Why is panpsychism popular?
Panpsychism has been around for centuries. As part of an approach to answering the hard problem, it has gained ground in recent years. What accounts for this shift? Is it related to confusion about quantum theory?
Comments (389)
EDIT: Whatever emergentist theory is proposed, the question "Yes, but why can't all that happen without consciousness?" is often not satisfactorily answered.
I believe David Chalmers and the formalization of the Hard Problem of Consciousness has probably helped that come into more popularity. Could be wrong. I do know that strict materialism is usually monistic, yet as we were discussing in Incomplete Nature, there is some sort of "hidden" dualism, a homunculus that is usually added at the end, where mental events occur at some point. Panpsychism is kind of holding them to this. Emergence becomes tricky when moving from a third-person view of forces and matter to a first person perspective. Emergence can inadvertently become dualistic when trying to remain monistic. Panpsychism kind of says "fuck it" if we want to be monistic, ditch the emergence of mental events and keep it from the beginning. Thus one can say that it is all first person perspective or something of that nature. This is something like Whitehead or process philosophy.
So it's a reiteration of the Democratic dilemma:
"The Presocratics were struck by a dilemma: either mind is an elemental feature of the world, or mind can somehow be reduced to more fundamental elements. If one opts for reductionism, it is incumbent upon one to explain how the reduction happens. On the other hand, if one opts for the panpsychist view that mind is an elemental feature of the world, then one must account for the apparent lack of mental features at the fundamental level." --SEP
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Looks like you have a pretty good answer right there.
Until the other half of the dilemma appears and then it's back to dualism?
Hmm, if that's the case, not sure. It could be that whole "microtubles" thing that physicists proposed a while back... like a hologram theory of mind or something. But that doesn't seem panpsychist as much. Certainly, what is in vogue now is "information theory" but how "information" is not hidden dualism, is interesting in itself. Deacon probably falls somewhere along that information theory. I'd like to see how he will account for how material shapes the information, etc.
I would say that dualism, though it is more complicated, is the only true solution.
In addition it is also because deflationary accounts of consciousness that don't involve emergence are also taken to not be treating consciousness seriously enough.
By the process of elimination that would lead to a substantive theory of non-emergent consciousness, which panpsychism seems to fit the mold of.
This is a strange quote. What do mental features look like compared to physical features at any level, fundamental or not?
They look like tiny rainbow-striped unicorns.
In other words, it's an easy way out of the problem, which avoids dealing with emergence.
Does each of my eyes have a seperate conscious experience? What about the lenses in each eye, what about each cone and rod, etc.? Does the upper layers if consciousness emerge from the lower layers? How do the various layers integrate? What is a fundamental mental layer compared to a non-fundamental mental layer?
That's good isn't it?
Well put.
Quoting Harry Hindu
A common strategy is to see the whole living, conscious thing as abiding naturally and some parts of it, individual humans for instance, identify with tiny bits of it and disidentify with the rest.
We can see why identity has to work this way on reflection. This picture explains a sense of depth to the psyche, and why direct experience is often accompanied by a sense of desire, expectation, curiosity, in short: an absolute lust to know [I]about[/I].
Quoting frank
That is easily accounted for by recognizing that the kind of “consciousness” that is everywhere (phenomenal consciousness, the subject of the hard problem) is not really “mental” in the substantive sense we usually mean, but just a trivial metaphysical thing that doesn’t add anything to the predicted functionality of anything as observable in the third person — it just posits that there is also a first-person perspective on that exact same functionality.
The substantive sense we usually nean is instead access conscious, the subject of the “easy” problem, which is philosophically easier because it doesn’t require anything metaphysically strange, just ordinary functionalism. But it is substantially harder because it requires an understanding of precisely what function fulfills our ordinary understanding of “consciousness”, which is an empirical question beyond the purview of philosophy.
I don't see the difference between the 3rd and first person perspective. Which part of some perspective is 3rd person vs first person? The information within any perspective is always from, or relative to, a particular point.
The problem is that panpsychism doesn't ditch emergence, rather it applies it by positing degrees of consciousness at varying levels of reality that equate to the same levels of emergence in the physical sense - i.e. neurons to brains, to bodies, to social structures.
Mind, with all of its intricate parts, cannot be fundamental. The parts, the sounds, colors, smells, sensations, urges, etc. would be more fundamental as mind is made up of, or emerges from, those things.
Information is what is fundamental and mind would is just a complex arrangement of information.
It works wonders. Should be used more often if you ask me, on scores of other problems. Whence art? Panaesthetism is the answer: atoms love beauty too, you know. Whence morality? Panmoralism of course! Electrons followed rules too, after all. Whence politics? Panpolitism, what else? Quarks know how to spin. Etc.
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He starts by saying that 'I take physicalism to be the view that every real, concrete phenomenon in the universe is … physical. ' His argument is, then, that (1) everything is physical (i.e. he's defending an essentially materialist ontology) but that (2) experience, 'what-it-is-likeness', is an apodictic reality, i.e. cannot plausibly be denied. He says that (3) most materialists, like Daniel Dennett, believe in PhysicSalism, which is the view, or faith, that the nature or essence of all concrete reality can in principle be fully captured in the terms of physics'. But, he says, 'The physical is whatever general kind of thing we are considering when we consider things like tables and chairs and experiential phenomena' - and as physics has nothing to say about the latter, then physicsalism must be forever incomplete. From this, he argues that because experience is physical, then 'there's a lot more to neurons than physics or neurophysiology can record'.
It seems to me that his argument is concerned with creating a conceptual space for 'experience' (I would use the term 'being') in the objective domain - to say that, because he can't doubt the reality of experience, and because he's committed to the view that every real phenomenon is physical, then the physical must also be experiential. 'That is what I believe: experiential phenomena cannot be emergent
from wholly non-experiential phenomena... Assuming, then, that there is a plurality of physical ultimates, some of them at least must be intrinsically experiential, intrinsically experience-involving....Given that everything concrete is physical, and that everything physical is constituted out of physical ultimates, and that experience is part of concrete reality, it seems the only reasonable position, more than just an ‘inference to the best explanation’.
In my view, Strawson is wrong from the get go, because of his insistence that whatever is real is a 'concrete phenomena'. In fact, even that term is self-contradictory, because 'phenomena' is 'what appears', and 'what appears' implies the existence of an interpreting subject. Strawson also claims as an axiom that 'the universe is spatio-temporal in its fundamental nature' whereas it is not hard to make the case that both time and space are at least in part constituted in the mind of the observing subject (per Kant's 'primary intuition' - Strawson acknowledges in a footnote that physics now considers that time and space may not be actually fundamental, but dismisses this with a facile argument.) I think Stawson is wrong about the constituents of reality: they are neither concrete, nor phenomena. They appear concrete to the observer, but that is dependent on the intellectual constitution of the observer, not on any intrinsic property of phenomena. What if there are no 'physical ultimates' or 'ultimate constituents' after all? Which seems eminently feasible in the light of current physics. It might turn out that the 'ultimate constituents' really are experiential: that is to say, the ultimate constituent is a form of being, not any type of object. And how would you go about looking for that?
A saying springs to mind about putting lipstick on a pig. That is what I think he's doing. :-)
Well no, emergence doesn't have to be dealt with, it just needs to be rejected as illogical. That's very simple, and it doesn't really require any substitute or anything like that unless the person is inspired to seek reality. But when people reject emergence it's usually because they are inspired to seek reality, then an alternative to emergence is required.
Weak emergence is uncontroversial.
Strong emergence is tantamount to magic.
For instance, consciousness?
"Recent developments have gone some way to reversing the aversion to panpsychism that has dominated Western philosophy in recent times. From the 1970s onwards hostility to metaphysics slowly withdrew, and most philosophers in the analytic tradition now accept the inevitability of metaphysics. And towards the end of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, the continuing failure of physicalists to come up with a satisfying account of consciousness has led many to look for alternatives. As a result of both of these things, a significant and growing minority of analytic philosophers have begun seriously to explore the potential of panpsychism, both to provide a satisfying account of the emergence of human consciousness and to give a positive account of the intrinsic nature of matter."
If by consciousness you mean some kind of metaphysical quality that human brains have that is totally irreducible to any aggregate of qualities that the stuff brains are made of have, then yes. That’s strong emergence, of phenomenal consciousness, and it would be some weird spooky magic if it actually happened like that.
But if you instead mean a thing that brains do that is perfectly reducible to an aggregate of things that the stuff brain are made out of do, then no. That’s only weak emergence, of access consciousness, and it’s a normal and completely uncontroversial thing.
There are many ways to show this, depending on the exact premises of emergence which are presented. The most simple and straight forward way, is something like what wayfarer presents. It's not logical that something experiential could emerge from something non-experiential.
Quoting Wayfarer
Why would it necessarily be weird spooky magic? And what do you mean by "magic" here?
I guess I was looking for a walk through that logic (if you have time).
Monistic idealists have been known to suggest that matter is an emergent property if mind, so perhaps this is again a mistake of logic?
You're wrong about weak emergence. A weakly emergent property is not reducible. The distinction is about truths specific to the emergent entity or property. Weakly emergent means those truths are unexpected. Strongly means those truths are not deducible (to truths about the lower domain).
So either way, something new is arising from the lower level. I wouldnt call it something from nothing, though.
Chalmers' essay on strong and weak emergence
A weakly emergent property will also emerge from a simulation of the underlying system. Simulate particles in of a gas just mechanically and you simulate temperature automatically.
Strongly emergent properties aren’t like that, and that’s what makes them like magic. You don’t just get them from some combination of the underlying behaviors, but they’re something else in addition to those parts and their arrangements.
People tout emergence from all different angles, each requiring a different logical refutation. Show me the premises which would lead you to believe in emergence, and I'll show you how they are logically incoherent.
Quoting frank
No, I think that this is an opposite type of mistake. Rather than being a mistake of logic it is a denial of empirical evidence. If matter is just a human concept, then it is an emergent property of mind. But this idea would deny the evidence that "matter" refers to something independent from minds.
If we find strongly emergent properties, physics would have to be updated to cover whatever we missed. We wouldn't just throw up our hands and declare it magic.
To rule out strong emergence requires a declaration that physics, in its present form, is finished, so no upgrades are pending. Are you prepared to make that declaration?
I'm a panpsychist because I think it's the most economical solution to a lot of thorny problems. But presumably I'm also in some ways a 'case' illustrating a general trend. I think there has been an implicit nebula of attitudes around the question, where being a panpsychist means you're 'soft' or not ' brave enough to accept the meaninglessness/contingency of consciousness' etc & that's a bummer. I think that nebula is fading, concomitant with shifts in cultural attitudes surrounding what a Serious Person believes, and that may account for some of it. Of course, the waning of a [Serious Person] wall around a possible solution doesn't recommend that solution, in-itself, only makes it less knee-jerk rejectable. You still have to articulate what you're trying to articulate. But I think the barriers are coming down.
So recall that the distinction between strong and weak emergence is in assessments of truths. Read the essay.
Is it a generational thing? Not to get too psychological, but when people insist on being strong, there could be some underlying fear.
The SEP says the peak of materialism was in the 1970s. Hmm.
Quoting 180 Proof
" :fire: "
I'm not sure. I think there's a thing of panpsychism=new age = intellecutaly-limp. There has to be a distance from the hippies, for sure.
As I post, I see that @180 Proof has stepped in with Bolds and references to Spinoza & references to his own posts & named fallacies. I think that illustrates better what I'm talking about that anything I could say would. That's about building fortresses.
I think we're moving away from needing to stay in fortresses, for whatever reason.
My response isn't "about building fortresses", just laying my cards on the table so we can dispense with bluffs and bluster and call everyone else's hand. It's facile, at best (like angelology), thus panpsychism's "popularity". So smoke 'em if you got 'em, peeps.
Quoting frank
Really? How so? Or just account for why e.g. Hegel or Maimon ... or Deleuze are - as well as I am - mis-interpreting 'Spinozism (a)s acosmist' (and not e.g. "pan(en)theist" or "pan(en)deist" or "neutral monist" or "panpsychist" ...) :confused:
In my Enformationism thesis, I get around that apparent dilemma, by using a more modern understanding of the fundamental element of both Mind and Matter : Information. Panpsychism has typically been interpreted to mean that everything is conscious to some degree. But I substitute the 21st century scientific concept of ubiquitous "Information". From that novel perspective, everything in the world -- Matter. Energy, and Mind -- is a form of Information. In that case, human-like Consciousness ("mental features") is a high-level form of Information -- a late emergence of evolution. And there's no need to assume that a grain of sand is aware of it's environment. Therefore, I would rename that ancient notion as : Pan-enformationism. :smile:
Ubiquitous Information : The basis of the universe may not be energy or matter but information . . . . Although this line of thinking emanates from the mid-20th century, it seems to be enjoying a bit of a Renaissance among a sliver of prominent scientists today.
https://bigthink.com/philip-perry/the-basis-of-the-universe-may-not-be-energy-or-matter-but-information
Panpsychism vs Enformationism : The August-September 2017 issue of Philosophy Now magazine explores the revival of a quaint antique worldview, Panpsychism (all is mind), as a way to come to terms with the paradoxes of Quantum Theory. For my own purposes though, I try to avoid the beguiling human-centric implications of “psyche”, and say instead that all is EnFormAction (creative energy, power to enform). Of course, Panpsychism is ridiculed by materialists, partly because proponents use the misleading anthro-morphic human-scale term “consciousness” when referring to the universal mind-like aspect of reality. Which is why I think the more-generic & less-leading term “information” is more appropriate when discussing the basic substance of both Mind & Matter. For example, at levels of low complexity, exchanges of information are merely what physicists call “energy”, which is “doing” without “knowing”. Only at higher levels of intricacy and entanglement do the conscious properties of Mind emerge from Material stuff.
http://www.bothandblog.enformationism.info/page12.html
Information -- Shannon vs Deacon : http://bothandblog4.enformationism.info/page26.html
Did Hegel say Spinoza wasn't a panpsychist?
I disagree with you - it is building fortresses; if we're talking cards: I call your bluff.
That said, I have no interest in tangling with you outside that. If the bluff works hereafter, I won't be tapping the bluffed on the shoulder to say 'consider this.'
Acosmism excludes, or is inconsistent with, panpsychism. Hegel himself, perhaps, can be construed as a panpsychist.
Maybe it's inconsistent with some definitions of panpsychism. Acosmism is along the lines of Neoplatonism. The realm of the Absolute's emanations is one of degradation and partial truths, but all Mind is of this realm. We and everything we know is here, so an AP philosopher would say we cant deny it's existence. The mystic isn't really disagreeing if she calls it the domain of the Lord of Illusion. It's a different sense of "exists".
Okay, didn't see anything contrary in there. That's all basically what I thought about strong and weak emergence already.
The point stands that if there is anything not deducible from current theories of physics, then that means that we need to modify our theories of physics to be such that those things are now deducible from them, and in the end, nothing will be non-deducible from physics. So nothing is fundamentally strongly emergent, unless you take "the physical" to be only exactly what current theories of physics say it is; I'm not the one taking physics to be finalized already, I'm the one expecting it to be modified as necessary until it accurately accounts for everything.
In any case, Chalmer's position seems to be not dissimilar to mine, which is merely that having a first-person experience is not something that can be built up out of third-person facts; the third-person isn't "below" the first-person. But it doesn't then follow that if you put together the right third-person facts in the right way, then suddenly a wholly new kind of thing that was not at all present in the stuff you built that out of appears on top of the thing you've built.
If anything it suggests the exact opposite: that if a brain has a first-person experience, and modifying the brain modifies that first-person experience, then disassembling the brain into its constituent parts should disassemble the experience into its constituent parts, such that even the most elementary stuff in the universe has a kind of primordial "consciousness", in this sense that we should by now realize is not the sense ordinarily meant by the word, if even lone protons have it. In other words, panpsychism, at least about phenomenal consciousness, which is not consciousness as we ordinarily mean it.
And then both the behavior of our brains as physical systems observable in the third person, and the first-person experience those brains have when doing that behavior -- which together are the thing we ordinarily mean by "consciousness" -- can weakly emerge in unison (because they're actually two faces of the exact same function) as we rebuild those brains out of atoms again. But nowhere in that process of building brains out of atoms did a metaphysically new thing start happening that was not in principle deducible from the atoms themselves, i.e. strongly emerge.
The Absolute is neither conscious nor volitional, and its supposed to be the higher truth, the only thing that doesn't exist relatively. Definitely Neoplatonic.
Ok. So?
That was my point that I thought you were disagreeing with. If I misunderstood you, then no further comment.
Because for the longest time we thought that by coming up with the right physics or chemistry or biology we could find the "equation for consciousness". That eventually concsiousness will be consumed by the sciences and be regarded as mundane as temperature. That one day we may develop a "consciousness-o-meter" which measures consciousness the same way a thermormeter measures temperature. But we've slowly given up on that view, it seems that consciousness is not approachable by scientific method. Heck I can't tell if YOU'RE conscious, or if my couch is conscious, much less come up with a theory for consciousness. So the simplest explanation then is to attribute it to everything, so that you no longer need to explain how it arises from "inanimate matter"
In other words, the assumption that there are these physical objects that have no mental properties that somehow come together and suddenly have mental properties has gotten us nowhere, so people are starting to reject it.
I love the way you've phrased this. The things that we are most familiar with, ourselves, are conscious. We're generous enough to at least extend that to other things that look like us "from the outside" (third person); we suppose they're also like us "on the inside" (first person). Some of us are also willing to extend that to things that are similar enough to us, like other animals. But really, the big assumption being made is not by those who just say "sure, and the less like us on the outside, the less like us on the inside, but there's still some 'on the inside' all the way down", but those who say "...and then at some point there stops being any 'from the inside'", or worse yet, those who say "there's no such thing as 'from the inside', even for you or me".
We're most familiar with our own view from the inside, and the natural assumption (on the Principle of Mediocrity) would be that everything is also like that, that we're not special. If anyone had a burden of proof (and to be clear, technically I don't think anyone does, because epistemology), it would be those who want to say that we're special and most other stuff is fundamentally different from us.
Your rejection of emergence and your panpsychism are both illogical, and are thus rejected.
Which brings up the question "What are Physical Objects"? and what are "Mental Properties"?
In the process view objects are merely repeating patterns of events, repetitive becomings not beings and mental properties are interactions, relationships and largely non conscious experiences. Consciousness is a relatively rare and high order of integrated unified for of experience but most of the experiential aspects of nature are of a non conscious and low level variety.
This sounds to me like "Square Circle" or "Married Bachelor"
Try this for a more complete explanation of the idea.
I agree it's important to see consciousness as functional, and contend that consciousness is necessary for the integration of various information 'feeds' into a meaningful, intentional whole. It's a sort of data fusion device.
I mean, if you implemented the functions in humans responsible for the conscious experience of a red apple in a robot or some other non-biological system, would it necessarily be conscious?
EDIT: Just because in my view consciousness is an emergent phenomenon, it doesn't follow that it would come 'naturally' to a machine past a certain degree of complexity, in the absence of a dedicated mechanism. No machine will one day "wake up conscious" like Skynet in the Terminator franchise, without some guy putting in place some actual hardware mechanism for it.
If you only want to fake it decently well, that's another thing.
What strikes me as odd about panpsychism is that it ignores the whole-part distinction. To be clear, panpsychism is the claim that "everything has a soul/mind." Compare this panpsychist assertion with the logically equivalent "every team member of the Chicago Bulls sweats". Now, if I were to conclude that the basketball team known as the Chicago Bulls sweats that's the fallacy of composition; the property of sweating isn't transferrable from the parts (here members of the Chicago Bulls team) to the whole (the Chicago Bulls team itself).
Now, take the panpsychist assertion that everything has a soul/mind in the context of a car. The car has parts. Every part is a thing and since everything has a soul/mind, every part must have a soul/mind but to draw the conclusion that the car itself, the whole, has a soul/mind is the fallacy of composition.
Coming at it from the opposite direction (a more relatable point of view I'm sure), most people will find it easier to think that a car, as a whole, has a soul. If so, according to the panpsychist, since everything has a soul, each and every part of a car should have a soul. That's the fallacy of division.
Since all matter is organized in a simple-to-complex manner, subscribing to panpsychism involves committing either the fallacy of composition or the fallacy of division at every level of this hierarchy.
To cut to the chase, panpsychists have to prove that their thesis doesn't commit the fallacies of composition and division.
By way of illustrating my point, take a look at the notion of super-organisms - ants and bees are super-organisms in that though they're composed of individuals, an entire colony acts as if it's itself a single living unit and despite this they haven't been accorded the same status as an individual organism like a human being who is, like ant and bee colonies, a colony of various cells. Clearly, in this case, biologists have avoided committing the fallacy of composition in the case of ants and bees (by not treating the colony itself as an independent organism) are and the fallacy of division in the case of human beings (by not treating cells as possessed of minds). Is there a lesson to learn from this for the panpsychist?
This is the combination problem. How do these "bits of consciousness" add up to a person and how does a person split up into "bits of consciousness". I have no clue how to solve said problem, but it not necessarily a fallacy. Quoting TheMadFool
That conclusion is not drawn. As the combination problem has not been solved yet.
Quoting TheMadFool
Again, that conclusion is not drawn as the combination problem has not been solved yet.
Panpsychism doesn't have much in the way of explanatory power, since it can't explain how these "conscious particles" combine or split up. But I still think it makes sense as a "default belief". If we are willing to say that the other is conscious, without having any evidence to lead us to that belief, then the burden of proof should be on the perosn that claims that "People are conscious but rocks are not because people are special".
As Pfhorrest said:
Quoting Pfhorrest
Need to prove that or else the assumtion of a "stopping point" where consciousness no longer exists is at least just as baseless as the assumption that there isn't one (panpsychism).
The combination problem is different and is a real problem for all panpsychists. The combination problem is about which objects are conscious, and how smaller conscious entities somehow 'pool' their consciousness to make a larger conscious entity, and at exactly what stages of complexification this happens. Any panspychist has to either find a version of panpsychism that avoids this problem or a version that solves it. I'm not completely sure what my response to it is.
If the assertion is that everything has a soul/mind, then not only do the parts of the car, (if each can exist as an individual thing), have a soul/mind, but also the car itself, as a thing has a soul/mind. There is no fallacy of composition here.
The issue of the part/whole relationship which is more relevant here, is the question of whether parts can be said to be things, in the same context in which the whole is a thing. The nature of a "part" is that it necessarily exists in specific relations to other parts which collectively make up the whole. In this context, the whole is the thing, and the part is a part of that thing. Notice the necessity in the part's relationship with others, as essential to the word "part". There is no such necessary relationship in the concept of "thing", or "object". An object is an independent entity having relations with others, but not having any specific necessary relations.
Therefore it is inherently contradictory to say that a part is itself an object, or thing, in the same context in which it is a part. The "part" is constrained by the necessity which makes it a part, and an object has no such constraint. Therefore to be both is contradiction. This logic of part/whole relations reflects the fact that in order to make a part into a proper object, the whole needs to be divided. When the whole is divided, it is annihilated. So it is impossible that the part exists as an individual object at the same time while it is a part. And we should never apprehend a part as an object because this is a logical incoherency.
Yes, I think panpsychism is often arrived at after a process of elimination. The worst theory apart from all the others.
Your questions are all good ones and need answers from the panpsychist.
If panpsychists are anthropomorphic, everyone else is anthropocentric, or at least neurocentric. What we all have in common is cuntishness, so let's gloss over that and stick to what is true and false, not which ones of us are the worst assholes.
This is the best answer to the OP so far.
Then how can you say the YOU are conscious if you can't tell if anyone else is conscious, and there is no theory of conscious?
Given what you said, it seems just as likely that consciousness is a myth kept alive by spiritualists and the religious.
No. There are other theories other than "everything is mental' and "everything is physical".
