Incomplete Nature -- reading group
"Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerged from Matter is a 2011 book by biological anthropologist Terrence Deacon. The book covers topics in biosemiotics, philosophy of mind, and the origins of life. Broadly, the book seeks to naturalistically explain "aboutness", that is, concepts like intentionality, meaning, normativity, purpose, and function; which Deacon groups together and labels as ententional phenomena." -- Wikipedia
I tend to approach topics amorphously and nonlinearly, which has advantages, but not for leading a reading group. @schopenhauer1 this book was your suggestion, do you have a preference for how we read it?
If not, I would say we could start with the introduction and go from there.
I tend to approach topics amorphously and nonlinearly, which has advantages, but not for leading a reading group. @schopenhauer1 this book was your suggestion, do you have a preference for how we read it?
If not, I would say we could start with the introduction and go from there.
Comments (103)
Descartes split mind and matter into distinct realms. The amazing success of the physical sciences eroded the realm of the non-physical and the trajectory seemed to point toward its elimination altogether. When things like meaning and intention remained unexplained by science, the response to this delay was to either send up a flag requesting methodological dualism, or to conclude that if the physical sciences don't explain it, it must not exist.
Where Chalmers seeks to just plop these unexplained aspects of consciousness into science as something fundamental, Deacon wants to explore it from the angle of absence.
I have a feeling this is going to end up being neo-Kantian, but I'm happier with it than the last book I read on this topic, which was an evolutionary angle on the emergence of consciousness.
Any other thoughts?
Yes, can you provide Deacon's account of Cartesian Theater, gollum legend, and Homunculus fallacy?
Sure! Give me a couple of days.
I don't know about "Neo-Kantian", but I now know something about "Aboutness". :joke:
The Power of Absence : In order to establish the plausibility of metaphysical causality, Deacon had to weed-out unwarranted assumptions of both physicalism and materialism.
http://bothandblog4.enformationism.info/page17.html
Sorry for the delay, I am still waiting for the library to retrieve and transfer this book for me. After looking at the snippets available online, one thing became clear which is that this subject is mostly unfamiliar to me.
Since Deacon is creating abstract philosophy he makes up and redefines many terms to cover the topic. An interesting introduction is to read the book starting with the glossary.
The Metaphysics of Causation : What must a world be like, to host causal relations?
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/causation-metaphysics/
Haven't checked in for a bit. How is the reading going?
"Quantity could be understood in both positive and negative terms, thus defining a number line. Equations could represent geometric objects and vice versa—and much more. After centuries of denying the legitimacy of the concept—assuming that to incorporate it into reasoning about things would be a corrupting influence, and seeing its contrary properties as reasons for excluding it from quantitative analysis—European scholars eventually realized that these notions were unfortunate prejudices. In many respects, zero can be thought of as the midwife of modern science. Until Western scholars were able to make sense of the systematic properties of this non-quantity, understanding many of the most common properties of the physical world remained beyond their reach."
That's fascinating.
Ahh! This is such a great book!
"Experiences and values seem to inhere in physical relationships but are not there at the same time. This something-not-there permeates and organizes what is physically present in these phenomena. Its absent mode of existence, so to speak, is at most only a potentiality, a placeholder."
Experience, as Heidegger points out stands for us against a background of Nothing. Individual aspects of experience, like hunger or anger takr on meaning, again, because of what it's not.
Do you know what I mean?
[quote=Terrence Deacon]despite the obvious and unquestioned role played by functions, purposes, meanings, and values in the organization of our bodies and minds, and in the changes taking place in the world around us, our scientific theories still have to officially deny them anything but a sort of heuristic legitimacy. This has contributed to many tortured theoretical tricks and contorted rhetorical maneuvers in order either to obscure this deep inconsistency or else to claim that it must forever remain beyond the reach of science. We will explore some of the awkward responses to this dilemma in the chapters that follow.
More serious, however, is the way this has divided the natural sciences from the human sciences, and both from the humanities. In the process, it has also alienated the world of scientific knowledge from the world of human experience and values. If the most fundamental features of human experience are considered somehow illusory and irrelevant to the physical goings-on of the world, then we, along with our aspirations and values, are effectively rendered unreal as well. No wonder the all-pervasive success of the sciences in the last century has been paralleled by a rebirth of fundamentalist faith and a deep distrust of the secular determination of human values.[/quote]
(2011-11-20T23:58:59). Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerged from Matter . W. W. Norton & Company. Kindle Edition.
Still mulling over chapter zero.
He says:
"Centuries of battling against explanations based on superstition, magic, supernatural beings, and divine purpose have trained us to be highly suspicious of any mention of such intentional and teleological properties, where things are explained as existing “for-the-sake-of” something else. These phenomena can’t be what they seem. Besides, assuming that they are what they seem will almost certainly lead to absurdities as problematic as dividing by zero."
He's saying that predicaments like the Hard Problem result from years of fighting the Church, basically, or fighting superstition that impeded science.
But arent those years of hyper-materialism also how we arrived at the concepts of say, intention, in the first place? A longing for complete reduction of everything to classical physics put a neon light on the aspects of existence that defy reduction.
I don't think the emergence of zero as a concept had that kind of background, did it?
