conscious of, what gives rise to experience; I'm arguing against the idea that we have any way of knowing, and certainly against the idea that it is simply self-evident, that consciousness does this, or even that it unifies experience.
I'm sure he's a top guy, but the issue I have is that I think there are more simple and direct ways of making his basic argument. When he tries to argue for it on the grounds of evolutionary biology, I am dubious about that, but I will take that up another time.
Quoting Janus
I was responding to your question:
Quoting Janus
I'm not saying that actually understanding all of these processes is common knowledge, but I think the 'existence of the unconscious' and the idea of the role it plays is common enough knowledge. But, maybe it's not. I was trying to explain the sense in which I think it is meaningful to say 'consciousness creates the world', and I think I succeeded in doing that. That aspect of Hoffman's philosophy is what I'm inclined to agree with.
He also says:
The question I would have is that, if the correlation between evolution and cognition it is so watertight, then how does he propose to see through it? How does science see through it? And the related question is: what of mathematics and logical inference? Are these also the products of natural selection, such that their aim is always tacitly to ensure the survival of the species? And if so, why are we to believe what they tell us?
That strongly resembles an argument which is used against evolutionary reductionism, namely 'the argument from reason'. If our knowledge of the world is simply the product of adaptive necessity, then is reason itself always in the service of survival? And if it is, how can we trust it?
I don't believe it is. I fully accept the facts of evolution, but I believe that once h. sapiens crosses a certain threshold, she is able to see things in a way that are not simply 'biologically determined'. Such, indeed, is the meaning of the 'sapience' after which our kind is named.
As I mentioned earlier in this thread, I think that Hoffman's basic argument can be said to be a version of the ancient philosophical thread 'appearance vs reality'. He is saying, that what we take to be real objects, are really just what he calls 'icons' which the organism that we are use to negotiate the environment. He says he doesn't doubt that there is a real, objective, and mind-independent world, but that we don't see that world. The world we do see, comprises the evolutionarily-conditioned experience of that world, which is shaped first and foremost by the requirements of survival.
So even though he appears to be arguing for a kind of idealism or pan-psychism, he's actually using a purely Darwinian type of logic - that everything about the human organism can be understood in purely evolutionary terms.
And that is the part of the argument that I really doubt. I don't think that Darwinian biology or evolutionary theory does have that kind of reach. Of course nowadays you are practically obliged to agree that everything about h. sapiens can be understood through the perspective of evolutionary biology, but I'm not sure I do. As I said above, h. sapiens, by virtue of being a language-using, story-telling, and rational being, is able to understand in modes that are not strictly determined by biology. That is why, for one, the distinction between 'appearance and reality' has such a long provenance in philosophy. Indeed I could argue that part of the intuition of philosophy itself, is to transcend the purely biological, the instinctive side of the organism that is purely concerned with survival and propagation. After all, it was ancient philosophy, first and foremost, which first preached renunciation and celibacy, and that certainly flies in the face of the presumed supremacy of the 'selfish gene'.
So I would say of Hoffman, overall: right idea, wrong reasons for holding them.
Don't we need to understand the motivations behind renunciation before concluding that it's inconsistent with biology?
How would you go about understanding those motivations? Which discipline would that fall under?
Surely, even a process can be defined. And the value of defining consciousness lies in the fact that it is the topic of this thread (i.e., its definition facilitates discussion).
What types (i.e., classes) of functions do you think brains execute?
How is awareness related to consciousness and mind?
Please cite a scientific paper which concludes that consciousness emerges from "an unbelievably complex and integrated world modelling process" (or even from neurophysiological processes). I will email it to Hoffman.
In addition to consciousness, do you think mind is an emergent property of this "world modelling process"? If so, is there any empirical evidence which can be cited in support? If not, is it an empirical or conceptual question?
What do you think about Hoffman's mathematical derivation of quantum physics from conscious agent interaction (apparently, it's the only bit of Conscious Realism the scientific community is taking seriously)?
The Tartu Schools of Semiotics (Moscow) and Biosemiotics (Copenhagen) produced work from many scholars beginning in the 1960s.
In what way were you "part of Salthe and Pattee's group"? Were you enrolled in one of their courses at, or employed as a research assistant by, SUNY Binghamton?
Thanks for endorsing my working definition of "mind", however; it says nothing about brains or modelling relations, because I don't think brains model anything; human beings model the world, brains host neurophysiological activity. So, if you think that brain=mind, my definition of mind should be inadequate.
Is there such a thing as non-living mindfulness? If so, please provide a one or two sentence definition (i.e., not an explanation of systems, complexity, information, emergence, or pansemiosis, although I would gladly accept the use of any of these words in your definition).
1) Consciousness is primary, fundamental, irreducible. No way to get around this. There is no way to have consciousness to spontaneously emerge from some soup of dead chemicals and out of no where develop this extraordinary "desire to survive". Ok, this and an endless number of other objects make the scientific model pretty far fetched and it would be ceremoniously rejected as fantasy if it was not so heavily marketed by the neurological medical industry. There's a lot of money riding on this model so the science behind their model has become entirely goal seeking while building an impregnable, moat around its idea (it's very, very big and very, very, complex, and it took a very, very, long time).
2) Then he goes on and tries to couch this simple idea with suffocating verbiage which is self-contradictory within a single paragraph concerning the precise nature of consciousness. This for me is usually a a red flag. Internal contradictions hidden with excessive verbiage and complicated mathematics is almost always a sign of obfuscation.
I would say he probably has one or two ideas which could be presented in a single slide that are derivative of those of others. Nothing new and nothing that even approaches the precision of description of Bergson and Robbins. I would say the only real merit of his presentation is that there is another philosopher who is willing to state, though not clearly, that the neurological model rests on quicksand and there is no reason to buy into it or take it seriously. Consciousness (mind) had to be considered fundamental.
Referring to the selfish gene puts it squarely in a social context, so sociobiology, a field of scientific study based on the hypothesis that social behavior has resulted from evolution would seem a good choice of discipline. There's a large body of work done in the area, including 'inclusive fitness theory' and even a mathematical formula (Hamilton's rule: rB>C) for predicting whether the predisposition towards a given altruistic act is likely to evolve. However it's not clear if renunciate behavior is altruistic, cooperative, or even selfish in nature. I suppose it could be any one of the three in different individuals and circumstances.
Quoting praxis
Right. Well, you're illustrating my point, which is the exaggerated role of biology in Western culture. I say that this approach is reductionist in that it reduces every question about human nature to a function of biology.
I'm aware of the ingenious Hamilton mathematics, but I'm also aware that there is an acrimonious debate going on between E O Wilson and Richard Dawkins about 'kin selection' which is in part related to this topic (see here.)
Me, I don't think sociobiology has anything in particular to do with the understanding of the spiritual, psychological or religious motivations behind renunciation. But as the kinds of people who look at such questions from the perspective of biology, are not well-schooled in other disciplines, such as comparative religion, cultural history or anthropology, then they will invariably try and understand it in those terms. 'If the only tool you have is a hammer', said Abraham Maslow, 'everything looks like a nail.'
Quoting Rich
I think it's more that he wishes to present his thesis in the terms his audience will understand, and so has created a mathematical model, justified with relation to evolutionary theory, which is the only kind of model that the audience he wishes to impress will take seriously. If he instead spoke about the issue in purely philosophical terms, he would then be simply another guy in the philosophy department, with the resulting loss of prestige and social kudos. This way, he gets to wear 'the white coat of authority'.
I doubt any sociobiologists have studied renunciation specifically.
Quoting Wayfarer
Your point challenged the sociobiological interpretation so naturally it should be taken into account. By excluding it aren't you lightening your toolbox... Anyway, I was just curious if you had investigated the motivation behind renunciation using any tool.
I guess in this case we are talking less about the selfish gene and more the urge to impress gene, both of which evolved naturally through selective evolution.
I majored in comparative religion, and also studied anthropology, in which I covered a range of theories of religion and religious psychology.
The point I was making was comparing Hoffman's analysis with traditional metaphysical accounts of 'appearance and reality'. From the standpoint of evolutionary theory, metaphysics doesn't really make any sense, as it really can't be said to provide any kind of survival advantage. I threw in the 'selfish gene' as I regard Richard Dawkins as epitomising biological reductionism. For him, whatever exists only does so because it represents a survival advantage. Even reason and language are depicted in evolutionary terms, as 'adaptions'. But, asking the question, adapted for what, the answer can only be the propagation of the genes - that is the only rationale possible for evolutionary biology. So renunciation is completely off the radar for that kind of attitude, it makes no sense whatever in biological terms. To try and rationalise it in those terms would be to misunderstand its purpose.
Then also, cooperativity is a necessary part of any level of systematic organisation. So renunciation or altrusistic behaviours can be explained naturally that way.
Finally to the degree that renunciation is not a fit behaviour given the global goals of life, naturalism predicts it will be minimised. And look around. Do you see much renunciation going on in the modern consumer society?
So naturalism makes predictions. And those predictions look confirmed.
I don't think I would call that difference "fundamental". What is fundamental, is that we and other animals are all animals. So when I said to apokrisis, that minds are not trapped by language games, this is because other animals which do not necessarily play language games still have minds. The point being that language is not a necessary feature of a mind, but a mind is necessary for language. Apokrisis, with a reverse, or inverted, ontology, assuming semiotics as fundamental, wants to claim that language brings mind into existence. Since the reverse is really the case, minds bring language into existence, this is just a further indication that apokrisis promotes a backward ontology.
Quoting Wayfarer
What is the point to assuming such a "threshold"? Each particular animal is different from every other, I am different from you. One species is different from another. Why consider that there is a special difference between humans and other species? That doesn't make sense to me. All species are different from each other. But human beings are different in a special way? Consider if we carried that principle to individuals. You'd be saying "all human beings are different but I am different in a special way". Sure, we have that special talent of being rational, but other animals have there own special talents as well. What makes one special talent more special than another special talent? I think we could only justify this by relating this special talent to something further, like God, and saying that this talent brings us closer to God therefore it really is special.
Quoting Wayfarer
Where evolutionary theory misleads us is with the idea that the special traits of the different species are created by the survival process. It is a fact, that the special traits which we can observe today, are the ones which have survived, but this does not lead to the conclusion that these traits were caused by survival. The traits must have been produced by the creativity of the living creatures in the first place. This creativity, which is the actual cause of variations and species is completely neglected by evolutionary theory, which dismisses it as randomness. Imagine if we looked at human acts this way. To conform in your activities is to be normal, but to be creative is to produce something out of line with the norm, something which considered in relation to the norm could only be apprehended as random. All creativity in human acts could be considered as nothing other than randomness.
Quoting Wayfarer
This is where I think perhaps you misunderstand the purely biological, instinctive side of the organism. To be creative is just as much of an instinct as is survival and propagation. Each individual has one's own instincts, and of these three, some will emphasize one more than the other, we are all different. Just because the field of biology has focused on instincts like survival and propagation because they do not have the tools to understand creativity as it falls outside the limits of inductive reason, this does not mean that creativity is not biological. It just means biologists will see creativity as random acts.
Quoting Wayfarer
So in response to this paragraph, I think we need to respect that there is a whole category of things which living creatures do, which are not done for the purpose of survival, nor propagation. This category can be loosely described as creativity, and metaphysics is within this. But just like other traits we have, which are also created by us, we can only observe those which survive. So survival is more of a conditioning agent, and survival needs to be distinguished from the creativity of the living being, which is the true cause here. Creativity, just like metaphysics, cannot be made sense off from an evolutionary perspective because it does not necessarily increase one's chance of survival, nor does it necessarily increase propagation. However, it is an essential part of life which cannot be overlooked.
I defined the core process. Semiosis or the modelling relation.
Quoting Galuchat
I just gave an example. Object boundary detection. Mach bands.
Quoting Galuchat
Yep. It was happening in Europe too.
No. It just illustrates your special gift of understanding everything backwards.
With that said, it is clear thanks in every day we are constantly using our creative minds to figure out how to adapt to different conditions of all types, some relating to economic conditions and others that are totally parenthetical. Today I tried to figure out how to adapt to a new table tennis table. It's really remarkable how successfully science had peddled this natural selection nonsense.
As for all the self-love that humans have for its own species, I would say from where I stand it is a giant embarrassment to be associated with it.
Thanks, any time I'm told that I have a special gift (which is exceedingly rare), I will not hesitate to take that as a compliment.
I'm just thrilled that we have a significant thread that treats minds and humans as real and not just robotic computers that are emeshed in some sort of universal illusion created by .... robotic computers??
We have two opposing directions, one toward the inside, the other toward the outside. I say we proceed toward the inside. You say we proceed toward the outside. Relative to each other we are both backwards. Your backwardness is the drab, everyday backwardness of all those cave dwellers, the entire scientific community. My backwardness is a special gift.
I don't recognise that as 'purpose', I think it simply reflects the emptiness of physicalism. The net sum is zero. Really the only appropriate philosophy for anyone who believes that is hedonism and consumption, as this is surely the most effective way to hasten it.
Anyway, I'm really talking only about evolution as an element in current cultural discourse, not as science per se. I'm simply arguing that, from the viewpoint of evolutionary theory, the sole criteria against which every attribute is defined, is 'that which contributes to survival'. But when it comes to 'the human condition', that doesn't amount to a philosophical answer.
There's a famous evo-biologist, by the name of Theodosius Dobzhansky, who is well-known for the saying that 'nothing in biology makes sense except for in the light of evolution'. However, he was also a devout Orthodox Christian, and published a book called The Biology of Ultimate Concern that canvasses these same ideas.
I think semiosis is certainly a step in the right direction, but mainly insofar as it understands information as fundamental to nature.