What does it even mean for an atom to have a mind and how does that contribute or integrate with a molecule's mind? Does an atom experience depth because most sensations (visual, auditory, tactile) have an element of depth, or distance relative to the sensory organ used to make an observation. How does an atom experience another atom? Does an atom possess knowledge (memory), or intent? What are the necessary components of mind some entity needs to posses to define it as having a mind?
Man do you guys have any idea how scientific explanations work? It’s very hard work and potentially incomplete. We haven’t even figured out how to explain chemical bonds form purely out of quantum mechanical principles, and it may be a type of emergent phenomenon where doing so is not possible. There’s still decades and centuries in the future to figure out how far we can do it successfully, computational chemists are working on it. I don’t know what you’re expecting out of scientific explanations, but it’s probably a ghost that isn’t there.
Doing a kind of metaphysics where you switch the words (especially to a radical position such as what we thought was inanimate matter in the rest of universe has elements of consciousness that we see in animals) just adds more confusing assumptions, it gives zero descriptive content that gets us closer to an explanation. Like if it satisfies you to call atoms and molecules as consisting of mental substance instead of physical, that leaves us with “so what now?” It’s an empty pyrrhic victory, you can’t use it for any additional predictions. If we want to know what consciousness is and how it works, everyone else is going to continue their investigations.
Panpsychism -- a retreat to an old idea that competes with reductionism and thus is attractive to anyone uncomfortable with reductive explanations for consciousness (which is where the evidence is now pointing) -- is an encouraging symptom of the fact that neuroscience is making good progress. We might not have predicted that panpsychism specifically would enjoy a resurgence, but we ought to have predicted that some such anti-reductionist theory of consciousness would.
The ultimate question that needs to be addressed by any "substantial" theory would be, "why is the evidence that I have for my consciousness different than the evidence others have for my consciousness?".
Good question. The answer presumably is "Because I am me and no on else is." This raises the further question, "Why am I this one and not some other one? And why aren't you, me?" But let's not derail the thread with that.
Is this intended to be an argument against panspychism?
EDIT: My bad, it's an answer to the OP!
You're saying that people who are open to panpsychism are "uncomfortable" with the facts. I think this is in line with csalisbury's view that the characters on the stage include:
1. A strong, intrepid physicalist, courageously facing the wilderness of truth, simultaneously defeating both panpsychism and nihilism.
2. A weak, muddleheaded boy, plaintively pushing magic on the world, in need of pummeling.
Freud.
"theory of consciousness" is different from "definition of consciousness". I am bad at defining things but if I were to define consciousness it would be "Having a first person view" or something like that. I definitely have a first person view, but I can't tell if you do or not. I may not know what conditions produce consciousness as I defined it but I definitely know I have it. It's like how I can know that I am typing on a PC right now but not understand how a PC works or how the internet works.
:nod:
But this is a very different kind of problem from consciousness. WIth enough time and effort we KNOW that we can explain how chemical bonds form because we can all see chemical bonds. We can test different hypothesis and jointly determine which is correct because we can all see the experiment right in front of our eyes.
But for consciousness it is different. I can't tell if you're conscious, or what kind of experience you're having. So how might I possibly construct a theory about how consciousness arises when I have no idea how to measure it in the first place? Let's say my hypothesis is "Consciousness arises when there is X level of data integration happening" or something. How can I test that? I can go and make some sort of machine that meets that condition but how can I know that that machine is conscious?
But for chemical bonds if I propose "X is necessary for a bond to form" I can design an expeirment where X doesn't happen and check whether or not the bond forms.
That's why panpsychism comes up, because not DO we know nothing about consciousness using the scientific method we likely WON'T know anything either (I can't see how the problem is approachable). We can know that this part of the brain produces this experience and this part produces that (and even that is based on testimony) but we can never know how consciousness is produces in the first place (because we can't ask rocks if they're conscious or not).
Quoting Saphsin
Is actully false though. The assumption that everything is conscious is just as valid as the assumption that there is some point at which things "stop being conscoius" suddenly in the absence of data to show otherwise. So far we have been assuming that there is some point at which things stop being conscious but since we cannot determine that point, nor does it seem like we'll be able to, the alternative hypothesis (that there is no such point) is starting to be seriously considered. They are both untestable for now.
Towards what exactly?
:up:
Again, I think you just have lofty expectations for what counts as incremental scientific explanation (it takes a ton of filling in details to get an intuitive grasp of some phenomenon) and settling for a non-explanation. We couldn’t really directly see chemical bonds or atoms until very recent technology, but that didn’t mean before we could, the past few centuries of chemistry wasn’t really improvement of knowledge.
No one "needs" panpsychism. It's a theory among many.
Quoting Saphsin
Panpsychism isn't really "settling". Instead of the "hard problem" which is created when you assume that at some point things aren't conscoius you have the "combination problem" which is asking "How do these "conscoius particles" add up to form a human consciousness and how does a human conscoiusness break down into particles", again, another unassailable problem.
I don't know why you went into this expecting panpsychism to be some sort of physical theory explaining how consciousness arises. It isn't, it is just metaphysical flavor. Which do you wanna deal with? Unassailable problem A or Unassailable problem B? I like B.
I don't know about being in need of pummeling. To borrow from comedian Kevin Bridges, when someone in a bar starts raving about tables and rocks having consciousness, the best thing to do is pat them on the arm, tell them to have a good night, and escape.
Quoting khaled
Are you asking me what the point of neuroscience is? Part of neuroscience is a reduction of psychology in terms of more fundamental neurological action, in much the same way that part of physics (quantum electrodynamics) is a reduction of chemistry to more fundamental physical action. So, in this context, toward a neurological basis of psychology.
Well, that's less Freudian. :smile:
My panpsychism isn’t at all motivated by quantum theory, but it does touch on it. Basically, I think that “everything has consciousness” only in the same sense that in quantum theory “everything is an observer”: quantum theory doesn’t mean a thinking human-like observer, just anything capable of interacting with the system being “observed”, and like I don’t think the kind of “consciousness” that can be attributed to everything is the thoughtful human-like function that differentiates us from rocks, but a much more boring thing. I do think that both of those boring but superficially mystical-sounding things, quantum “observation” and phenomenal “consciousness”, can be identified with each other, because on my account (like Whitehead’s) “experience” in this sense is just one perspective on interaction.
The alternative (that at some point things stop being conscious) also doesn’t explain anything. So why are you wasting your time with THAT? You gotta pick some sort of metaphysical stance here and all of them are untestable, in which case it really doesn’t matter which you pick, that’s mostly personal preference.
Quoting Saphsin
It IS a replacement, that comes with its own questions. It replaces the hard problem of consciousness with the combination problem. Why would someone do that? Because why not, they’re both hard problems.
What happened is: We had the assumption A that we thought was gonna lead us to understand consciousness. We gave up on that idea. Therefore alternate assumptions (panpsychism being one) arose.
All I’m trying to establish here is that panpsychism isn’t a “more complicated” or “unscientific” version of the standard view.
How is that related to consciousness if at all? Every psychological bias/fallacy/theory/heuristic/etc still makes sense without consciousness.
Scientific investigation reveals features and fills in details, it doesn’t satisfy your “why” intuitive inquiries right off the bat. Either it will if we fill in enough details (it’ll take decades or centuries, not surprising it doesn’t right now), or there are limits to scientific investigation and it won’t (and thus we shall remain quiet) or we’ll learn enough to realize the initial mystery turns out not to be a good question (often happens)
When I say panpsychism doesn’t explain anything, I meant exactly that. I didn’t mean its explanations are unsatisfying because it fails to get to the root of the mystery, but that it’s just label switching and has no positively contributing content or description. And I’m utterly confused why you think it does.
If this is what you think you are simply misunderstanding
Quoting Saphsin
I’ve restated countless times that panpsychism doesn’t have any additional explanatory power. It solves the problem of WHY we are conscious (by simply attributing it to everything) and replaces it with the equally challenging problem of “How do these consciousnesses combine?”. This doesn’t explain anything, you’re absolutely correct. But it makes just about as much sense as the alternative view of “There are things that aren’t conscious that come together and magically become things that are conscious”
Panpsychism doesn’t explain anything more than the traditional view, and it is not in any way more complicated. Therefore whether or not you choose it or the traditional view (or something else) is a matter of personal preference. That is all I’m trying to establish
His point is that its negation is exactly like that as well, so you can't help but waste your time on either one or the other.
The two do seem to be closely related.
The two are similar in that they're both understood to have intentionality or ententionality.
[quote=Phillip Goff]We rightly celebrate the success of physical science, but it has been successful precisely because it was designed, by Galileo, to exclude consciousness. If Galileo were to time travel to the present day and hear about this problem of explaining consciousness in the terms of physical science, he’d say “Of course you can’t do that! I designed physical science to deal with quantities, not qualities.” And the fact that physical science has done incredibly well when it excludes consciousness gives us no grounds for thinking it will do just as well when it turns to explaining consciousness itself.[/quote]
[i]Italic Quotes Taken From Wikipedia Article on Panpsychism
In philosophy of mind, panpsychism is the view that mind or a mindlike aspect is a fundamental and ubiquitous feature of reality.[1] It is also described as a theory that "the mind is a fundamental feature of the world which exists throughout the universe.[/i]
The role and place of mind in nature is at the heart of both neutral monism and panpsychism. I think it is a mistake to use the terms experience, mind and consciousness as though they were synonyms. It is non-conscious experience which is fundamental to nature. Consciousness is the highest form of unified, integrated, self-aware experience and may be limited to humans (with language and abstract thought). Mind on the other hand is also a lesser form of unified and integrated experience and may come in various forms (such as the hive mind of bees and ants) or the distributed but communicative neural networks of the octopus, or the awareness of higher animals with brains. It is non-conscious experience (proto mind or mental pole) which is the most fundamental type of mental property in nature. The intrinsic (not extrinsic or measurable or observable) property of even the most fundamental units of nature (relationships to other events, to the past and to future possibilities) that is the basis of panpsychism.
They therefore ascribe a primitive form of mentality to entities at the fundamental level of physics but do not ascribe mentality to most aggregate things, such as rocks or buildings.[1][9][10]
A frequent criticism of Panpsychism is the assertion that it must postulate that rocks and other such structures must be “conscious”. The taunt intending to make the concept seem ridiculous on its face. This is a misunderstanding. No serious proponent of panpsychism asserts the consciousness of rocks or other such simple aggregate structures. It is also a misunderstanding of the use of the word “consciousness” to mean the kind of high level, integrated, unified, self-aware experience such as we humans ourselves experience. To have such high level experience one must also have a physical structure which is complex, integrated and unified (such as a brain). I tend to avoid using the term “consciousness” for the type of fundamental mental property found ubiquitous in nature and instead prefer the term experience or proto mental. The term experience used in this way does not mean conscious experience but a more fundamental relationship and interaction between events and time.
Charles Hartshorne contrasted panpsychism and idealism, saying that while idealists rejected the existence of the world observed with the senses or understood it as ideas within the mind of God, panpsychists accepted the reality of the world but saw it as composed of minds.
Panpsychists do not reject the “reality” of the physical properties of nature. They merely postulate that the physical properties alone are incomplete explanations of the experiential aspects of nature.
Panpsychism is incompatible with emergentism.[8] In general, theories of consciousness fall under one or the other umbrella; they hold either that consciousness is present at a fundamental level of reality (panpsychism) or that it emerges higher up (emergentism).[8]
It is the notion that somehow inert, non-experiential, matter with only physical properties somehow in certain combinations gives rise to experience, mental activity, mind and consciousness that strikes the panpsychist as irrational and mysterious (more magical then logical). The notion that some form of experiential or proto mental property is intrinsic to matter, particularly if one has an event based (process) ontology where relationship and interaction to other events and to events of the past and possibilities of the future are fundamental seems more logical and rational.
[i]Other forms or types of Panpsychism
Goff has argued that panpsychism avoids the disunity of dualism, under which mind and matter are ontologically separate, as well as dualism's problems explaining how mind and matter interact.
Tononi’s Integrated Information Theory-He believes consciousness is nothing but integrated information, so ? measures consciousness.
Goff has used the term panexperientialism more generally to refer to forms of panpsychism in which experience rather than thought is ubiquitous.[1]
Though there some radical Platonists, such as Max Tegmark, who believe reality has no intrinsic properties. By Tegmark's account, the universe is made of math without anything to ground it.
Panpsychism has recently seen a resurgence in the philosophy of mind, set into motion by Thomas Nagel's 1979 article "Panpsychism"[22] and further spurred by Galen Strawson's 2006 realistic monist article "Realistic Monism: Why Physicalism Entails Panpsychism."[23][24][25] Other recent proponents include American philosophers David Ray Griffin[1] and David Skrbina,[/i]
These are all good reading for anyone interested in a more detailed exposition of the various notions and forms of panpsychism.
In the 20th century, panpsychism's most significant proponent is arguably Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947).[4] Whitehead's ontology saw the basic nature of the world as made up of events and the process of their creation and extinction. These elementary events (which he called occasions) are in part mental.[4] According to Whitehead, "we should conceive mental operations as among the factors which make up the constitution of nature."[8]
I am strongly influenced by Whiteheads variety of Process Philosophy. The fundamental units of nature are events, not physical particles. Events have physical aspects and duration but they also have experiential aspects to other events and to the past and to the future. I prefer David Ray Griffins use of the term panexperientialism (avoiding the usual connotations associated with the terms mind or consciousness) to refer to these proto mental aspects of events. Objects are merely repetitive events. These notions are more in keeping with our knowledge about the true nature of reality at its most fundamental level. Fundamental particles are really just quantum events and measured properties are really just relationship and interactions.
Panexperientialism is associated with the philosophies of, among others, Charles Hartshorne and Alfred North Whitehead, although the term itself was invented by David Ray Griffin in order to distinguish the process philosophical view from other varieties of panpsychism.[8] Whitehead's process philosophy argues that the fundamental elements of the universe are "occasions of experience," which can together create something as complex as a human being.[4]
Complex, integrated, unified physical structure gives rise to complex unified integrated experience (mind and consciousness). It seems a very logical proposition and in keeping with our observations and experience of the world. Science measures only the physical, measurable and empirical properties of the world. The intrinsic nature of things (even our own mental experience) remains outside the realm of empirical measurement. So, while science is one of our most valuable tools for exploring and understanding nature, it always gives us only a partial and incomplete picture of “reality”.
[i]From Neutral Monism Article in Wikipedia
Substance can have both extrinsic properties and intrinsic properties. Extrinsic properties are properties that are outwardly observable, such structures and form. Intrinsic properties are properties that are not outwardly observable and concern the intrinsic nature of a thing.[note 1] By its very nature physics deals with the extrinsic properties of matter As a consequence, most of the positive claims in these fields are related to the extrinsic properties of reality. When it comes to describing the intrinsic nature of matter physics "is silent". However, just because the intrinsic properties of matter are unknown does not mean they don't exist.[no[/i]
Perhaps this is the most important concept. Merely because we cannot measure something or detect it with our senses or instruments does not mean it does not exist. Our measurements and our senses give us only an incomplete and partial view of nature. Also on this note the “warmth of the sun” and “the redness of a rose” are just as much a part of nature and our experience as infrared and wavelengths of color. It is all part of nature: we cannot pick and choose; the distinction between primary and secondary properties is really at its heart an artificial distinction and the source of many of our philosophical problems.
When we explain why water boils or metal rusts or uranium atoms decay, we have an explanatory hypothesis or prediction, on one side, and an observed effect, on the other. Left hand side is prediction, right hand side is result or observation. But when we seek to ‘explain consciousness’, we have no such division - we are that which we are seeking to explain. So there simply cannot be an objective explanation of the nature of consciousness analogous to objective explanations of phenomena, as a matter of principle (which is another way of stating the hard problem.)
But understanding that takes a gestalt shift. This is well-understood, if not always well articulated, by the various forms of Eastern philosophy that fall under the umbrella term of 'non-dualism'. The 'duality of subject and object' is precisely the subject of their analysis. That is why non-dualism has become a subject of consideration by modern theories such as 'enactivism'.
What has to be seen through, is the pervasive tendency to 'objectify' and to seek to understand everything through the prism of 'objectification'. This is more than a theory, it's a stance, a way-of-being in the world. That stance is what has to shift.
Oh, and here is Thomas Nagel's chapter on panpsychism.
The standard view adds two more assumptions on top:
1- At some point things stop being conscious.
2- When enough non conscious things come together consciousness magically pops up.
And these two assumptions are completely unfounded and assuming them has demonstrably gotten us nowhere. That’s the appeal of panpsychism, that it’s actually simpler and more intuitive. Panpsychism assumes LESS about the world not more.
There are several Eastern philosophical and Buddhist concepts which run in a vein similar to monist and process philosophy. One would be the concept of "maya" or illusion, another would be the concept of impermanence "anicca". It is the unity and the flux of reality which dominates.
The distinction between subject and object, between self and other and any attachment to the impermanent things of the world are all false dichotomy. In the process view reality is a constant flux, a becoming, composed of events not objects. All things are relationships and interactions and thus the notion of independent existence is an illusion. There are many different ways to try to express these abstract concepts and many different terminologies and terms from different philosophers to express them. I usually resort to process philosophy and particularly Whitehead to try to express these views as this is the terminology and author that seems to speak to my mode of thought and expression but I find the same basic concepts in many different places.
A part has a necessary relationship with other parts that all together go into constituting the whole. A thing is just a thing, anything, and there are no necessary relationships in being a thing. Ergo, a part is just as much a thing as a whole is a thing. I agree with you so far.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
This seems to be a repetition of the first paragraph with some additional information of course. I'll agree to this too.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
So, once I talk about things I can't talk about parts. How come then that you talk about the car having a soul then? After all, the car is, essentially, the whole consisting of parts and you said, in your own words, "....to make a part into a proper object, the whole needs to be divided. When the whole is divided, it is annihilated" (in the second paragraph of your post) and this is exactly what you've done when you made the claim that "...not only do the parts of the car (if each can exist as an individual), have a soul/mind..."
To make things easier, let's continue with the example of a car. At one point, you're saying that the parts of a car are things and ergo have souls/minds (accepted) and that you can't view them as parts to do that (accepted). Then you go on to say the car is also a thing and so has a soul/mind but the problem is you can't talk of a car anymore because when you took the parts of the car as individual things, you, by your own admission, believe that"...the whole (the car) needs to be divided. When the whole (the car) is divided, it (the car) is annihilated". :chin:
"Magic" on this forum tends to be used instead of "mysterious", including here. When anyone on TPF fails to understand something, he declares it "magic" and hence feels allowed to deny phenomena that he can't explain.
Because "magic"... :-)
Yet not knowing how to explain a phenomenon is no ground to deny it. Otherwise we would never learn anything new.
Get rid of your cheap "magic" tricks and accept the real thing instead: puzzlement and wonder as fundamental and beautiful aspects of our intellectual life.
Only then will you have any chance to do philosophy.
"Magic" isn't just the unexplained, it's the fundamentally unexplainable. To deny something because it would be magic is to deny that anything is fundamentally unexplainable.
Strong emergence suggests the appearance of something from nothing and for no reason: when you arrange some stuff together, some new stuff appears, not because of anything to do with the pre-existing stuff, but just because.
(If the new stuff did have anything to do with the underlying stuff, that would be merely weak emergence, and not magic, not unexplainable, just surprising and unexplained, but still in principle reducible to the fundamental underlying stuff).
I think you're onto something there.
Consciousness can be equated with living. Perhaps only living things, beings, are in complex realities, where there appears to be material.
Mutes don't talk either, but I'm pretty sure they're conscious. These two properties aren't related then.
Did it ever occur to you that they may be perfectly rational explanations unknown to you in both the cases of the rabbit and consciousness?
Quoting khaled
So you think dead people are still conscious but can't say it anymore?
What is lacking, is praxis - a way in which this insight gives rise to actual consequences, other than the writing of academic papers for an academic audience. My objection to 'panpsychism' is precisely that it attempts to 'objectify' consciousness - to create a scientific model in which it can be incorporated. But this doesn't come to terms with why no scientific model, in the modern sense, can ever do that. So its exponents might get an audience, book sales, and so on, but they'll never get to the truth of the matter.
Quoting Punshhh
I think a lot of the chatter about 'consciousness' actually seeped into modern discourse through the influence of Vedanta. There is the well-known Sanskrit compound with which you in particular will be more than familiar: sat-chit-ananda, ??????????, 'being-knowing-bliss'. Never going to crack that nut from within the bounds of science.
On the contrary, a requirement of a proper definition of consciousness such that explaining consciousness is actually explaining something is that we can identify it in something that has it that is not ourselves, otherwise our explanation is nothing more than personal testimony. To put it another way, if consciousness *is*, then consciousness *does*, and we ought to be able to identify it in an object of study by what how it behaves.
Things like the hard problem exist specifically to add by hand a component that does nothing at all, and therefore is not amenable to scientific study. If it does nothing, how are we aware of it in a first person way, in the same way we are aware of the redness of a red ball which *is* amenable to scientific study? The answer is merely that enough of us believe in it, even though many do not. Is popular belief worth a damn to a good explanation of consciousness? No. Does this fact temper the role of belief when defining consciousness robustly? Alas also no.
Quoting khaled
The scientific study of all aspects of consciousness, such as perception and identity, fall within psychology and therefore, where possible, neurology.
Yes, there is an implicit intentionality in all life: the will to survive etc. which is not unlike the multilayered intentionality of any conscious thought.
How does Ententionality differ from or brings a nuance to Intentionality?
Maybe but I don't think there are. I think strong emergence is nonsense. You have to assume that the rabbit didn't pop up out of nowhere, that there was always a rabbit (or the constituents of a rabbit) in the hat but that we couldn't see it, for that trick to make sense.
Quoting Olivier5
Not necessarily. I'm pointing out that the ability to talk is not indicitive of consciousness.
Based on what? Your ignorance or your knowledge? If knowledge, of what? What is there objectively or logically, that makes it impossible for new combinations to fold or unfold in a new way, and for new phenomena to appear as a result?
Life emerged. It wasn't there at the beginning. Atoms are not alive. If emergence of something as complex as life can happen, then I see no reason to exclude the emergence of consciousness from the realm of possibilities.
Quoting khaled
So what exactly is indicative of consciousness?
I do understand why you would see it like that.
And I see why you say that, too. But i think there actually is a problem, which you’re not seeing - and that if you don’t see it as a problem then there’s no use trying to explain it further.
Life is a pattern. Perfect knowledge of how atoms operate will lead you to understand how "clusters" of them operate. If you could predict accurately all the motions of every single atom you would have been able to predict the second world war.
However for consciousness nothing like that seems to be the case. No amount of knowledge of how particles operate will lead to the conclusion that there is an experience that accompanies their operation assuming that the particles themselves don't have any sort of "mental properties". Because the experience is not a pattern of movement, or charge, or any other physical property.
Consider this:
Can you conceive of a clone of your self acting in the exact same way you do but without conciousness?
If no then you would be implying that consciousness is necessary for our function, that it natrually comes out of the particles that make us up. In this setup "consciousness" is akin to "temperature". Knowledge of everything about the particles will lead you to discover that these particles will act a certain way. Temperature is a pattern produced from the movement of the particles, and it would make no sense if the particles couldn't move (didn't have kinetic energy to be precise). Similarly consciousness would be a pattern produced from the particles and it would make no sense if these particles didn't have any mental properties. That particles have some mental properties is panpsychism.
If you can conceive of such a thing then consciousness is not necessary for our function, and so no amount of studying our function (neurology/psychology/biology) will lead us to detect it. In whichcase the best we can do is say that we don't know anything about why consciousness exists and furthermore that we don't know which participants are conscious and which are not.