No. Intention as the cause of goal-oriented human behavior was defined long before the anti-religious hyper-materialism emerged to disentangle Science from Catholic Hegemony. :smile:
Note -- Daniel Dennett was talking about "aboutness" when he coined the concept of "intentional stance"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intentional_stance
Intention : In philosophy, intentionality is the power of minds and mental states to be about, to represent, or to stand for, things, properties and states of affairs.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/intentionality/
Intention : For Aristotle, orexis or desire is the cause of all animal motion, including human motion. Prohairesis is a deliberate desire for the means to an end. It is a principle of action peculiar to mature human beings capable of deliberating, as it is the intention which is the result of deliberation.
https://dlib.bc.edu/islandora/object/bc-ir%3A101290
Much truth in that. The foundation of the Royal Society, the first truly scientific society, explicitly excluded consideration of anything 'metaphysical' or of interest to priests. Early modern science and philosophy was constantly wishing to differentiate itself from 'scholastic philosophy' which was the dogmatic theology that incorporated Aristotelian philosophy and Ptolmaic cosmology, among other things.
As a result of all of this certain ideas or themes in philosophy became taboo, specifically because of their association with religion. Chief among them were doctrines of creation, the alternative account being the naturalist explanations. But this became a dogma (or a 'no-god-ma' :-) ) in its own right.
This is about history and cultural dynamics, not whether either side is 'right' or not.
Quoting Gnomon
Specifically so he could dispose of the inconvenient truth of intentionality. He fails. See two current threads on Dennett.
Yes. He was like those who deny the existence of immaterial Minds, even as they use their abstract reasoning to produce imaginary reasons why there is no such thing as Consciousness or Soul. But he made a good point about "aboutness". :smile:
Dennett constantly speaks of the "aboutness" of intentionality
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intentional_stance
Note the very first sentence: first you decide to treat the object whose behavior is to be predicted as a rational agent.
Dennett’s strategy is: what is required of an object so that we can say it exhibits subject-like behaviours? But this already misses, or rather obfuscates, the entire point of ‘aboutness’ and ‘intentionality’; it is only ever exhibited by subjects for whom there are objects of attention. How the subject behaves is then a derivative, third-party perspective on reportable behaviours; but it does not come to terms with what intentionality is.
What point is Deacon trying to make in regard to "absentials"?
As with Pattee, Bateson, Peirce and many others who speak for a biosemiotic approach, the transformative physicalist insight is to see how complexity in the form of life and mind is all about the interaction top-down "informational causes" and bottom-up "material causes".
DNA changed the game for reductionist physics. It showed how information is part of a physicalist ontology as a way an organism can stand outside its own material being so as to regulate that being.
The import of that has become ever better understood. In particular, it is the way that an informational code can in fact interact in way that stabilises material dynamics which is explained by Peirce's story on semiosis as a mechanism. A system of interpretance.
So when Deacon makes a big thing about absences, he is highlighting that the material aspect of the world has no choice but to be what it is. It's being represents what exists.
But then information gets its supra-causal power by being able to represent what in fact does not exist. Memories, habits, pathways, molecular machinery, and other forms of semiotic mechanism can represent what is not present, what is merely possible, what is indeed materially present but able to be suppressed or ignored.
Reductionist physics does talk about emergence and other varieties of causal holism. But it doesn't really work because they are only talking about bottom-up emergence. And that can still only produce that which materially exists. There is no real room for intention, design, choice - all the qualities that would characterise a living and mindful organism.
But having an information aspect to biological systems now makes possible the capacity to construct absences. Acting top down from the realm of symbols and interpretation - the realm of genes, neurons, words - an organism can constrain what is the material case. Information can limit reality so that some things are definitely not there. Material physics can be given a chosen shape.
So biosemiosis is a way to re-introduce teleology to science without having to claim anything spooky.
The material world just is whatever it is. But organisms have an epistemic cut, an interpretive machinery, that allows them to make sure a wide variety of possible material states are prevented from existing. And in that act of selection, that must leave the "desired outcome" as the actual result.
So material cause can be seen as the positive action - matter flowing into some natural pattern. And informational cause sits over the top of it – constraining the possibility space in such a fashion that what happens becomes a reasoned act of choice.
It means that all of material physics was true. All that science still works.
And now the project for semioticians is to create the models that account for the other half of the equation when it comes to complex systems that exhibit what we would call life and mind.
After all his astute reasoning on "Consciousness", he concluded that it is an "introspective illusion". But even "illusions" are mental states, and "introspection" has no visual organ.
Apparently, "Intention" is also illusory. I agree with most of his reasoning, except for his vain attempt to remain within the margins of Materialism, while dealing with ethereal Mental Abstractions. In his favor though, he tries to avoid the extreme stance of Reductive Materialism, which denies the reality of all Qualia --- the "stuff" that makes life worth living.
Materialist philosophers are all over the map in their contortions around the ancient notion of a Conscious Soul. Since, on principle, they eliminate an immaterial Soul as a possible candidate for the seat of Consciousness and Intention, they are still waiting for empirical science to find a viable alternative. In my own thesis, I propose an alternative that is real but not physical. In deference to materialist sensibilities, I call it "the Self", but define it in terms of Universal Information. It performs the same function as a "common sense" Soul, but naturally emerges instead of being divinely added to a body. It's a mental Self-Image that serves as the perspective point for all behaviors --- including the Intentional Stance. :smile:
Human consciousness is the same, says Dennett. "It's the brain's 'user illusion' of itself,"
Eliminative Materialism : In the context of materialist understandings of psychology, eliminativism stands in opposition to reductive materialism which argues that mental states as conventionally understood do exist, and that they directly correspond to the physical state of the nervous system.An intermediate position is revisionary materialism, which will often argue that the mental state in question will prove to be somewhat reducible to physical phenomena—with some changes needed to the common sense concept.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eliminative_materialism
Power of Absence : And I view his “Absence” as a religiously neutral term for what used to be known as incorporeal “Spirit”.
http://bothandblog4.enformationism.info/page17.html
I'm at Golems chapter. He is essentially trying to discredit both preformationist and eliminativist theories, specifically focusing on computational theories of mind. Does anyone want to comment on his criticism of computational theory of mind? This would be around page 100 in the edition I'm using.