Quoting apokrisis
No. It clearly goes against the current of consumer society (and for that matter, Buddhist monks were described as 'those who go against the current'.) But that is not the point.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
OK then, "unique".
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
One of the signifiers of crossing that evolutionary threshold comes with the ability to ask the question 'who am I?'
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
That's very similar to the point I'm trying to make.
What could decide whether the naturalist or the transhumanist is correct here?
Purpose is the reason why things are done. Naturalism suggests the most general reason it can. And proof would be that the reason ultimately constrains everything.
But how could transcendent purpose be validated? Is personal revelation or religious tradition enough to talk about purpose in that universalising sense?
Nowadays we presume that such things as religious ideas are subjective, personal, private, or internal. Nature, studied by science, is external, shared, objective, and studied in the third person.
But this background understanding, which is widely assumed by modern secular culture, is itself a culturally- and historically-conditioned perspective. However, as Buddhist scholar David Loy points out, "the main problem with our usual understanding of secularity is that it is taken-for-granted, so we are not aware that it is a worldview. It is an ideology that pretends to be the everyday world we live in. Many assume that it is simply the way the world really is, once superstitious beliefs about it have been removed.'
Consequently, it is naturally assumed that 'science has shown that the Universe is devoid of purpose' and that 'man is simply another evolved species'. It is what sensible people believe, nowadays. You see that in questions on this forum, practically every day.
And I think from within such perspective, the question about 'meaning or purpose' is indeed meaningless! I remember some of my early exchanges on the old forum, with the likes of Death Monkey, with my assertion that there is an objective moral order, and he patiently assuring me that this was in fact nonsensical. And from within the kind of weltanschauung that he had adopted, indeed it was.
Go to a Zen master, and ask 'what is the meaning of it all', and he'll likely whack you with a stick and tell you to go sit, or work. 'Purpose' he might say 'is not something separate from practice'. Same with many traditional philosophies - if you asked them 'hey what is the meaning of it all?', they wouldn't have any idea what you meant. It was only when we 'became modern' that the idea that the Universe might 'exist without purpose' became clear enough to really even be thinkable. It's part of the condition of modernity, in my opinion.
So, asking the question is religious, in a way, but in the sense of a quest, I would like to think, rather than the acceptance of packaged answers.
But I have taken care to distinguish my holistic naturalism from that reductionist Scientism. So you are not dealing with purpose as a systems science perspective would understand it.
Quoting Wayfarer
Yes. But the question was how you could claim to know.
Naturalism has its way of supporting belief - inductive scientific reason. You seem to be saying that a religious account would be the correct one here, not the naturalistic. So what method are you using to support that belief? Let's see why it is in fact better than methodological naturalism.
One, to me glaring, metaphysical lack in Hoffmanâs worldview is that he addresses evolution as a leading cause for how we are (something that I happen to agree with on multiple levels) yet does not give any attention to how evolutionary processes work on a strictly metaphysical level.
Yes, this in itself is a can of worms; e.g., which parts of our evolutionary theories are approximated maps and not the actual terrain? (lots of thingsâboth philosophical and of the empirical sciencesâcould be addressed here; sorry, canât help myself: one easy to express example: given todayâs models of fitness, a bacterium which both a) has never reproduced and b) has been around since the dawn of bacteria would be denoted as holding zero fitness, this despite it having out-survived most life forms on this planet; to me, this hypothetical (it is possible in principle, and might be actual of some individual bacterium out there that, in essence, is a species onto itself) has implications regarding our models of fitness that always bothered me ⊠but back to the main point).
Evolutionâi.e., change due to natural selectionâcould be universally applicable, and not strictly limited to life. (You'll note how the concept of purpose is inextricable from evolutionary theory--this despite it being explained away in multiple ways by those who deny purpose to existence.) But in order for this scenario to make sense one first needs to reduce the complexities associated with biological evolution down to their bare minimums in terms of processes (thereby excluding the means via which these processes occur in physical life both genotypically and phenotypically). Nevertheless, all this would still address the physical. What Hoffmanâs worldview endorsesâto me, similar enough in attitude to biocentrismâis that only awareness-endowed agencies are objectively real on a metaphysical plane. I say fine, I agree, but then what form of evolutionary theory is espoused that would further simplify change via natural selection so that it may logically hold when strictly considering conscious agents (hence, that would apply to an ecosystem of aware agents/agencies even in the absence of all physicality; or, to be more precise, in the absence of all phenomenalâthough not noumenalâreality)?
If this point is not resolved, thenâas it currently stands for meâhe is endorsing logical contradictions on a metaphysical level in justifying who we are via theories of evolution. However, I grant that Iâve only read the interview and seen the video linked to in the OP. Maybe Iâm so far missing out on something? Like I said previously, Iâm sympathetic to his cause.
A bit late in the thread with this post in relation to this and other related comments you've made.
Youâve affirmed that consciousness is there due to unconscious process of mind. On its own terms, I agree 100%. However, if this is intended to dissuade one from granting consciousness its own agency, it then does away with all possibilities of top-down causation as it would apply to consciousness. It seems to me you either a) ascribe to the unconscious mind awareness-endowed agency (i.e., top-down causal processes) or b) deny agency (i.e., top-down causal processes) to the unconscious mind.
If (a), what coherent rationale would there then be to deny agency to consciousness on its own right? If (b), how would this not be a variant of epiphenomenalism?
[Haven't read you posts in a while. Needless to say, feel free to correct any unintended misrepresentation of your stance.]
Or rather I have repeated back the terms in which the discussion was being framed. I hope I have made it clear enough how I object to the presuppositions with which those terms are loaded. But just for the sake of conversation, I'm also trying to use the preferred jargon of those I might argue against.
In another thread i argued at length why I would instead prefer the terms attentional level and habit level processing. And one of the reasons was that that allows top-down causality to be a part of both. The difference between the two levels then becomes one of spatiotemporal scale.
I canât help drawing a parallel between the non-biological sterility of the renunciate and the Australian jewel beetle that Hoffman mentioins in his TED Talk, and imagining a more evolved being considering which is sillier, the beetle dry humping a beer bottle or a renunciate trying to transcend an imagined disparity between appearance and reality in an effort to cure their existential anxiety.
I understand that your approach is not materialistic, but you still say that 'the idea that life has the global purpose of surviving is being replaced by the idea it serves the greater purpose of entropification or dissipation.' So how is that not reductionist?
Remember 180 Proof?
[quote=180 Proof] 'life' is a specific emergent level of molecular-structured thermodynamic complexity that "happened" insofar as -- "because" -- there weren't conditions which prevented it. Same reason snowflakes "happen". In other words, the universe consists in entropy-driven transformations wherein complex phenomena like (terrestrial) "life" arises & goes extinct along a segment of the slope down from minimal entropy (order) to maximal entropy (disorder); the universe is always-already "dead" but becomes a little less-so ever-so-momentarily at different stages of its (cosmic) decomposition. [/quote]
Quoting apokrisis
First person.
Quoting praxis
Well, it just goes to show that some discussions are pointless.
Quoting javra
As soon as you combine 'metaphysics' and 'evolution' you're going to end up with something like Bergson, or Tieldhard du Chardin, who are generally ridiculed in the secular academy (if anyone bothers to mention them). The explicit aim of nearly all evolutionary biology qua philosophy, is positivist, insofar as its aim is to banish anything metaphysical from consideration.
Evolutionary Naturalism and the Fear of Religion
Like you, I'm sympathetic to his case, but I'm dubiuos about appealing to evolutionary theory to justify it; seems self-defeating to me.
There is an entire alternative cultural movement dedicated to 'evolutionary enlightenment' but again, has very little to do with evolutionary biology as it is understood in mainstream culture.
I glanced that thread over, portions of it at any rate. As its theme relates to this threadâs: Attention is not merely conscious; e.g., the generalized conscience is also attentive to whatâs going on (otherwise it couldnât inform of alternatives to what one desires), though it is not the first person point of view we term consciousness. Habit, on the other hand, can pertain to both the unconscious and to consciousness. A murky, and altogether different topic though.
What Iâm here addressing is the agencyâor non-agencyâof consciousness, i.e. of the first person point of view.
To keep things simple: in your worldview, does consciousness hold its own top-down causal ability?
Yes, I agree. If I didnât specify my position well enough previously, his methodology contradicts the conclusions he draws from it. More concretely, heâs using physical models of evolution to explain conscious agentsâ abilities while, in the same breadth, claiming that the physical is an illusion. This leads to a chicken and egg dichotomy in which he wants to support the illusion of physicality via arguments reliant upon physicality not being an illusion. At least as I so far interpret his worldview. So, yes, to me his stance appears to be logically contradictory. Wanted to double-check, though.
So it might be consistent with your faith based understanding that the ultimate purpose is the Good. But again, naturalism says look the world in the face and describe it as it actually is.
And 180 was wrong on a key technical detail. Life and mind arise to accelerate enropification over and above the rate being achieved by "dead matter". That is what intelligence is for. To improve on what dumbness can achieve.
I just don't see consciousness in this kind of entitified terminology. There is no agent, just a process exhibiting what we choose to describe as agency.
So "consciousness" is just a loose word that covers everything in most discussions. In my view, most people are talking about attention when they say it. But they also mean self consciousness or the linguistically structured skill of introspection. As a word, it just overclaims and doesn't carve the phenomenon at its structural joints.
OK, I agree, itâs a loaded term whose referent is often ambiguous. And worse, it often addresses different referents (albeit loosely associated) to different individuals.
Nevertheless, Iâve clearly specified what I meant by it in my last post to you: the first person point of view. And, if it must be repeated by me, I do not entify the first person point of view (to use your slang); consciousness is not a homunculus; nevertheless, I uphold that it is, exists, holds presence, etc. while the first person point of view holds awareness. BTW, Iâm pretty certain of this one.
My question to you is then not yet answered: in your worldview, does the first person point of view (more concretely, you, me, and many, many others) hold top-down causal abilities of its own?
Tangentially, as to the agency/agent linguistic issue: a bundle of coherently functioning processes is conceived of as a unitary, holistic identity; an identity that may be in the process of becoming, but an identity nonetheless. I say âlook: a rock is over thereâ and not âlook; a bundle of coherently functioning processes that, as bundle, takes on the attributes X, Y, and Zâall of which, however, are perfectly devoid of identityâis over thereâ. Hence, were we to be brief in our statements, that which holds agency is addressed by the identity of âan agentâ. This, then, results in the terminology of âconscious agentsâ.
If you disagree with these comments, on what non-contradictory grounds do you do so?
And it arises as "consciousness" is not a passive display but an intentional view, as talking about it as a modelling relation is meant to emphasise. In every moment of comprehending the world, the brain is having to dynamically form the sense of self that is then standing in opposition to the world that is to be mastered. Perception is not merely about constructing a view of the world, it is about creating that intentional distinction which is the self experienced as that which is apart from the world with some agential purpose.
Even to eat my dinner, I have to be able to distinguish what is food, what is tongue, in my mouth. So there is agency, a point of view just in understanding the world as that which is not my "self".
The connection to top down causality is then that an organism has a point of view from which it can impose "its" wishes and designs - final and formal cause.
So it is not consciousness, nor even attention, which is the locus of top-down causation. It is the very thing of being in a modelling relation with the world where the other aspect that must be constructed is a running sense of selfhood, or autonomy and will.
I watched the video and found it very interesting. It seems like what Hoffman is asserting is a simple derivation from Quantum Mechanics. That there is a superposition of all information and that the job of the brain is decohesion of that information. In fact the Copenhagen interpretation that when observed an object is force to take one state or another fits right in. There is, after all, something there that our senses are picking up on, or else I would be able to walk through walls if only I closed my eyes.
By finding the fastest route to maximum entropy? That's intelligent?
Quoting apokrisis
I don't want my understanding to be 'faith-based' but it is instructive that it must appear that way.
Quoting apokrisis
But how is it, actually? That's what the whole thread is about. That's what philosophy is about.
Quoting apokrisis
Oh come now. Who is it that is designating consciousness in such and such a way? That's you, and it's an intentional action on your part. That makes you 'an agent'.
Quoting apokrisis
I should expand on my answer to this. There is actually a venerable notion of 'scientia sacra', the sacred science. That conveys the understanding that the philosophical and spiritual traditions are engaged in disclosing matters of fact. But they were generally not engaged in 'modern science', of course, but matters that were, so to speak, concerning the 'domain of values'. Nevertheless, there are ways of validating knowledge within those domains, albeit of a different kind to today's scientific methodology. Mind you that certainly doesn't rule out, or even contradict, natural science, in respect of the kinds of questions which it is suited for. But questions of the kind I am endeavouring to raise, may not be among them.
But regardless, there are schools, methods, and ways of validating such 'first-person' understanding, that is still scientific in the sense of laying out a way of proceeding and a way of validation as you go along. That is the whole idea of a spiritual discipline.
Quoting MikeL
Thanks Mike. That's very imaginative, especially since Hoffman only mentions quantum mechanics in passing, when he says 'we don't expect monkeys to solve problems in quantum mechanics'. So I'd be careful about mixing scientific metaphors, when the topic is daunting enough as it is. Besides, nothing about quantum mechanics is simple!
That is the question I asked. So more detail please. How does this validation work and how is it demonstrably better when it comes to talking about nature's purpose.
as no doubt you know. So in that arena, I would expect the scientific method to be the natural modus operandi. But the questions that drew me to philosophy were of a different kind.
So when you ask for something 'demonstrably better', then the question becomes, what kind of purpose do you have in mind? If the criteria are those of science and engineering, then that requires a certain method. But if the criterion is, the attempt to understand an existentially meaningful truth, then the method may be different. Although they may something in common, too.