But how would that lead to a general theory of consciousness? In psychology and neurology the most you can confirm is "When X happens Y follows". "When asked to focus on a demanding task, participants fail to notice the dancing gorilla". But that would be akin to saying "When I press A on my keyboard the letter A is typed on the screen". This would work for explaining how a PC works eventually by testing countless hypothesis and sometimes breaking open the PC (neurology) but it does not answer whether or not the PC is conscious, or why it would or wouldn't be.
This sentence is simply not true: combination of things adds information that was not present in the things being combined. No knowledge of atoms will ever allow you to predict this monster:
Chaperone proteins "Heat Shock Protein 60" and HSP10 (the cap), so called because their molecular mass is approximately 60 and 10 kDa. This means that the whole complex composed of two "baskets" (HSP60) and two "caps" (HSP 10) is more than 8000 times larger than methane, the simplest organic compound (CH4, of molecular mass 16).
This is an example of a chaperone protein, that is to say a protein that helps other proteins. In this case it helps them take or recover their correct shape after they have been damaged by heat.
...which is ruled out by the uncertainty principle....
Consciousness may be necessary for our function, and yet totally different from temperature in that it may require an actual dedicated mechanism, an organ, a structure, in order to happen rather than just piling things up with no particular structure.
Really?
Quoting Olivier5
Seems like you defined it pretty damn well here though. I'm sure you mean "won't help you predict that this monster would form in the process of evolution". But even that is false. Realistically, yes no amount of computing we can realistically do will ever predict something of that complexity, but it is theoretically possible.
But this seems like bs to me:
Quoting Olivier5
If the behavior of this protein doesn't match the predicted behavior that we get by solely applying our best physical theories to it, then either the physical theory is inadequate or the molecule doesn't behave as we think it does. We don't throw up our hands and say "Guess this molecule is so complicated that it is for some reason allowed not to obey our laws because combination of things adds information that was not present in the things being combined (whatever that means)"
If we knew everything there is to know about the state of the world at the big bang, and we had a working physical theory, we would be able to predict everything until today with the highest certainty possible. If we are not able to do this then either we don't have enough computation power, our theory is wrong, or our data is wrong. You sound like you're proposing that despite having all 3 we would still be unable to make accurate predictions because... what exactly?
Quoting Olivier5
Yes but whatever that organ or mechanism is made of it has to have mental properties there at some level. Those cannot arise out of nothing. And panpsychism isn't claiming that consciousness is a piling up of things with no structure. Figuring out that structure is the "combination problem".
Quoting Wayfarer
Sure but on the macro level the uncertainty principle becomes irrelevant so prediction should still be possible as far as I know. Or rather that is what should be the case but for some reason quantum mechanics calculations start breaking down at a level that is "macro enough". But that's why I said "perfect knowledge" as in a working theory that actually works at all levels (the whole goal of physics)
This is not what I said. What I said is that a part is not a thing. If "thing" is defined as having no necessary relations, and "part" is defined as having necessary relations, then to be both at the same time would be contradictory.
Quoting TheMadFool
The soul is not a thing.
Quoting TheMadFool
Again, the soul is not a thing. You seem to be proposing that the soul is a part, and also a thing, and insisting that this is contrary to what I said. But we do not apprehend the soul as a thing and therefore you are proposing a false premise.
Quoting TheMadFool
Again, you are making the same mistake I pointed out already. The four meter plank is one thing, it has not been divided. You cannot speak about it as if it were a large number of things, just because you have the capacity to divide it. It has not been divided. If it were divided you could not call the pieces a 4 meter plank. To talk about the plank as if it is both divided and not divided at the same time is simple contradiction.
No, I mean you could not figure out what this molecular machine does, based on knowing its components only, not anymore than you could predict what a car does based only on a description of its parts. Even if you had a good description of the STRUCTURE of the car / protein, you'd need to know additional stuff about the environment of the car / protein to understand its function. Like you'd need to know that a certain fuel has to be added in that hole at the back of the car, that a key needs to be inserted to start the car, that roads are somewhat included in the concept of car, etc. And someone would have to teach you how to drive the car.
In the case of the HSP 60-10 complex, it turns out it's a molecular machine to fix other molecular machines. We know this by looking at how it works in a cell, not by looking at it's atoms.
Proteins are the building block of life, but they are very unstable, and can mis-fold (or fail to fold properly) when the cell is too dry or hot. Misfolded proteins are like loose cannons for the cell. So HSPs 'fix' them. Here is how we think it works for HSP60/10:
The "polypeptide" (equivalent to an unfolded or misfolded protein) gets in the basket (HSP60); some fuel is added then the lid (HSP10, here noted GroES) is put on; then more fuel is added and the polypeptide folds correctly; then the lid goes off etc. ATP is the fuel. The system is polyvalent: it can fix a large number of proteins, not just one type.
So, since, as per panpsychism, only things have mind/souls, a part can't have one since, after all, it isn't even a thing to begin with.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
So a soul is nothing then. Why all the hullabloo then?
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Sorry but I can't see your point. Begin from any point in an organized system - bottom-up or top-down, you're eventually going to have to make a jump from a whole to its parts and wherever, whenever, this happens, you're at risk of commiting the fallacy of composition/division.
Yes, but only if you're making an inference. Simply holding the position that both parts and the whole of, say, a plank, simultaneously have their own conscious identities (as I do) need not commit fallacies of composition/division if that conclusion was arrived at by other types of inference. You have to have an inference to have a fallacy.
The theory and the definition need to integrate well. You can't have a definition that contradicts the theory. And your definition has to make sense enough to be explainable in the first place.
You define consciousness as a "first person experience". But what does that really mean? What is an experience? What does it mean for an experience to be first person? Is there such a thing as second or third, or zero (views from nowhere) person experiences?
I see but here's the deal. If I say everything has a soul/mind, what does everything mean?
Necessarily that nature is organized - simpler stuff combine in all and sundry ways to make more complex things. In other words, nature has, as a facet to its personality, parts-to-wholes relationships.
Now, when I say everything has a soul/mind, it can be interpreted in only one way in terms of parts and wholes viz. that both parts and wholes have souls. There's a boundary that's been crossed - the boundary between parts and wholes - and it's necessary that an inference be the means of doing that.
Also consider the paradox I mentioned in one of my posts. Does a 4 meter long wooden plank have 1 soul/mind or an infinite number of souls/minds? You can't say it has 1 soul because it can be divided infinitely, each piece itself being a thing and so possessed of a soul/mind. You can't say it has 1 soul for the reason that it consists of infinite pieces. You can't say it has both 1 soul/mind and an infinite souls because that's a contradiction.
All of these are questions you already know the answers to. By trying to ask for more and more precise definitions all you end up doing is muddying things that are perfectly clear. It's like if I asked you to define "Red" or "Run" how would you? These concepts are too basic so as to require much definition.
I made a topic about this years ago but basically I think there are some concepts that don't need definition only "assignment". An "assignment" is when you already know the meaning of a word but just need to assign a word to the already present meaning. These concepts include: Color, Space, Shape, Time, Consciousness and many others. You can't define "color" or "shape" or "consciousness" in simpler terms, all you can do is assign a word to a concept that you come pre equipped with. At least that's what it seems like to me. If you want to disagree then by all means try to define "Space" or "Shape" in simpler terms.
But that doesn't really answer the question. What is "you"? It goes back to my question before...Are "you" one neuron, a group of neurons, a brain, a body, or what? And what is it about you that provides you with different evidence of your consciousness than I have of your consciousness?
It's Deacon's word for a quality of aboutness. A thing doesnt have to be conscious to have it.
But you can know what a car does based on the description of its parts. If you know what each part does then you know exactly what will happen when you start driving.
Quoting Olivier5
Yes and in all my examples that information is given as well. This is not "new information arising from the structure of a car/protein".
Quoting Olivier5
But if you knew all the atoms in a cell you'd be able to surmise what HSP 60-10 does.
Are you simply trying to say "You can't know what a car is used for just by studying its components"? Yes, obviously, no one is debating that. However if you DO know everything there is to know about cars and you were asked "what happens when the key turns", your explanation (while likely to be very techincal and complicated) has to be reducible to "the car turns on". The introduction of the concept of "car" and "key" does not change the result. There is no NEW information in the introduction of those concepts. They are just simplifications.
So in the same way, if P-zombies are impossible, then the introduction of the concept of "consciousness" must not be a new property with no existence in the subordiante parts. It has to come out of the components naturally, and so the componenets must have some property or other that interacts to produce it. Just like how temperature comes out of kinetic energy or "car" and "key" and "driving" come out of a hunk of metal.
I understand what you mean. If you want to know what "red" means, I'd simply point to things that are red. But the same cannot be said about consciousness. Consciousness is not as simple as "red" and "square". Consciousness is a more complex entity that is composed of those things and much more. The goal for a proper definition and theory of consciousness would include how it interacts with, and relates to, the rest of the world, and defining it simply as a "first-person experience" just doesn't do that.
Then we're probably not talking about the same thing. Consciousness is more fundamental than "red" and "square". Without consciousness "red" and "600 nanometer electromagnetic wave" would be synonymous, but they're clearly not (or else we would need to teach children about electromagnetic waves before they understand what "red" means). I don't see consciousness as a complex entity at all. When first you heard the word didn't you understand it? How is it complicated then and how come we can talk about it so easily?
I'm curious how you would define it now.
Quoting Harry Hindu
And how might we test that?
"Synonymous" isn't the word I would use. I would say that without consciousness, there would be no red - only 600 nanometer electromagnetic waves (and there is even question as to whether there is actually 600 nanometer EM waves, as 600 nanometers and waves are conscious constructs). Something cannot be synonymous with something else that doesn't exist.
I thought you were on the right track with "first person experience". It's just that this is the trope most people use, and I wanted you to try and paraphrase what it means to you. Are there other words that you might use, like "awareness", or "informed"? Does "first person" refer to the uniqueness of what you are aware of, or what you are informed of, as in only you have this view and no one else does?
But you will never know everything there is to know about anything, so this is a false, unrealistic premise.
What is important is that the components do not, by themselves, contain the information you need to explain the function of the whole. The really useful information is at a level higher then that of components: it's in the way they are connected with one another to form a whole functional structure. It's a question of form, not hyle. And then about how this form interacts with other forms.
So that's the important difference? That means it applies to anything alive? Eg like plants too are tenacious and stubborn in their own way?
Yes, it's just broader. I dont think it would apply to a virus because they don't have any moving parts, so to speak. They just passively wander into a system that does exhibit ententionality and their numbers are increased in the process. We may speak of them as doing this with purpose, but it's easy enough to dispense with that framing. It's much more difficult (not sure it's even possible) to describe the physiology of a vertebrate's cardiovascular system without speaking in terms of entention.
Plants, I guess you could look at it that way. We understand the process of germination to be directed toward maturity of the plant.
Deacon hasn't addressed whether he realizes that entention is an aspect of the way we understand things. Whether that's how things really are is another issue.
You have yet to show an example of this. My point is that the higher level concepts must be reducible to the interaction of components do you disagree with that? If so please provide an example.
Quoting Olivier5
But has nothing additional to the components.
Maybe because it explains enough?
Quoting Harry Hindu
I can be unaware of my surroundings and still be conscious. And idk what informed has to do with it.
Quoting Harry Hindu
I don't know. Will get back to you after I become someone else and compare.
Yes, we can identify consciousness in the human object by studying how the human behaves. All that is required is acceptance that a human also “behaves” in an internal domain apodeitically known only to himself, in addition to his observable behavior known to others, behavior tacitly understood as some ends in accordance with the means sufficient for it.
The internal behavior in the human object of study, such behavior apodeitically known only to himself, is his thinking. Any characterization of the means for such behavior, by which the ends of such behavior are sufficiently, but henceforth also necessarily, given, can have no possible external explanation whatsoever, for that which is known only to the self can be explained only by the self, and then only with respect to the self.
While it is established that the brain is ultimately responsible for any human occupation, sheer accident and pure reflex excepted, it is clear the human does not think in terms of brain mechanics, which are predicated on natural law, from which follows inexorably that thinking is entirely dependent on its own nature. And if human thought is never in terms of natural law, it becomes clear that the notion.....
Quoting Kenosha Kid
.....is catastrophically false, under the predication that scientific study is itself in terms of natural law, in conjunction with the absolutely necessary condition that consciousness is a product of human internal behavior alone, which is not. The intrinsic circularity, as ground for asserting the falliciousness, is obvious, insofar as no science is at all possible that has no relevant thought antecedent to it, of which consciousness itself is an integral member.
It is current physics which must throw up its hands in defeat, and grant extant metaphysics its true purpose, for even if it should eventually come to pass that certain natural activities in the brain are proven sufficient causality for some immediately correlating thought, it never will appear as such to the possessor of both the brain and the thought. Especially as metaphysics has already explained internal behavior sufficient for use by the human in possession of it, all the while in complete disregard for his own brain. Not to mention, metaphysics has already identified consciousness, and feels no need to prove anything about it, except the logical validity of its place in a system.
“....Besides, when we get beyond the bounds of experience, we are of course safe from opposition in that quarter; and the charm of widening the range of our knowledge is so great that, unless we are brought to a standstill by some evident contradiction, we hurry on undoubtingly in our course. This, however, may be avoided, if we are sufficiently cautious in the construction of our fictions, which are not the less fictions on that account....”
Not looking for a response; just opinionatin’, doncha know. But thanks for a decent opportunity.
The structure is additional.
By your own words, a PC may or may not have a property you call
So the pragmatic way of proceeding is to define what we mean by consciousness in terms of what the property actually does, how it interacts with the world, what it's correlates are, then look for it. This is what some neuroscientists do. But often what we find is a recourse to mysticism. "It's the thing left over when all those other things are discovered by science." "It can't be explained in mere words!" "It's what it's like to be a conscious thing."
If you're of the former persuasion, i.e. you actually want to know what consciousness is, you have to do this iteratively. You start with a putative idea of how a conscious thing behaves such that a non-conscious thing would not behave that way, and then you refine.
Either way, saying "Science cannot explain" is not useful. You have to explain *why* science cannot explain, which means describing its properties such that they aren't amenable to scientific modelling. This is not what you are doing. Just pointing at the fact that it currently does not fully explain is an -of-the-gaps argument.
Agreed.
Hard to find something if you do not know what you're looking for.
By 'definition' the hard problem arises. The framework is the problem.
I will ask again. Are you asserting that electrons are "conscious"? If so, are they conscious in the same way and to the same degree as humans? When we say a human is unconscious (as in an accident or anesthesia) or that some action is subconscious as in reflexive response, what do we mean? What is the difference between experience, awareness, mental, mind and consciousness? Are all these term synonyms in your view or can you define differences in meaning?
Good points.
I would have thought the structure adds predictive power where knowledge of the components may be incomplete.
Yes but maybe it can’t be ascertainable for most cases. That is different from it not existing.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
Incorrect. Ascribing it says something. However we may not be able to ascribe it to most things due to not having enough evidence to do so. That’s how I see consciousness. Ascribing it means something but we have yet to find what causes it (and I don’t think we will)
Quoting Kenosha Kid
Quoting Kenosha Kid
You’re starting as if there is this word “consciousness” that means nothing that we then ascribe meaning to by specifying some capacity or other. But I would say that consciousness already has a well defined meaning. It is whether or not something can have experiences. And so defining consciousness as something like a certain level of data integration or a certain neural oscillation or whatever is just misleading. It is hijacking the word for a different use and does nothing to explain what people actually mean by consciousness.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
I did that already but not in response to you. The reason it cannot be scientifically modeled is because we cannot experiment on it. The only thing that I definitely know has the property “conscious” is me. And 1 data point is not enough to come up with a theory of any accuracy. And unlike a property such as color or length or density, I have no instrument by which to measure consciousness.
But assuming complete knowledge of the componenets the structure is just simplification and adds no predictive powers. So if "consciousness" is a structure it has to arise out of some prooperty or other of its componenets.
To know whether they are or not I would have to somehow morph into an electron and back to compare. All I'm asserting is that there is no reason to assume that consciousness is only present in the highest level organisms such as humans without even having any sort of theory that predicts so.
And yours, too, re: the argument that the hard problem is defined into being so.
Leave it to reason to confuse itself.
Which assumes that thinking is ethereal, i.e. the mind is a closed system and anything that goes on inside it is completely transparent to outside interrogation. But what neuroscience sees is the opposite: we can see you think. What remains is a difficult classification problem: how we identify a particular neurological activity with a particular mental activity.Quoting Mww
It's not, to the same extent that psychology is not. Psychology of perception, for instance, is as concerned with the external world as perception itself is.
Quoting Mww
What is the claim here, that since thinking involves consciousness, we cannot start to think about consciousness? It simply doesn't follow. Philosophy has the exact same features you describe btw, so:
Quoting Mww
by your own logic, metaphysics is doomed. Which it is, but not for that reason.
For me, it means any arbitrarily defined object whatever, for example, half-a-biscuit-kilo-of-air-over-Brazil-rock-on-Mars considered as one thing. This is a very extreme form of panpsychism and seems maximally silly at first, but it becomes less silly when one considers functionally defined individuals which, except in very unusual cases, are incredibly simple and have minimally interesting or complex experiences. I'm open to the idea that individuals are defined by the amount of information they integrate (as per Tononi and Koch). Not at all sure though.
I'm not aware of any panpsychist who says that parts are conscious because a whole is, nor that wholes are conscious because their parts are. That would be very poor reasoning. If you want to pursue this line, I'd be grateful if you could show me some bit of reasoning written by a panpsychist which commits these fallacies. Not sure where we would go from there though, if you found something I would just agree with you that it is fallacious.
Quoting bert1
from the original claim of panpsychists which is that everything has a soul/mind. Parts are things, so, they have souls/minds but the whole the parts make up is also a thing and so must have a soul/mind. Both wholes and parts are things and so, both must have souls.
However, there's a clear distinction - organizationally (is that a word?) - between wholes and parts and that distinction is important for the existence of the fallacy of composition/division - some things true of parts may not be true of wholes and vice versa. An argument becomes necessary to prove that the fallacy of division (if you're taking a top-down approach) or the fallacy of composition (if you're going for a bottom-up approach) isn't being committed.
The possibility of the fallacies mentioned being committed becomes real once you look at the paradox I mentioned earlier. Take a piece of wood - it's a thing, so, has a soul/mind. Repeatedly break it into two equal halves and with each such procedure, the number of souls should double. Do this n times and you should have in your hands 2^n pieces each with its own soul/mind.
Now ask how many souls/minds does the original piece of wood have? You would have to say, as per the panpsychists' claim that everything has a soul/mind, that the original piece of wood has both 2^n souls/minds (the 2^n parts) AND 1 soul (the original piece of wood as a whole) and that's a contradiction. The only way out of this contradiction is to draw a distinction between parts and wholes but when you do that the specter of the composition/division fallacy looms overhead like the sword of Damocles.
I'm not very well read at the moment, sorry. I haven't kept up that well with developments.
There are two camps (among others) among panpsychists IIRC. One camp are the micropsychists (or smallists) who think that there is consciousness everywhere there is matter, because all matter at the level of fundamental particles possess a unitary consciousness. So quarks and electrons and leptons or whatever are conscious. So these panpsychists don't think that literally everything is conscious, just that consciousness is everywhere because tiny things are everywhere. At exactly which points in the complexification of matter consciousness arises again as a unitary mind (i.e. a self, a centre of experience) I'm not sure about. Is it at the level of atom? The organic molecule? The cell? The neuron? The brain? Or what? Smallism seems doomed to arbitrariness to me, and very vulnerable to all the usual objections: How do experiences 'sum'? This is still a kind of emergence so why not just have emergence from non-conscious stuff? How do we avoid the arbitrariness? No doubts smallists have their answers, but one way out of this is to drop smallism and opt for....
...Cosmopsychism, which could be called 'biggism' I suppose. This says we start with the universe as a whole as the primarily conscious entity. I'm not sure about that either, although I prefer it to smallism. I might be a cosmopsychist, I'm not sure. Need to read up about it. There is the possibility here of making a fallacy of division (the parts are conscious because the whole is) as @TheMadFool will be alert to. But it's likely that other arguments are made which do not fall foul of that.
For a theory of what makes a 'self' or private unitary centre of consciousness is a very interesting question and I don't know the answer to it. However we could plug in various functionalist theories of consciousness here, but rebranding them not as theories of consciousness, but theories of the self. For example, the Integrated Information Theory of consciousness (Tononi and Koch) is a really interesting idea, except it is wrong because it is a functionalist reductionist theory of consciousness. It says consciousness and integrated information are one and the same thing, which is just wrong. Consciousness is consciousness and integrated information is integrated information. Instead it could be much more profitably rebranded as a theory of the self. That is to say, any entity that integrates information is an individual. Everything (however arbitrarily defined) integrates at least 1 bit of information (I'm winging it here - it's ages since I read the papers) so everything is a centre of consciousness. However experiences start to get interesting when more than 1 bit of information is integrated. And when we come to brains, which integrate large amounts of information, we get the rich conscious lives we currently have. I think it's an interesting possibility.
In general I think there is a massive confusion which dogs both philosophy and science, the confusion between consciousness and identity. For example, when people take an anaesthetic, it is said they have lost consciousness, which is fine for everyday talk of the kind that @Banno likes. But if we take this a little more carefully, we might ask "What exactly is lost? Could it be identity that is disrupted, rather than a loss of consciousness? Experientially, for the person, wouldn't those two things be the same?" On one, identity remains, but consciousness is lost; Asil has no experience. The other, consciousness remains, but identity is lost; Asil has no experiences because Asil, defined as a functional unity, no longer exists; instead, lower level systems which do retain (complex or simple) functional unity are the ones having experiences. When Asil wakes up, what has happened? Has her consciousness rebooted? Or has her identity rebooted? It's hard to tell experimentally. But we tend to assume it is consciousness that has rebooted, but this is not a safe assumption. I think it's much more likely that identity is disrupted.
Not all panpsychists claim that everything has a mind, some claim only that where there is anything, there is consciousness also, i.e. the smallists mentioned above.
However you successfully target my panpsychism, because I do think that everything, however defined, is individually conscious. I see no contradiction in holding that the plank as a whole has a mind, and also that, say, individual molecules in the plank also have their own minds.
It's highly relevant to the claim that 'perfect knowledge of the configuration of atoms will reveal a complete explanation of the nature of consciousness'.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
David Chalmers does that in 'facing up to the hard problem', to wit:
[quote=David Chalmers]The really hard problem of consciousness is the problem of experience. When we think and perceive, there is a whir of information-processing, but there is also a subjective aspect. As Nagel (1974) has put it, there is something it is like to be a conscious organism. This subjective aspect is experience. When we see, for example, we experience visual sensations: the felt quality of redness, the experience of dark and light, the quality of depth in a visual field. Other experiences go along with perception in different modalities: the sound of a clarinet, the smell of mothballs. Then there are bodily sensations, from pains to orgasms; mental images that are conjured up internally; the felt quality of emotion, and the experience of a stream of conscious thought. What unites all of these states is that there is something it is like to be in them. All of them are states of experience.[/quote]
The eliminativist claims that it is possible in principle to provide an account of the nature of experience in third-person terms, continuous with the other sciences; in other words, the first-person sense of experience can be eliminated without loosing anything essential to it. But what Chalmers is saying is that the first-person aspect of experience can never be explained in third-person terms as a matter of principle. So the property of the 'being the subject of experience' is not amenable to scientific modelling.