Could one of you, or anybody, explain why zero was a "troublesome" concept to integrate into science? Was the issue forced by the success of math in making predictions?
What I could find:
Pope Sylvester II (c.? 946–12 May 1003), a French-born scholar and teacher who ended up ruling the Papal States from 999 to his death was aware of the Arabic numeration system, which he had studied in Catalonia.
The first formal introduction of the new numeration system was done by Leonardo Fibonacci. In his Liber Abaci (1202), Fibonacci introduced the Modus Indorum (the method of the Indians) or base-10 positional notation to Italians, and Europeans:
Quoting Leonardo Fibonacci
His book advocated the use of the digits 0–9, and of place value, as he had learnt from Arabic merchants in his youth. The new system was much more powerful and faster than Roman notation, and Fibonacci was fully aware of this. Until this time Europe used Roman Numerals, making modern mathematics almost impossible. This put European merchants at a disadvantage to Arab ones, precisely in places like Bugia where a lot of North-South Mediterranean trade happened. So his book was a great success amongst European merchants and bankers, who could now compute interest rates as fast as any Arab out there...
But the invention was poorly received by the general public because the people could no longer understand the calculations that merchants made. In 1280, Florence even banned the use of Arabic numerals by bankers. The zero was decried as confusing and difficult to understand, to the point that the Arabic al sifr would lead of course to the word "zero" in English but also to "cypher": secret code, from Italian "cifra", French "chiffre".
Al ??fr in Arabic, means literally: the void.
Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea : https://www.amazon.com/s?k=zero&i=stripbooks&ref=nb_sb_noss
I can't remember the detail of his position - his book came out 10 years ago. But to the degree he understands biosemiosis, the critical difference is that a biological system employs "computation" to stabilise its "being in the world". Biology has intentionality baked in by its need to rule over material instability.
So life and mind - as the intentional attributes of an organism - are this hybrid thing of information and dynamics. Computers - under the Turing Machine definition – are just plain informational mechanism.
Now you could broaden your definition of computation to start incorporating some biosemiosis - some biological realism. That is what neural network architectures attempt.
But computational approaches to theory of mind play fast and loose with this critical distinction, largely because the messy facts of biology and neuroscience seem so irrelevant if you are a computer scientist. You don't know what you don't know.
However this is what to beware of. Biosemiosis doesn't exclude "computation" as an important part of its theory of life and mind. It just says that a Turing Machine notion of computation is something else.
A TM is designed so as to be materially divorced from reality. A biosemiotic system is evolved to be intimately connected to the construction of its material reality.
The two ontologies are so wildly at odds that there is no point making "computational" arguments until you can show you get the difference.
"Seife urges his readers to peer through the zero down into the abyss of absolute emptiness and out into the infinite expanse of space."
:up: got it
Quoting Olivier5
I love that. The void shows up in Einstein's stuff as part of his thought experiments
Quoting khaled
You're saying numbers had to become abstract in order for zero to be accepted?
In maths, zero doesn't stand for the void. It is the additive identity element - just as 1 is the multiplicative identity. Anything plus 0 is unchanged. Just as anything times 1 is unchanged.
So where this leads is a notion of symmetry and symmetry-breaking that is critical to scientific models. The positive number line can be mapped on to the negative numbers by a reflection through the zero point. And so a notion of "threeness" can be mapped on to the notion of "a lack of threeness" as a justified symmetry operation.
Once you understand the role of the identity element as a fulcrum of symmetry, rather than as a void, then useful mathematical results follow. Presences can be matched up to absences. Complex directions in space and time coordinates can be simply inverted or reversed.
Note also the practical uses once the modelling of nature became reduced to the 1/0 of a digital code, or the yes/no of any bivalent logical argument.
It really has nothing directly to do with nature and everything to do with formulating a reductionist view of nature. And from there, imposing a controlling mechanical design on nature.
So realising that zero was the key to unlocking a higher level of generality - a new level of symmetry - in counting operations, was crucial to the rise of the modern mechanistic mindset. A way humanity could enslave nature to its desires.
But the tricky part about biosemiosis is the realisation that nature was already playing its own version of this game. Just a much more sophisticated one in being "organismic" rather than "purely mechanical".
This animation of the molecular machinery that regulates the thermodynamic instability of every living cell gives an idea of just how literally life depends on having one foot in the informational/mechanical side of things.
And now imagine humans trying to replicate this kind of organic complexity with their clumsy reductionist science.
It seems to me that the idea of zero enables the grasp of orders of magnitude, so I wouldn't see it as "troublesome" but quite the opposite, as preeminently useful.
I read that Deacon objects to the overly simple linear computer modeling for either the massive neuronal cross-wiring of the brain or for the unknown complex higher functionality of the mind. In the example of Big Blue's defeat of chess champion Kasparov, Deacon says that the computer was loaded with the all relevant historical games and the computer's speedy and deep calculations just wore the human into exhaustion. In other words, it was more a competition of computational speed and not of mental power.
To me, the real test would be one of judgment, creativity, and adaptability.
I am curious how Deacon develops 'absential' as the centerpiece of his theory. When thinking of holes in wholes, Emmentaler Swiss cheese or a mathematical doughnut comes to mind. These are fixed though, there can't be much action there. The example of the red blood cell is intriguing from evolutionary, structural physical chemistry, and functional perspectives. Just the right hole for an oxygen atom for transport is shaped and preserved, and the atom is loosely held by the cell's molecular structure so it can later be released. But absences in other instances could also be environmental or symbiotic in some sense.