Here's another example of why I say your ontology is backward. You look outward for purpose. But clearly we must look inward to find purpose, and purpose is something which comes from within us. If you derive purpose from outside of yourself, you are taking someone else's purpose, working for someone else's intentions instead of your own. The only way to have true purpose is to be true to yourself, and this purpose comes from within, or else it is not your purpose.
When we go deep deep within ourselves, we find the uniting principle at the deepest internal level, not being imposed on us from the outside. And this is why Rich, with a very odd sort of ontology is on the right track. We may look outward, at a vast external world but there is only separation out there. Any appearance of unity in the external world is just that, an appearance. When we turn inward, we find the true principles of unity, and unity is the basis of all mathematics and logic.
So the puzzle which we find here is how is the unity of objects which appear to our senses as being at great distances from each other, achieved through the inside. When we look to a smaller and smaller point of space, artificially, or theoretically, dividing space to a smaller and smaller point, we approach the issue of infinite divisibility. So we assume that somehow this divisibility has to stop. We can go in two directions. We can take an infinitesimally small point of space as our limit, or we can jump to the non-spatial, dimensionless point. Those who do not make the dualist inspired jump to non-spatial existence, and assume an infinitesimal point as the limits to reality, are locked into a physicalist system which does not recognize the reality of non-spatial existence.
But if, in the platonic tradition, we recognize non-spatial existence as the true basis of reality itself, we open up an entire realm of non-spatial existence to our inquiring minds. It lies within, or underneath all of physical existence, which, being non-physical, cannot be perceived by the senses, but only apprehended directly by the mind. From this perspective we can apprehend the existence of information at non-spatial, dimensionless points, and the unity of those points through the means of that information.
Actually I'll have another stab at this question because my previous response was about the notion of 'purpose' generally, whereas here you're asking about a very specific issue, namely, the sense in which entropification constitutes a purpose. I guess, as we're talking about 'the heat death of the universe', a sense of the vastness of the time involved should be retained. We're talking about something that is predicted to happen billions of years in the future. So to be honest, I really couldn't say which out of the two given options is the correct one, or if it even matters. My point is simply that as a kind of symbolic or metaphorical 'reason for it all', the notion that life is really just the most efficient route to the heat death of the universe seems at the very least nihilistic.
Good point.
Quite plausible.
I agree with Hoffman to this extent: conscious agency is a creative power and fact of human nature.
I agree. To address human creativity requires different toolsets (i.e., social sciences, humanities, philosophy).
For example, the soup of chemicals magically came together and decided that it would like lie down to be amused by the Simpsons.
Or, different soups of chemicals magically bumped into each other and all of a sudden started to fight against entropy and organize it self long enough to casually discuss with each other about whether they have minds. One group of chemicals all of a sudden created wonderous illusions so it would think it would have a mind while the other group did not spontaneously create such illusions so it would magically tell the other group of chemicals that it has illusions.
Such is the naturalness of the magical, fantasy land of the Wonderful World of Materialism. Viewing the world as it actually is. Now, one has to ask, who has the more vivid imagination: Hans Christian Anderson or those who invented this preposterous tale of Chemicals that Came to Life? Isn't it easier to believe in unicorns? And why isn't materialism taught in elementary schools without the use of pronouns. We want to be precise don't we? Maybe because all of the children would start laughing hysterically? Or maybe their parents would be shocked?
If this purpose can be made known (as you believe) then couldn't people in theory act against it's will for the sake of acting against it. And so it wouldn't by definition be the purpose of certain actions anymore?
An example I recall reading was Kurzweil and google were working on ways to circumvent the second law of thermodynamics. Sorry if that sounds superficial and this sounds self-defeating as far as philosophy goes, but I always believed that a telos wouldn't be able to be revealed until after it is reached. You can't be told your fate is to turn right before doing so because you could then decide to turn left.
Thanks in turn for your direct answer.
Yea, as to the first person point of view being a thing ⊠âneither is it a (some)thing nor is it not a (some)thingâ is my honest, best answer for the moment, equivocal though it may be.
I acknowledge it to be a laconic answer: both in the sense of âSpartanâ and in the sense of âdenseâ. Still, if weâre to make things as simple as possible but no simpler (as someone once said), most any laconic statement can be a bit too simple in certain circles.
Why would we be compelled to apprehend this unity?
Just like good requires the other of evil to make sense as a system, so entropy is defined by its other "choice" - negentropy.
It is not a problem if the conscious purpose of humans is negentropy production as that goal also produces more entropy on the global scale. Every organised act must make waste heat.
The mention was of a "transcendent purpose", and the point I made was that this idea doesn't really make sense. Purpose always seems to inhere within us, I have my purpose, you have your purpose, etc.. The only way that purpose seem to get outside us is when we create something with a purpose. Then that thing has a purpose, but that purpose is derived from within the person who created the thing.
When God is conceived of as a transcendent being, then we have nature, and existence in general, being created by the will of God, and this allows that nature and existence in general have purpose according to the intent of God. Therefore the concept of God supports the claim of transcendent purpose. But without God, "transcendent purpose" becomes a meaningless phrase. Furthermore, if we find that we get in touch with God through our inner self, then the question of how God may transcend us through the inside becomes a very difficult problem.
Quoting praxis
We are compelled by the evidence. The fundamental concept of mathematics is unity. The entire conceptual structure of numbers is based in one concept, the unit. And this unit, "one", is itself immaterial. Then the numerical structure is built on the assumption that there are numerous different units which are the same. Since the units are the same, "different", here implies a separation between them, such that "two" signifies multiple units which are the same but different (due to separation). Furthermore, the entire structure itself, as a structure, is also necessarily a unity, consisting of "the numbers", and this unity is necessary in order that the numbers are intelligible. Intelligibility, is associated with coherency which is the property of a unity. The individual unities, the numbers starting with one, as well as the entire structure, are all completely immaterial, non-dimensional.
Then we can move toward the higher mathematics such as algebra which works entirely within the immaterial realm of symbols, and find that the symbols signify nothing material, everything conceived of is in the realm of non-dimensional numbers, unities of units. or we can move toward the lower mathematics such as geometry, where the non-dimensional is applied to the dimension. Notice that the starting point in geometry is the non-dimensional point, and we build up the dimensions with lines, circles, and spheres. The non-dimensional point again is a fundamental unity. It is indivisible, and therefore the most pure unity in relation to spatial existence. This indivisible point is the unity which allows us passage from the realm of spatial existence to the non-spatial.
But the physicalist who denies the reality of this fundamental unity denies passage into the non-dimensional realm. The evidence though is overwhelming. These immaterial, non-dimensional units, and unities are used continuously by mathematicians and scientists, with very productive results, so they must be real.
Further, we assume objects, which form the basis of many logical proceedings, as we attribute properties to objects. The object again is a unity. Newton assumed the unity of the object, as something taken for granted when he produced his laws of motion. But objects have long been known to be divisible, so taking unity for granted was a misleading position which the principles of modern physics have moved beyond. Now we have no basis for the assumption of a physical unity (object), because even what was once considered to be an object is now believed to be a process. However, as evidenced above, unity, and the unit (object), remains fundamental within the immaterial, non-dimensional, conceptual realm. .
That's a pretty weak effort. Only revelation? How about - the realisation that what most people understand reality to be, is only a shadow on the wall of a cave?
There are numerous other conceptions of the aim of the spiritual life. Vedanta talks in terms of 'God realisation' which means, awakening to the true nature of the Universe, and the realisation that Brahman alone is real.
I think the parallel expression in Christianity is Capital L Life.
All of them convey the sense of a complete transformation of perception, an upending or radical change in the understanding. Far from learning an habitual response.
Quoting apokrisis
But that is only a physical or chemical description. I still can't see how it can serve as the basis for any kind of philosophy in the sense I understand it (and which I have been trying to explain).
Quoting JupiterJess
There's a very useful summary of the original idea of Telos here. But I don't think 'telos' ought to be equated with 'fate'. I suppose it does carry a connotation of 'destiny' but it's more like an inherent attribute - as an acorn has the inherent ability to grow into an oak. But in the case of human beings, obviously they are capable of many different things, so I don't think it would be nearly so straightforward in this case.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
That is very much the original intuition behind Pythagorean philosophy, which was incorporated into Platonism. Actually Bertrand Russell says, in his chapter on Pythagoras, that it was the mathematical dimension of Greek philosophy that differentiates it from Eastern traditions, and is one of the principle reasons that it gave rise to modern science (which has now, however, forgotten its Platonist origins).
Where I thought the Hindu and Christian accounts were so different, was that Christians just 'believed the dogma', whereas the Hindu attitude was much more 'experiential', i.e. derived from spiritual experience. But I've started to see that really they're not so different after all, i.e. there's a sense in which 'revealed truth' also applies to the Eastern religions, and a sense in which Christian teachings may also be experiential. In any case, the experiential dimension that is supposedly at the heart of all of these teachings, is elusive. Seek it, and it dissappears, forget about it, and it taps you on the shoulder.
Then he got unnatural in arguing that the realm of form must be the true reality. Having realised something due to an immanent or dialectical argument, he then reified one half of the duality thus revealed and made it the transcendent or the divine.
Or rather that is the telling theists like to remember. Plato tried to do justice to the material pole of being with his late comments about the chora or "receptacle" that could take the imprint of forms. Aristotle also had his go an reuniting the two aspects of being - bottom up and top down causes - in his account of hylomorphic form.
Anyway, there is a metaphysical approach - dialectical reasoning - that has proven itself as a western method. And science has cashed that out in its own largely reductionist way. Science brings the "conviction of pure experiencing" back into it in the form of observations or acts of measurement. A theory is a Platonic assertion of a mathematical form. We then experience directly the truth of that form by conducting an experiment and seeing the expected result.
So that is the essential difference. Scientific reasoning (as defined within Peircean semiotics/modelling relations) is a method that perfectly aligns concepts and impressions. A theory abstracts a Platonic form. Measurements are the way that the validity of the form can be experienced as a fact. If beliefs can become numbers read off a dial, then that is the end game as that is belief fully symbolised by Platonic abstraction.
The kind of religious experiencing you are talking about is relying on the unreliable feeling of "hey, that feels right". Neurocognition can tell you all about the circuits that subserve an "aha!" recognition response - a match/mismatch feeling of salience.
It is a biological kind of world measurement. Psychologically I need to have a judgement that says either "that fits" or "that doesn't fit". We couldn't act in the world without that kind of biological level capacity for "revelation".
But a sense of conviction is quite wrong as a basis of abstract belief. The western method of scientific reasoning is all about rising above our biological embeddeness to find an objectively philosophical point of view. And so that is why we seek to put belief and understanding on a rational footing where our modelling relation with the world becomes one of fully symbolic theory and measurement.
If Russell actually intimidated or actually said this, it shows how poor Western education was and continues to be. Incredibly myopic. It reminds me of the world history books I read which cover Western Europe .. period. Ditto for the histories of philosophies.
How so? What do you mean, 'myopic'?
I think elsewhere in the book, there are further references to how Platonism (which, he argues, was derived from Pythagoreanism), because of it's emphasis on ideas such as forms, types, number, and related concepts, provided a foundation for modern scientific method, even though much of it is obviously archaic in today's terms. But I think the divergence between European thought, and Eastern thought, is pretty undeniable - not that it's always a good thing.
I don't see anything particularly wrong with that, although I hasten to add, I don't share your dislike for science - only for it's misapplication in scientific materialism.
No, Russell obviously had the standard myopic education which apparently much of Western academia relishes. As I said there are some European authors who have allowed their curiosity to extend beyond the very narrow culture of Western Europe. Good for to them. Otherwise, wee can pretend that all history is Western Europe. Who really cares? Those who are curious will find out otherwise and those who aren't can revel in their glory.
BTW, you can do yourself a favor by studying the history of science. It's more than making weapons that go Boom! Or declaring that humans are computers.
On a related note, from The Onion.
One way to look at what he is telling us is that the universe is front of us is filled with so much white noise that we need to filter it in order to understand a truth that promotes our survival. We can take the idea of a Superposition of all information of our world, and suggest that our mind Decoheres it in order to make sense of it (Rich won't like the idea of a decoder as the mind).
In this model of the world our mind has created visual buttons for us to understand the world around us, hiding the complex behind it. The snake, the train. In this instance closer inspection reveals the atoms and molecules.
I may have been too hasty in dismissing Hoffman's work as simply that though. In relation to the computer there is really only one thorough way to go about solving the problem, and that is a top-down, bottom-up, top-down, bottom-up approach, stepping systematically through observations and theory as we work backwards.
The problem as I understand it is that by understanding the Folder on the Desktop we only understand the code that created the folder, by understanding the word document we may only go so far as understanding the code that created that program. It gives no further information that we can trace back to the computer.
But it does. A Save file must be getting saved somewhere, an Open File must be getting opened from somewhere. We would need to begin to invoke the existence of abstract storage areas to get a full model. For the interface to run we can elucidate their is a background program and seek to determine what it is. Letter input's from keyboard's can likewise be accounted for and a list of all the possible keys drawn up, leaving spaces for those keys we suspect are out there but are yet to discover.
As we elucidate the background code there will be pointers in the code that suggest it is running on a BIOS, especially when we know there is a folder and other GUIs. So too BIOS when we begin to unpack it will reveal a deeper machine code or bits and bytes or whatever it is.
When we run unpack the machine code there will be pointers to information processing diodes, information storage magnetic disks, power sources etc.
Of course the other way to solve the problem is abstract mathematics where we start with the premise that there is an underlying computer and computer program running on it and work upward from there.
well, that's not a bad interpretation of what Hoffman says, but you need to realise that he also says 'atoms and molecules' are just as much icons as are any other kind of objects. In other words, he doesn't see atoms or molecules or any other kind of supposedly fundamental physical object as actually fundamental. What is actually fundamental, is conscious experience, and reality comprises entirely conscious agents. He lays it out in Conscious Realism and the Mind Body Problem.. I'm still reading it, and there's parts of it I really don't get, but it's important to see that he doesn't think you can get 'behind' conscious experience to discover what is 'truly objective'.