Tantalising hint from ancient philosophy:
[quote=New Advent Encyclopedia] God, according to the Stoics, "did not make the world as an artisan does his work, but it is by wholly penetrating all matter that He is the demiurge of the universe" (Galen, "De qual. incorp." in "Fr. Stoic.", ed. von Arnim, II, 6); He penetrates the world "as honey does the honeycomb" (Tertullian, "Adv. Hermogenem", 44), this God so intimately mingled with the world is fire or ignited air; inasmuch as He is the principle controlling the universe, He is called Logos; and inasmuch as He is the germ from which all else develops, He is called the seminal Logos (logos spermatikos). This Logos is at the same time a force and a law, an irresistible force which bears along the entire world and all creatures to a common end, an inevitable and holy law from which nothing can withdraw itself, and which every reasonable man should follow willingly (Cleanthus, "Hymn to Zeus" in "Fr. Stoic." I, 527-cf. 537). [/quote]
There is some similarity with the Hindu conception of ?tman:
[quote=Encyclopedia Brittanica]?tman, (Sanskrit: “self,” “breath”) one of the most basic concepts in Hinduism, the universal self, identical with the eternal core of the personality that after death either transmigrates to a new life or attains release (moksha) from the bonds of existence. While in the early Vedas it occurred mostly as a reflexive pronoun meaning “oneself,” in the later Upanishads (speculative commentaries on the Vedas) it comes more and more to the fore as a philosophical topic. Atman is that which makes the other organs and faculties function and for which indeed they function; it also underlies all the activities of a person, as brahman (the Absolute) underlies the workings of the universe. ?tman is a reflection of the universal Brahman, with which it can commune or even attain union. [/quote]
(Note this concept that is denied by Buddhists.)
That suffices. The redness of the ball is not ascertained in pitch darkness.
Quoting khaled
About the ascriber, maybe. If I say the red ball has a soul (a rubber soul, natch) but you can't do anything that proves or disproves it even in principle, or some new property that interacts with nothing in the universe, even other things having that property, it would be foolish to believe me.
Quoting khaled
Yes, on a thread in which people cannot agree as to whether an atom has consciousness or even whether a person has it. A strange place to insist it's all very well defined.
As for your definition, it simply defers it's vagueness. What do you mean by 'have experiences'? Do you mean it as Pfhorrest's conception of consciousness would have it, wherein an experience would simply be a response to a change in the environment, such as a charged particle in a changing electric field? Or do you mean it in it's normal sense of animals that are not only conscious of, say, a red ball, but aware that they are conscious of it? Or something in between?
I don’t use mind with respect to thinking, mind being merely a logical placeholder having no pure functionality of its own except to arbitrarily terminate infinite regress. I will admit that pure reason is an individuated closed system and by association, is inaccessible to general external inquiry. We can talk of it post hoc, but not concurrent with it.
————————
Quoting Kenosha Kid
No, we do not; what is seen, is a mechanical representation of my thinking. Strap a machine to my head, watch me tie my shoe. You see traces, graphs, lit sequences......I see my shoe being tied. Watch me repeatedly, set a norm, and you can subsequently see a representation of my intent to mis-tie my shoe, while I, on the other hand, will see a shoe already mis-tied.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
Difficult indeed. And with a neural connectivity average of 12.9 x 10^8/mm3**, the physical process of burrowing down to specific network paths in order to correlate them to specific cognitive manifestations, may very well destroy that path.
**Alonso-Nanclares, et. al., Department of Anatomy/Compared Pathological Anatomy, Madrid, 2008)
——————-
Quoting Kenosha Kid
It doesn’t follow because it’s no where near what I said.
The claim is scientific study of anything at all, necessarily presupposes both the empirical object to which it is directed, or at least its predictable possibility, and the rational means for its accomplishment. In order for science to study consciousness, it must reify it, or, which is the same thing, turn it into a phenomenon, the misplaced concreteness fallacy of which metaphysical study has no guilt. I understand science cannot abide the “fictions” of which metaphysics inevitably is guilty, but still, if we are careful in our construction of them then we have something to talk about in pure conceptual form, rather than a hodge-podge of conversational idioms.
Now don’t get me wrong. Science is the second most valuable paradigm in human life, right after the human himself.
Oh...forgot: in what sense do you say metaphysics is doomed?
I like this bit. Wanking should be appreciated more for its cosmic significance.
You're every welcome, thanks for asking.
I'll be especially on the lookout for fallacies of composition and division now.
The Stoic worldview quoted above is similar to my own Enformationism thesis, which is based on modern science, rather than ancient philosophical speculations. So, I use mundane metaphors from Quantum Physics and Information Theory instead of poetic notions of honeycombs permeated with the staff-of-life for bees.
I try to avoid the misleading term Panpsychism, due to its implication that bees and atoms are conscious in a manner similar to human awareness. This may sound anthro-centric to some, but human-self-consciousness is in a whole separate category from bee-awareness. There is indeed a continuum of Information complexity from atoms to humans, but it's still a hierarchy, with silly self-important humans on top.
I'm also wary of the label Cosmopsychism for the same reason --- although Phillip Goff's concept is closer to my own. This holistic concept is not the God of the Bible, but it is god-like in function. However, any personal characteristics are completely speculative, and possibly romantic. Instead, it's more like the god of Spinoza, who is "intimately mingled with the world" in the form of the ubiquitous energy of Information (Universal Substance). :smile:
Cosmopsychism : Phillip Goff -- "If we combine holism with panpsychism, we get cosmopsychism: the view that the Universe is conscious",
https://aeon.co/essays/cosmopsychism-explains-why-the-universe-is-fine-tuned-for-life
Cosmopsychism vs Enformationism : “agentive cosmopsychism”
http://www.bothandblog.enformationism.info/page53.html
Spinoza's Universal Substance : https://iep.utm.edu/spinoz-m/
The mass-energy-information equivalence principle : https://aip.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/1.5123794
You know, the bulk of this paragraph can be summarised as: "Chalmers can use the terms 'subjective aspect of information-processing', 'experience', 'felt quality' and 'state of experience' as synonyms". Other than that, he enumerates a few experiences. "dark and light"... pretty much the first neurons that fire when the retina is excited detect dark and light. What we want is not a stating of the obvious that we experience dark and light, but the distinction between "experiencing dark and light" and "detecting dark and light". What can we point as a property in our experiences that goes beyond "this is light" or "this is dark".
Analogously, what is the distinction between "I experience pleasure" and "my nucleus accumbens is stimulated"?
Quoting Wayfarer
I'm not an eliminativist. I think maybe Isaac is closer to that than myself. I do not deny that you or I have subjective experiences. My question to khaled was: what properties do they have that are not accounted for neurologically? If you look at a red ball on the table in front of you, what subjective experience of a property of that red ball do you have that is additional to the third-person view, beyond the fact that it is happening to you not someone else.
That said, I also suspect we're drifting from panpsychism a lot. The point of course is to identify a property of an electron or an atom or a living cell that can be said to be this additional property that consciousness has that a future neurological description of a conscious thing will not account for.
It may not be anthropocentric to say that human consciousness is categorically different to bee consciousness. A more telling comparison would be a chimp or a dolphin.
If one accepts both a) the primacy of awareness in one form of another, together will all that this entails (e.g., goal, and thereby telos, driven behaviors), this as an idealist would; and b) the logical necessity that life - and, thereby, the first-person awareness it can be deemed to necessitate - evolved from nonlife; what other conceivable, logically consistent inference could one arrive at other than that of panpsychism?
As you’ve alluded to, the “biggism” brand of panpsychism which bert1 refers to is a modern rebranding of the Stoic Anima Mundi. In such form of panpsychism, prior to the emergence of life in the cosmos, the cosmos would yet have been an animated given governed by Logos and its universal telos (the “universal end” the first quote in your post makes reference to). What awareness, or consciousness, or mind, or psyche/anima means in the context of a cosmos devoid of life is to me still a riddle. But, so far, the conclusion of panpsychism (in some variety or other) seems to me well enough justified - here claiming this as someone who upholds both (a) and (b) aforementioned.
I’m asking because I’ve gained the impression that you don’t find the panpsychism hypothesis appealing—while yet upholding both (a) and (b) as tenets.
I might be wrong in my presumptions regarding your outlook, however.
At the begining was the word, and the word was with God. John 1
Yes. But the categorical difference between our own and chimp/dolphin consciousness, is that human self-awareness has created a whole new form of Evolution : Culture. The evolutionary process has accelerated since humans became the dominant species. Unfortunately, human Morality has difficulty keeping up the pace with Technology. :smile:
Haven't read up on dolphins but, as a fun tidbit, chimpanzee cohorts have their own unique cultures (with a small "C").
For example: https://www.newscientist.com/article/2195890-unique-chimpanzee-cultures-are-disappearing-thanks-to-humans/
A psychism limited to certain life forms.
Maybe this needs clarification: if primacy of awareness is true, and a universe that was once devoid of life-forms is also true ... then what other viable conclusion to reconcile these two truths?
But this just defers the categorisation problem. Now we have explain why a human matriarchal tribe somewhere is a culture but a non-human matriarchal primate tribe is not. This isn't obviously easier than explaining why humans are conscious but primates are not. In fact, it's harder, since we also have to show that consciousness is the cause of culture. What we call cultural transmission -- memetics -- is observed in many animal species. These animals and no others being found to be conscious would be a great indicator that consciousness is indeed the driver of culture. Unfortunately we're trying to show that only humans are conscious. This is generally the mucking fuddle we get into when we try to show that humans a qualitatively different from, rather than just more complex and successful than, related animal species.
Yes and no. :grin:
Panpsychism is a non-starter for a science-informed metaphysics because "consciousness all the way down" explains nothing and just defers explanation.
But clearly, even physics has changed its materialist paradigm to now think of physical reality as somehow a product of "information". So science is also proving it is not adverse to a radical paradigm shift here. A metaphysics of material/efficient cause has been making way for a metaphysics of formal/final cause in some guise.
So something like a pan-informational view of the Universe, or better yet, a pan-semiotic view, has emerged. And via that, a science-based understanding of "consciousness" can be suitably naturalised. We can see how what humans do is explained within some totally generalised "physical theory of everything".
Yet even if we accept a physics which says "everything is an informational process all the way down, rather than a material process all the way up," this same ToE must make a hard distinction between "mindless physical systems" and "mindful living systems".
So there is a generalised informational/semiotic process that applies to the inorganic and non-organismic world. This is covered pretty well in unmysterious fashion by thermodynamics and quantum holism. We can understand reality and the emergence of its dissipative structures in terms of its generalised drive to entropify.
The shift from the old materialist paradigm to a new informational paradigm is about how a material world would self-organise in emergent fashion from the demands of entropy-maximising flow.
That is just untroubled science these days.
And then, likewise, we can also see how life and mind are both embedded in this generalised entropic flow, and have some extra trick - an epistemic cut - that lifts them to a different level in regards to that flow. Life and mind have the trick of memory, the trick of a modelling relationship with their material environments, the trick of being able to harness entropic gradients and direct them towards their own organismic ends.
So that makes a hierarchy with a sharp division. The foundation is a brute material world of entropy flows and the structures and patterns that must produce. Then the further thing is the evolution of semiotic mechanisms - truly informational substrates like membranes, genes, neurons, words, numbers - to support a world of self-interestedly entropifying organisms.
Again, panpsychism is a theory that is "not even wrong" as whether it is the case or not, makes no difference. Panpsychists still explain atoms vs amoeba vs chimps vs humans in terms of genetic information, neural information and cultural information.
And that still leaves "consciousness" as completely unexplained as it is by material reductionism.
The only difference is that physical materialists have to say that consciousness somehow pops out at the end. And panpsychists have to claim it was always there - in some invisible and maximally attentuated fashion - from the beginning. It is just a different choice about which carpet the essential explanandum gets swept under.
But biology, neuroscience and social psychology have already long shifted to a worldview that accepts reality is a combo of matter and information. Or to be more precise, a semiotic interaction between the two.
Consciousness - in that view - is simply what it is like to be in a meaningful and intentional semiotic modelling relation with the world. It feels like something to be an organism engaged in the world via a complex interpretive relation because ... well, why wouldn't that feel like something. It must feel like exactly what it is. An enactive or embodied psychological relation.
And then happily, the physical sciences have shifted from an uber-materialist metaphysics towards a information-based one.
The Universe isn't gaining a "mind" in the process as to have a mind is to have the kind of private point of view that a semiotic interpretive relationship is all about. But it does then allow the Universe to be modelled overtly in terms of its formal and final causes - as for instance, the laws of thermodynamics. So the metaphysics becomes "mindful" in that important respect.
So panpsychism is bunk because it is a simple inversion of the failures of materialism.
Materialism shrugs and says consciousness must pop out due to "sufficient complexity". And that emergence thesis is meaningless to the degree materialism offers no proper model of "complexity". Meanwhile panpsychism shrugs its shoulders and says consciousness is always there in matter, even when it is ultimately simple. And panpsychism then offers no proper model of this simplicity. It just claims property dualism as a logically necessary fact.
But physics was in need of metaphysical reform. That is happening with an information theoretic perspective that shows how a generalised material simplicity can arise from "complex" chaos. The Comos could arise as a self-organised dissipative structure - the Big Bang universe.
And the biological sciences also had to finish the job on modelling actual complexity - systems that are organismic in that they can embody their own formal/final causes. That too is a project that has moved at great speed these past 50 years.
Right, a part only exists in relation to a whole, and mind/soul would be attributed to the whole.
Quoting TheMadFool
Why do I need to "jump from a whole to its parts"? We can talk about a whole and its parts all in the same context. No jump is required. You are proposing that we divide the whole up, but then you want to keep talking about the whole as if it still exists after its been divided.
Are you asking how it is possible that a thing can be divided in two, and both halves might have the same attribute that the whole had? Isn't this like asking how it is possible that a red thing might be divided, and both halves might still be red? Why not ask the more interesting question of how it is possible that a single celled organism can divide, and become two copies of the very same thing? What are the two a copy of, each other, the original, or something else?
Premise 1: Everything has a soul (panpsychism)
Premise 2: Everything about a car (its parts and the car whole) is a thing
Conclusion: The parts of a car have souls. The car, as a whole, has a (one) soul. The car has many souls (parts) and the car has one soul (the car as a whole) [CONTRADICTION!!]
Proposed resolution of the contradiction: the parts and the whole are different kinds of things and that's why parts can be many souls and the car, as a whole, can have one soul.
Problem with the proposed resolution: a jump has been made from parts to wholes because necessarily the everything in "everything has a soul" (panpsychism) can't be refer to both parts and wholes [because if it does the contradiction I obtained above stands] and so an inference from either parts to wholes (bottom-up) or an inference from wholes to parts (top-down) has to be made and then the fallacy of composition and the fallacy of division becomes a clear and present danger.
You seem to be missing the point. Either you are talking about the car as one unified entity, or you are not talking about a car, but a bunch of separate things, existing independently which could be used to make a car. The contradiction is in saying that there is both, at the same time, a unified car, and also a bunch of independent parts. The car cannot have one soul as "a car", and also many souls as "a bunch of independent parts", at the same time, because it cannot fulfill these two distinct descriptions at the same time. Therefore there is no problem with contradiction. There is only contradiction if you think that it is, at the same time, both a car and a bunch of independent separate things.
Take the following symbol for example: 8. Either this symbol represents one unified whole, consisting of eight parts, or it represents eight independent things. Clearly it is the former, it represents a unified group of eight. To assign to each of the eight, a separate, independent existence would be to deny their status as eight which requires that they are a unified group. We can say that the group has a "form", represented as "8". It does not have eight independent forms.
How does that follow from the premise that the universe has been partly negentropic from the Big Bang get go? This being something you’ve previously stipulated in other threads.
Upholding a partly negentropic universe that is, and has always been, governed by teleological and formal principles is nothing short of a proposal for an Anima Mundi, i.e. for an animated cosmos with teleological strivings, this being a form of panpsychism. Only that, to the staunch materialist, this flavoring of “anima/psyche” can only be an object of ridicule. And this due to a deeply engrained materialistic dogma that needs to be safeguarded.
On the other hand, if there indeed is upheld a sharp division between the entropic and the negentropic, as you’ve here asserted, then how can a fully entropic system logically give rise to negentropy? The empirical fact that life (which is negentropic) emerged from nonlife (which you here specify as being sharply entropic) does not, in and of itself, provide a shred of explanation of how this could have come about.
Quoting apokrisis
And so panpsychism is not something that, of itself, makes a difference. Granted. Notwithstanding, the primacy of awareness, from which the stance of panpsychim can be derived, does. A reading of C. S. Peirce's philosophy can illustrate how. With one example being that of the objective world being effete mind; another being the difference in where the cosmos is headed: a difference that is exceedingly substantial.
But I gather the primacy of awareness is a bit too theistic reeking for the materialistically minded. So, to avoid that slippery slope into monotheism or some such, it must be denied tout court.
A car is in fact the worst kind of example as a car is a machine and not an organism.
The whole point of a car is that it exists as the expression of some engineer's wishes and designs. So it is an example of nature that is as much an arrangement of dumb components as is materially possible. It is an example of the maximally unnatural, in other words. It is built to be as little subject to holistic physical processes - like rusting or change - as possible.
It is thus a Cartesian object - the sophisticated expression of a human capacity to separate top-down informational constraints from bottom-up material processes. It is dualism made real.
The engineer becomes a god ruling nature - an intellectual willing soul. The world becomes a realm of passive material action.
But that is the reality of artifice, not the reality of nature.
So, when there's a whole car there are no parts and when there are parts there's no car? So, when the car is being assembled piece by piece the souls of the parts conveniently vanish and the soul of the car comes into existence when the car is being disassembled, the souls of the parts magically reappear and the soul of the car vanishes? Is this what you're saying? If you are then everything doesn't have a soul for the simple reason that the parts are still things even when they're all assembled together into a car and, according to you, they don't have souls when they are so.
Quoting 180 Proof
Yeah, I get the apex predator thing. Maybe a better analogy would be a fortress + good logistics + divine armor + divine weapons. The Iliad complex: a righteous cause, tight tactics, traceable lineage of armory, gods on your side.
There's a whole machinery that lets the heroes get real nasty - something subtends their courage, if you like. Homer loves lion and sheep metaphors, but the heroes that those lion-metaphors apply to only get to the lion-point after all the 'secretly aided by gods" stuff. Maybe the difference between us and, say, Dimoedes is that Diomedes would never brag about his confrontation with the void, because everyone would laugh him out of the room. You only boast about confronting the void, if youve lost some confrontation. The loss irks you and then you make your experience of being-knocked-down a victory. I mean this is zero-level compensation. Sometimes I think you let your Brassier drown out your Nietzsche.
At some level, 'apex predator' on a forum is just a metamorphosis (metastasis?) of choosing badass anime fighters for one's avatar. Boys in a Sandbox, right? Here is my homebase: this action figure is here and says this, and this action figure is here and says that, and etc etc. The 'Apex Predator' thing is always based in the fortress, eventually.
Ok.
I don't want to get into the weeds here. You can parse that as fear of being shown wrong, if you like. I've stopped wanting to think things through by defending against people who think of themselves as apex predators, against kids who have the best action figures. The problem with the strawberry thing you bring up is that of course the taste of strawberries is emergent. But I think it less useful to argue for panpsychism by explaining why that is the case than to ask why you think the atoms-like-strawberries is a good 'in', a knock-down reductio (it's patently not) rather than a move by a self-styled apex predator characterizing a panpsychist sheep's thought (strawberries, curious, why that particular thing?)
What I've emphasised in the past is that entropy and negentropy are two sides of the one coin. You have to have structure to dissipate, and dissipation to have structure.
So yes, the Big Bang can be talked of as just dissipation - a great cooling. But that in itself requires structure - the expansion of spacetime which creates the "sink" in which the material contents of the Big Bang can cool.
In cosmology, that makes entropy counting a tricky business. In the end, the amount of entropy and the amount of negentropy have to come out the same. The two add together to sum to nothing.
Quoting javra
A pansemiotic approach is Aristotelean in accepting that there are all four causes in nature. And that maps to a physics of thermodynamics and cosmogenesis that gives equal dues to negentropy (or informational structure) and entropy (or dissipation).
But it doesn't support panpsychism for the reason I gave. There is still a clear line to be drawn between the inorganic realm and the organic realm. Science also talks about that.
Quoting javra
Again, the thesis is that they are two sides of the one coin. A case of dependent co-arising if you take the Buddhist view. A dichotomy if you take the Greek one.
So it is a division that arises and grows sharp. And it can do so because those are the two contrasts embedded in the very beginnings.
Quoting javra
The "effete mind" quote is easy to misinterpret as one sentence picked out from a large corpus.
Peirce was clearly trying to move beyond Cartesian dualism in toto, not merely declare against materialism and for divine soul. His focus was on the semiotic relation between impersonal information and informed material being.
Either you critique that machinery - the thirdness of a modelling relation - or you are avoiding the point of his metaphysics.
Quoting javra
Primacy itself is the problem here.
Whether you are an idealist or realist, theist or materialist, the problem with your scheme is the drive to declare one metaphysics right and its opposing metaphysics wrong. That is the faulty mindset that defines the Cartesian bind.
As I have reminded here, my pansemiotic approach is all about dependent co-arising and dichotomistic symmetry breaking. You have nothing at all unless there is already a division in nature towards its two logically opposed limits. There is no yin without yang.
Furthermore, any successful dichotomy has to show the relation that makes its two halves logically connected. They must be thesis and antithesis - each obviously the other of the other.
With spirit and body, these aren't a dichotomy as we have no such explanatory connection. It is just a simple dualism aching to be resolved into a monism.
It is only if you can follow Peirce and other triadic system thinkers that you can go in the other direction of arriving at a duality that in fact is the trinity of a self-organising and synergistic relation.
Peirce nutted that out as a formal logic - his semiotic. And it happened to map to the way science has now gone as it gets to proper grips with nature.
The car was the choice of TheMadFool as an example of a fallacy of division. I explained how it was not really a fallacy of division.
Quoting TheMadFool
No, I went through this with you already, twice now I think. The car has parts, but as "part", they are not independent objects. Therefore you cannot speak of them as if they are independent objects, in the same context as you speak of the car as an existing object. It's the same principle as the issue with your four meter plank of wood. It cannot be a four meter plank, and also a whole bunch of short pieces in the same context. It must be one or the other to avoid contradiction.
Quoting TheMadFool
Now you're on the right track. These are the mysteries of the soul which no one seems to be able to adequately answer. Here's another similar mystery for you. How does a single celled organism divide and go from being one soul to two souls?
Quoting TheMadFool
This is not true though, for the reasons I've explained. When a part is united as a part of a whole, it gives up its identity as "an individual entity", for this new identity, "part of a whole". The two identities are distinct and incompatible, contradictory, such that it cannot be both at the same time.
Sounds about right to me. Generally I mean. I disagree with the semiotic distinction between syntax and semantics when it comes to meaning, but other than that... Yeah, that sounds about right.
Conscious experience is meaningful to the creature having it.
Yes. Most of the higher animals have some form of culture, including ants & bees. But I wouldn't put them in the same category with human culture. I'm aware that some people prefer to belittle the accomplishments of humans, in order to avoid the notion that they are something more than mere animals. I assume it's a rejection of the notion of human souls, and a unique "human nature". But that's not what I'm talking about. There's no need for the miraculous addition of a soul to turn a sheep into a shepherd. Evolution does that trick naturally, but it takes time, lots of it. :smile:
Animal Culture : Animal culture involves the current theory of cultural learning in non-human animals, through socially transmitted behaviors. The question as to the existence of culture in non-human societies has been a contentious subject for decades, largely due to the lack of a concise definition for the word "culture".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_culture
Anti-Humanism : Central to antihumanism is the view that philosophical anthropology and its concepts of "human nature", "man" or "humanity" should be rejected as historically relative, ideological or metaphysical.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antihumanism
Other than via mischaracterization or willful strawmaning, panpsychism does not deny the (somewhat) clear line between the inorganic realm and the organic realm (unless we forget viruses, viroids, and prions - which are organic and replicate but are nonliving, or, at the very least, non-metabolizing).
Recall that, of itself, panpsychism "is a difference that makes no difference".
Quoting apokrisis
I'd don't believe that I misinterpreted the notion of effete mind. Peirce, after all, was an objective idealist, not a materialist. And yes, the concept is vastly more complex than what can be conveyed by two words.