That's what the guy says in the other book I'm reading. :grin:
I suppose I will read more about this as I move forward in the book. It sounds like he's saying a TM is all form and no matter. Matter drives form and is messier perhaps. Of course, the overriding thing he hasn't gotten to is how absence of material processes create the form, yadayada which I am sure is the bulk of the book. He does a good job priming his main point with a lot of what isn't his theory, which keeps you reading I guess to see what indeed is the his main thesis and how it will spread the gamut to the hard question of consciousness. That is the part I am more skeptical he is going to accomplish.
It just seems to me that at the end, we are going to get a lot of what the machinery behaves like, but then lose how behavior becomes something like the internal colors and textures of our internal subjective self.
I think a lot of the debate is conflating mechanism with experience. The eliminativists want to keep point to one part of the equation and keep forgetting to address the part we are actually trying to figure out which is "what" (metaphysically) is experience as opposed to the matter which is causing or associated with the experience. It seems to me that even behavior patterns of matter and their statistical tendencies for this or that, are still not quite getting at the question. It does provide interesting ideas for how biology can be considered information rather than mechanistic, but that's not answering the question I am interested in.
Do you have any idea at all what a possible answer to that question could look like, or what (observation or logic) could possibly justify it?
As I say, I can't remember Deacon saying anything surprising so far as biosemiosis went.
But the way I view this is to stress that semiosis depends on top-down informational constraints on bottom-up material possibilities. So this means that the right kind of material foundation for a living and mindful system is one that has critical instability. The material aspect must be in some kind of delicate equilibrium balance that both makes it essentially formless, but also eminently tippable. Because that is how informational mechanisms can step in and deliver the tiny nudge needed to tip the material dynamics in one direction vs another direction.
The obvious everyday example is how tossing an enzyme into a metabolic pathway can drive the reaction faster. The chemistry is some kind of equilibrium equation in which one thermodynamic direction is statistically favoured over the other. But the genes can make proteins that then apply a purposeful regulatory framework of over that dynamic, switching the pathway on or off as best serves the needs of the organism.
So life and mind boil down to this trick. The natural world offers up tippable states of matter. There are fundamental sources of instability that can then be harnessed - given some stable and definite direction - by a machinery of information. It is the lack of form and purpose in the states of matter that permit form and purpose to become the purview of the informational machinery.
In terms of "absentials", this just means that some state of matter could accidentally go in a near infinite number of directions. If it is a complex and unstable network of relations, then chaos rules. Tippping one direction is as good as another.
But once under informational regulation, all those other trajectories become potentials being actively and intentionally suppressed. The matter can no longer lurch off randomly. It is being nudged so that it keeps falling towards the right outcome.
If we zoom in on any material process in a living system, then it still seems to be just some kind of statistical event. Every metabolic reaction can still reverse itself. An enzyme is just tilting the odds in favour of the house. So - unlike a machine or computer - the material process is not being actually controlled in the positive deterministic sense.
And that is where talk of absences would fit. The negative space view. What is critical in semiosis is the ability to constrain the material system - limit other outcomes. And that is how on the whole, the desired outcome, the desired material form, is sure to emerge into concrete being.
That is why consciousness is not about an attentional spotlight that illuminates the world for some ghostly viewer. Instead, an attentional spotlight is what emerges from the active suppression of every other possible state of interpretative response. We are conscious of "something" because the brain has just filtered out "everything else" that might have been the case.
As a general principle, the brain is assaulted by a barrage of noise in every instant - all the sensory energies flooding from every direction. And its job is to suppress the noise to discover the meaningful signal it can pick out of the chaos. You can record the wave of excitation followed by the wave of inhibition as the brain makes this focusing transition to a state of attentional connection.
Quoting schopenhauer1
Of course. But that is a prejudice bred by believing in a computational model of mind. You are presuming the world is all signal, all data, not all noise, all material dynamics. And so the job of the brain becomes to form a display or representation of this data - for some ghostly homunculus to then "experience" ... and probably then issue some spooky mental commands that cause the material body to jerk into neural and muscular reaction.
If the brain's job is to instead impose that kind of attentional and behavioural particularity on the chaotic energetic assault of an environment, then this is quite a different thing. It is by successfully being in the world - regulating its flows - that we develop this sense of being conscious. Our actions construct an "us" that is rendering a "world" as some meaningful structure of being. There is a place to be understood in terms of "its" colours and textures.
Quoting schopenhauer1
Yeah. But that is a question that can arise only because of a materialist/mechanical world view. It make sense because you also accept that the Cosmos is essentially a dumb Newtonian and Darwinian machine.
That is Cartesianism in a nutshell. If the Universe is dumb matter, that justifies an endless pining for the absent thing which is the mindful soul, the moving spirit, the machine's missing ghost.
But biosemiosis is a different paradigm. With it, science has moved on. Talk of qualia and suchlike become redundant relics. Empty questions challenging the sterile notion of physical materialism.
That seems to summarize the dilemma of the social sciences. When they study minute mechanistic processes they get funded and succeed with many small publishable results. When they study meaningful, experientially relevant topics the results are washed out by the inherent multi-faceted complexity of the subject matter and consequently lose funding.
Does this mean that experience is not intentionally directed but emerges as an act of subconscious attentional focus?
It is more complicated. But as a general principle, yes. Your brain tries to do everything at the level of subconscious habit. And then by default, that which is too novel or too demanding to be handled by automatic routine becomes escalated for a full brain attentional response.
The complication is that whatever catches your attention this way then becomes the intentional frame guiding your next moments of action. So conscious intention exists ahead of the fact in any largely predictable world. It is only when the world is found to have a surprise that there needs to be an intentional reset.