It seems to me that the whole idea of 'natural law' originated with 'divine law', in the early modern period. It was commonplace for Newton and his contemporaries to refer to natural laws as 'God's handiwork'.
But over the subsequent centuries, the 'divine' was dropped, while 'law' was retained. But a consequences was that the link between law and (the moral) order was severed, with the consequence that 'laws' are still believed to 'rule', in some way, but now only in a purely physical sense - what is governed is principally the motions of bodies, the combinations of substances, and the actions of forces such as gravity, electro-magnetism, and so on, which are held to be ontologically fundamental.
That gives rise to the idea that physical laws, such as the law of thermodynamics, are understood to be causal, in the sense that the original idea of 'God's laws' were causal - but without any reason, other than physical necessity. Hence the idea that the actual reason life has developed, is because it is the most efficient way to attain the state of maximum entropy. But, satire notwithstanding, I do question the sense in which that amounts to the basis for any kind of philosophy.
The "immanent purpose of naturalism". I've never heard that before. Care to explain? I thought naturalism, by definition, excludes purpose. Are you just trying to inject purpose into naturalism in a way which veils the inherent contradiction? Bear in mind, that something created with purpose is artificial, and therefore by the law of non-contradiction, cannot be natural.
Quoting MikeL
But what if survival is just a side effect? Suppose that it is possible that the mind is trying to do something, and survival is not even related to what the mind is trying to do. Some of the efforts which the mind carries out, happen to promote survival, but this is really irrelevant to what the mind is actually trying to do. So for example, if I was trying to harvest grain to eat, and I spilled it and happened to seed an area, then the propagation of the grain into the next generation is accidental to what I was really trying to do. I say this just to stress the point that if there is intention behind the acts of living things, then that intention is not necessarily survival. It is possible that survival is a side effect, therefore we must seek the real intention.
I also take the points raised earlier on creativity, or in your point, of the scattered seeds. I think the scattering of the atoms or the subatomic particles across the very fabric of the universe itself set the conditions. The real intention behind it all may be to see how it turns out. I don't think it is being directed in its course. The steps on the path to becoming is of no importance (man rules the universe, dinosaurs do, galaxies interact with sentience toward each other) but that it will turn out a certain way may be what has a "God" very curious. Just like the rolling of the proverbial dice. An eventual Heat Death, as Apokrisis states, may just be the game over sign.
The easiest way to understand the mind is to simply observe patterns as they are actually unfolding in your we everyday experience. It is all real and it is exactly, precisely as you are experiencing it. Your mind is creating and observing what others are creating right smack in the fabric of duration real time). This is the Universe evolving. No decoding, because it is the mind.. Sure can play the mind-is-a-computer game with other academics, but at the end it is just a game and as such you might as well play chess, which is far more instructive about life.
Once you begin to explore the mind as it is, and not just create fireside stories as is popular in academic philosophy, you will find a very rich world to explore in many dimensions. Not only does it enrich life and bring in an abundance of joy and awe, it also allows you to develop a very keen sense of life with a multitude of practical uses, not the least of which is great health in into your senior years via an enriched and keen eyed soul.
The purpose of survival is to allow the mind to create. To create and learn it's the purpose of life. If you don't believe me, just observe. This is the Science of Eastern philosophy.
Quoting Rich
I'm not so sure I can agree with you here, Rich. Life in this definition seems to have a very narrow application to humanity. But life is teeming all over the earth and probably all over the universe and I don't see how it fits. Is the assertion that creativity and learning is the purpose for all life, including moss?
It is true that a child will find immense joy and fascination in watching a stick float down the drain, and that once they understand this process thoroughly it no longer holds any interest, so too with playing with toys, but are these things (creativity and learning) not simply masks to enable learning that can be applied to survival via complex reasoning later on? Much like the sex drive is the mask for reproduction?
I'm a bit vague on how the term creativity is being used throughout this thread too. It seems to have some other meaning.
Just observe. It is not complicated, though one can make it complicated in order to create a lifetime game or of it.
It is your Mind that is observing. It is peering out through your eyes. Quoting MikeL
Yes. Observe the beauty of the moss. Today, I saw some beautiful, multi-colored carrots grown on an organic farm. So much creative beauty all around us. Of course, the very advanced species of humans creates weapons and pollution. Talk about hubris.
Quoting MikeL
No, the child is learning to create and should be encouraged to do so. We sent our child to a Montessori School. Creativity to life. Without it you end up with existentialism and other types of philosophies that suck life out of life. That's the Dark Side.
Creativity is what scientists are doing when the make humans into computers to advance their economic interests. It is also drawing a tree.
I think I might be on the Dark Side. It's actually quite a bit of fun over here, bit I like to run around between both sides. One thing I need you to clear up for me though, Rich, is what you mean when you say "Just Observe" You've said it a few times now, so I know it has some significance for you beyond just the words, but it is not giving me any direction for my thoughts. Can you be more precise?
Observation is a skill that is developed over time. It is not reading.
Trying drawing something, anything or listening to music or trying to learn a new dance step. from a video. Maybe try growing something. Observe life as it unfolds. Really observe. Over time, you see more and more and more. Deeper and deeper. Wider and wider. Don't read about history, observe it closely as it unfolds. Don't read about medicine. Learn to observe your own health and signs that unfold that reveal healthy and unhealthy lifestyle habits. Look around and build the skill of observation. You'll be amazed at how much is revealed.
There was an example I used about vision. I wish I could remember the name of the book I got it from, but it was full of these great examples of abberations to visual processing. If anyone knows it please tell me, I would love to read it again.
In one of the examples the man's eyes and optic nerves were functioning fine, but the visual cortex had been damaged. As a result he was 'blind' but could see. He could not create a visual impression of the environment in his cortex, but he could dodge telegraph poles and garbage bins while walking down the street by 'sensing' they were there. Of course he could only move very slowly to do this. My contention at the time was that the difference was the difference between Windows and DOS operating systems. In a Windows based GUI you could see instantaneously and react appropriately without have to sought the code.
It also give a lot more surety about what you are perceiving. I used the example that there was a time when I was sleeping and I heard a noise - a bang. As I was in the netherworld between sleep and wakefulness my mind manifested the sound visually to me. I saw the sound expanding like a sphere. Several seconds later the bang was repeated. I saw it again. It expanded at exactly the same rate to exactly the same size and I woke up immediately and said "Double barrel shotgun." The visual representation of the image gave me certainty. I had no doubt what so ever that it was the same sound. I have no idea if that's what it was (I have been asked), but I am sure of what I saw...heard.
It also makes you wonder about other animals such as bats where the dominant sense is not vision. Do they actually visualise what they see, like I did with the sound? It might mean we need to redefine the idea of vision.
Then what is the point of the hologram?
A central problem with his thesis that I can see is that in this virtual MUI world while we cannot directly ascertain from observation how the folder opens, we would question it nonetheless and derive theorems to explain it. That the folder opens would be observable and would contradict the laws of nature as we were building them. We would seek the truth, and that would lead into the explanation I suggested earlier.
If we forgo any folders, recycle bins, word documents and just get caught in a virtual game, the game would constitute Objective Reality. How do we determine there is a background code by which we can begin our backward trace? The same way we've come out with this virtual world hypothesis that's been around for years. Mathematics.
I've heard it said that if Jesus or some other entity came floating down to earth on a cloud that would be the proof we need that this world is a computer simulation, so I guess we would be looking for code contradictions where the apparent truth is violated.
I'm just up to his definition of the objective world.
I think you're struggling not because the paper is difficult so much as disorganised and muddled. I am trying to untangle contradictions all over the place. Admittedly perhaps my lack of grounding in philosophy may be the cause of it. Maybe I don't have the correct definition of terms. Have a look for example at this paragraph I just pulled out, which is where I am up to now.
"Conscious realism asserts that the objective world,
i.e., the world whose existence does not depend on the perceptions of a
particular observer, consists entirely of conscious agents.
Conscious realism is a non-physicalist monism. What exists in the
objective world, independent of my perceptions, is a world of conscious
agents, not a world of unconscious particles and fields. Those particles and
fields are icons in the MUIs of conscious agents, but are not themselves
fundamental denizens of the objective world. "
1. The Objective World consists entirely of conscious agents.
When I Google conscious agents I get: "The theory of conscious agents proposed by Hoffman and Prakash (2014) takes conscious agents, rather than physical objects and space-time, as fundamental. ... The conscious experience S(N) is the ânowâ of the conscious agent and the conscious experiences 510 Page 18 S(1)âŠS(N ?1) are its âpastâ".
2. Conscious Realism is non-physicalist monism.
When I Google monism I get: "a theory or doctrine that denies the existence of a distinction or duality in a particular sphere, such as that between matter and mind, or God and the world."
- if there is no distinction between God and the World, or the computer and the world, shouldn't we be able to see it all?
3. "What exists in the objective world, independent of my perceptions, is a world of conscious
agents," -- but hang on, Conscious agents are the conscious experience, so how can they be independent of the perceptions?
4. "Those particles and fields are icons in the MUIs of conscious agents" But the Objective World consists entirely of Conscious agents (Point 1).
5. "But are not themselves fundamental denizens of the Objective World" - and yet by definition they are.
'Monism' is any philosophical theory that proposes that there is one substance. Be mindful that 'substance' has a very different meaning in philosophy than in everyday life, it's original meaning is nearer to 'being', so monist philosophies actually say something like, there is really only one real being. An historic form might be - only God is real, all other apparent beings are merely projections of God. That kind of understanding is typically associated with forms of philosophical idealism in which the 'one being' is something like the 'divine intelligence'. However Hoffman denies that his theory is idealism. Quite why he denies this is one of the things that is not clear to me.
I am very drawn to various forms of philosophical idealism, which is why I initially felt an affinity with Hoffman's ideas. But the more I read of them, the less I understand, and frankly I am getting close to the point of giving up on them.
But the other thing is, as I said before, I really sceptical that evolutionary biology has the all-encompassing power that Hoffman claims it does - that what we see is only what we're adapted to see. I can actually believe that of most creatures other than h. sapiens. I can perfectly understand that predators are adapted to seek their prey and screen out everything else. But, what is 'sapience'? That is actually a real question. Sapience is usually translated as 'wisdom', which sounds kind of patronising - old guy, grey beard, makes wise sayings - that is what wisdom is to most people. But I think sapience has a connotation of 'seeing through illusions', which is something that crocodiles and tigers are patently not capable of, in my view. And I think h. sapiens can do that. At least they can ask the question, what is an illusion, and what isn't. And I think h. sapiens can arrive at an understanding of truth that is NOT species-specific, but that would be discovered by any other rational sentient being. And furthermore, if evolutionary conditioning is so all-powerful, how come Hoffman's philosophy is able to see through it? What makes his approach different to any other wisdom traditions? They're the kinds of questions that are occurring to me.
Quoting Wayfarer
Yeah, I know where you're coming from. Sometimes you have to sort through a lot of debris to find the gem. I think Hoffman made a good point with the zooming up on the icon of a computer screen as not revealing its inner workings but I think he has failed in his attempt to create a unifying explanation.
I'll go out for now on this:
Here's another example where he appears to be arguing both sides of the coin.
The sun you see is a momentary icon, constructed on the fly each
time you experience it. Your sun icon does not match or approximate
the objective reality that triggers you to construct a sun icon. It is a
species-specific adaptation, a quick and dirty guide, not an insight into
the objective nature of the world.
This suggests that if the sun is a representation of the truth, but only a dirty one, then it is pointing right through to the core of the computer. It is either an icon on a GUI that only has contextual meaning or it is the truth.
I find it easier when I read if I substitute GUI for mind and conscious agents for consciousness.
I just wanted to acknowledge that I kind of blew this criticism off when it was made, but have since decided it was actually pretty fair. (Y)
I think I brought up creativity. I use it in what I believe is the normal way. It means to bring something into existence, to cause the existence of something. The point was, that all living things express creativity, to different extents, but the creations are not what you might normally refer to as a creation, because what is created are the parts of the living creature's body. This creativity is essential to evolution, because it is responsible for the variations found between individual beings. It may appear to you as an odd sort of meaning for "creativity", because we don't normally think of the living being as creating its own body, but why should we not think in this way, if it is true? We do not think in this way because we have been conditioned by the societal pressures, to suppress the idea of a creator. When we see living things as creators themselves, it leads us toward the assumption that there is a creator of life.
So take Rich's example of moss, or different coloured carrots. The differences which are seen in the moss field, and the differences seen in the colours of the carrots are all expressions of the creative power of the living organisms. I find that seeing these things as creations really helps me to appreciate and enjoy the splendour of life. Instead of looking at "natural beauty" when I look at the vast array of life forms around me, I am looking at the artwork of living organism and I am awestruck by their creativity.
Try looking at a rainbow chart showing the colours of the visible spectrum. Then take a look through a substantial flower garden in full bloom in the middle of summer. See how the living things in this garden have taken a rather boring "natural" spectrum of six or seven different colours, to create literally hundreds if not thousands of different colours, through the use of different chemical structures. Some of those colours and contrasts are so stunning they can stop you in wonder. When you see these colours as a natural beauty you think wow, that's incredible, but when you see them as creations it blows your mind.
The holographic-like image is the real thing that is being observed out there. The brain is creating the reconstructive wave that is revealing the object.
1) The Creative Mind explanation recognizes the universal, every day experience of the mind which defines "I".
Science declares it is all a magical illusion that took a very long time to naturally happen and with zero explanation why or how such an illusion can materialized out of a chemical goop.