As to Peirce's point, agapeism was a part of it. Something your system appears to conveniently overlook.
Quoting apokrisis
Misplaced words. The dichotomies offered are faulty. Plato, for instance, was a realist. Moreover, isn't it about truth and that which is real? As one example, if one rejects the notion that a first-person awareness can be reincarnated, is this not about one's belief in what is true? In what can and cannot be real? Or is this conclusion the "faulty mindset that defines the Cartesian bind"?
That is the point of my Enformationism thesis. It's not just dumb Information all the way down. Instead, it's the upward evolution of Information over the ages. The information in the Big Bang singularity is imagined as a simple mathematical algorithm. That simple expression must have included self-reference to create feed-back loops in the program.
And that non-linear loop was the beginning of complexification, which has resulted in the current form of Information that we call "Ideas in a Mind". That distinction may not be "hard" enough for you, but it postulates a continuous logical progression of Information processing, as a natural solution to Chalmer's "hard problem". :nerd:
Evolutionary Algorithm : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionary_algorithm
Do Loops Explain Consciousness? : [i]Review of Douglas Hofstadter's book, [u]I Am a Strange
Loop[/u][/i]
https://www.ams.org/notices/200707/tx070700852p.pdf
Evolutionary (Genetic) Programming :
[i]The program does not specify the final outcome. But it does define a “fitness function”, which sets the criteria for acceptable solutions. With-out those limits, the process could go on indefinitely.
We can see that natural evolution is circling around some future state, like a moth to a light. The ultimate fitness point functions like a Strange Attractor to “pull” the present toward that future state.[/i]
http://blog-glossary.enformationism.info/page13.html
I'm not sure what you mean. You may be making a point from linguistics that is not that relevant to semiosis in a more general triadic sense.
But syntax and semantics would be an example of a dichotomistic opposition here. A sign intrinsically refers to nothing. And so it can be take to mean anything.
In causal terms, the apparent impotence of a symbol - its lack of meaning - is likewise the source of its omnipotence. It is now completely up to a community of speakers to agree as to the semantics of any utterance.
And in that, an epistemic cut becomes a physical possibility. A Cartesian-style division between worlds and minds can arise with the syntax - the naked symbol - as the universal fulcrum to lever the situation.
So as a general story, semiosis is about how a system of reference can arise in a materially constrained world. The possibility of a relation emerges on the back of some state of physical meaninglessness that thus enables a matching degree of informational meaningfulness to be injected into the equation.
That is what the evolution of semiotic codes - like genes, neurons, words, numbers - is all about. Each level has less to do with concrete physics and thus more to do with abstract information.
A gene can speak about any possible protein structure, but also, only about possible proteins. A neuron can encode any physical stimulus in terms of a behavioural response. Words and numbers encode for material social relations and logically abstract ideas. (Eventually, Platonia is achieved. :grin: )
So there is a constant thread. Syntax is how the material and informational aspects of being get divided into their two distinct halves by the time you get to that Western philosophical ideal of the abstract mind in opposition to a brute meaningless world. The mathematical understanding of nature.
But Peircean semiotics brings us back to the fact that a code - a syntax - is simply a mediating device. There is nothing at all unless the two sides being divided are also then in a pragmatic modelling relation. The full triadic relationship has to be "meaningful" in that it represents now "a point of view acting on the world with intent".
Quoting creativesoul
Or to generalise that, semiosis is all about the possibility of a point of view. And that possibility hinges on the machinery of a triadic modelling relation.
We can thus see an amoeba is as semiotic as any human at the level of general natural mechanism, even if we might not have reason to think of the amoeba as "conscious".
In some sense, every organism has a first person perspective. And so the proper target of a theory of mind and life is just that.
The explanation for consciousness is then focused on animals with a running neural model of their worlds.
And for human introspective self-awareness, that is a story all about the difference a linguistic code makes to the running relation humans have with their sociocultural worlds.
Numbers in turn are constructing an even higher and more abstracted semiotic reality beyond that. A noosphere or singularity some might speculate. An AI Platonia or Borg colony possibly. Heh, heh.
No biggie. I'm stoked to see the genuine agreement between our views regarding conscious experience(consciousness).
Bees and ants do not have socially transmitted behaviors as far as I'm aware - hence, no culture. If you know otherwise, please provide a reference.
No, human culture is not chimpanzee culture, nor vice versa. The question isn't whether human culture should be placed into the same camp as the culture of some lesser animal species or another. The issue is one of whether humans are metaphysically divided from the rest of life, or, else, are a progressive aspect of life in general - this despite the massive punctuated-equilibrium leap which our species has undergone.
I agree. But I'm not talking about PanPsychism, but about PanEnformationism.
See my reply to above. :cool:
I would say that Humanity is "metaphysically divided" from animals as an Aristotelian ten-fold conceptual category. Perhaps number (3) Quality. Christians would call that "quality" a "Soul". But I don't use that terminology. :smile:
That is where panpsychism becomes even more intellectually dishonest. People do argue that neural complexity somehow amplifies the dilute awareness that is already a property of the material realm.
This is called having your cake and eating it. You can agree with the material emergentist while also disagreeing.
But that is a failure to engage with the actual position that a biosemiotician would be advancing on the how and why of this "clear line".
Quoting javra
Yes. That was my criticism. It is not an advantage to argue a theory that "isn't even wrong" in this fashion.
Quoting javra
Quoting javra
Peirce offers any number of hostages to fortune. It is the totality of his life and work that must be weighed here.
And even if modern biosemiotics only picked and choosed what best fits a science framework, that would be OK too.
My approach is that of a pragmatic scientist, not a theist who must defend a holy text. It just so happens that Peirce turns out to be such a rich resource for any systems thinker seeking to go beyond scientific reductionism.
People are sometimes also fond of arguing that ameba do not hold a first-person awareness of light and dark, not to again mention of what is relative to them predators and prey. They hold no "neural complexity" to speak of. But then, this can get boosted all the way up the to the supposed metaphysically unique status of humans - as divided from everything else in the cosmos.
Be aware that Christian theology appropriated many of these ideas from Greek philosophy, and then adapted them so they would confirm their dogma. And now such ideas are tacitly rejected BECAUSE of their association with that dogma. It's a tangled web.
Quoting apokrisis
I mentioned 'enactivism' recently.
[quote=Wikipedia]Enactivism argues that cognition arises through a dynamic interaction between an acting organism and its environment.[1] It claims that our environment is one which we selectively create through our capacities to interact with the world.[2] "Organisms do not passively receive information from their environments, which they then translate into internal representations. Natural cognitive systems...participate in the generation of meaning ...engaging in transformational and not merely informational interactions: they enact a world.[/quote]
Similar to what you're arguing, I think.
However, I'm dubious about the notion of 'information' as a kind of fundamental or foundational category. Whenever the word 'information' is used, I'm inclined to ask, 'what information, in particular?' or 'what do you mean by "information"?' I'm aware of that well-known quote by Norbert Weiner that 'information is information, not matter or energy'. But 'information' is not, as it were, a metaphysical primitive, or so it seems to me. To say that 'everything is composed of matter and information' is a kind of modern update of hylomorphic dualism, but 'information' is a very different conception to 'form'.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
Apart from anything else, because a neurological account requires an interpreter. Neurological accounts, or any accounts, are symbolic representations, they have no intrinsic reality. That act of interpreting data is also internal to thought, you won't find that anywhere in the data of neurology or in the analysis of brain states.
On a more mundane level, the description of a thing is not that thing. Knowing about the physiology of pain or fear, does not amount to 'knowing pain' or 'knowing fear'. You can describe the physiology of a bee sting or a shark bite but the description doesn't amount to the experience.
And besides, as I've pointed out to you previously, neuroscience has had to acknowledge the 'neural binding problem' - which is that it can find no neural mechanism which accounts for the subjective unity of experience.
[quote=Jerome S. Feldman] As is well known, current science has nothing to say about subjective (phenomenal) experience and this discrepancy between science and experience is also called the “explanatory gap” and “the hard problem” (Chalmers 1996). ....What we do know is that there is no place in the brain where there could be a direct neural encoding of the illusory detailed scene (Kaas and Collins 2003). That is, enough is known about the structure and function of the visual system to rule out any detailed neural representation that embodies the subjective experience. So, this version of the neural binding problem really is a scientific mystery at this time. [/quote]
Quoting javra
A very insightful post.
The concept of evolution in the Darwinian sense doesn't really account for the origin of life, as such (notwithstanding Darwin's musings about the 'warm little pond'). And so I question whether the notion of evolution can be extended to the origin of life. I think this comes from the way in which Darwinian biology displaced the traditional account of the Creation, and so therefore is expected to be able to provide a comprehensive account, in the way the creation story purportedly did. So it is 'naturally assumed' that life evolved from non-life. But then, before Louis Pasteur came along, it was 'naturally assumed' that mice spontaneously generated from damp cloth.
I noticed once an item of dogma from one of the Hindu religious sects: 'life comes from life'. To my knowledge, this supposition has not yet been overturned by an empirical observation.
In very general terms, the appearance of life anywhere in the cosmos represents the manfestation of subjective awareness. I think I would like to argue that this is because there is an inherent trend towards self-awareness, so as to disclose horizons of being which cannot otherwise be realised. (This is an idea is not allowed in mainstream thinking, as it is 'orthogenetic'. However it is discussed in rudimentary form by Nagel in several of his essays and books. And I also always liked Bohr's (tongue in cheek?) remark that 'a physicist is an atom's way of looking at itself'.)
My objection to Strawson's argument is: basically that 'everything is material' (i.e., he's a materialist); but you can't deny the reality of experience; so matter itself must somehow embody the capacity for experience. So, again, he's trying to maintain or validate materialism, whilst acknowledging the apodictic nature of first-person experience.
Whereas, I question materialism, on the grounds that physical matter has no intrinsic reality at all. It is real in some sense, it's not simply an illusion, because you can stub your toe on it. But it has no intrinsic or inherent reality; as Buddhists say, whatever reality it has, is imputed to it. But I'm not claiming to know what 'the origin of life' is. I simply question that the widespread assumption that it must have somehow sprung from matter, like mice from damp cloth.
This. This is basically exactly as I defined it but although you were apparently confused by my definition you still reused it. Which shows that maybe it's not confusing or vague, at least for the purposes of this discussion.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
What is happening in the case of consciousness is sort of similar. We all jointly claim to have some sense of experience/qualia/consciousness-of-red-balls whatever you wanna call it and we do not know whether or not that property interacts with the universe or how it would do so. And we cannot show how this property interacts with other things that have this property. Would it be foolish for you to believe me if I say "I am conscious"? Regardless of your answer, how do we scientifically go about confirming the existence of this property and what brings it about, when we do not know how it interacts with the universe or similar things that we believe (or don't believe) have that property.
How would you define this?
Indeed, the important point is that panpsychism is a (at least) 2000 yr old mythology. Doesn’t make it false but it cannot claim to be original thinking.
Therefore:
Quoting Mww
must be false, since observing that mechanical representation is a form of external enquiry.
Quoting Mww
Hurry up, quantum computing!
Quoting Mww
Okay, so I wasn't that far off. It's still not shown why this is problematic. There are good methods precisely for this.
Quoting Mww
Well... who would win in a fight between Superman and The Rock?
Good point. And this is interesting precisely because this sort of argument pits personal testimony -- the narratives we construct around experience -- with physical activity. Why is experiencing pleasure more than having one's nucleus accumbens stimulated? Because some people insist they experience more, although they can't quite pin it down. But their description of the thing is not the thing itself. We've considerable amounts of evidence to show that people are not great judges as to what happened, why they did what they did, etc.
The same also must be true for any description of experience, which might explain why it can't be pinned down better. Be it a metaphysical description, a neurological description, or personal testimony, we are always making some transform between description of experience and experience itself or vice versa.
Quoting Wayfarer
Yes, seeing someone have an experience is not the same as having the experience. The experiencer is different.
Quoting Wayfarer
This is an -of-the-gaps argument.
Quoting Wayfarer
Which, @khaled, is a different definition of consciousness to the one I had in mind re:
Quoting khaled
Above you're saying that any use of 'conscious' is how you mean it. But you're entertaining panpsychism, which is not compatible with consciousness as I define it. Seeing that I use the word is not evidence that you and I use it in the same way. Pfhorrest uses it synonymously with reactivity, any change in a system due to changes in its environment counts. That is not my definition, or most people's. Panpsychists generally hold consciousness or mind to be something that an atom has. That's not compatible with most people's views either.
The question is: what properties does consciousness have such that one could say a computer has or doesn't have it, or an atom has or doesn't have it. In Pfhorrest's schema, these properties are well-defined. Mine are less well-defined, but are nonetheless incompatible. Chalmers' are at once under- and over-defined and fail to show, merely insist upon the existence of, distinction.
To put it another way, I place a cup, a ball and a towel in front of you. One of these has property X. Which one?
Yep. Enactivism is another recent incarnation of the general idea.
Quoting Wayfarer
This is tricky as information is both a primitive, and also stands against the notion that a primitive is something concretely material.
Information could be considered the atoms of form. A bit of information is a countable degree of freedom. So it is elemental in the sense of existing as some constraint on material possibility. It is thus a top-down way of defining a concrete primitive - one that denies primitives have the brute material existence that a materialist wants to presume.
Atomism presumes that matter has some divisible limit, otherwise matter would crumble to nothingness. Nothing could be composed unless matter is grounded in uncuttable atoms.
Information in physics also speaks to such an ultimate limit. But now in terms of form rather than matter. There is some smallest Planckscale notion of an event or action. And so that is what grounds a composable reality. There is a smallest signal or definite countable possibility. An atom of form.
You are showing the incoherency of your ontology here. A sign, as a sign, is created intentionally to have some reference. Without that it is not a sign. So your attempt here, to remove the essence of "sign" from the sign, and say that "a sign intrinsically refers to nothing" is self-contradicting. Removing the intentionality (source of meaning) from the sign leaves it as something other than a sign. So that you'd need to replace "sign" in this proposition with something else, "a ... intrinsically refers to nothing". From here, we can proceed to acknowledge that an act of authority is required to make something (the supposed sign) refer to something when previously it did not.
If and when you realize that your premise is self-contradicting, you'll see your system theory fall like a house of cards. The intent of the author then becomes the most important factor in meaning, validating "what is meant by", so that the premise of infinite possibility, and your assumption that it is "completely up to a community of speakers to agree as to the semantics of any utterance", is falsified.
But you are aware that you are conscious and you being conscious is part of your surroundings, no? Informed, as in possessing knowledge. Are you conscious, or aware, of your knowledge?
Quoting khaled
Then what did you mean by "first-person"? You still haven't clarified what that even means, or how ti compares to zero-person or second-person experiences.
I am but I didn't mention that in my discussion with you because it is unrelated to my argument. Whether or not I am a panpsychist should not change what I said.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
I don't see how that follows. Maybe if you were to define it I'd see why it's incompatable with panpsychism. I don't see how it follows because if I entertain the notion that everything in the world has the property "red" that doesn't necessarily mean that our uses of the word are different. They could be the same, but one of us is just outright wrong. In the case of "pan-redism" I am obviously wrong. In the case of panpsychism I don't know which is wrong and which is right (assuming either of us are)
Quoting Kenosha Kid
Again, it would help if you defined what you mean by it.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
This is putting the cart before the horse. You already assumed that computers and atoms don't have consciousness before even coming up with a theory that explains what consciousness is. What you're doing here is you're defining this word "consciousness" as a capacity or other that humans possess that computers and atoms don't. But again, I think the word already has an associated meaning, and what you're doing here is simply hijacking the word to detect something else.
Saying "aware that you are conscious" is like saying "wet water"
Quoting Harry Hindu
Can't remember a point where I possessed no knowledge so I can't tell you if you need to know things to be conscious.
Quoting Harry Hindu
Zero person doesn't make sense. Second person also doesn't make sense in this context. Third person is your view of something from a distance. First person is the view from my perspective. I'm just saying the same things over and over again because this definition cannot be simplified. Maybe check what the difference is between "first person shooter" and "third person rpg"
And I don't get why this quote prompted your question:
Quoting khaled
What I meant there is that for example if we're both stuck in identical rooms in identical locations in identical positions in identical everything (physical), I cannot tell if we would have the same experience.
I don't think so. Can you report anything that you aren't aware of, like being conscious? By what means do you know things, like that an apple is on the table and that you are conscious?
Quoting khaled
Do you know anything when not conscious?
Quoting khaledthird person and first person seem to be the same thing as "from a distance" is just a different location of the first person experience.
You're saying the same things over and over because you seem to be unwilling to even try to make any sense and be consistent.
I was not doing some reductio ad absurdum here. I was implying that this point of contention is useless. No one cares whether or not water is wet and it doesn't help in whatever discussion you decide to have about water. In the same way I don't think "are you aware of being conscious" is important.
Quoting Harry Hindu
Depends on your definition of knowledge. And that says nothing about the original statement even if I answered yes or no.
Quoting Harry Hindu
Oh so you understand what it means now all of a sudden? You just used it to form a correct sentence. Congratulations!
Quoting Harry Hindu
No. It's because no matter how hard I drill down into this definition all I will do is make it more complicated and you will forever keep asking for more drilling. You clearly understand what "first person view" means since you just used it in a sentence, yet you keep asking for more and more pointless drilling.
Categorical error: seeing a mechanical representation, an altogether empirical enterprise, is very far removed from the a priori originating cause it. Ther’s precious little difference between that, and this:
Quoting Kenosha Kid
Not to mention, given that observation implies attention, you are in the metaphysical position of turning the mechanical representation into a cognitive representation of your own. And, if that wasn’t un-scientific enough fer youse guys, you probably should invoke a judgement relative to your understanding of the mechanical representation of my thinking about fooling you by intentionally mis-tying my shoe. Which of course, you will never be able to do, for no judgement is at all possible with respect to second-hand, non-empirical predicates. You may certainly think I purposely did what I did, but such thinking on your part can have no sustaining visibility from the device you put on my head to watch my brain.
Barbarians, 42; lions, 0.
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Quoting Kenosha Kid
Good methods for precisely this taken to mean methods for the scientific study of consciousness.
Are you going to bring in psychology? Or are you going to restrict scientific study to the conditions explicit in the scientific method pursuant to the hard sciences?
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Quoting Kenosha Kid
I don’t know what to do with that. Sorry.
Because in my view, states of consciousness are just brain states, and atoms don't have brains. You seem to be reacting with faux surprise at the idea that a panpsychist-compatible idea of consciousness isn't to be taken as a given. This is nonsense. Even panpsychists know that their idea of consciousness is not in any way mainstream.
Quoting khaled
That's been my question to you. You asked me if a computer has it or not. State what it is. (Of course, I'm not really expecting an answer. Conversations like these exist precisely because people cannot or will not say what it is they are talking about, viz. Chalmers' chain of synonyms.)
Quoting khaled
That is a false representation of the facts. You asked me whether a computer has it. I have not answered that because you cannot say what 'it' is. You are putting the cart before the horse by asking whether something has a property but refusing to say what that property is. I did the same when I asked:
Quoting Kenosha Kid
Yes, I can answer your question according to my own definition, but it's you asking, not me, so it's your definition that matters. Since you do not have one, its a meaningless question.
Very important distinction here: are they brain states or are they caused by brain states. Because for me it is the latter (note: I am not saying they are only caused by brain states). I cannot understand how it can be the former. So the experience of the color red is a 600nm wavelength entering your eye?
I'm assuming by brain state you mean the literal state of my brain as a certain experience is happening, and that that experience is (somehow) that brain state. So we are talking about the location and movement of particles here and additionally implying that having a brain means being conscious.
So let me pick your consciousness a bit here. What are the properties of brains that allow for consciousness, aka what passes as a "brain"? If someone had a steel rod fly through their head and survived their brainstate is obviously different from ours, are they still conscious/is their damaged brain still a brain? What about other animals or are we just talking about human brains here? If someone had a surgery that replaces a part of their brain with an electrical component are they still conscious/does that modified brain pass as a brain? And if so, that would mean that even non-organic components can pass as "brains" in whichcase how do we make a non-organic brain that produces consciousness?
Quoting Kenosha Kid
Not so much surprise. I was just pointing out that maybe it isn't incompatable.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
The ability to have an experience. I know this doesn't explain any more than the previous "definition". But that's because this can't be simplified.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
I would just like to point out that that doesn't make it meaningless. If I asked you to describe what "shape" is for instance you would also struggle. Because the concept is so basic any attempt at defining is going to require more complicated concepts which only make sense assuming you already know what "shape" means.
If we were to define a word by using multiple other words, then define each of those by using multiple other words, we would have an infinite loop where people can no longer understand the language because in order to understand any one word they must understand infinitely many. Which is why I think there is a "cutoff point", words that do not need definition just pointing. An example is "Red". You point at enough red things and anyone will understand what red means and you do not need a definition. I think "shape" and "consciousness" are such words among others. And that's why people use synonyms to describe consciousness.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
I have now answered what "it" is. The ability to have an experience. You will likely find that inadequate but on the off chance you don't: does a computer have 'it'?
Then how do you know that you are conscious? Its important to know how you know that you are conscious, or any other fact for that matter. Do you know that there are eggs in the fridge in the same way that you know that you are conscious?
Water isn't wet. Wet is a relationship between water and something else. An object that is not water is wet when water interacts with it.
Quoting khaled
No. I was simply reiterating your explanation and showing you how your distinction between first and third person is nonsensical. So, no. I still don't know what you mean by first person experience. It sounds redundant.
I know that I am experiencing something. I later call this ability to experience something "consciousness".
Quoting Harry Hindu
No because I cannot be wrong about the fact that I'm experiencing something.
Quoting Harry Hindu
Or I could define "wet" as "in contact with water" in whichcase water would be wet unless it is just one molecule. Again, this is pointless.
Quoting Harry Hindu
What sounds redundant?
Quoting khaled
You cannot be wrong that eggs are in the fridge if you experience them in the fridge? If your aren't wrong that you have experiences and you have experiences of eggs in the fridge, then how can you say that you can be wrong about eggs in the fridge, but not about having experience of eggs in the fridge?
Quoting khaled
Exactly. You need something else that isn't water to be in contact with water. Contact is a type of relationship between water and something else. You haven't said anything different than what I just said.
Quoting khaled
First-person experiences. If all experiences are first person then it is redundant to even use first person as a qualifier to describe experiences.
Because there is an experiencer (me) who is aware (conscious) of these experiences. And that is the definition of "having an experience"
Your question implies that it is possible to have an experience but think you're not having an experience. Can you give an example of that?
Quoting Harry Hindu
I don't "experience eggs in the fridge". That's word salad no offence. I see eggs in the fridge. I cannot be wrong that I am seeing eggs in the fridge (Assuming I'm not blind of course). But I can be wrong about whether or not there are eggs in the fridge (could have been an elaborately placed cutout so as to make it seem like there are eggs there).
Quoting Harry Hindu
No. You decided to define it as "isn't water". I decided to include water. Anyways I won't bother with this pointless line anymore.
Quoting Harry Hindu
Sure. Let's just say "experiences" then. Do you get what that means?
When is there complete knowledge of the components without structure, and what would the predictive powers be in that case? Structure is not a simplification - it’s an understanding of the potentiality in relations between components. It is what enables us to complete our knowledge of the components, particularly when those components are not directly observable.
The way I see it, all the components of consciousness have relational properties, whether we acknowledge them as aspects of consolidated structures such as atoms, molecules, objects and organisms, or not.
No, because we do not experience a 600nm wave, nor is one entering the eye the brain state. Irrespective, what I think of as consciousness is not relevant. When YOU ask whether a computer has it, you need to state what YOU mean.
Quoting khaled
No one is asking you to simplify anything. I'm asking you what you mean by a word. Merely refering to another equally ambiguous word isn't helpful. If you cannot explain what you mean by consciousness, how can I or anyone else answer a question about it and know we're talking about the same thing?