So I head to the kitchen because I'm thirsty for a beer. I could be thinking of half a dozen other things while my feet tread a well-worn path and my hands reach for a familiar location.
In a general way I have made an intentional choice after the idea I both want, and am deserving, of that beer. That is, I have created an attentional constraint of my behaviour that for the moment rules out other things - watering the garden, feeding the cat, whatever. And in that focused state - a state carried by working memory - I can let all the detail, all the supplementary motor routines, just kick in without further conscious choice.
The key thing for attention was to eliminate the many alternative goal states I could have been in. Then as much as possible, learnt subconscious routines are left to deliver the goods.
This is efficient. It takes about a fifth of a second to execute a skilled habit. That is how it is possible to return a 100mph tennis ball serve with practiced ease. It takes half a second to have a full brain attentional reaction to that same tennis ball. That is why the ball flies past the beginner before they have time to take its presence in.
So when it comes to the "machinery" of the mind, this is all well understood neuropsychology. And it illustrates the principle that the brain does not exist to represent the world as a conscious display. The brain is forever trying to learn how to reduce its awareness of the world to some collection of well-honed automatisms that by-pass any need for thought and deliberation.
Of course, the world always has surprises. So in any half second, there is always something a little bit novel to latch on to. Or at least we need to be shifting our eyes towards the beer bottle we mean to grasp just so our hands get enough last millisecond subconscious docking data.
The cartoon version of consciousness is that the mind makes choices and then the body executes its decisions.
But it takes a tenth of a second just to subconsciously hear the starter's pistol fire in a sprint race, half a second to attend to the fact in any conscious way. That is how they detect false starts in international rules.
So any sense of making conscious choices is about the pre-thought that can form some goal - like clearing the mind and getting set to make the fastest race start. And then afterwards - half a second later - we can begin to credit ourselves for getting out the blocks right at the crack of the pistol as a self-centred reconstruction of the facts. We can notice that there is a memory for the sound and for our body leaping into action. So now, we can retroject ourselves as the entity making the choices and commanding the muscles.
Does a computer have the equivalent of either attentional or habitual processing, let alone a complex interaction between the two?
A Turing Machine certainly doesn't. But certain neural network approaches do try to build in this kind of biological realism.
So the whole debate can't come into focus until we can compare and contrast functional architectures. And biosemiosis is about the very different functional architecture that organisms employ.
If my memory serves me right, you used to talk of top-down process working in conjunction with bottom-up processes.
In your post you address, more or less, bottom-up process that result in what we experientially appraise to be voluntary behaviors that do not require cogitations on our part to accomplish. You’re sitting on a stool; you feel an impetus to drink a beer; then you voluntary ask the bartender for one; this without cogitations of whether or not you should drink a beer rather than a cola or a whiskey, nor with cogitations of which word choice to utilize in order to accomplish the feat of conveying what you want to the bartender (etc.). All good. A multitude of habitual behavior process kicking in. Given that our conscious awareness is not identical to our total mind’s awareness - which in laymen terms consists of both subconscious and unconscious awareness and cognitive activities, with neither the sub- nor unconscious mind (where differentiated) being the conscious awareness we as egos hold - it only makes sense that our non-conscious minds do a heck of a lot without any conscious input; and that this should be observable neurologically. (We, for one example, don't choose, intend, what to perceive; our non-conscious minds, in their interaction with our environment, are from where these percepts develop.)
Yet, when it comes to deliberation - wherein a choice is to be consciously taken between two or more alternatives (with these two or more alternatives themselves being products of the sub/unconscious mind) - the consciously aware ego can (or else cannot) hold top-down effects upon the substratum of its total mind and, therefore, upon the neurological correlates of the respective CNS.
I’m curious at this point. Are you now upholding that consciousness (as differentiated from the total mind within which it is embedded) cannot hold top-down effects upon the CNS via its consciously performed choices during times of conscious deliberation?
Concordantly, how are we to neurologically pinpoint such top-down effects by a consciousness when we can’t even neurologically pinpoint consciousness? … here alluding to the combination aspect of the binding problem.
This could all be part of what you meant by "it is more complicated". To me, at least, top-down process of consciousness - when they occur - do touch upon an important aspect of our cognition.
I wouldn’t agree that habit level processes are unconscious and thus that only attentional processing is conscious.
When driving on automatic pilot, your eyes are open and your brain processes the sensations. But because you allowing habit to control the actions, it all just kind of flows through you in an unremarked and unremembered way. There is no deliberation and so no need to form a working memory to juggle options or debate alternatives. You just respond to the road conditions, forgetting as fast as things happen.
So operating purely at habit level, there is awareness - of the unremarked and immediately discarded kind.
Thus - in keeping with the neurology - I talk about attentional vs habitual processes. Consciousness is an ambiguous term, even further confused by the fact that human self awareness or introspective consciousness is a socially constructed and language based skill.
So consciousness has at least three levels of complexity that need to be distinguished. And none of them have anything to do with the usual passive data display conception of experience.
Is this the reaction to a bucket of icy cold water or a charging tiger which are animal responses held in common with a paramecium or an earthworm, or is it deliberated act of educated judgment, creativity, adaptation?
Quoting apokrisis
I wouldn’t agree with that either.
Humans also have reflexes. Put a hand on a hot plate and you will jerk it off as a spinal level reaction.
and all
End-directed forms of causality, or purpose, is clearly an aspect of life and consciousness. The term "abstential" is supposed to pick out the object of purposeful behavior.
I'm not sure life and consciousness are exclusice about that, though. A positively charged object is understood in terms of what it's missing. Right?
Is thrre a particular part of book you are referring? Also can you elaborate your last statement about positively charged?