2) The Creative Mind is constantly learning and evolving which accounts for the evolution and the process of sharing.
Science provides no explanation for the process of learning or communications. It just happen without any explanation of why a soup of chemicals might all of a sudden start sharing experiences or even what is an experience other than an illusion.
3) The Creative Mind seeks to survive so that it can experiment and create.
Science says the chemicals miraculously developed a need to survive in a form and continues to move against entropy in order to keep such a form until it miraculously decides not to.
Science essentially provides no explanation other than a series of nonsensical miracles that "just happen" and then "just stop happening". The Creative Mind recognizes and describes exactly what each person experiences and observed every day of life.
4) In Bergson's analysis everything that is being created is really out there. The Creative Mind is designing into the fabric of the universe (duration) and it is all being shared and observed as part of the universe We are existing in duration. This is real time. Duration is the canvas of the Creative Mind and all of life is involved in Creative Evolution.
Science claims it is all happening in the brain - everything, illusions and all, without any evidence of this or how this miracle developed.
Yo, you still around?
Wanted to see how this idea might pan out with you (and others). To be explicit, Iâm using geometric points as representations of aware agents. Most of this will not be analytically reasoned but, rather, terse ideas thrown out there for potential feedback, etc.
Iâll first philosophically entertain an existence (or presence) consisting of a singular geometric pointâand nothing else. The geometric point, being volume-less, is in this scenario also space-less yet, nevertheless, a perfectly integral unity. Because this singularity is devoid of otherness, it is also devoid of boundaries via which it can gain a quantifiable identity and, therefore, can well be demarcated as a non-quantity whole. This mathematical scenario is rather hard to conceive other than in very, very abstract terms; but, Iâll intuit, it can be likened to Pythagorasâs circle (the circle devoid of a point at its center or of any line(s), via which quantity is represented within his system), to the Neo-Platonistâs âthe Oneâ (albeit, as with the singular geometric point, this âOneâ could in fact be demarcated as a perfectly integral and wholesome non-quantity being), to Kabbalistic notions of Ein Sof, to Eastern notions of the Brahman, and I dare say even to notions of Nirvana or, similarly, Moksha.
As I remember it, as was addressed in a by now ancient discussion on the old forum, we already agree that it is only once two or more geometric points hold presence that space itself holds presence. What Iâm reaching at is that while a singular geometric point can be conceived to hold space-less presence, the presence of two or more points entails the co-dependent origination of space.
Were we to grant both awareness and creative agency to these geometric points, not only would the presence of two or more points necessitate to co-existence of space but also of time: the creations of one point will occur either before, after, or simultaneous to the awareness/apprehension and/or creation of any other geometric point.
Again, in the scenario of there being only one geometric point present, there is neither space nor time (because there here is no occurrence of any before or after). Space and time become, allegorically, the shell of the aware agents (for emphasis, when there are two or more of these).
Abstractly tying this into evolution, I speculate that evolution can be boiled down to âpreservation of identityâ. I say that this encapsulates all the more complex, empiricism based notions of evolution (begrudgingly, even the âselfish geneâ one which Iâve never been able to stand). Now, what is the ontically real identity of geometric points? The spatiotemporal context within which they (again, plural) duel or, alternatively, the perfectly whole/integral being of the limitless here noted by the singular, non-quantifiable geometric point scenario? There are complexities galore in that we conscious agents, as identities, are always a conflux of both aforementioned idealized identities - I so argue. Yet, as with the notion of âwe are points of light emanating from the same sourceâ, a notion arguably as old as Akhenatenâs Ra, it is at least arguable that our metaphysically true identity (independent of our beliefs, etc., of who we are) is that of the perfectly whole/integral unity that is both limitless and non-quantifiable.
Though mumbo jumbo to some, it can further be noted that base natures of people are (overly) selfish and elevated natures of people are (relatively speaking) selfless. This singular geometric point example is, in so many other words, a perfectly selfless being: the pinnacle of elevated nature as viewed from within space and time.
So, appraising darn well that all this will be largely nonsense to many (most notably, physicalists), what Iâm allegorically alluding toâhopefully in a clear enough wayâis that evolution, when metaphysically appraised, might be a struggle between different beings to preserve self-identity given a conflux of teloi of what one seeks to becomeâone of which will be ontically real (right) and the others being illusions produced by the imagination of minds (and, hence, wrong ⊠such as, Iâd argue, the illusion that one can become a spatiotemporal controller of all spacetime/physicality, to whose authority all other conscious agents become subjects of ⊠again, selfishness taken to its extreme, at least to my mind). This metaphysical evolution of being/identity thenâto fast forward a bitâplays out physically within spacetime between different lifeforms (of varying awareness ability) and, Iâd still maintain, potentially among non-living identities as well.
Ok, I feel Iâve been all over the place in my attempts for concision of basic ideas. Logically, all this would need quite a more robust and coherent means of argument to hold waterâI know very well. But hey, I'm aiming for it to make some intuitive sense.
So, yes, within such a model conscious agents are the only things that are metaphysically real, but the physicality that in part emerges due to the space and time that a multiplicity of conscious agents necessarily entails would be quite real in a physical, everyday sense.
Not now such how well this would integrate with Hoffman's position ...
If I can jump in, I really like the idea above. As you say, "atoms" are just more icons. But (perhaps you'll agree) independent, differentiated conscious agents are also just more icons. If there are only icons, then the mind-matter or objective-subjective distinctions are secondary in theory if hardly in practice. We have an apparently self-organizing system of icons that comes to represent itself via this very theory of a self-organizing system of icons.
The process catches its own tail ("absolute knowledge") and finds that it is a Mobius strip. It thought of itself as two-sided, the collision of icon and non-icon, but discovers itself to be an "outsideless" or one-sided process. "There is nothing outside the text." But that also means there is no text in the first place. Text and the object described by the text are the same self-enriching subject-substance.
In retrospect, we can think the idea of the objective in terms of the fragility of the current icon system. Our "model" of unmediated objective (thing-in-itself) reality could be wrong, we would have said then. But this can also be described as an anticipation that our icon-system will simply develop a update that makes it more complex. We or "it" will create icons, perhaps, describing this process in terms of a desire for self-knowledge or stasis (homeostasis: it wants a fixed shape but responds to tensions in its vortext?)
"Absolute knowledge" would be the icon-system's existence for itself as an icon which it experienced as final in its general form. Obviously the icon-system remains unstable away from this presumably stable core of its awareness of itself as icon-system.
The icon or the sign can be neither mental or physical. It is the condition of possibility for this and all such distinctions. So it's not the conscious agent that "really" exists but the icon which is revealed to exist systematically. (Obviously Plato & Hegel & others come to mind and are influences.)
Speaking then for a physicalist naturalism, I would make a few points.
A geometric analogy is fine. The very thing of a mark can be understood to bring into sharp contrasting existence the "other" of the general plane whose unmarked symmetry it breaks. There is now a world divided into the locally marked and the globally unmarked.
You are likely familiar also with Spencer-Brown's Laws of Form (or Peirce's existential graphs) where the primal act of symmetry breaking is imagined as the drawing of a circle. That is now not just a geometric move, but a logical move. The point has an interior and space is marked by a boundary. Logic can be built up by crossing and re-crossing that boundary. As a conception of semiotic origination, it has its advantages.
And the Peirce imagined it all in terms of flashes of chance or spontaneity - a conception that is more physicalist as it unites space, time and energy in the notion of a primal action or fluctuation. But also, starting with a chance action is more compatible with a mentalistic ontology. It speaks to a fundamental freedom or creativity. So if Firstness or vagueness is the unformed potential that is lacking in all otherness, the most neutral conception of the first step in creation is a pure undirected action of some kind - not merely a geometric mark but an energetic move.
As Peirce put it:
And of course, modern quantum cosmology would say this is the right way to understand cosmic evolutionary beginnings.
The Big Bang started in a particular state - the Planck scale. A state of maximum fluctuation. Being as hot or energy dense as it was possible to be, it was as energetically curved or spatiotemporally disconnected as it was possible to be.
In the very first moment, there was no spacetime backdrop as such as every point of spacetime was so furiously energetic as to warp its own spacetime like an isolated black hole. But the Planck scale was also the "size" where each hot point could first align with its neighbours to start to share relations and so begin to thermalise. Spacetime could start to shed its extreme local curvature and begin to become connected and flattened. Energy could spread and cool. Classicality emerged.
So the modern geometric approach would understand spatiotemporality as the converse of energy density - a fundamental quanta of action. And this would be represented graphically as curvature. A phase transition where a realm of hyperbolic curvature at every point of space became connected and so collectively flattened as all that unaligned action became aligned in a common direction - a cooling/expanding cosmos running down to its "other" of a perfectly flat and absolutely cold Heat Death. And because this flattening, this act of cooling/expansion "takes time", time itself emerged as a thing to mark change.
So rather than a geometric point or even a logical cut, modern theory supports a conception of Firstness or Apeiron as a hot fluctuation, the moment spatiotemporal curvature hit a balance between hyperbolic curvature (a point that curves away exponentially from any nascent dimensionality) and then by definition, that flat dimensionality which is the "other" that now exists as the ground from which any such curvature could be said to exist. Already, you get both sides of the deal from the one act, just like breaking the symmetry of a blank piece of paper by marking it anywhere with a black pencil dot.
Quoting javra
Yep. There is a selection principle at work with a physicalist concept of creation as to persist, the world has to work. The constraints that emerge and come to dominate must be the constraints that can globally stabilise.
[EDIT] In case it wasn't clear, what I like about Peirce's "psychological" habit-taking approach is that it tries to stand half way between the two dualistic extremes of brute matter and creative intelligence.
So the first action is conceived of as a chance fluctuation. Both the materialist and the theist could find common ground in that because there is the irreducible element of creativity and agency in that conception, as well as the dumb energy of an action.
A fluctuation speaks to both order and chaos at the same time in being some definite suggestive move in a direction, but it is an act of no particular meaning or significance until, or unless, it also proves to have a context. It must spark the change which is the development of the coherent backdrop against which its own existence becomes a mark, a difference that makes a difference.
So firstness - conceived of naked fluctuation - is nicely poised between the antagonistic world views that demand we begin either with conscious agency or mindless physics. A fluctuation is the least creative thing as an action. But it is still irreducibly creative in being so purely spontaneous or uncaused. And also a fluctuation is very material in being a primal energetic spatiotemporal event.
As I argue, everyone wants to bat for one side or the other - brute materialism or creative intelligence. So everyone reading Peirce will feel compelled to demonstrate that he too is really speaking for one side or the other.
But what if Peirce - as both a scientist and philosopher - was striving to find the middle path that could do justice to both, without collapsing back into either?
So you are still trying to play the game of theism wins - or rather, the theism that maximises transcendental causality, the intelligence that stands outside the world it creates.
Peirce was explicit enough that his theism sought to maximise immanent explanation. His God would be the least kind of transcendental being. The "divine" becomes another word for pure creative potential.
And my point is that the same goes for the atheistic materialist - once they are thinking in systems fashion. Material being is inherently spontaneous or indeterministic - as quantum theory avows.
Our two worldviews often converge in multiple ways when it comes to explanations of the physical world. Iâm in truth uplifted by this. Yet our differences lie in the metaphysical basic underpinnings. You for instance focus on vagueness as an ultimate beginning; I instead will affirm that the ultimate beginning is unknowable by us *. You view the ultimate end as a materialist form of nothingness (to not confuse it with Eastern notions of emptiness, for example); I instead will affirm that the ultimate endâthough its occurrence is contingent on the choices of all co-existing agentsâis one of awareness unshackled from the limitations/constraints of space and time (even that which pertain to mind and its thoughts), and, hence, from the boundaries of selfhood (and otherness) ⊠a juncture wherein subjectivity at last becomes, or transcends into, awareness-endowed metaphysical objectivity; else stated, where no difference remains between subject and object (not to be confused with the identity/otherness notion of objects) [* with what the ultimate beginning of space and time was maybe becoming at last apprehended by awareness at this transformative juncture of spatiotemporal finality]. Yet otherwise expressed, the contingently awaiting ultimate end is a juncture where the fist-person point of view at last apprehendsâexperientially and via logos/ratio-devoid understandingâwhat it in truth objectively is ⊠it, in my outlook, is the only possible instance of absolute knowledge.
Iâve little doubt of othersâ mistrust and distaste for this perspective Iâve been developing. Still, let it be noted that this final endâotherwise conceivable as the totality of unbounded awarenessâis not itself a deity; deities are selves separated from otherness. Nevertheless, from within the framework of my metaphysics, this âomegaâ can only be stated to exist, if nothing else then as an existent potential with teleological impact upon all sentience (be it via freewill-resultant aversion to it or the converse). Whether this âomegaâ can then be termed a theistic notion of God/G-d/Divinity or, else, an atheistic construct (due to its lacking of a deity that, as a self separated from non-self, interacts with us), I wholeheartedly presume will be in the eyes of the beholder and his/her perspectives of reality.
Where all that matters is parsimony in coherently explaining the physical world, we often can cordially debateâand, again, often enough find agreement. But our metaphysical systems are built up differently.
For now Iâd like to address aspects of this difference. By saying âyupâ in you previous post to me, I take it you agree that evolution can be partially simplified into a universal common denominator of âpreservation of identityâ. How do you propose that identity is established if not via awareness which, as awareness, identifies itself as same/identical to itself and different/non-identical to other? Now, if thereâs agreement that this identity is established via awareness, then how is the primacy of awareness (an identity known experientially) abandoned for the sake of primacy of matter (an identity known theoretically)? I anticipate that this will reduce to what is the true metaphysical nature of identity.
That's quite the post. Let me see if I can, in some way, understand what you are trying to say.