Quoting khaled
Not remotely. The shape of an object is its outline. If you ask me what shape I'm in, potentially I'll get confused, can ask you what you mean, and you can clarify that you're asking about my physical health. There's no fundamental problem with shape. There's no fundamental problem with Pfhorrest's definition of consciousness either (in that respect), or Dennett's. Mine will probably curl up at the edges. But yours is absent entirely.
What does it mean for a thing to "have experiences"?
Quoting khaled
This is circular. What is an experiencer? Are you referring to a homunculus?
Also, you previously said this:
Quoting khaled
...but now you are saying that you can be aware (conscious) of experiences. How is an experience different from awareness/consciousness?
Quoting khaled
"Experience" is just a word. You've been trained to refer to this event as an "experience". But what is it that we are referring to really? Telling me that it's an "experience" just tells me what scribble I can use to refer to this event, but what is this event? Is it the only event (solipsism)? Is it an event among many others (realism)? If the latter, how does this event relate to, and interact with, the other events? You might say that all this is unimportant and that we can use a computer without knowing how it works, but you still have to know what a computer is to use it. The amount of detail that you know about the computer is relative to what you want to do with it, and I troubleshoot them so I know more than just how to use them. That is the level of detail I want when it comes to "experiences" and "consciousness" because then we can learn how to fix them and maybe even improve them.
Quoting khaled
Quoting khaled
No, because I thought that seeing is a type of experience, but you are saying that it isn't. Care to clarify?
Do you disagree with the qualitative difference, or the out-dated notion of a god-given Soul? If the latter, then we may be somewhat in agreement. :smile:
That is not the issue. A thing cannot be at once hidden from the world and and have an open representation in the world. The latter is an observation that the thing has *some* footprint in the world, which makes it amenable to physical enquiry.
Quoting Mww
Yes. The mechanical representation must end up being a good one, ideally not a representation at all but the thing itself. One needs to know what phenomena one is looking to phenomenalise, which isn't hard. In an example elsewhere, I suggested pleasure. Not pleasure *of something* necessarily, just pleasure. You need to know what phenomena phenomenalise pleasure. This has thankfully been done. There is a very particular area of the brain that, when stimulated, will cause the subject to react with signs of pleasure, will have them self-report pleasure, will lead them to, when given the button, press it repeatedly, even fight you for it, in a statistically compelling (i.e. independent of the individual) way. So when we observe brain activity in that region, using specific technology that causes lights to light up in a region of the screen corresponding to that region, we have a phenomenon: I see lights in that preselected region, or not. Boom! Phenomena phenomenalised! I see your pleasure.
Now obviously I predict the response: I see but a correlate of your pleasure, an electromechanical feature that corresponds to your phenomena. But then any phenomenon I experience is incomplete, whether it is of my pleasure or of yours. When I see the Moon, I know the Moon itself is not in my eye, or brain, or phenomena, but rather my lunar phenomena are just correlated to the real thing. Same goes with my phenomena of your phenomena. It can only be a correlate. The task is to identify what of your pleasure is unaccounted for in my indirect experience of it.
Quoting Mww
Oh go on, answer it! Pleeeeeeease?
I think I can very much understand and respect where you’re coming from. Abiogenesis is a big thorn in the side. As for myself, though, I do strongly believe in the universe having once existed in the absence of lifeforms - despite my idealist leanings.
My own definition of awareness’s primacy: The tenet that everything which can and does exist (i.e., everything that can and does stand-out in any way) is either directly or indirectly contingent on the presence of awareness - with some existents (like the objectivity of space, time, and matter) being contingent on all cooccurring instantiations of awareness, some (like the intersubjectivity of cultures and languages) being contingent on certain limited cohorts of cooccurring instantiations of awareness, and some (like one’s personal REM dreams) being contingent on unique instantiations of awareness. This tenet of awareness’s primacy thereby results in a stance of idealism.
My post regarded a conditional partly constructed from “if primacy of awareness is true” and not an argument for awareness’s primacy. I currently don’t want to engage in any such argument.
That’s right. To in-form is to constrain or give shape. And information is a constraint on uncertainty. It produces concrete definiteness from a sea of possibilities.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
A word like “baby” doesn’t have intrinsic meaning just as a collection of four letters. It gains meaning as a communal habit of interpretation.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
So how do you use “baby” in a sentence? Do you always have your own completely private meaning in mind? Is that a useful habit do you find?
Ok, fine. The Rock....with or without hair?
———————
Okay, so very different from phenomenology’s primacy of perception. I got confused.
Yes, or a signal standing out from the noise.
So how does this work?
It seems that awareness is being defined by its freedom to be about anything. A mind can imagine what it wishes. Yet also minds then all interact to co-create a shared spacetime material world. They are somehow constrained to agree due to the demands of being able participate as actors in the same place.
Now this holism is a systems way of looking at things. It says some kind of synergistic duality of parts and wholes is need to have "a world". Even a materialist needs to claim a reality that involves matter and laws - locally differentiated parts being organised according to global integrating rules.
So both idealism and materialism actually must invoke some form of triadic systems ontology, even if both want to claim to reduce the wholeness of reality to some kind of monistic primacy - a world that is actually mind, or a world that is actually matter.
Thus what I point out is that panpsychism tries to make sense by smuggling in a triadic relational perspective while still sounding like a monistic idealism standing in paradigmatic contrast to a monistic materialism.
Given that, it is better just to keep on going and openly embrace a triadic relational ontology - which is what Peircean semiotics is.
The categories of both matter and mind then drop away as we focus on the bare structure of networks of differentiated relations (secondness) and the generalised world of integration (thirdness) that results.
To talk about ontology in either the language of matter or mind already freights the conversation with all sorts of ontic commitments that create all the friction. Every thread becomes a rerun of idealism vs realism - the effort to reduce a dualism to a monism.
But the way out of the bottle is to see a triadic systems logic as the maximally general ontology. It is much more abstract - a mathematical representation in moving past questions of concrete quality. We don't have to worry about the mind as a quality (a quality of experiencing, whatever that is), or matter as a quality (the quality of substantial being, whatever that is). We are now dealing with a notion of pure relations - a system of signs and interpretance.
So again, both materialists and idealists can work their way towards some kind of triadic ontology. They can see what needs to be said to inject some necessary holism back into their general reductionism.
But this just winds up being inefficient as ontology. The step forward - as Peirce demonstrated - is to arrive at a proper ontology of a system of relations itself. You want the triadic or hierarchical order in which the local parts are the clear product of differentiating relationships (or local symmetry breakings), and the global whole is the clear product of a collective integration over all those possible relationships (or the unity of the production of a generalised universal symmetry state ... the one that can be locally broken in ways that prove it in fact exists ... ).
So as philosophy, the problem is that monism is much simpler to think about than the holism of a triadic system of relations. One produces an ultimately simple stuff - call it mind, call it matter. The other produces only the "simplicity" of an irreducible relational complexity. The image in mind is of a hierarchical feedback loop of interactions - a simultaneity of local differentiations amid a global integration.
But in the end, if we want to understand nature, learning to visualise holism in this fashion is necessary. The only viable "monism" is the one that is the traditional Greek unity of opposites, the Hegelian synthesis, the Peircean semiotic, the modern systems science or hierarchy theory story of reality as a self-organising process.
I nearly added that too. :grin:
We are on the same page. I was also going to remind of the formal duality that has been established between information and entropy. As signal vs noise, order vs chaos, message vs meaninglessness, we can see why information and entropy stand in relationship as the two faces of the same coin, the two dichotomous extremes of the one opposition.
Yes yes, all well known and familiar. Piercian semiotics got me googling though. If you can explain in a few words, it’d be appreciated.
:gets popcorn:
Good one. I mean, i checked the corresponding wiki entry but fail to see the relevance to system thinking. It’s some kind of proto linguistic...
This is classic Apo. Perfect specimen.
I think that's a compliment. Monism and dualism are bad, triadism is good.
That's a challenge and a half. But the central claim of a biosemiotic approach to the science of life and mind is that the mind~matter divide can be bridged by understanding that mind and world exist in a modelling relation.
Mind is not something passive and separate - an awareness - but a state of interpretance that arises through active engagement with the material potentials of the world. Mind and life exist as informational structure regulating the entropic physical goings-on of the world.
This means life and mind interact to impose constraints by way of mechanism.
Genes code for proteins. Proteins make enzymes, channels, membranes and all sorts of cellular machinery that control and stabilise chemical and energetic gradients.
Neurons likewise encode sensory and behavioural habits that impose a regulating machinery on an organism's general environment.
Words do the same again in encoding the sociocultural habits that are the regulating machinery of a complex human society. Words are the syntactic mechanism that underpins a collective social life and collective social mentality.
So the semiotic bit is about recognising that the science of life and mind boils down to the critical question of how there can be this "physics of symbols". How does a protein become a message rather than just a molecule? How does a neuron represent information rather simply some electrochemical chatter of noise?
To talk about biosemiosis is to say - as a scientist - that it is being recognised that symbols aren't explained by material physics. Symbols require their own branch of science - semiotics!
And semiotics is also then more than just "information processing" or "computation", as a modelling relation is all about a regulatory interaction with the real physical world.
A computer doesn't need the world. It lives in its own Platonic realm of mathematical pattern spinning.
But semiotics is information plugged into entropy. It is the science of life and mind plugged into the physics of thermodynamics and dissipative structure. So it is an approach to life and mind that never fractures the two halves of the equation while also never confusing the two halves either.
You can then go beyond biosemiosis to pansemiosis - which would be Peircean semiotics applied to the Cosmos in general. Even physics would have this informational aspect, and so count as a complex system of interpretance.
Peirce had that ambition. And modern physics has arrived there too with its information theoretic turn.
But in general, semiotics is the science of meaning, or meaning making. And that leads to seeing symbols as their own "unphysical" thing. Another basis of causality in nature.
But then the proviso. A symbol system or modelling relation can only exist in the context of there being material flows to regulate and organise in an organismic fashion.
So as a science, semiotics speaks to this duality of symbols and matter, and also to their mutual ontological dependence on each other - as each is the "other" of the other.
All the sciences had to somewhat smuggle in this complex arrangement. The life sciences talked of bodies as machines, and brains as computers. The physical sciences had to have universal laws and other abstract regulative principles.
But as ontologies, abstract laws and information processing are both pretty crude concepts.
Semiotics goes to the heart of the matter by being clear both about the general nature of the separation - symbols vs matter - and about the means of the interaction, the connection that is a modelling relation.
As said, that applies very straightforwardly to actual organisms - life and mind. It is more of a speculative stretch to apply it to inorganic systems like the Universe.
Yet still, physics itself is winding up having to make some such paradigm shift. And semiotics provides a well-worked out explanatory structure for doing that - for combining information and entropy, formal cause and material cause, in the one over-arching reality scheme.
I've made a good living putting complex stuff into the simplest lay explanations. I've even been commissioned to do such for the likes of Reader's Digest, Dorling Kindersley and New Scientist. So I certainly don't lack the skills.
And if you say I have tried frequently enough, and you have failed to understand just as often, well where is the issue likely to be?
I realise the difficulty though. We are all trained to think in simple cause and effect terms. And Peirce - as a process philosopher and systems thinker - demands a conception of causality that is complex in that it must construct its own ground of being.
It is not monistic, linear and one-dimensional. It is tri-dimensional and recursively holist - a complex entanglement never at rest but always developing. A squirming beast of causal interaction.
So to understand anything about a semiotic ontology, you have to establish a second brand of logic - of causal analysis - inside your own head.
The standard issue "cause and effect logic" you got taught is not wrong, just a corner of the larger story - the right way to think if the problem is the engineering one of regulating the world as if it were a machinery.
A holistic causal logic is then something you can only learn about directly in specialised education - an interdisciplinary "field" like systems science or hierarchy theory. Or of course, Peircean philosophy.
I learnt about it over many years progressing from biology to neuroscience to systems science and then Peircean semiotics. And at least I always knew roughly what I was looking for, so could recognise it when I found it.
But as I say, it is its own contrasting system of thought. You can't make sense of it from the standard cause and effect paradigm. And you only truly understand it in its own terms once it is obvious how mechanistic cause and effect thinking is in fact the formal "other" of it holism.
It is funny that way. Life and mind are seen as paradigmatically organic and holistic phenomena. Yet it is they that most perfectly employ machinery to regulate their worlds and bring order to chaotic physics.
Anyway, I'm not trying to baffle you. But it is a whole system of thought I am saying you would need to learn rather than some particular theory that ought to make more sense from a simple cause and effect perspective.
I don't know, and I still don't. It's a risk. I'll be pissed off if I go to a lot of trouble understanding your stuff and it turns out to be bollocks (at least in respect of the philosophy of consciousness). I might ask pfhorrest for advice on this. They seem to have studied everything so might have some useful advice.
Quoting apokrisis
I appreciate that. Thank you. I don't know if I'm guilty as charged with the cause and effect monolithic thinking, but I might be.
This is where Chalmers has looked to IIT: a camera detects light and dark, but photo-receptors experience it, in their own way. That is, they are re-structured by the interaction. Experience is a function of consciousness, but not a definition of ‘consciousness’. The extent to which a system distinguishes “this is light” and “this is dark” as distinct experiences without fully embodying them I see as a function of self-consciousness, in which ‘conscious’ can be distinguished from ‘not-conscious’.
Matter is a symbol. It is symbolic of the process that created it. Therefore panpsychism, through the process of self organization. According to Fritjof Capra, the basic unit of cognition is a reaction to a disturbance of a state – I cant remember the exact words. So basic cause and effect at the most fundamental level is cognition. Hence panpsychism. No?
Define, simplify, potato, potato. I cannot define it without referring to equally vague concepts becaue it doesn't get simpler than that.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
Outline is just as ambiguous as shape. No one would understand what outline means and not understand what shape means. Same with consciousness and experience. If I asked you to define "outline" what would you do (without referring to shape or an equally vague concept of course)?
Quoting Kenosha Kid
Well I would use another vague concept here such as "awareness of qualia" but I think you already used it in another thread here (in reply to harry hindu):
Quoting Kenosha Kid
If I asked you about what you meant by "experience" or "awareness" there what would you say (because you seem to be referring to the same things as me here)? Because "awareness" seems to me just as vague as "experience" so if one doesn't (pretends not to) understand one they likely won't understand the other. Also can you help me understand what this means:
Because here you seem to be suggesting that subjective experience is caused by brain states and is not somehow the exact same thing. So which is it?
Yep. He was talking about autopoiesis there most probably - one of the various incarnations of a systems science approach through the 80s and 90s. Or that is also the basic insight of 1960s cybernetics - particular Bateson's definition of information as a difference that makes a difference.
So that is a very general truth. And Capra is a good populariser of systems science thinking.
Quoting Pop
It isn't really basic cause and effect, but holism. So nope.
Cause and effect is an input/output model. And so it would suggest that the mind is like a final act of display - in the computational view. Or a soul stuff, an experiential field, or some other kind of emergent substantial property, if you are thinking consciousness is the "effect" of a suitably complex material process.
But autopoiesis tries to start turning things around the other way. The "output" of a biological system is a prediction of the state it needs to be in. And it then reacts to learning it hasn't quite achieved that state.
Reversing input/output thinking so that the output is the prediction of the input is the first key step that cybernetics, gestalt psychologists, neural networks, autopoeisis and other systems thinkers were making a while back.
In terms of the mind, it means the brain has a homeostatic goal of not wanting to be disturbed. It wants to predict the world so well that all its reactions are at the level of well drilled habit or automaticism. It is seeking not to experience as such, just act constantly in ways that maintain a smooth flow.
But of course the world is full of actual unpredictability. So that is when it needs to focus and pay attention. There is some disturbance - the difference that makes a difference. Then attentional processing assimilates that to the running world model and the organism can return to being absorbed in its running homeostatic balance.
So the brain is set up as a consciousness minimising machine. Which what makes it such a super-effective "shit going wrong" detector device.
Which is cause and effect given this mutually dependent story of manufacturing states of contrast? The ground of unconcern is what creates the possibility of foci of high concern. The assimilation of these foci of high concern then build up that ground of unconcern.
Each is the other's cause. Each is the other's effect.
Or just move on and see the holism at work here where the very idea of the production of effects as the end points of linear processes is the wrong mode of analysis.
Of course it is. As is every definition ever (at least of these basic concepts)...
Quoting Harry Hindu
Quoting Harry Hindu
Whatever "I" is referring to here.
Quoting Harry Hindu
Oh so you understand what it means now all of a sudden? Yes, it is probably that event you had in mind while writing this (in a literal and metaphorical sense).
A sensible question. But consider this: maybe the reason we use that scribble only and we do not have accurate language to describe what is happening is because we don't know what is happening.
Quoting Harry Hindu
Not at all, I wouldn't say it is unimportant, I would say we can't know the answers to these questions. Because this isn't an event we can detect. Show me the "consciousness-o-meter" and then we might be able to answer these questions, or show me how to make one.
Quoting Harry Hindu
Sure you do, you wrote that "experience" is a scribble that refers to an event.
Quoting Harry Hindu
Seeing is a type of experience. However "seeing eggs" =/= "experiencing eggs in the fridge" (whatever that means). You experience a certain image, of there being eggs in a fridge. I don't understant what "experiencing eggs in the fridge" means. That image may or may not reflect reality.
Sorry for jumping in, but by definition - and the reason I don't agree with panpsychism - anything capable of experiencing a subject of experience, and therefore not 'a thing'. Conversely, things are not subjects of experience. What makes something a subject of experience? The fact that it's a living thing. So any living thing is in principle a subject of experience, but non-living things are not. Hence the requirement for a dualist ontology.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
That's a form of 'brain-mind identity', is it not? Question: what about rational inference? Is drawing a rational inference - 'because this is the case, that must be the case' - also 'a brain state?'
Quoting apokrisis
I still don't see how Peirce avoids some form of panpsychism.
From [url=http://www.commens.org/encyclopedia/article/esposito-joseph-synechism-keystone-peirce%E2%80%99s-metaphysics]Synechism: the Keystone of Peirce’s Metaphysics
Joseph Esposito[/url]. Bolds added. It is the bolded concept which seems panpsychist to me.
Yes he was. I don't agree with all he says, but systems, process, and information, is the way forward , in my opinion. Holism it is, and cause and effect are one of its elements. In this regard, you didn't address my main query, that matter is a symbol of an ongoing process of self organization. It is not the end point, as all is in motion / evolution, but at any given time matter symbolizes the state of a process. I believe, in the same way that a thought dose. It would cast doubt on symbol vs matter, it would suggest symbol = matter. So, panpsychism?
If it is a form of panpsychism, then it is one shorn of panpsychism's subjectivist and idealist tendencies.
That doesn't really square with panpsychism wanting to claim experience as a dualistically primitive aspect of matter, does it?
And if anything, Peirce is placing the "mental" at the level of global habit. So all reality is being organised by some suitably impersonal and objective integrative force.
To the degree that sounds like a variety of idealism, the point again was that it wasn't about any first person experiencing but a universal "rational" tendency that any objective physical reality would have to develop to be able to exist.
So Peirce doesn't ground anything on a Cartesian notion of subjective experience as a spooky soul stuff. Instead, he expanded the explanatory resources of science to the point that they could both objectively include the causality we like to assign to "the mind", while also introducing useful critical doubt to our matching presumptions about the hard, atomistic, material reality of the world.
That is a bit of a double whammy that turned out pretty prescient just before the revolution of relativity and quantum mechanics.
The mind aspect of systems causality - the Universals issue - was taken as more concretely real. And the matter aspect was revealed to be less concretely real. And out of this, you get a picture where mind and matter arrive at the same degree of (mutually derived and emergent) reality.
Yes, you can twist that to sound a bit like panpsychism. But only if you miss the fundamental differences in ontological thought that are in play.
I don't understand your point. What definition of matter are you using?
Matter can be seen as a material process or flow. So it is a succession of events organised within a context. Something is material for us as it can be recorded as an event happening and history being rewritten by a possibility being eliminated.
So in a process philosophy view, a material act is a sign that something "eventful" has happened. There was some difference that makes a difference. That in turn speaks to the context, the developing general history of the world, for which the difference is mattering. Pansemiotically, the event is a symbol playing its part in a system of interpretance in that sense.
But that is the pansemiotic view. What are you claiming from a panpsychic point of view?
A thought can be described in a similar way. As the current result of a process.
It would seem there is a process of self organization at play at the fundamental level, and this would suggest panpsychism. It is difficult to relate this to human mind except to point out that our thoughts are the result of our biological state of self organization. We can focus attention, but each thought contains a subconscious element. We don't actually design the algorithm, or pathway that processes them. This is done by our biological process of self organization. In a similar manner matter is created through self organisation - the self organisation ( mind ) of the universe, if you will.
Every time that a word is used it has meaning at the time of being used, by the very fact that it was used. This means that the first time that the word "baby" was used (we can assume that there was a first time can we not?), it was not a communal habit of interpretation which gave it its meaning, because there was no communal habit of interpretation of that word at that time..
Quoting apokrisis
Yes, I always have a very private reason for using that word, and not choosing another word like "infant" or "child". And, yes I find it very useful, having my own private reason for choosing the words that I do. This makes the words that I use very well suited to my own private intentions. Why would you think that it's not useful?
Do you think that different people must carry out precisely similar actions in order for the action of one individual to be meaningful to another? Of course this is not the case, meaning is found in difference, not in similarity. Are you familiar with what is called "the division of labour"? There you will find clear evidence that difference between the actions of individuals is the essential property of meaning, not similarity. It is the fact that your actions are different from mine which makes your actions meaningful to me, not some supposed similarity. So your idea that people must act according to some "communal habit", (which would incline them to all do the same thing), in order for their actions to have meaning, is the furthest possible thing from the truth.
Again I will point out that there are two different notions of causality in play here.
The mechanical notion of cause and effect would say that A gives you B. One thing leads to another in the direct deterministic fashion of one billiard ball bumping the next. In that view, a thought is computed.
An organic notion of cause instead speaks of constraints being placed on possibility. And so there is a holism in play in which a context places limits on the actions observed at a locale. A result is not determined as such. It is just that enough other choices have been removed to be sure of an action breaking in a selected direction.
In this view, a thought pops out as a kind of general neural competition - an optimisation function. The brain needs to globally suppress a near infinite number of thoughts that might have been the case and that sets the scene for a best fit answer to emerge.
This constraints-based causality is modelled by simulated annealing and other such network approaches.
Quoting Pop
But physics has become fairly successful at modelling self organisation in terms of collective, constraints-based, causality.
You don't need conscious elements making clever individual choices. You need the formation of global states of constraint that are then the context which forces blind spontaneous action to break in a collectively optimal direction.
And so you are claiming instead that the first person to utter this particular noise had exactly that clear intent of it being understood in that fashion ... by some linguistic community used to noises meaning something ...
I don't think your "Just So" approach is going to get you far here.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
It is pretty clear that the more private your meanings, the less useful they would be in a communal setting.
I mean, if I say "MU is talking utter bollocks as usual", but in private that means to me: "What another splendidly insightful remark from MU", then where would we be in terms of communicative effectiveness?
So less of this time-wasting bollocks please.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
A major feature of a constraints-based causality is that it gives a solid answer on why nature repeats with variety. Similarity and difference are generated by the same process.
That is why when I say "baby" to you, I expect that to constrain your thoughts in a certain direction. But I don't make the mistake of expecting you to have some complete exact replica of whatever I have in my mind. There is always an element of variety or unconstrained spontaneity in the response you will have. Or even a surprisingly large degree of that uncertainty in your case?
So what actually is the story in terms of a constraints-based causality is that both similarity and difference can be produced. Difference will always exist in some degree. But we can regulate that to limit it to differences that don't make a pragmatic difference. Or we can also work to ensure that a difference that does make a difference gets maintained.