Yes. That seems to be the meaning of Deacon's term "Absence" ; the pull of the future, so to speak. Apparently, only humans can imagine a non-existent future state, and then work to make it real. So the purpose of Purpose is to convert Absence (lack, want) into Presence (possession, fulfillment). :smile:
Then he points to the abstential associated with the child's purpose.
I dont know if it diminishes his point, but absence is an aspect of a lot of things, such as a valley or a positive charge which results from atoms that are missing some of the electrons they would need to be neutral. True?
Yes, but not magically all at once, as is usually implied by teleology. Nature is infinitely complex with many levels of complexity and we are rarely smart enough to look past just one level at a time. This is a valid reason to be suspicious of broad claims, even if eventually they turn out to be correct. For instance, impressed but not convinced, both Hume and Kant proposed their own alternatives to Newton's Laws.
Hemoglobin's ability to transport oxygen in the blood stream [p.9] can be understood either for the single blood cell or for oxygen transport functionality one level above. The cell is a structure that houses a hemoglobin molecule to fit oxygen like a glove and just the right amount of energy will cause the release of the oxygen at any peripheral organ. It serves until it dies. The functionality is to have enough working blood cells in total for all organs to survive.
The Zeno example of infinite divisibility may not have a philosophical solution. It was solved after 150 years of intense search by the greatest minds for mathematics as the Fundamental Theory of Calculus. For physics, quantization as Planck length-time guarantees a minimum step where division must end. To my thinking, unbounded lines and numbers are geometric and mathematical, infinites are unmanageably philosophical.
Quoting frank
I'm still confused by absential. I understand what a key missing from a lock is, or that my pocket is empty, but that seems too specific for what needs to come later in the book. Absence should incorporate enough of the unknown background environment to explain symbiosis and forward evolution.
Ok, I remember this now. So he introduces the term "ententional" to capture the idea of intentionality in any sense, whether mentalistic (human mental representation of a goal in mind), or more primitively biological (like an organism's "goal" to survive). He wants to introduce the idea that biological organisms aren't just mechanical but end-driven. This he might then tie to an even more general principle of absential states.
Quoting frank
I think he is trying to say that yes, absences actually may be the key in defining what will eventually become end-driven "ententional" states in biological systems.
Quoting magritte
This comes together in any holistic perspective, like Tao, Hegelianism or Peirceanism. You have the three things of an action, its negation, and then the equilibrium balance that is the ground state that was being sought before any particular disturbance rose.
So you discover the flat surface of a pond when a falling leaf makes a sudden pattern of ripples. And you discover positive and negative charge when their natural tendency to be in balance is broken by a local action and its global contextual response.
From a pansemiotic point of view, this makes all nature ententional. Nature is always going to arrive at some dynamical state of balance, some minimal state of dynamical tension. That's just a blind statistical fact perhaps. But thermodynamics thus has finality in this fashion. It is "intentional" even at the most brute material level possible. Though we would properly call it a tendency rather than a telos as such.
So a local presence speaks to its global absence. And the two together speak to the thirdness of a underlying state of equilibrium.
That's probably one reason a focus on "absences" alone is not enough for a pansemiotic rewrite of mainstream mechanistic thinking.
So far, I think it means the thing that's missing.
Would you agree that purpose cant be explained in terms of matter and energy?
That's part of the argument under discussion. Most people are economic materialists, they are motivated by more goods, money, and power. Science offers no answer for matter and energy, so far. Maybe Deacon will show us how.
For liberal theism, this could be rephrased as how much purpose can be explained by mechanistic models? Morality cannot be so easily explained, any moral purpose if not inherent is intentional. I've always been amazed by wild birds' inherent ethics. Some species will strongly aid others of their kind at the risk of life. Others only protect their own young.
I would weave this back into the fabric of the topic by asking if we're projecting our nature onto Nature if we see morality in birds.
I have a tiny wildlife preserve in my back yard, so I watch birds a lot. I watch the multi-species community go to war with hawks, I see which species acts as the alarm, which ones are the army, and which ones ignore the whole show.
Maybe they're just sort of programmed to act that way. A conventional materialist view would be to assume that there really isnt any volition in birds or humans. We just interpret things that way. So I'll be looking for Deacon to address that.
Yes. Deacon provides many illustrations of meaningful "Absence" in the world. Our understanding of the number "Zero" was long delayed, because the notion of functional absence was counter-intuitive. Now, we take it for granted that an empty orbit in an atom can have a causal effect on other atoms. We are somewhat comfortable with the idea that Negative Space can be attractive, and have positive effects. In many situations, that-which-does-not-exist in a physical sense, still has Potential, in a metaphysical sense. In Taoism, "Wu" (emptiness) is functional Potential. :nerd:
Incomplete Nature : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incomplete_Nature
What is Wu? : "The thirty spokes unite in the one nave; but it is on the empty space (for the axle), that the use of the wheel depends. Clay is fashioned into vessels; but it is on their empty hollowness, that their use depends. The door and windows are cut out (from the walls) to form an apartment; but it is on the empty space (within), that its use depends. Therefore, what has a (positive) existence serves for profitable adaptation, and what has not that for (actual) usefulness."
https://www.taopage.org/emptiness.html
Functional : of or having a special activity, purpose, or task; relating to the way in which something works or operates.
I suppose so. Then we have to ask if the different patterns of behavior serve any purpose at all. Do they help the birds to survive, were these selected or are these a neglected folly of nature? Evolutionary dogma might overstate the case for evolution but here it could still be something else.
Quoting Gnomon
Functionality is contextual only to what we can see and perhaps that could open things up for purpose in things we can't see.