Quoting javra
The space-less point would not have a boundary itself, but as soon as you assume a multitude of such points, there must be something, reified space or some such thing, which separates one point from another. The singular point, therefore, as a whole, must be the whole of everything, the entire universe, and all of existence, because there is no principle of separation. As soon as we assume something other than the point, space surrounding the point for example, we then allow for the possibility of more points, so if the point is singular, it would be all that there is.
Quoting javra
I don't think you should be so quick to assume a spatial separation between points, because there is another way we can go, and that is a temporal separation. Imagine counting, two comes after one, and three comes after two. If the space-less point is separated from itself by a period of time, then we get such a count, one, two, three, four, five, etc.. Each number represents an appearance in time of the point, and without a premise of continuous existence of the point, through time, we have no means for concluding that the appearance of the point, at each following moment, is an appearance of the same point. Now we have a multitude of countable points which are not separated by space. They have order, identity and distinction according to the passage of time, such that one was prior to two, which is prior to three, etc.. We have a fundamental separation between entities (points), with order and positioning of these entities without even assuming the existence of space.
So we actually can have numerous points without space, and this is a fundamental temporal order, but as soon as we assume numerous points at the same time, then we need spatial separation. The points with temporal separation are identified by temporal order, but how would we identify, and distinguish between the numerous points existing at the same time? We would have to produce a geometry of co-ordinates.
Quoting javra
Suppose there is a multitude of creative points with a temporal order. There is no spatial separation between these points, so if taken together in order, they constitute a continuous self. Assumption of a self establishes that the procession of points is of the same point, at a different time, and therefore continuity of existence . Could the points create a spatial separation through the use of geometry? Can a temporal separation be inverted such that it becomes a spatial separation? By creating this spatial separation, the creative agent would create space.
Quoting javra
The repetition of the same point in time, over and over again, as temporal order, is the existence of the self. This is the temporal continuity of existence. The selfless act I believe, is to give of one's temporal continuity, in order to create a spatial unity with other points existing at the same time. The question at hand is how it comes to be that there are multiple points existing at the same time. The different points cannot be of a different universe because they exist at the same time. How does it come to be that the points may have spatial separation in the first place, that there may be numerous selves?
Again, if one seeks division, one can always find it. But I'm seeking the third path that lies between the very familiar cultural positions of materialism and theism.
So vagueness is just a word to talk about unknowable beginnings in a rational - that is, retroductive - fashion. If two complementary things came out of creation - like mind and matter, or information and dynamics, or constraints and degrees of freedom - then logically the ultimate beginning is where these two things fold back into each other as a naked unformed potential.
I like "vagueness" as that comes from Peirce's attempts to get to the root of logic, or reasoning, itself. If you want to come at metaphysics from a psychological or idealistic direction, then vagueness seems a very natural category as it speaks to states of experience before it speaks to states of being.
And vagueness is about information and uncertainty. Your point is that the beginning is unknowable. Calling it a vagueness is agreeing that it is a state of maximal uncertainty. Then putting on a physics hat, we can understand that in materialistic terms as a state of maximum quantum indeterminism. And when that in turn is understood in terms of the spatiotemporal general relativity, we can cash out a description of a vague beginning as a maximally fluctuating geometry - a "realm" with the most extreme imaginable curvature.
So that is what I am seeking. A jargon that actually does translate smoothly from one metaphysical point of view to its "other". Whether we describe creation psychologically or physically, it really means the same thing.
Quoting javra
Well, sort of. The Heat Death is the finality of natural habit becoming eternally fixed. The laws of nature are finally fully expressed.
So not exactly a case of nothingness. A state of regulated lawfulness has become definite and classical, having started out vague and quantum.
Quoting javra
Pansemiosis would be saying a similar thing, but in terms of infodynamics - consciousness not being accepted as "a thing".
So yes, in the current era, there is complex semiosis. You have life and mind on Earth doing its best to break down accidental blockages in the greater entropy flow. But in the end, dissipation will become as simple and universal as possible. All particular points of view will disappear. As cosmology describes it, there will be nothing but the cosmic event horizons and the quantum sizzle of black-body photons they radiate.
So in a sense, "consciousness" - as another word for the process of semiosis - developed and grew complex in the current era. It was located at least on one planet as a human mindfulness. And this is truly exceptional as an event. These human creatures could have the self-reflective capacity to develop a form of semiosis - abstract scientific modelling using mathematical language - that looked to speak to the existence of the Universe itself. That's stunning, no doubt.
But in the long-run, the Universe will head for ultimate semiotic simplicity again. The work will be done. It can rest, forever coasting into the future as the ultimate peacefulness of a Heat Death.
(Yep, some rhetorical flourishes of my own here. :) )
Quoting javra
Well the difference here is now that you are arguing for the bounding constraints to be caused transcendentally from without, whereas I say they arise emergently and immanently from within.
So it is in fact an evolutionary position. What works is what survives. There might have been an infinite variety of possible states of constraint. But one of them would have been the best - the best at doing the job of constraining the identity of the world in a way that caused the world to keep reconstituting itself. And so that particular way of organising things would have won through by definition. History is the story told by the winning side.
Again this is a fundamental physicalist concept. Quantum theory understands collapse as the sum over all quantum histories. And as a theory, this path integral approach has been demonstrated to more decimal places than any other physical theory - as with the calculation of the magnetic moment of an electron.
https://phys.org/news/2012-09-electron-magnetic-moment-precisely.html
So quantum theory is far weirder than any theistic metaphysics in most people's eyes. Yet there is nothing hand-waving about it. It produces the most precise predictions humans can manage. And the metaphysics it employs is about how things begin in a state of vague everythingness (or anythingness) and then that is collapsed by a principle of selection to find a stable identity. Every electron has a little more magnetic pull than it should, according to classical conception, because every electron feels the same "ghostly" contribution of all the other "kinds of interaction" it could have been.
When transcendental theism comes up with facts about the detailed state of the Universe that are as remarkable, profound and challenging, then maybe metaphysics would take more notice of its attempted ontic contributions.
Of course quantum theory is said to struggle to account for the observer half of its formal equations. So that seems to give wiggle room for "consciousness as a transcendental thing". But in fact "observation" is being reduced to thermal decoherence. The informational structure of the Universe in general is doing the (pansemiotic) observing. The path integral or sum over histories story is being generalised so that it applies to the persisting Universe as a whole, not just to the persistent identity of its fundamental particles.
So the theist wants to make the ultimate observer the mind of God. But that is just so clearly anthropomorphic as to be a non-starter.
Some theists then try to create a story of immanent divinity. The purpose which drives the development of being is a different kind of "stuff" woven into the fabric of the Universe rather than the big daddy in the sky.
But talking about a spiritual substance as the source of agency is just good old fashioned dualism still. It perpetuates a mystery.
And as I say, the cultural war is between a scientific view which in the end has dematerialised its own materialism, and a theistic view which has produced nothing of note in a metaphysical sense these past 500 years.
Where are any new ideas, let alone the evidence that stands tested to the precision of one part in 1.5 billion?
Yes, but here Iâd also be presuming block time rather than some variant of presentism (to generalize: wherein past is collective memory of what was and future is anticipatory forethought of what will most likely be given the logically non-contradictory facts/info of the present ⊠which themselves include the information regarding the past).
Given the premise that only conscious agents are metaphysically realâor, rather, that the whole of the phenomenal universe is derived in one way or another from conscious agentsâI donât find a means to substantiate block time. Again, I do find a requirement that before and after occur within the first-person point of view regarding apprehensions and creations relative to other andâin a more complex fashionârelative to any cohort of individual agents that can causally affect each other. But this would lead to a variant of presentism.
Let me know is this does not directly address youâre offered alternatives regarding temporal separations of identity.
I can paraphrase this from a different point of view: the ultimate end is the actualization of absolute order wherein a) all conflict vanishes and b) all imperfectly integral identities become an objectively perfect identity/unity.
Physical entropy--to distinguish it from IT notions--is merely the process of taking paths of least resistance toward the grand finale of this absolute order--thereby being determinstically driven teleologically toward the final end of absolute order. Negentropy, were it to approach this grand final (which is itself metaphysically determinate as end) via its top-down causal abilities, would via its own freewill become more determined/determinate in its actions toward the requirements of actualizing this ultimate end - thereby itself becoming ever-more entropic (following paths of least resistance toward absolute coherence/unity/accord/etc. given contextual constraints).
Yet there is still the same difference in the basic metaphysical underpinnings of what this final end ontically is.
Quoting apokrisis
I don't get what makes you presume this of me. To me, purpose/telos is intrinsic/immanent to awareness. That the ultimate end is determinate has arguably nothing to do with the objectively real telos (sentience will sometimes pursue other teloi) occurring transcendentally from without as something separate from self. Think of universals ... are they in any way transcendentally from without (such that they at the very least are not also simultaneously immanent to psyches)?
But you still haven't addressed my previous questions regarding the metaphysical nature of identity.
It's not a game, and it also may not even be 'theism'. What has happened is that a great deal of traditional philosophy was swept up under the umbrella of 'theism', including a lot that originally didn't conceive of itself as 'theistic' at all, but became incorporated into theology by the Church. (The Platonists were never given a vote.) The discarding of that, or the reaction against it, has many consequences, not all of them conscious or deliberate. It influences the kind of ideas you're willing to consider, often in a subtle way.
Quoting apokrisis
The changes that 'transcendental theism' are concerned with, are first-person. But then, I have already tried, and failed, to explain that. (That's one of those no-go ideas, I think.) Anyway, here you're criticizing metaphysics for being bad science, which is like criticizing a boat for being a bad car.
Now, on the other hand, I can also agree that most or all of what passes for metaphysics is (to use a technical term) otiose. But it can only be done away with from a point beyond it (as the Buddha does) - not before it has even been understood; and generally speaking, it's the latter which has happened. As a consequence, the culture is falling back to a kind of pre-human condition, even despite its technological achievements ( think that's the basic idea behind Planet of the Apes.)
Quoting apokrisis
You reckon? You know that a sizeable minority of physicists and popular philosophers hold to there being an infinity of parallel universes, as we have discussed many times. And then there's the most embarrasing graph in modern physics.
Quoting apokrisis
Other than Western civilization, now showing signs of imminent collapse.
The question of how to be a better self is an important one. But my argument - as you know - is that the self is a bio- and socio-semiotic construction. So the answers would have to be naturalistic ones, not transcendental.
Of course, that evolutionary view of religion means that one would understand in an anthropological fashion why a good religion would capture a lot of social commonsense. So one would endorse religious moral wisdom without then having to believe in the ontic claims that are meant to give transcendental authority to that wisdom.
That's a good translation.
Quoting javra
You are now talking about entropification at a more subtle level. But my view then is the dissipative structure one where entropy and negentropy go hand in hand. So rather than the usual simple-minded story - "thermodynamics = disordering" - I am talking about the self-organisation of the structure which creates those paths of least resistance.
So yes, there is an entropy gradient everything slithers down. But only because of the negentropic construction of that gradient.
The Big Bang couldn't have gone anywhere unless it had crystallised a three dimensional spatiality - a directional volume within which to cool/expand. The Universe had to build its own internal heat sink to dump all its hot energy somewhere.
As far as teleology goes, it is hardly the grand kind of purpose that folk traditionally want to credit existence with. Folk want something ringing and exalted to give meaning to the cosmos.
But so what? Maybe organising a Heat Death seems merely a "tendency" within the pansemiotic telic hierarchy of {tendency {function {purpose}}}. But it is what it is.
Quoting javra
But bio-semiosis agrees that purpose is internal and agential and first person when it comes to organisms. They have the right modelling machinery - ways to code and remember.
And then with physio-semiosis, this is what is missing. There is nothing inside a tornado with which it regulates its being, maintains its identity. All that information is contextual - part of the structure of the world in terms of the weather patterns which swept the tornado into local being.
So the semiotic approach can track telos or top-down finality across that epistemic cut separating life and mind from brute dynamics. It explains both an underlying continuity and the sharp disconnect.
Though I am by no means as in-depth in knowledge as you are when it comes to physics (QM, thermodynamics, etc. ⊠to be slightly arrogant, I instead view my strongpoints to be biology and behavior, or at least to so once have been), I find our worldviews to in large part agree on the issues youâve just mentioned.
Still, whereas you reduce metaphysics to a triadic system of relations, Iâve instead reduced metaphysics to a) a multiplicity of awareness-endowed agents (i.e., first person points of view), b) the entailed requisites of their presence (e.g., space and time as Iâve alluded to in some previous posts here) and c) a set of teloi, all being alternative means of attaining a state of being devoid of obstructions to intent ⊠with only one such alternative being ontically real and all others being, in essence, illusions of will/sentience.
I donât see why these two systems couldnât integrate in principle. In practice, however, within the metaphysics I propose there are logical consequences that so far seem to be viewed in adverse ways by the metaphysics you propose. One such logical consequence is that the body is perishable while awareness is notâstated in terms of more spiritual folk, we are physically mortal but our core remains immortal (again, no homunculi here addressed). Another logical consequence is the metaphysically cogent allowance for the possibility of a multiplicity of incorporeal realms dwelling between our physical world and the pinnacle awareness of the final end. Also stated in terms of more spiritual folk, it is metaphysically possible that different incorporeal worlds exist, possibly worlds of angels, worlds of gods, worlds of chakras, etc. [although the clincher is that, while such worlds cannot be metaphysically disproven, by definition of not being universally applicable to all corporeal beings neither can they be evidenced to be realâelse they would be as profane and physically objective as rocks or the laws of gravity ⊠this gets a bit into epistemology, empirical evidence, and the principle of falsification, as well as the metaphysics of the physically real. Still, it is not intended as a jokeâthough one could well yet maintain atheism (lack of deities) in this metaphysicsâand it ties into the logical necessity that the body (and ego) is mortal while awareness is not ⊠something that is readily evident in the nature of the final end Iâve previously addressed.]