Do I need a knife to cut my meat. I could use a fork edge if its soft enough. Or if its particularly tough, I might have to scrabble in the cutlery drawer for a serrated steak knife.
A fork is sometimes similar enough to do the job of a knife. A blade sometimes needs to be more specialist than the typical knife.
And the use of words is just the same. We find it quite natural to broaden our definitions, or to narrow them, depending on the pragmatics of what we hope to achieve.
I never would say similarity was primary, nor that difference was primary. That is a false dichotomy you want to pursue.
As usual, my position is that it is the contrast offered by similarity and difference as the complementary extremes on possibility that is what then makes the third thing of some actual choice on the spectrum a meaningful action.
Right, so it plays the same role in your metaphysics than Saussure and structuralism in mine: a useful language to express systemic relations within any given field.
Spoken like a scientist overly concerned with hair! :rofl:
If you are interested, it would be worth checking out Howard Pattee’s papers on biosemiosis, the epistemic cut and the physics of symbols. His is the most incisive presentation of the crucial ideas.
Then two other theoretical biologists, Stan Salthe and Robert Rosen, are part of the same circle.
Why do you insist on using 'simple' as a synonym for 'unambiguous'? They are not even close to the same.
Can you say anything about consciousness at all that would shed any light on your question, without just deferring the ambiguity to other ambiguous terms?
When I use the word, I use it in two ways. One is Sartrean consciousness: consciousness is consciousness of something. When we apprehend multiple things, we have a consciousness of each of them. If I see a red ball before me while I chew spearmint gum while church bells peal behind me, I have a conscious each of: the ballness of the ball, the redness of the ball, the proximity of the ball, the taste of spearmint, the texture of chewed gum, the sound of church bells. This you might call animal consciousness: how the central nervous system receives, processes, and transforms information about itself, the body, and its environment.
Obviously things like the ballness of the ball (recognising a ball as a ball irrespective of its colour, size, proximity, material, etc.) aren't freebies. There is some element of optimised recall (pattern-matching) that requires me to have already been trained to recognise a ball in terms of its other properties, most of which will be quite contingent (such as the nane 'ball') on things that have nothing to do with the phenomenon. This training relied on a general openness to information in my early environment in which I learned to associate contingent and non-contingent properties of balls with certain combinations of phenomena.
This already distinguishes animals with this sort of consciousness from computers, which have no general ability to assemble arbitrary information about their environment into patterns, although many AIs do have the ability to train neural networks based on specific contents of limited inputs for the purposes of pattern detection. What these AIs lack, in addition to this generic and open exploitation of environmental data, is the motivation to do so.
Nonetheless, I don't think it's completely unreasonable to predict that something hair-splittingly similar might exist in the not-so-distant future. So if this is what you mean by consciousness, I'd say: not yet, but maybe one day.
The other use of the word is more in the Kierkegaardian sense: a reflexive, totalising consciousness of a subset of the consciousnesses described above, a sort of metaconsciousness that is, I think, what people mean when they ask if a dolphin has consciousness. This is a less reactive, more proactive capability that goes beyond dumb unitary, binary and pattern-matching behaviours toward a more contemplative, algorithmic consciousness.
Unlike a consciousness of the first kind, which might be 'ball', or 'lion!' or 'pain', because consciousness of the second kind is a partial consciousness of consciousnesses of the first kind, there is an implicit but unavoidable relation of phenomena to the self. 'lion!' is a statement about the person's environment, good for running procedures like:
if lion(): {
body.rotate(PI);
body.legs.alternate(FUCKING_FAST);
}
But a second order equivalent is 'There is a lion a short distance from me'. This might be useful if 'me' has 'my gun'.
Do computers have this kind of consciousness? Absolutely not. Will they? I honestly can't see why not. I think the blocker is that non-biological technologies just won't do it as well. But yeah maybe a simple version, one day.
"An early part of my adventures" was the Kabbalah and its sefirot tree. :-) Of course it's loaded with all sorts of impenetrable mysticism and magic thinking, but there was something to how the whole scheme is conceived which was appealing: a systemic, holistic language usable to describe pretty much everything.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
You cannot use the word in its definition.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
You cannot use the word in its definition.
So far you've given me four definitions of consciousness:
1- Consciousness is brain states. You seemed to immediately drop this one as you didn't answer any of my questions about it (because it makes no sense). And you didn't use it in this reply to answer the question about computers either.
2- Consciousness is something caused by brain states. You didn't say this in my discussion with you but in another thread. Regardless, this is not a definition, just an outlining of conditions that are sufficient for consciousness (but not confirmed to be necessary for it)
3- Consciousness is consciousness of something. You were more than happy to say that "awareness" and "experience" are vague terms but somehow you entertain a definition of the word that uses that same word in its definition while simultaneously thinking that the word is ambiguous enough so as to require a definition.
4- Consciousness is a reflexive, toatalising consciousness of the subset of the consciousnesses. Same as above, you're using the word in its definition (twice) while insisting that it is ambiguous enough to require a definition. But whenever I try to do something similar (use "awareness" or "experience") you immediately point out how I'm deferring ambiguity to other equally ambiguous terms. Oh but apparently "apprehend" is not an ambiguous term while "awareness" is Quoting Kenosha Kid
So what exactly do you expect of me. Because so far none of your definitions pass your own criteria:
Quoting Kenosha Kid
What surprises me even more is that you were able to use these supposedly ambiguous terms to answer the question of whether or not robots may have this supposedly ambiguous property in the future. Even though by your own criteria you have failed at disambiguating them in any way. This leads me to believe that maybe "consciousness" already has a referant or a two.
That's part of the problem - in thinking of these concepts in this way.
Quoting khaled
For me, "I" refers to my body as a whole. I can think just as I can run, jump, dance and talk. The question is, why is thinking special, in that it is in a separate category (mental) than all of the other things that I do (physical)? And if they are separate categories, then how do my thoughts cause me to run, jump, dance and talk, and vice versa?
Quoting khaled
Uh... well, yeah. That was the point of my question.
Quoting khaled
Well, you know that you are conscious. So you tell me the meter that you used to determine that you are conscious. Your meter seems to simply be how many human beings in your immediate environment use a particular scribble to refer to the event.
Quoting khaled :roll: I was asking what the event is, not what the scribble is. And in asking what the event is, I'm NOT asking what scribble most English speakers use to point to it (unless you're saying that consciousness is a word?). I'm asking about those relationships I spoke about earlier.
Quoting khaled
:roll:
Sheesh! First you say, "Seeing is a type of experience", and then seem confused about what it means to experience eggs in the fridge! Think, my man! Think!
If seeing is a type of experience, then what other types are there? There would be hearing, smelling tasting, and feeling experiences to name a few. The cool thing about consciousness is that all of these types of experiences can occur together, in the same moment, in the same mental space. I hear you where I see you and feel you. It is a type of fault tolerance for the information about some object's location relative to the body, and a means of confirming what the other senses are telling you - like whether or not those are real or fake eggs in the fridge. In other words, you experienced [real] eggs in the fridge because you saw them, felt them, smelled them and tasted them.
Oh yeah!?!? Well....(sputterchokegasp).....your definitions of consciousness are all wrong!!!
Consciousness: the quality of all my various and sundry representations united under one representation.
Consciousness is not a thing, so it has no properties. It is nothing more than the condition of the intellect, so necessarily accounts for experience with respect to objects, and at the same time, pure thought, which has no object. It is the compendium of all that I think about.
Don’t you dare tell me you can get all that from a display on a machine strapped to my head. As my ol’ buddy Gilda Radnor would say, “it is to laugh....”
Really? So if you lost a finger you're not you anymore? Which part of the body exactly carries this "I"? How much of a body can you lose or replace to still be the same "I"? Whatever "I" remains after all is replaced or changed, that is "the experiencer".
Quoting Harry Hindu
Well at least we've established that there is an event. I thought you were one of those people who pretend that the scribble refers to nothing. But I still think "what is this event" is akin to asking "what is shape", It's one of those things you can't simplify further. Why don't you take a crack at it because I can't do it.
Quoting Harry Hindu
It's just that when I'm talking definitions with someone I get really nitpicky about words. "experiencing eggs in the fridge" is sort of vague because it can either mean simply seeing eggs in the fridge or somehow literally "Knowing beyond all doubt that there are in fact eggs in the fridge". I just wanted to be specific that we're talking about seeing things here.
No beef from me. As I just said to Khaled, I'm open to the idea that technological consciousnesses are possible. You might consider these simulations, whereas I'm of the view that what something is is determined by what it does. But yes I think most people consider life, even a central nervous system, to be sane prerequisites for consciousness.
Quoting Wayfarer
Yep. The mind is what the brain does.
Quoting Wayfarer
Yes, I think so. To be clear, it is part of a time-dependent state, not an instantaneous state, i.e. it is a process. But this kind of inference is something that AI can do quite well, such as on classification problems. You could train a model with historical data concerning sunrises in Adelaide, and it will not only yield a high probability that the Sun will rise tomorrow, but also a high certainty about the precise time it will rise. Is this a 'state' of the computer? Yes, over time, since any computer process is a part of the history of its state.
But there probably isn't. Semantics could easily be a game of pretend. Syntax, just automation. Confusing the two, woo.
I was giving you a quote, not a definition.
Quoting khaled
I think a vaguely interested, vaguely intelligent human being can, if not fully understand what I meant, correctly establish bounds of possible interpretations of consciousness. My description was not consistent with Pfhorrest's, for instance, nor your more standard panpsychists'. Nor is it very consistent with a rationalist's description, who would likely deny that the brain is doing anything that we're not second-order conscious of (i.e. the second order is the only consciousness).
You can't get any of that from 'consciousness is the ability to have experiences', which is consistent with EVERY idea of consciousness. My feeling is that you're not actually very interested in the subject. You refuse to think about or communicate what you mean, and you're obviously not very interested in what I mean. I can only guess that you're practising your typing?
Btw, I never promised you a definition of consciousness because I'm not asking you questions about it. The above was me giving up on you ever explaining what your asking about and having a go myself. It's a pretty poor show that others have to do this for you.
What I am saying is that the first person to use the word had some sort of intent, therefore the word had some meaning. Why the sudden requirement of "clear" intent? I thought you had respect for vagueness. Do you not see vagueness as inherent within meaning, and it is what we might try to exclude through the application of constraint? It appears like you want to associate meaning with the constraints (form) rather than with what is constrained (content).
Quoting apokrisis
Again, you're speaking untruths as if they were true. What language is used for, is to put across one's own personal ideas, which are unique and particular to the circumstances. Therefore, "the more private your meanings are", the more useful they are, because they must accurately convey something personal and private. How would you ever understand what I was trying to say, if everyone was saying the exact same thing?
Quoting apokrisis
Well, your "constraints-based causality" as stated here, is clearly contradictory. An answer which is contradictory ought to be rejected no matter how much the proponent insists that it is "solid".
Quoting apokrisis
Do you not apprehend the role of context in meaning? Context provides the difference. The word "baby" might be very similar each time it is used, but it is always used in a different context. And context changes with each passing minute. Therefore, despite the fact that we say it is the same word, it has a different meaning each time it is used, due to the difference in context. Obviously the word, "baby" and its physical similarity over hundreds of years, is not the same process as the instantaneous process whereby the individual user of the word puts that word into context, giving it its meaning according to the circumstances of use. Therefore you are way off base in your contradictory claim, that similarity and difference are generated by the same process. What makes a word the same, is long term repetition. What gives a word its meaning is its context within the particular and unique circumstances present in its use.
Quoting apokrisis
What you do not seem to be acknowledging is that "same" is defined by a process which requires the longest possible period of time, and "different" is defined by a process requiring the shortest possible period of time. These cannot be resolved, or reduced to one another, so they will always be fundamentally distinct processes. To think that meaning is produced from an act of constraining the differences involved within an extremely short period of time, by applying principles of long term similarity is completely misguided. There is no such "constraint" actually going on. The basis of meaning is the freedom of choice of the individual. The true process which produces meaning is the expression of short term freedom within the context of long term constraint. So meaning is actually found within the freedom of difference, rather than within the constraints of similarity.
Quoting apokrisis
How do you expect anyone to believe your proposition that there is no real distinction to be made between similarity and difference? Once you allow that similarity is not the same as difference, it becomes evident that it is impossible that the two are created by the same process.
Uh oh. Too late! :rofl:
First, I'd like to point out that this quote boils down to "I can't define it further so please stop pretending you don't get it" which I've been saying for a while.
Now, don't get me wrong, I understood what you meant, but I was pointing out that both of us understood it even though it doesn't pass your criteria of a definition. My reply was intended to point out how nitpicky your claims that "awareness", "experience" and "consciousness" are completely meaningless words that still need defining. They have SOME associated meanings and it is possible to narrow those down, but not without some ambiguity. However you seemed to pretend that they don't so I wanted to see how you would define them without any ambiguity at all which is the standard you set for me and failed to keep yourself.
I didn't want to write a wall of text like the one you wrote only for you to say something like "'apprehend' is an ambiguous word so I don't get what you mean". Your first definition of consciousness in that reply can be boiled down to "apprehention of qualia" but when I say "awareness of experiences" it is apparently vague and ambiguous. All you really added was "apprehention of qualia which is brought about (inexplicably) by (undefined) pattern recognition"
Quoting Kenosha Kid
I don't think so necessarily. Your description of consciousness was "consciousness is consciousness of something". And that that "consciousness of something" is a result of some pattern recognition. One argument for this description being consistent could for example be (note: I don't expect every description of consciousness to be consistent with panpsychism, I'm just making a case that this one could be): Is by defining "pattern recognition" in such a way so as to classify complex natural processes as involving "pattern recognition"
For instance: When a white blood cell attacks bacteria is it doing pattern recognition? It clearly doesn't just attack indiscriminantly.
Additionally, in this schema is pattern recognition a necessary or sufficient condition for consciosness? You didn't make that clear. If it is a sufficient condition then what exactly do you mean by it because depending on that answer white blood cells may or may not be conscious.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
This doesn't even make sense. Remember how this whole conversation started:
Quoting khaled
You made a claim that neurological progress will lead to some theory of consciousness (not in that particular quote but earlier). I asked you how? In order to answer that question you need to define what you mean by consciousness and what you mean by neurological progress, as you are the one making the claim. You defined the latter but not the former.
Your definitions so far:
Consciousness-as-brainstates actually supports the statement that neurological progress will lead to a theory of consciousness, but I think it makes no sense and your continued reluctance to mention it again makes me think you think so too.
You would need to explain how consciousness as "consciousness of something which (somehow) results from pattern recognition (whatever that means)" is related to neurological progress. I don't see how perfectly understanding how the brain works will lead us to a theory about why consciousness arises form pattern recognition and what exactly counts as "pattern recognition".
For consciousness as "consciousness of a subset of consciousnesses" I don't see how neurology has anything to do with that. It vaguely reminds me of the neural binding problem but that's it.
Neither. I sharply disagree with the part about there being a metaphysical division between humans and all non-human life.
Quoting apokrisis
I'll leave that for another day.
Yes, which looks like a semantic correlation. My point (inadequately specified) was that the correlation reduces to a syntactic one, as we would tend to expect of an automatic process.
Semantics is a social game of pretend.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Your logic is all over the shop in your eagerness to foster a dispute. I make the obvious point that similarity and difference are terms relative to each other. So things in the world can be vaguely different or similar, or they could be extremely different or similar. Difference and similarity then become the dichotomous concepts we employ to try to define some absolute notion of sameness and difference.
So while we may talk of them as two categories of being, we shouldn’t make the mistake of demanding that only one or other is the case. We don’t have to reduce this dualism to a monism.
Indeed, following Hegel and Peirce, we can recognise the triadic metaphysics in play. Similarity and difference are opposing limits that define a connecting spectrum of possibility.
And that is where a logic of vagueness becomes valuable. It defines the third thing that is the state where neither similarity, nor difference, is the case. The principle of non contradiction has yet to apply. Things have yet to go either way on that score.
Mechanical thought routinely demands counterfactual definiteness. It can’t tolerate ambiguity in its claims about reality. That is why it ends up insisting - as you are doing - that things just either are similar or different, with no scope for relativity.
But an organic understanding of reality sees that all universals are pairs of relatives. A unity of opposites. And so a triadic logic, a systems logic, needs to be used.
So I approach every argument with that triadic logic. And you have your own habit of always trying to reduce every dichotomy to an either/or monism. You can never see the big picture like that.
I’ve now read Cell Phenomenology: The First Phenomenon by Howard Pattee, and I must say it’s top notch. Thanks for this reference.
Can it both be a pretence (in physical terms) and yet also a hugely powerful one? I would say that undercuts your own argument.
My claim is that the human language game is all about organising the material environment that gives physical reality to human society as an organismic state of being. So language is all about regulating entropy for self-interested reasons. It could evolve as a communal habit because it physically plugs in a cultural mind into a material world.
But of course, as I said, the power of any code is that it is not tied to the physics of its world. It is powerful because it could refer to anything. That means when it is not used that way, but instead pointed rather precisely, that is what makes it meaningful - signal rather than noise.
So a community of speakers can spin any fictions or fantasies they want. They can talk nonsense if they choose. The faculty of language has that absolute freedom built in as the necessary other to what language is actually evolved for - organising social behaviour in ways that physically sustains that community of speakers.
One can’t be definitely pretending anything unless that is a clear contrast to the “other” of now making clear and meaningful reference to something understood to have a genuine social reality. Something that is of material consequence.
I would add that we should consider what happened once human societies added numbers on top of words as ways of regulating their material conditions.
Maths considers itself a truly transcendent exercise in abstraction. A Platonic realm of form. It has no necessary connection to physics or material reality.
And yet then this very separation turns out to make maths a next level tool of entropification. It went hand in hand with the scientific and industrial revolutions. Human entropification went exponential as we became technological and economic creatures speaking the language of numbers.
Evolutionary history shows that symbols systems are always about a separation - an epistemic cut - that then enables an organism to take over control of the "laws of nature" for personal gain.
That is what unifies the biological, neurological and social sciences. The humanities even.
And biosemiosis is a general model of this story. It shows how symbols and physics are bound in this mindful causal loop.
As such, it stands apart from the regular mechanical description of nature given by the physical sciences. It says organismic causality is also its own part of nature.
So when it comes to panpsychism, we can rule it out just by its failure to speak to this organismic causality. If panpsychism wants to argue that awareness is a property of particles just like gravity, then already it is sunk by its attempt to ape the metaphysics of monistic material reductionism.
Now that is a rabbit hole, but certainly the Sepirot and the Ogdoad are early examples of an systems that see reality as a series of interactions.
Is Umberto Eco's A Theory of Semiotics a good place to start? My cousin's wife recommended it to me. I absolutely love the guy's fiction.
Well, here's the problem: this associates, or reduces, logical causation to a physical state. Whereas physical and logical causation operate on completely separate levels.
Well, greetings, your Hghness! The contributors here are much more inclined to what is called bio-semiotics, which originated with the application of C S Peirce’s conception of signs to biological disciplines.
(I’m probably one of the few contributors whose heard of Rene Guenon on this board, generally speaking there’s very little discussion of esoterica on this forum.)
Maybe the Hard Problem is only a problem for those still stuck in the maw of Cartesian dualism?
Pattee is a biologist. And biology had its own version of the "hard problem". It was called vitalism. It was just obvious that some spirit must animate a flesh and blood body. But who now believes the body is anything other than a complex machine? Life - as a phenomenon - holds no metaphysical mystery anymore.
Well in fact, the machine metaphor was also inadequate as far as any curious biologist was concerned. And so people like Pattee in particular have gone beyond that in defining life as a semiotic phenomenon. The organismic view of physics parasitised by codes.
A holistic or triadic paradigm now explains life. And it is easy to see that it also explains mind, as semiosis already grants life an intentionality and "awareness" at the cellular level ... the subject of the cited paper here.
I came up through both sides of the debate as the Hard Problem was raging in Philosophy of Mind at the same time that neuroscience was finally getting to grips with the enactive and semiotic basis of the brain's relation to the world.
So on one side, there was this constant chanting of the "Hard Problem". On the other, there were the neuroscientists not interested in the time-wasting diversions. It was a very 1990s moment.
I was sitting next to a philosopher when Chalmers gave his first big public presentation of the Hard Problem. I asked him why all the fuss? He said Chalmers was making dualism respectable again as a philosophical position. And ain't it great just to have something new to stir things up, give philosophers something of their own to argue about rather than just tag along behind the science bandwagon?
In a nutshell, that should tell you the social dynamics at work.
It is worth knowing that semiotics is divided into the dyadic tradition of Saussure and the triadic tradition of Peirce. And until the rediscovery of Peirce's corpus in the 1990s, it was Saussure who dominated the landscape.
On Eco's own position here....
Also, Saussure was focused on semiotics - the science of meaning-construction - as it relates to human linguistic culture. That was broadened somewhat to the degree it influenced psychological structuralism and continental philosophy.
Whereas Peirce was mounting a fundamental assault on meaning in the Cosmic context. He was concerned with grounding logical and mathematical thought in some general metaphysics. So his ambitions were vastly greater.
Nevertheless, Pattee acknowledges that he has been unable to solve the question of the origin of life. He says that in the Physics and Metaphysics of Biosemiotics, in a couple of places.
I'm in agreement with a lot of what you say, but wary of scientific hubris. Maybe some very simple or even elementary fact about the nature of existence is beyond science, due to the specific ways that science has to go about analysis of an issue. I think that's Chalmer's point, and I think it's a valid point. But if you don't see the point, or don't think it's a valid point, then what scientific evidence could be assembled to convince you? None, I would suggest. Which is, kind of, the point.
We've had this discussion before. In my view - and I spent many years talking with him – he took this angle to sell his wares.
He was making his name in the era of Crick-Watson where science had discovered the double helix of DNA, the cellular machinery of protein manufacture and respiration. The reductionists where dusting their hands on a job well done.
But Pattee was making the point that a system of code and metabolism raises an obvious chicken and egg problem for biology. We know they evolved to be the two aspects of the one whole, but it seems one ought to have evolved first. And that has become the new great problem.
In my view, this is another advantage of a Peircean metaphysics. The origins of things are not about some first thing and then the next other thing - a simple chain of cause and effect, a tale of material/efficient causality.
Instead, the origin of things is about symmetry-breaking, co-dependent arising, or however you want to put a fully organicist position - one large enough to embrace the holism of all four Aristotelean causes.
So the bug becomes a feature. It would be my argument that the degree to which symbol and matter are formally the "other" of each other - the product of a symmetry breaking or dichotomising development - then it is inevitable that you should have both arising in tandem.
Actually this applies to the origin of human speech and any other origin problem. The language origin problem is which came first - words or rules, semantics or syntax? My answer is that words (as atoms of meaning) and rules (as the structuring habits of a grammar) would be the matching halves of the one division. Each would arise within the context of the other.
The more you have something like a word atom, the more you are going to get something like rules for combining those atoms. And the same goes the other way. The more you have a habit of using rules, the more words you are going to require as components to manipulate.
It is a virtuous feedback spiral. The faintest starting difference becomes magnified until you get a very clear difference between vocabulary and grammar. It is only together that they work. But at the beginning, you only need a slight difference with a slight edge and then a positive feedback that amplifies things and gives the divide its fullest expression.
Anyway, I've also pointed you in the direction of Nick Lane's The Vital Question as a good contemporary view on abiogenesis. The picture of how life could have got started in the way I describe is explored there.
Quoting Wayfarer
Of course I agree that our epistemologies frame the facts we are able to discover. Everything is just a paradigm.
But that is also why I put so much effort into exploring all the different paradigms people use and defend the few key people – Peirce and Pattee for instance - who do it best.
Quoting Wayfarer
I think you give Chalmers way too much credit as a critical intellect. He's a nice chap. But a showman.