Yes. Humans can imagine functions for things unseen. That is why we create new tools for purposes that are not yet doable. :smile:
Tools : A tool is an object used to extend the ability of an individual to modify features of the surrounding environment. Although many animals use simple tools, only human beings, whose use of stone tools dates back hundreds of millennia, have been observed using tools to make other tools.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tool
" [I]f it isn’t literally true that my wanting is causally responsible for my reaching, and my itching is causally responsible for my scratching, and my believing is causally responsible for my saying . . . if none of that is literally true, then practically everything I believe about anything is false and it’s the end of the world.10" [/I]
So I'd say it's important to remember that we are coloring inside the lines of this insight: that if there really isnt any such thing as purpose (in some form), then we're too deeply deluded to say anything at all about the world.
So thats our starting assumption, right?
Chapter 2 is about the homunculus. Remember earlier I postulated that behaviorism brought intentionality into focus? The homunculus helps explain what I meant. Since [I]wanting[/I] is usually thought of as a cause, we may resist seeing the idea of intention as an object [I]to be explained[/I]. The homunculus represents the dead end for inquiry that's plagued by this mindset.
This isn't an issue with any contemporary philosophical approaches, but it's something to keep in mind.
Ironically, Deacon's notion of Purposeful or "Causal Absence" sounds a lot like the ancient notion of "Invisible Spirits" (Animism), which caused real-world effects that could not be explained by pointing to a physical agent. So, I suspect that his detractors will interpret such "absence" as Metaphysical, if not outright Spiritual & Magical. :cool:
The Power of Absence : “[i]I will refer to this [something-that-is-not-a-thing”; elusive character of incompleteness] as an absential feature
. . . A causal role for absence seems to be absent from the natural sciences[/i].” ___Terrence Deacon
http://bothandblog4.enformationism.info/page17.html
After a micro-review of Chomsky's theory of language acquisition, Deacon says
"Postulating that this algorithmic system is in the mind in this sense is a redescription relocated: a homuncular move that mistakes a map for the territory."
Yes, but Chomsky doesnt say the algorithm is in the mind. He thinks it's part of the brain. Since we know speech production and interpretation are associated with two distinct brain structures, where else would the algorithm for universal grammar be?
Does anybody else see it differently?
I'm not sure what you're getting at here. I just thought that he did a good job showing how many theories are indeed unintentionally putting a hidden homunculus back in there without realizing it. I don't have the book in hand, so I can't give you specifics right now.
If I remember Chomsky, he does indeed think that the "mind" is computational in a sense whereby an algorithm (i.e. merge) is constantly taking place for recursive thought generation. I believe he is saying that "merge" now becomes a homunculus of sorts. Again, don't have the book on hand, so I'd have to look.
Well maybe I'm the one who has a homunculus lurking in my outlook.
Could you explain what the non-homuncular approach looks like? I mean, it's more than just having gaps in your theory.
I think Deacon is trying to do that haha.. Let's see if he does. It's almost impossible not to probably. Perhaps panpsychism's insistence that the homunclus is just always there in some fashion is a way around it, but perhaps not a satisfactory one. I see the problems basically as always there vs. emergence more than anything rather than "materialism" vs. "dualism" or what not. Let's see how Deacon does against his own backdrop of how others fail.
Ok. I'll leave his attacks for now. The goal is to end up with a discerning subject. We just dont want to explain that with... a discerning subject. That's homuncular.
Haha, yes. And the problem with most theories of mind.
The word in psycho-babble is "desire". The absence of beer that sends one to the fridge. (We don't want to say that the beer in the fridge is capable of spooky action at a distance.) One wants something because it is wanting.
Such is the traditional power of the absent. England expects every smith to shoe his horses properly.
In architecture, its a "plan" - a structure that does not exist, and whose absence provokes its creation (or sometimes not).
Perhaps the discerning subject is also missing, or at least indiscernible.
Yes. Deacon is trying to maintain his credentials as a scientist, even as he crosses the Cartesian line between Soul & Body. But the Matter/Mind "line" is arbitrary, and fair game for Philosophers. That's why, in my Enformationism thesis, "magical" explanations are not necessary. All it takes is a change of perspective, from Physics to Metaphysics. :smile:
Special Metaphysics : The philosophical science of Metaphysics is essential to my worldview, because, unlike Physics, it allows us to study the immaterial aspects of our reality, such as Qualia (properties) and Ideas (meanings). Such non-things have no objective manifestation, but they do have subjective significance. The name for this kind of deep thinking originated, fortuitously, from Aristotle's encyclopedia of knowledge published in 4th century BC. He didn't distinguish the intangible topics from science-in-general, but he did separate his treatments on the objective natural world of the senses from those of the subjective artificial world of the mind. The Physics volume dealt primarily with hard-science topics that today we call Physics, Biology, Chemistry, Geology, Astronomy, etc. In the second volume, he dealt with miscellaneous topics that now fall under the generic heading of Philosophy, but also include Psychology, Sociology, History, Ethics, Logic, and so forth.
http://bothandblog2.enformationism.info/page74.html
There's an octupus who carries two coconut shells when it explores areas that have no hiding places. When it stops, it climbs inside the shells. Scientists speculate that this is evidence of planning: acting for the benefit of a future octupus, one that doesnt exist now.
So it looks like the octupus is mostly missing. It only exists for infinitesimal time. The rest is the one who hauled the shells and the one he hauls them for.
Cool!
Let me know where you're at!
I'm on the chapter about the self. What did you think of his assessment of information? I'm not sure it makes sense to say that information is ententional, but I wouldn't put too much energy into wrestling with the question. I'm not sure what the consequences would be either way.
Page number or chapter and page?