Do you see any possibility of these givens being incorporated into the model you endorse? These givens are some of the intrinsic aspect of the model I uphold. Again, we tend to agree far more when addressing issues of physicality.
Now, what about them questions regarding metaphysical identity?
I've been turning the theory over all day long, and am quite surprised that I have not been met by a rush of contradictions - not a single one. Not yet anyway. I should feel a little skeptical about it all, but it has slotted straight in as a deeper truth. It has clipped in like a bar magnet to a fridge. It's quite bizarre how it's bypassed so many rows of mental filters that should be able to trip it up. Nothing has ever done that before. My basic stance is to believe nothing and work backwards from there.
And because I see the creativity in things as I look around, in the twisting of the tree limbs and the arrangement of the items on people's desks, I actually feel quite a strange sense of happiness, that I can't quite account for. That also should not be happening because of a theory. I think you have a convert, not that I was a great lover of survival of the fittest. As I look around I am seeing the creativity and can distinguish the difference between that and base survival.
I learnt once that a study of drug addicts found that even when hooked to the drug, they didn't take it because of a need to restore their baseline equilibrium (which of course they need to do), but because they were still chasing the high. I don't know how valid that experiment was, I think it was one of the 70's hippy experiments. I think this theory kind of fits in there.
Survival of the fittest is a baseline, getting dragged across the gravel on your back while gripping with all your might the rope that might allow you to continue to survive so long as you don't let go, kind of theory. Your creative theory, allows for the superfluous, which could very well be the true key in this whole equation. I'm going to run with it for a while and see if it truly fits in with my own ideas.
Just to change topic a bit: Rich, did you read my post in this thread on seeing sound? How does that fit in with your holographic model of the real world? Is the mind reconstructing the world as it is, or only those aspects it chooses to see? (much like the theme of this OP).
Also, why reconstruct the world when it's already right in front of you? Plus, what you see is loaded with information from lots of senses, including memory. Does the hologram model allow that?
I agreed that in evolutionary theory, the global constraint of natural selection preserves identity. So the environment of a species acts to stabilise its identity. If the environment doesn't change, then neither will the species. The causality is contextual. The environment acts as information that regulates species identity. And it can do so because there is the genetic memory to capture that as actual information. The genes can remember the identity that the environment demands. In effect, the genes can take the environment's point of view of what some individual of the species ought to be.
Dissipative structure theory is about how identity persists due to environmental negentropy. A tornado is kept alive by the thermal gradient off which it feeds. Then life has the extra trick of being able to form a model of how it ought to look from a natural selection point of view. It has a self-identity now as it can milk dissipative gradients "at will" due to its control over its own negentropic structure.
The infodynamic closest equivalent might be agreeing that every material event or degree of freedom is like an informational point of view.
If something happens, then that fixes a departure point for what may follow. In that sense, material reality is a pattern woven from the establishment of multiple points of view. If an atom decays, the event creates fresh information, an update on the physical context within which all possible points of view are determined.
But this is a metaphorical rather than literal description. The having of a point of view is not about awareness as such (awareness not being a substantial thing). It is just speaking to the particularity of being a dissipative event located at instant of spacetime.
I quite agree that experiences throughout a lifetime must affect the germ line, although I think we both would be in the minority. For example, we may expect a animal to grow quite a thick coat of fur after living in a cold environment for a long time. It makes sense. That by random chance they start growing thick coats seems a bit far fetched, and we can trace human adaptation as it moved out of Africa and into the colder regions of Europe as case in point.
I just want you to clarify one thing for me. You say.
Quoting apokrisis
How does this account for divergent evolution? In Australia, for example, a marsupial found itself isolated from many predators and evolved into all sorts of weird creatures such as wombats and kangaroos and koalas. Are you arguing that the global constraint in this instance would be competition between the marsupials rather than the environment itself? How would you define 'environment'?
Then on marsupials, you would get divergent evolution to fill all niches because of a lack of constraint. And convergent evolution due to constraints emerging. There are wolf-like and flying-squirrel like marsupials as ecosystems would be organised with similar niches to fill.
By environment, I meant everything that might impinge as information. So that would include competition and predation from other species.
It's the idea behind punctuated evolution. Whole ecosystems can maintain a collective stable balance for some time. Then there is a collective jump to another balance as the result of some perturbation.
ego eimi (Greek present tense): continuous self existence.
Conscious agency (i.e., creative power)?
To biologists?
You're right, the global constraint has been significantly loosened in a divergent system. I don't know your position on evolution, but it seems to me that by loosening the constraint there is no driver of change for the animals. The competition for resources in the vast continent was negligible. Adaptation into niches without a primary environmental driver to do so seems like a superfluous action. Do you agree with the idea that a creative evolution model and not survival of the fittest model fits best here?
But there is an environmental "driver" if there are resources sitting around needing consuming. So adaptive radiation is no big deal. Life would fill every available crevice even if that search is purely random.
Then Bergson was indeed right about the hole in early evolutionary theory - the fact that selection can only remove variety - but hardly correct about the answer for where that genetic variety might come from.
Of course Bergson was years before the machinery of DNA was discovered. We now know how the genetic deck gets shuffled.
Sorry, I missed your post on sound. If you wish to copy it here, I'll read it and see if I have any comments to share with you.
The mind filters and constructs through the brain. Each person (the individual mind) filters and constructs differently. Ditto for each form of life. No one approach is superior or inferior, just different because if creative evolution. So what is "out there" is the result of all like creative evolution. What we perceive is our own evolution. I suspect the humans are far behind other species in its ability to perceive and communicate. What humans are good at are tools.
I guess the Survival of the Fittest model would contend there is equal adaptive advantage for the kangaroo, wombat and koala, so they were all selected for. Normally the environmental forces would have wiped the variants out of existence, except in this case there is a lack of them (your global constraints). The mutant variants got lucky and be damned with thoughts of adaptive advantage.
When a species is well adapted to its environment though the Survival of the Fittest model would suggest that DNA should be trying to minimize the amount of variant alleles in the population to help ensure its continued survival. It should be increasing the conserved regions of DNA, constraining itself so that it sticks with a winning combination. Allele diversity in the population should fall, or at the least the increase should only be a gradual creep.
The Creative Evolution Model would contend also that a lack of global constraints enabled the survival of a diverse progeny. It would suggest though, that rather than being an aberration of nature that somehow got out of its intrinsic DNA constraints, it instead would have been almost impossible to stop the variance from arising because variance is the sole driver of life. The organism would have been looking to maximise its amount of variance. For this model to work there would need to be a highly conserved (constrained) portion of DNA and a highly recombinant area. We would expect the allele count in the population to rise rapidly until new species are born.
" [i]In one of the examples the man's eyes and optic nerves were functioning fine, but the visual cortex had been damaged. As a result he was 'blind' but could see. He could not create a visual impression of the environment in his cortex, but he could dodge telegraph poles and garbage bins while walking down the street by 'sensing' they were there. Of course he could only move very slowly to do this. My contention at the time was that the difference was the difference between Windows and DOS operating systems. In a Windows based GUI you could see instantaneously and react appropriately without have to sought the code.
It also give a lot more surety about what you are perceiving. I used the example that there was a time when I was sleeping and I heard a noise - a bang. As I was in the netherworld between sleep and wakefulness my mind manifested the sound visually to me. I saw the sound expanding like a sphere. Several seconds later the bang was repeated. I saw it again. It expanded at exactly the same rate to exactly the same size and I woke up immediately and said "Double barrel shotgun." The visual representation of the image gave me certainty. I had no doubt what so ever that it was the same sound. I have no idea if that's what it was (I have been asked), but I am sure of what I saw...heard.
It also makes you wonder about other animals such as bats where the dominant sense is not vision. Do they actually visualise what they see, like I did with the sound? It might mean we need to redefine the idea of vision.[/i]"
What are your thoughts on this in relation to the holographic theory?
Such an idea will have a profound impact on the way one views life and lives life. For example, every cell is living and intelligently communicating with other cells (and the bacteria and viruses that are ten times as many as cells in the body), and has the intelligence to heal (correct) if allowed to. Interference in such processes will harm not assist the body. Thus the Body adapts as a whole. The best way to have a healthy life is to nurture the health of your whole body, physically, mentally, spiritually.
The behavior of the jewel beetle that Hoffman mentions in the TED Talk doesn't make sense in biological terms either. The "evolutionary hack," as Hoffman calls it, is so maladaptive that it could potentially lead to the extinction of the species, but we can easily see that the hack, though efficient, fails in the new circumstances because of its rigidity or narrowness of scope. We can see that the environment changed too abruptly for the beetle to adapt. The hack made perfect sense as long as the beetles environment remained relatively constant. It stoped making sense after the circumstances changed.
We also know that the goal of the beetle in this situation is simply to mate and that it's not trying to understand an existentially meaningful truth or anything like that. Assuming that the purpose of the renunciate is to understand an existentially meaningful truth, or to realize such a truth, what motivates them to do so? and might not that motivation be understood in biological terms? and if it can be reductively understood in biological terms, does that present a problem for the renunciate, or rather, have the effect of rendering their purpose less meaningful?
If a leaf eating possum suddenly appears, that creates a selective advantage for trees to have poisonous leaves. Then eucalypts having evolved toxins, that creates a niche for specialist eucalypts eaters like koalas.
For every move, there is a countermove. And eventually things settle into some mutual balance that is tolerable for both.
Well, if you want to understand religious renunciation in terms misguided biological impulses, I doubt that I will be able to say anything to that, apart from prescribing a large course of study, which you may not have any interest in.
I have a very high regard for it actually, and I don't believe that understanding the motivation for it in biological terms should make anyone think less of it. Now that I think about it, there are secular forms of renunciation, forms as old as Epicurus and as new as deep ecology.
I still wonder what you believe the motivation for seeking an existentially meaningful truth is.
If anyone else finds the question interesting I'd like to know what you think.
I had composed a long reply to your above question, and am willing to post it if you are interested. It's only that you gave the impression of not being particularly interested in the answer.
Existence.
Quoting Wayfarer
to which the response came:
Quoting praxis
Well, my point was, first, that the meaning of renunciation is not a meaningful question for biology, because 'renunciation and celibacy' means the end of you, as a gene machine! But such things are often depicted in biological terms nowadays - because everything is! Evolutionary biology has become a guide to values, to how educated folk ought to think. This is why, instinctively, people will look for an evolutionary rationale for this or that human trait, including such things as religious or philosophical goals and aims and even for altruism.; everything about us must be explicable in Darwinian terms.
(For critiques of some of these points, have a read of The God Genome, Leon Wieseltier; It Ain't Necessarily So, Antony Gottlieb; Anything but Human, Richard Polt - none of whom are religious apologists by any stretch, I should add.)
Now to what renunciation actually meant in the context of the cultures that practiced it. In ancient India, where Buddhism originated, there had always been a 'culture of renunciation', whereby individuals leave home and village life for life in the forests as 'sanyasi', or renunciates. The Buddha was an example of the 'forest-dwelling recluse' and is often described as such in the early Buddhist scriptures. The aim of the renunciate life was to escape from endless re-birth in the 'wheel of birth and death' (samsara or maya) and realise the state known as mok?a (Hinduism) or Nirv??a (Buddhism).
(I don't know if there are real equivalents to this conception in Christianity, although if you study the history and the literature deeply, some parallels can be drawn. But I think it can be argued that the goal of 'spiritual liberation' is represented in the Western religious imagination by the belief in 'heaven', albeit nowadays conceived as something you'll never know this side of death. Whereas there is a strong emphasis in Eastern spirituality, on attaining 'spiritual realisation' in this life.)
So to try and draw these points together - the Darwinian rationale for human existence is that everything is predicated on survival - on what contributes to it, or detracts from it. Typically, ethical systems that are built on that (like Sam Harris') amount to some form of utilitarianism, 'the greatest good for the greatest number', and so on.
But if you really think through the philosophical implications of evolutionary theory there is no over-arching raison d'ĂȘtre for human existence. We are, according to the many popular intellectuals who argue for this point of view, the products of selfish genes whose only real purpose is to dumbly enact the survival strategies which they are driving, unknown to us. Furthermore, the origin of life itself is something very near to a chemical reaction, albeit one complex enough to sustain the so-called 'Darwinian algorithm' towards ever-higher levels of complexity.
But why this has all happened, is never discussed or even considered. Indeed the very notion of 'why' in the sense of any kind of formal or final cause, is tacitly forbidden in secular philosophies of today; goals can ever only be personal or subjective, cultural or social, as there is no cosmological reason why humans ought to exist. We're in some sense accidents of nature, the outcome of chance and necessity.
Whereas, the religious vision implies also a religious anthropology; that humans have a particular role to play in the evolution of the cosmos. Now, as explained earlier, this way of thinking about the question may not have occurred to those engaged in it at the time; it is one of the consequences of modernity, that we are able to think about these questions in such an abstract way. But, for example, the Buddha's leaving home and family, and devotion to six years of life of arduous asceticism, then his final realisation of Nirv??a, which became the basis and over-arching goal of Buddhist culture, does not, I think, make sense or stack up from the point of view of biology. At this point, he's exited the whole show! He will have no genetic successors. And this is reinforced by the emphasis on celibacy amongst the members of the Sangha (for whom sexual congress meant automatic expulsion.)
There's a curious thing I noticed once. I found a Dawkins quote, where he says:
So Dawkins, here, actually grasps the futility and uselessness of his 'selfish gene' metaphor as a guiding philosophy, and seems to pine for something else - namely, 'pure and disinterested altruism'. But he has spent the whole latter part of his career bollocking religion, which is supposed to embody that very quality! So where he thinks the wellsprings of 'pure and disinterested altruism' might actually be sought, I have no idea - maybe through science, although he ought to know that science is primarily concerned with quantitative analysis and measurement, and not with compassion or altruism.
Right, so that's why we need to dismiss block time, and the hypotheses which give rise to it, and start from scratch. Starting from scratch we have conscious agents who are creating a phenomenal universe. Everything from within the phenomenal experience indicates that time is passing, change occurs. So time passing is the number one premise or assumption of what is the case. The second premise is that there is something which is active, something which is changing. We do create spatial and temporal concepts to understand what is given by these two premises, but to validate past memories and future anticipations through referencing these spatial and temporal concepts is a different issue.
The point I was making is that if we assume the non-spatial point, and give the agent non-spatial, immaterial existence at this point, we can still conceive of the passing of time without any spatial change occurring, simply by assuming the continuous temporal existence of the immaterial agent. The "something which is active" then may be the agent itself. In this way we do not yet need to assume material existence. The next question then is what is the agent doing, and this is where we draw on the concept of creativity.
Quoting Galuchat
Right, that's how I'm trying to represent conscious agency, as creative power. If we assume an active agent with no causal necessity to move in any particular way because it is immaterial, and no inclination toward any particular intent, then all we have is creative power. What moves the will of that agent other than the desire to create?
I'm not sure; you'd have to unpack that.
Dawkins is not alone. Pretty much all the more cultured and intelligent atheists adopt a similar point of view. This is a very good book I read awhile ago about decision making and business. It's philosophical in its themes, so it's different than your run of the mill business book.
The idea is that the "selfish gene" marks our starting position. We start by being controlled by the "selfish gene" and we can only gain independence through sustained effort and education. This is similar to the doctrine often found in religions of the Fall of man. We are thrown into the world in a fallen state, and only recover and clean the surface of the mirror so to speak with time and intense effort.
So according to these atheists, we need to understand our chains - what binds us to the purposes of the selfish genes - in order to be able to free ourselves and find our own, true independence. The difference from this narrative, compared to the Platonic/Christian one is that the driving force is thymos (will) not eros (love).
And in this, the atheist is actually a spiritual person. It is a very Hegelian/Schopenhaurian spirituality, and I say that because I've started to read the two as essentially the same. Both Hegel and Schopenhauer develop a system that is driven by self-affirmation. For Schopenhauer, the will seeks to affirm itself. For Hegel, Spirit seeks its own self-affirmation in history through the negation of the other. It seeks to prove its own certainty - to make its certainty truth. Spirit never seeks the other out of love - it seeks the other to posit its own self - perhaps to find its own self in the other. It is very violent to the other.
The atheist becomes merely the - perhaps final - expression of the logos of modernity. The essence of modernity seems to be the will - and in this, our two last great metaphysicians agree. Love - altruism - is made subservient to the will. The will becomes fundamental. And this is a great inversion from the earlier Platonic thinkers where eros was the fundamental driving force, where desire was other-directed instead of self-directed. In modernity, desire is purely self-directed. Subjectivity becomes pure negativity - it is negation that is constitutive of the subject.
Indeed, the journey of the subject is fueled by this inner void that compels the subject to bring itself into being as it were. To make itself real. To transform itself - the void - into something substantial. Desire is pointed inward - desire itself is circular. Pure non-being becomes the active force. The end of desire or the will isn't the object anymore - but rather desire itself - its own self-affirmation. Obtaining the object desired is not the essential aspect anymore - rather it is the affirmation of the desire itself - which is exactly why desire is always frustrated in obtaining its object because self-affirmation knows no end.
That's why Schopenhauer decries the tragedy and cruelty of the Will. It is why Hegel states that Spirit develops only through intense suffering, and suffering is essential to its own development. It is why Marx states that capitalism devours itself. It is why we take suffering for granted in the modern world and dispense it without regard, especially to those closest to us. Even the noblest of modern thinkers can only go so far as the complete self-devouring of the Will - its quietus.
And all this ends in Nietzsche's will-to-power and Spinoza's conatus. Will turned inwards on itself. Desire is no longer conceived in terms of being caused by the external object, as it is for Platonists, where the Agathon pulls a being out of itself into the external world. But rather desire becomes the in-itself, self-sustaining and driving force of everything. It has to - for otherwise self-consciousness, which is desire, can never make itself all by itself. This is but the necessary result of the denial of transcendence (God), and the effect of spiritual pride. Desire is perverted and becomes demonic, and hence spiritual.
The self is no longer drawn out by the object through desire. Rather the self doesn't exist - it is anatta, a void. A process, not a being, constituted by desire itself. Objects become merely the opportunity for desire to objectify itself, and hence they're seen only as techne, as tools. Being - as Heidegger would say - is forgotten.
For all these thinkers, love is self-affirmation. Altruism is finding one's SELF in the other.
This is a lethe of the Platonic eros, where thymos - or will - takes its place entirely.
There appears to be something incorrect in this description. If there is an inner void, then it is impossible that desire is pointed inward, because there is nothing there to be desired. Desire is always point toward what is desired. So you have put together two opposing, or contradictory premises, to create a desire which is circular.
Either the subject has an inner void and desire is necessarily directed outward from this void, perhaps in an attempt to fill the void, or, if desire is directed inward then there must be a perceived object there which is desired. We could say that one or the other is an illusion, either that the void is an illusion, or that the inner thing desired is an illusion, but we cannot suppose the reality of both. Therefore you cannot propose such a circular desire without involving contradiction in your proposition. So your conclusion of frustration and "no end", is just a product of contradictory premises.
It's not my conclusion, I was drawing and spelling out a difference that is present in the thinking of modernity as opposed to more Ancient thinking.
Modernity does conceive subjectivity to be self-affirming desire, which is turned inwards on itself. I have explained how they have arrived at this conception, whether it is right or wrong I haven't much addressed, but I do think, same as you, that it isn't right. My post should have suggested that.
Now to address your remarks on your own terms. Here's how the argument would go.
The inner void is constitutive of desire - it is desire. Desire just is the inner void trying to affirm itself - make itself actual - and failing to do so. Desire in this conception is not conceived with reference to any external or internal OBJECT. Rather it is conceived only with reference to itself. That is why, according to Spinoza for example, or Nietzsche, will-to-power or the conatus is the essence of man. This vain striving to no end - striving for its own sake.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Here you illustrate that you're using a different conception of desire.
And as viewed apart from space and time. Both immanent and transcendent. Perhaps immanently perfect because also transcendent?
Since Hoffman and I have different interpretations, neither one of us could point to the beetles behavior as supporting our argument. And to say that there is a consensus of interpreting the beetles behavior is to reject Hoffman's argument that we construct reality. How is it that so many different perspectives come up with the same interpretation if there wasn't an objective world that we all come from and perceive similarly? Is Hoffman constructing your reality by explaining the beetles behavior as a result of his interpretation?
If you laugh or scoff at my interpretation, then you are rejecting Hoffman's argument. Why else would you laugh or scoff at my interpretation if there is no objective world where a real beetle is mating with a real bottle and there is real misinterpretaion happening and that we perceive as the truth? If reality is what we construct, then my reality is just as real as yours and the beetle's.
Yet another problem is Hoffman rejecting the beetle's construction of reality. Who is to say that we aren't misinterpreting the bottle? Who is the one with a misinterpretation - us or the beetle? And to even say that there is misinterpretation going on is to say that there is a reality outside that we aren't perceiving correctly - that there really is a bottle instead of a female there that beetle is mating with and the beetle is the one misinterpreting, not us.
Hoffman, and those supporting his argument, don't even seem to realize their own contradictions. The fact that intelligent people can debate this for 16 pages is ridiculous.
We, like all living things, have inherent values or primal drives encoded in our genes. We might label these drives 'evolutionary hacks', as Hoffman does with the jewel beetle. If it's anthropomorphic to say that the male jewel beetle values things that are dimpled, glossy, and brown, it's because we're applying our evolutionary hack (ability to form abstract concepts, use language, plan and make long range goals, etc.) to them. Beetles don't appear to have a concept of value, though they must have some kind of non-linguistic concept for dimpled, glossy, and brown. Significantly, they also don't appear to have concepts for life, death, self, and suffering. So as far as I can tell it would be just as false to say that jewel beetles value life as it would be to say that a clock values time, neither possessing a self-concept, if nothing else, to reflect meaning. By avoiding danger, maintaining their health by eating and drinking, mating, etc., from our perspective beetles appear to value life, but it may be more accurate to say that they're simply attracted to things that, for example, are what we would distinguish as 'dimpled, glossy, and brown'.
Reflecting on it now I suppose it may be going too far to say that we inherently value life because I don't know if it's possible for a human to be raised in such a way as to not develop concepts for life, death, self, and suffering. These concepts appear to be embedded in every culture that I know of.
I believe that our evolutionary hack or ability to form concepts like life, death, self, and suffering is the fundamental cause of our existential anxiety.
Quoting Wayfarer
Archetypally speaking, a hero with a thousand faces, the journey ending with the hero's return and a benefit to the community. The benefit, in my opinion, can have both practical value, in strengthening community bonds and unifying goals (increasing odds for survival and gene propagation), and transcendent value by relieving existential anxiety, which we may owe to our 'evolutionary hack'.
Quoting Wayfarer
Why must there be? Is our predicting, goal seeking minds compelling us to find purpose and meaning in things that exceed our current ability to understand? We can just not know. We can just 'chop wood and carry water'. To paraphrase Alan Watts, life is not a journey, it's a dance.
Quoting Wayfarer
My bolding of the keywords "supposed to."
Quoting Wayfarer
To name one example, you're not buying Sam Harris's take on human values and science?
I'm not a Harris fan, he's a dogmatic materialist. Have a read of this blog post - yes it is an anti-atheist site but raises important questions.
Buddhism or any other religion is concerned with the domain of objective values, that there are real goods, that are not culturally- or socially-conditioned.
Well sure, to conceive of desire in this way, as if it were a thing in itself, simply "desire", without recognizing the fact that desire always involves something which desires, as well as the desire for something, and does not ever exist as a thing in itself, then you might conclude that it is a vain striving to no end. But that 'is only because you've made a false representation of desire, by separating it from the thing desired, when in reality desire does not exist without a thing desired. So of course it's going to end up looking like a vain striving to no end, because it has been separated from its end in this description. But that's a false description
\
Yes, that's quite correct because the one you've provided is false. We should dismiss yours and examine mine to see if perhaps it is right. If not, we should continue to seek a better one.
You do realise that this is one of those 'first principles' which have to be seen, and cannot be deduced, right? If someone lacks the noetic insight into their own desire, then they cannot be 'reasoned to' it. It's disagreement over basic premises. Both Plato and Aristotle struggled with this problem of how to arrive at correct/true first premises.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
The more interesting thing to look at, is why does one end up believing such a true falsehood?
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
I do tend to see desire as something produced in us - or aroused in us - by the object desired. But this is to give power at a distance as it were to the object desired. It is to accept some sort of teleology, where the object desired can orient my being towards it. Not many people today would be willing to accept that.
I believe that all premises must be reasoned, most come from inductive reason. If a "first principle" is not reasoned, then it is most likely random and unreasonable.
Quoting Agustino
You mean how does someone believe a contradiction? That's what "true falsehood" is, contradiction, and the other description you provided involved contradictory premises. It's actually quite common for people to believe contradictory things. When we just accept the words without properly understanding what the words mean, we can have that problem. In other words, when we simply believe what has been said, without taken the time to properly understand it, we can believe contradiction.
Quoting Agustino
The "object" desired is always a state of being within the person who desires, so there is no such thing as the power of an external object causing the desire. The perceived external object is just a means to the end, the end being the true object. That's why there is most often many different external objects which will satisfy the same desire, but we focus our desire on an object which appears to be convenient due to habit, proximity or whatever.
That depends what you mean by "inductive reason". Can you give an example of this, or explain it further?
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Wait. No, this isn't it. The "true falsehood" is the one that is actually believed in its meaning. It is the one that would prevent the person who believes it from seeing and apprehending reality as it is. It's not merely the acceptance of words whose meaning isn't fully grasped.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
I disagree. Take the love of God - it is directed towards God. God is the final cause of the whole of creation, thus the whole of creation is "drawn" to God as it were.
and that not even those are real, because behind them - in a sort of SUBLIMINAL - there is my keyboard and my fingers writing back again the same things about Hoffman and his icons. At this point, however, I could say that these words are not the reality, since I translated with the support of an online software from Italian into English. Finally, even in their Italian version, I always take off all my responsibility, because these words, conventional, are not reality, but only the interface of my thoughts, logical forms, before they are representated into words. In short, as for me, I need to ask Hoffman to develop a system of metaphors that is most compelling.
I believe the universe is conscious as well but that is opening another can of worms.
Hoffman has responded to many of the objections raised against his earlier presentations in his latest book : The Case Against Reality. I recently posted a book review on my blog, that might help to clear-up some of the misunderstandings of his modern version of Platonic Idealism, and Kant's Transcendental Idealism . Unfortunately, the commentary in the review is based on my own unorthodox worldview, which some people have trouble grasping, because it looks at the world from a similar unconventional and unfamiliar perspective.
By the way, Hoffman doesn't deny Ultimate Reality, he just shows that it ain't what you perceive, but what you conceive. He doesn't claim that the world itself is conscious, but that Consciousness rather than Matter is the essence of Reality. As a professional scientist, he avoids going into the religious implications of that assertion.
Against Reality : http://bothandblog6.enformationism.info/page21.html
He doesn't. It's a metaphor.
cognitive science needs mind, we study the brain to understand the mind.