I suspect that Deacon views the evolution of Information as a directional process. "To Intend" means to be inclined or directed-toward some goal or end. So, he seems to view "Enformation" as the intentional creation of novel forms. "To Enform" means to form, to fashion, to create. So, in a broad sense the process of Information involves future-directed creative change. Of course, he neglects to speculate on the original Intender or Informer. In my own thesis, I interpret the word "information" as both a static noun and an active verb. As a verb, "To Inform" implies the purposeful intention to convey ideas to someone. :smile:
Endless Forms :
“There is a grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved." ___Charles Darwin
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/3895-thus-from-the-war-of-nature-from-famine-and-death
Information :
[i]* Claude Shannon quantified Information not as useful ideas, but as a mathematical ratio between meaningful order (1) and meaningless disorder (0); between knowledge (1) and ignorance (0). So, that meaningful mind-stuff exists in the limbo-land of statistics, producing effects on reality while having no sensory physical properties. We know it exists ideally, only by detecting its effects in the real world.
* For humans, Information has the semantic quality of aboutness , that we interpret as meaning. In computer science though, Information is treated as meaningless, which makes its mathematical value more certain. It becomes meaningful only when a sentient Self interprets it as such.
* When spelled with an “I”, Information is a noun, referring to data & things. When spelled with an “E”, Enformation is a verb, referring to energy and processes.[/i]
http://blog-glossary.enformationism.info/page11.html
I'm in chapter 15.
:up:
‘
Here’s a related anecdote. I read in relation to another book that the symbol for zero, 0, comes from the hole in the central seat of a dhow - the boats that used to ply between the Red Sea and India. That hole is where the mast fits, and the mast makes the voyage possible. The discovery of the concept of zero was also fundamental in the advancement of mathematics, but it was fiercely resisted by Greek mathematicians on the grounds of its irrational nature.
See the connection?
Indeed. I’ve been familiar with the Tao Te Ching for many years, and was glad to see the quote at the beginning of Chapter 1.
Oldie, but goodie.
Gonna conjure Apo? It’s his wheelhouse, though if I remember he wasn’t particularly impressed of this information theory- could be mistaken.
I've had to learn a heap of stuff to constructively disagree with him - which I do (and I'm also grateful for it). But he still insists that at bottom it's all molecular switches. What I'm proposing is considerably more subtle than that. Have a read of this recent AI dialogue.
I read Etienne Gilson's book on natural selection later, and I wonder if, going back to this, how I might reappraise this.
I find a ton of overlap between the "classical metaphysics" (i.e. the (neo)-Platonic/Aristotlean/Stoic synthesis of the Patristics and Scholastics) and the whole semiotic, information theoretic, and complexity studies approaches to the natural sciences/natural philosophy (the semiotic connection is more obvious because C.S. Peirce was working right off the Scholastics).
I just posted much of this in one thread or other in the last couple weeks.
Information is sometimes naturally-occurring. Like DNA. DNA is instructions for making amino acids and proteins. The codons and strings of codons [I]mean[/I] amino acids and proteins. Meaning, as it turns out, does not always need an interpreter to be information.
An important aspect of naturally-occurring information is - it is active. At least when it is in its naturally occurring medium and environment. The information compels its own processing. If it didn't, it wouldn't be information. If we ran across DNA just scattered around, and the strings of bases did not correspond to anything outside of themselves, they would not be information. We would just see pretty molecules. Like elaborate crystals. But DNA causes it's own expression.
Compare this with the other type of information. Information we have created. Books, for example. Books are filled with information. But only when viewed by us, and only because we created the system. This information would not exist if we had not created the system, and it would not be interpreted if we vanished. (Unless some other sufficient intelligence happened alng and found it.)
Information created by us is static. The information in a book doesn't do anything. A book about architecture doesn't cause a building to be built. Even if we read the book, and have that information in our head, a building might never new built. It's not active information.
We could have books with all the details of a living thing's DNA, and it would never build a single amino acid. The information is not in it's naturally-occurring medium and environment. It isn't active information in book form. No information in books is active. It's not an active medium. No books are conscious or living.
Certainly that's one example, although I am mostly aware of the via negativa in terms of apophatic theology. I would say the entire Thomistic idea of limiting essence, the generally anti-reductive bent of classical metaphysics, the way things exist in "web of relations" and, as Deeley puts it while drawing on John of St. Thomas, a "semiotic web," etc. Also the way particulars are "virtually contained" in their principles (e.g. Scholastic commentaries on Diophantus of Alexandria)—which reminds me of discussions of Kolmogorov Complexity and the interplay of information and algorithmic entropy, or the notion of "virtual quantity" in Aristotle and Aquinas as being a "measure" of the degree of participation, possession, or perfection vis-á-vis some qualitative trait/generating principles.
IDK, maybe I am just seeing connections that might turn out to look superficial upon rigorous inspection, but there seems to be a lot of conceptual overlap. And in the whole "self-organization" literature space, which I've read a decent amount of, people very much seem to be reinventing the Aristotlean wheel, which is funny given the focus on semiotics (Deacon included) and that this is an area largely developed in the medieval period until interest kicked back up again recently through Peirce (although sources will sometimes present it as if he or Sausser [I]invented[/I] the notion, and a similar thing happens with phenomenology).
I have noticed an unfortunate trend though, that the folks who tend to want to do more "scientific philosophy," tend not to look backwards as much for ideas.
I think Aristotle is often cited in that literature. There’s no escaping some notion of final causation in biology. Not quite what I was driving at but mine was a very abstruse idea.
I will at least read the closing remarks and see if there is anything there.
I have noticed I tend to have a similar mindset to Frank so asked him.
But yeah, I doubt anybody ever thought of that before they tried to explain negative numbers.