[quote=Howard Pattee]The origin of life question is: How did this separation, this epistemic cut, originate? As Hoffmeyer (2000) has pointed out, the apparently sharp epistemic cut between these categories makes it difficult to imagine how life began and how these two categories evolved at higher levels. The epistemic cut appears to be a conceptual as well as a topological discontinuity. It is difficult to imagine a gradual cut. The problem arises acutely with the genetic code. A partial code does not work, and a simple code that works as it evolves is hard to imagine. In fact, this is a universal problem in evolution and even in creative thought. How does a complex functioning set of constraints originate when no subset of the constraints appears to maintain the function? How does a reversible dynamics gradually become an irreversible thermodynamics? How does a paradigm shift from classical determinism to quantum indeterminism occur gradually? At least in the case of thought we can trace some of the history, but in the origin of life we have no adequate history. Even in the case of creative thought, so much goes on in the subconscious mind that the historical trace has large gaps.
I will state at the outset that I have not solved this problem.[/quote]
I've read that paper about half a dozen times since you first pointed it out to me. I think it cautiously supports dualism in recognizing the distinction between the 'inexorable laws of physics', and 'the symbol vehicles like the bases in DNA, voltages representing bits in a computer, the text on this page, and the neuron firings in the brain [that] do not appear to be limited by, or clearly related to, the very laws they must obey.' Granted, he says that Descartes' proposed model consigns the relationship of these two domains to 'metaphysical obscurity' - no argument there. But the duality still exists and is acknowledged by him. The dualism of self-other - the 'epistemic cut', being one manifestation of it - is clearly a deep metaphysical issue.
I'm not asking you to 'solve' this problem - who could? - but when I see the claim that life 'holds no metaphysical mystery', I'm going to object.
What would you say is the distinction between the ability to have an experience and the ability to experience?
If you really do take into account Aristotle's four causes, then the question of 'how' only addresses two of them.
But does Pattee think that?
What is relevant to this thread is the point I have already tied to make. Yes, there is a dualism at the heart of everything in some strong sense.
But then there are the two completely different paradigms trying to "resolve" that. And panpsychism/idealism/eliminativism/etc represent the mainstream mechanistic response - an attempt to reduce a dualism to a monism.
Meanwhile triadic systems thinkers see a dualism as a dichotomy. It is in fact the very thing nature must produce as a fact of historic development. Reality itself is an evolutionary process.
So sure. Science hasn't done its job until it can account for the emergence of critical dualisms - in particular, this general semiotic one of matter and symbol. The job isn't done until there is an account of abiogenesis.
And what Pattee provides is robust basis for having this particular discussion. He ain't no closet panpsychist. I can tell you that for a fact.
Quoting Wayfarer
It is more that there is an odd contrast where public opinion no longer finds the problem of life to be sufficiently mysterious, while it also clings on to an exaggerated mystery in regard to the problem of mind.
Even on PF, who still thinks biology needs vitalism to explain anything - close an explanatory gap?
Yet talk about mind and the explanatory gap is the only thing that needs explaining. Who would pick up a neuroscience or psychology textbook to find the answer on that?
Biosemiotics takes the position that life and mind are pretty much synonymous as phenomena. They share the same basic systems explanation.
That is another reason for being dismissive of the Hard Problem. It logically either applies to both or neither. They are not two kinds of things but different semiotic levels of the same thing.
This is indeed the reason I gravitated towards Pattee and his circle in the first place.
Within neuroscience and the science of mind during the 1980s/1990s, there was a very strong division between the computationalists and the dynamicists. Another paradigmatic duality. And both sides were very persuasive that theirs was the proper lens to view the brain through.
Neuroscience - as a branch of medicine - was actually very backward and untutored in its metaphysics so was failing to figure it out. It wasn't seeing how these were the two aspects of the one semiotic whole.
That led me to complexity theory and hierarchy theory as a more abstract level of discussion. And then I stumbled into the Theoretical Biology crew who had a 20 year head start because they had been forced to explore exactly the same issue as a reaction to the mechanistic triumphs of the Crick-Watson 1960s.
Pattee, Salthe, Rosen and others had hammered out the answers that resolved the neuroscientific dilemma.
As it happens, neuroscience did eventually rediscover much the same answers. You had Friston's Bayesian Brain, the enactive turn in cogsci, etc.
And as another wrinkle to the tale, the Theoretical Biology crew was undergoing its own next step transition. The sudden wealth of Peirce scholarship was revealing the guts of the answer had already been laid down with greater metaphysical generality by 1910.
Salthe was the one pushing a semiotic rewrite of hierarchy theory. I was an eager student. Pattee was sternly resistant.
We all went our own ways after a few years. And suddenly Pattee came out with his own blizzard of papers about biosemiosis. He has seemed unpersuaded. Then he was leading the charge. The paradigm shift had clicked for him too. And he has the razor intellect to make the best case.
So there is a really intricate social history here. I was in fact in contact with another dozen such camps at least, all roughly pursuing the same quarry. Second order cybernetics was its other whole thing. I was close with Friston and his Bayesian Brain. There was Walter Freeman and his chaos approach. Scott Kelso and his complementary nature approach.
The point is that this is science in action - multiple camps of overlapping activity, often rediscovering the same truths in different jargon and believing it is wholly original.
And then there is public opinion in action - hooked on ancient science debates recycled in dumbed-down format. The audience of the Chalmers, Krausses and other carnival buskers. :smile:
Quoting Wayfarer
And?
The Theoretical Biology crew - especially Salthe - push the fact that the systems science approach requires science to take teleology seriously. And indeed, in the laws of thermodynamics, that is just what has happened. Life and mind are now to be grounded in the science of dissipative structure.
I was referring to Mental quality, not a different kind, or value, of Life.The metaphysical distinction I was making is a Qualitative difference -- a matter of degree -- rather than a Quantitative difference -- two separate things. A Metaphyiscal difference instead of a Physical difference. As a Quale, it is also a matter of opinion. :smile:
Quale : a quality or property as perceived or experienced by a person.
Yeah I'm afraid 'dissipative structures' will never provide a philosophical rationale as far as I'm concerned. It's engineering speak.
BTW, how do you rate Stuart Kaufman in the overall spectrum?
In fact, it is anti-engineering speak. It is natural process speak.
A tornado is a classic dissipative structure. The interest of engineers is piqued more by the fact that the fluid mechanics involved represents the outer limits of computability.
It doesn't get more metaphysical than to deal with the formally non-computable.
But whatever. :roll:
Quoting Wayfarer
Big fan. The whole Santa Fe complex adaptive systems bandwagon was an important stepping stone.
So I was mostly involved with the backroom guys labouring in obscurity. There was bugger all funding for the systems science tradition.
But then this was this new mathematical physics that was gaudy and caught the public eye, while also being hugely important in terms of the techological payback. You had the computer-based breakthroughs of chaos theory, non-linear dynamics, complexity theory, network theory, fractal mathematics - anything where you could start with a seed algorithm and run it through enough cycles to produce a self-organising pattern.
So that was a case of valuable new science hitting the public immediately between the eyes. It did produce a popular paradigm shift.
However it also seems to say that "more is different". Complexity is a matter of emergence. Create enough interactions and even randomness becomes organised.
And that is still a reductionist sounding take-home. It doesn't actually make contact with the biosemiotic story with its epistemic cut between symbols and matter. It is just matter being busy on its own in essentially meaningless ways.
So it was the rapid rise of the new complexity maths that was this other camp in neuroscience - the dynamicists opposed to the computationalists. It was very important to learn how self-organisation is an inherent part of nature, not some unexpected add-on.
And talking of dissipative structure, that was part of this bottom-up, mindless, self-organisation story too.
However, seen from a semiotic perspective, the fact that inorganic physics could produce so much "order from chaos" for free also then meant that any semiotic regulation of the material realm had in fact far less it needs to do.
The material world already wants to fall into its dissipative structure patterns - vortices, tributaries, etc. And so information - DNA, neurons, words - only has to provide some well directed nudges to tip the balance.
That was the point where biosemiosis could click into place as an unmysterious story - once you understood the triadic nature of the relation.
//oh, and there's a bunch of very interesting videos on just these questions on the Santa Fe Institute's website. Just re-read Andromeda Strain.
That's where I like to be, all over the shop, it means I'm on top of the situation. You are a master at changing the subject. So even when I'm all over the shop you duck into a worm hole and pop up somewhere else.
Quoting apokrisis
In reality, this is not really true. And all it takes is a bit of thought about what similarity is, and what difference is, to understand that. Look, let's take "the same" as an absolute. Now, different means "not the same". And similar also means "not the same" but in a different way. They both mean "not the same", but in completely different ways. "Different" signifies the absolute, "not the same" in an absolute sense. "Similar" however, requires a judgement of sameness in some respect. It is a qualified, or relative form of "not the same". So "similar" takes us to a completely different category from "different", because it requires not only the initial judgement of "not the same", as an absolute judgement, but it also requires a relative judgement, it is in some respect "the same". Therefore "different" is an absolute sense of "not the same", while "similar" is a relative sense of "not the same".
I see what you mean. But that is part and parcel of the constraints-based approach here.
Sameness (or synechism in Peircean parlance) is the global condition. All are within one. A continuity. A lack of differentation.
So sameness is about wholeness and the single general large scale state. It maps to the bounding constraints in other words. A constraint is an ultimate measure of sameness. It constitutes "the same".
And then difference is the local exception to the general rule. In hierarchical terms, it is down there at the ground level as the grain of atomistic action. It is the many within the one. It is something plural rather than singular simply because that is how our hierarchical model of any system works.
So the point you make only confirms the position I argue. It picks out that even you are working with the same systems perspective without realising how it informs the very grammar of this discussion.
You can't help but think of sameness as singular and difference as plural. Or sameness as exception-less because difference is about exceptions. Or sameness as continuity because difference is discrete.
But differences still then divide into differences that make a difference and differences that don't. A state of constraint is disturbed by the one and indifferent to the other.
So difference can never be eliminated - all part of the story that absolutes are only approached in limiting or asymptotic fashion. But large differences are likely to matter - in being large and so challenging the prevailing singular state of sameness. And small differences are likely not to. They all just blur into each other and so look like a continuity of sameness.
I never asked you for a formal and rigorous definition. I asked you to describe the thing's properties such that I could understand what you think it does. In the end, I just asked for anything that could shed light on how you're using the word.
If, as you say, you understood what I meant, then mission accomplished. Except that this isn't about what I think consciousness is... This is a looooong attempt to get you to talk about what you think it is in a way that I can understand. But I'm not sure you know what you think it is.
Quoting khaled
A little ambiguity is a large progression from total ambiguity.
Quoting khaled
You're projecting. You did not provide any information. It's not possible to answer your question because it's about something you do not describe at all. I wasn't nitpicking details. There was nothing other than a deferment to another ambiguous word.
Quoting khaled
I covered this above (the answer would be no):
Quoting Kenosha Kid
So clearly I'm not using the term "pattern-matching" in a way consistent with your counter-example.
Quoting khaled
The field of psychology is not up for grabs. I don't have an exotic take on the field that is distinct from the field itself: if I did, I would be misrepresenting it. (Which I may well do as well, accidentally.) Your idea of consciousness, by contrast, entertains panpsychism, i.e. is not constrained even to that which is amenable to scientific study, let alone that which is studied in a particular field. This is why your notion of consciousness required illumination: you were asking questions about a thing that is not identical to modern, scientific descriptions of it, nor with any certainty similar to any other particular notion.
Quoting khaled
I'm happy to reaffirm it here and now.
Quoting khaled
For sure, and that's what we have neuroscience for. I'm not going to reproduce every paper, which is what I suspect you're suggesting my burden entails, or even send you links you probably won't read, but check out Isaac's Halle Berry detector description on the Quining Qualia thread for a great example.
Quoting khaled
So for instance in no-report problems, you can track what the brain is paying attention to and compare to what the consciousness is paying attention to. Your eyes might physically move to focus on a secondary stimulus but, when asked, you will report no awareness of it. In terms of accounting for the difference, neurology seems to be the *perfect* framework in which to explain it, as it deals with the transmission of information between different parts of the brain responsible for different tasks.
The whole idea of an “epistemic cut” is precisely how Pattee phrases what others call “the hard problem”.
What's the problem? That it conflicts with a belief? That's par for the course. Although I wonder what you mean by "completely separate". As in, there's no neurological activity related to rational thinking at all?
Logical necessity is not dependent on any particular configuration of physical states, because you can encode logically necessary statements such as the above in any number of different physical forms. It could be represented by different symbols, in different forms, and even in different media. So how could such an idea as a rational inference be the same as a 'brain state'? How could it be that every brain is in 'the same state' when it says 'A>B....' etc?
….the fact that in thinking, your mind is identical with the form that it thinks, means (for Aristotle and for all Platonists) that since the form 'thought' is detached from matter, 'mind' is immaterial too. [/quote]
And what would be the purpose of that? You claimed that neurological progress would lead to a general theory of consciousness. I asked what you mean by that. Forget me, what do you mean?
But if I were to define it it would just be defined as "awareness" or "apprehention" as you used them. I can add to that that these things (qualia) being apprehended are a result of trained pattern recognition and recall. This is a sufficient condition but I don't know if it is necessary (and you haven't clarified that bit either). I would also agree that consciousness has this "unifying effect" you speak of, as in you can be aware of multiple qualia at once (the taste of a banana as well as its color for instance).
I think the most effective way to define what I mean by it would be by comparing it to a state where it doesn't exist. Consciousness is the difference between dreaming and the other stages of sleep. You are conscious when you dream as I define it (and it doesn't have to be a lucid dream).
Another definition could be "The thing that remains constant no matter how much the qualia change". So whether I'm listening to music or screaming in agony after breaking an arm, there is always the awareness of this or that qualia (pleasant in the former case, unpleasant in the latter(the qualia that is)). That is consciousness.
Does that make it clearer what I mean?
Quoting Kenosha Kid
My question was "What do you mean by....?". Which word in that question is hard to describe?
Quoting Kenosha Kid
Fair enough. My bad on that one.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
I wasn't asking questions about what consciousness is or what brings it about. I was asking what you meant by "neurological progress will lead to a general theory of consciousness". Forget me, I want to understand your point of view. Which is why I didn't mention panpsychism at all at first, you brought it into the discussion and then asked me to define what I mean by consiousness. In your own words, what I mean by consciousness has nothing to do with what you mean by it.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
Alright then. Let me ask some of the same questions about that again. Are we talking human brains only here? What happens if a part of the brain is replaced or lost? Does it have to be organic? In other words what exactly counts as a "brain".
Quoting Kenosha Kid
It could explain why certain information, despite being within your field of view, you remain unaware of. But what does that have to do with explaining what the necessary conditions are for this awareness? All you can get out of this is sufficient conditions for consciousness/awareness, not necessary conditions for them.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
No nothing like that.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
I'll get back to you after I've found it, I don't feel like rummaging through 40 pages right now.
The last part doesn't make any sense. If all is replaced, then how can there be anything that remains?
If I lost a finger, I would still be the same I, that just lost a finger. Things change and remain the same, or else "change" wouldn't make any sense as change is what some thing does.
Are you saying that the only thing that you do is experience? You don't run, jump, laugh, talk, etc.? When your body commits an immoral act, are you at fault or is your body at fault?
Quoting khaled
What is shape? Information.
What is this event of shapes, colors, sounds, smells and feelings? Information processing.
What are all events? Information. Process. Relationships. Take your pick. They all seem to apply. These are the terms I like to use.
Quoting khaled
True. That is why I don't really care much for using the term, "experience". I was only using it because that is the scribble that you know to refer to the event we are talking about. I have learned that, in order to communicate, you have to use words that your audience understands, not necessarily the words you would use, because it is the thing that we are talking about that is important, not the scribbles that we use.
I am implying that there is something that is not replaced no matter how much of your body gets replaced by functionally equivalent parts
Quoting Harry Hindu
Not a very good definition. Not all information is shapes. For instance the color of an apple is not the shape of an apple. It's like if you asked me to define consciousness and I said it was "an event" or "a phenomena"
Quoting Harry Hindu
Have no clue what you're trying to say here. Each of those words can mean a whole world of things.
Quoting Harry Hindu
So consciousness is information processing? What does information processing mean? Is a white blood cell processing infromation when deciding whether or not to attack something? And if so does that make it conscious? Is my pc processing information right now? Does that make it conscious?
I find your "constraints-based approach" interesting and informative, but as I've explained already, I think it has a fundamental problem of a reversed representation for the roles of the foundational elements. You associate meaning with the constraints (form), I associate meaning with the thing which is constrained (content, or matter). So from your perspective, what is required to make matter meaningful (a symbol), is constraints. From my perspective, matter is inherently meaningful, because it cannot exist in a meaningless way. To exist as matter is to already have meaning. So even when matter appears to be free from constraints in an absolute way, it is still meaningful. This implies that we need to look beyond "constraints" to find the foundation of meaning.
With constraints, is the way that one might represent meaning in a systems model; having meaning is to have constraints. But there is always the fundamental elements, the parts or particles, which are modeled as being constrained. Since the existence of these parts is taken for granted by the systems model, and meaning is confined to the constraints which are applied to the fundamental parts, these elements are necessarily meaningless within that model, and therefore out of the range of intelligibility. You might, as I do, see this as a defect of the modeling system, it leaves the basic parts of the system as fundamentally unintelligible.
A proposal to rectify this situation would be to assign meaning to the fundamental elements themselves. This would allow those fundamental elements to be intelligible. But this would annihilate the validity of the widely accepted idea that meaning is produced through constraints, and is therefore proper to "constraint". This is very much a Wittgensteinian approach. We apply boundaries (define words) for specific purposes. This creates the appearance that the meaning of the word is associated with the boundary. However, such a boundary (definition) is not necessary for the word to have meaning. And, the word inherently has meaning simply by the fact of being used. We can use a word, and therefore it has meaning, without employing any boundary. So prior to all the constraints or boundaries which we create and employ to restrict the meaning of the word, there is meaning inherent within the word's capacity to be used freely, in any possible way. Now, the foundation, the base of meaning is placed within this freedom, rather than within the constraints which are applied to the freedom.
Once you allow for this possibility, that meaning is properly identified as within the freedom, rather than within the constraints, the real existence of living beings, and their vast array of apparently unconstrained or random acts, suddenly makes so much more sense, as purely intelligible, rather than as unintelligible anomalies. No longer are the free acts of living beings considered to be unintelligible, "random" acts, they are now meaningful acts. Therefore at the base of evolution for example, the cause of genetic variation, what appears to some people and is often described as "random mutation", is really meaningful expressions of freedom. Clearly the evidence which is the process called evolution, indicates that these mutations are meaningful.
Quoting apokrisis
So, to support my way of looking at this, which is the reversal of yours, I will point to the problems with yours. To begin with, we cannot ever have this perfection in sameness which you propose as "the global condition". "Similar" can never obtain the absolute perfection of same. "Same" is merely an ideal, produced as a modeling condition, like an artificial scale. In reality there is no such thing as perfect continuity with a lack of differentiation. I would say that this is so highly improbable that we can rule it out as physically impossible. So if this is proposed as a starting point for the existence of real constraints, it cannot be accepted, because it's just an ideal, an artificial perfection, which has a purpose as the basis for a scale in helping us make judgements, but it doesn't represent any reality.
Quoting apokrisis
This I see as a mistake of contradiction. To say that it is a difference, implies already that it has made a difference by allowing you to say that it is a difference. It is only by ignoring the reality that in relation to absolute sameness, this is contradiction, can we get to the reality of your proposed ideal, absolute sameness. If you stipulate that the most minute, infinitesimal differences do not make a difference, you might propose that this form of similarity is the reality of absolute sameness. It is not, it is contradiction.
Quoting apokrisis
Now, since this ultimate "same", "the global condition", has been ruled out as an unsound starting point, being simply an ideal, and not actually representing anything real, we can move to the opposite, "difference". We cannot describe difference as "the local exception", because the global, "general rule" has been ruled out as impossible. Therefore we now have a multiplicity of grains of atomistic action, free and different, and we cannot say that they are "within the one", because the real existence of that perfection, that Ideal, the One, has not been validated. The multitude of free and different grains of atomistic action is verified by empirical evidence, but the global condition of perfect continuity and absolute lack of differentiation, remains an unsubstantiated ideal, judged on principles of probability as impossible.
So, the question is, where do the constraints come from. Since the global Ideal has been ruled out as extremely improbable, we need to look at what inheres within the individual grains of free and different atomistic action.
The hard problem is asking why are there both conscious states and brain states.
People seem to be forgetting that we only know of brain states via conscious states - meaning that our knowledge of brain states takes the form of conscious visual sensory data, like "shivering brains" and such.
From where you stand, you experience brain states when looking at my conscious states. From where I stand, I only experience conscious states, not brain states. I don't experience my conscious states like you experience my conscious states. If this is the case, then how do we know that we are talking about the same thing. If we are talking about the same thing, then why does it appear so different from where we stand? We don't seem to have this sort of problem when talking about apples, tables and chairs. The differences that are there are the result of our our different positions in space-time relative to what it is that we are perceiving. Does the same hold true for consciousness - that the difference is just in our different locations relative to what it is that we are talking about?
Quoting apokrisis
What does this really mean? It seems to me that you can always simplify dualism into monism. Dualism is just another way of saying that everything is a relationship. The problem is that there are many relationships between more than two things. Not to mention that dualism seems to be a false dichotomy derived from the idea that the singular "I" itself possesses qualities that are on a level between everything else. The world is only hot or cold relative to your own body temperature, large or small relative to your own size, etc. In other words, these sensations are relationships between the state of your body and the state of the environment. I think this is more or less something that you might agree with and maybe any disagreement we might have will be semantics, but then that just means that the real difference between dualism and monism is just semantics.
But the boundary between life and non-life gets blurry. After all, life is just a more complex relationship than non-life, so it stands to reason that non-life would have very rudimentary, the most basic, the most fundamental relationships that life has, not that it doesn't have it at all. What that thing is is information. Effects are informative of their causes and vice versa. A relationship is informative of its constituents and vice versa. Information is the relationship between cause and effect and it exists in everything that is a causal relation, like scribbles on a screen and the intent that caused them to be on the screen and the information molecules have about their atoms.
Quoting khaled
If you're saying that you meant "Does a computer have consciousness according to *my* understanding of consciousness," then we've been speaking at cross purposes.
Quoting khaled
This presumes a definition of consciousness in which a conscious PC would be what-it-is + what-it-does (3rd person) + something else that is undiscoverable from the outside. This something else is what I've been asking you about. it's a property of *your* understanding of consciousness, not mine.
But I think I now get what you maybe really meant. Let's say neuroscience has provided a complete and universally accepted description of human consciousness. Armed with that, is a sophisticated computer conscious? Or a chimp, or a rat, or a crow? Knowing how human consciousness works does not decide for us the essential properties such that we can say something else is also conscious.
A human is a specific system. Is a blind person conscious? I'm sure you'd agree that they are. So one of the most important set of phenomenal consciousnesses that is available for access consciousness is not an essential for a thing to be called conscious.
So at the other extreme, let's consider a speed camera. It could be said to have a phenomenal consciousnesses: it processes raw sensory data according to its training, detects car objects, license plate objects, numbers and letters, and estimates velocities. This is close enough to some things that humans do with visual data. It also makes decisions and reports this derived data (it's nearest equivalent to qualia) to external entities. Given that every qualia it has goes through this decision-making process and is available for reporting, is it conscious?
I would say it is not. It has many of the properties of human consciousness, but it's decisions are reactive, not proactive. It never muses on the prevalence of white over red cars, or gets excited when it sees a licence plate from its home town. These specific things are not what it means to be conscious, rather are indicative of what it means to be human. But the underlying capacity strikes me as being what access consciousness is *for*. So this proactive capacity is what I would include as an essential feature of consciousness.
That is true or false or arbitrary with or without a complete neurological description of human consciousness, which merely limits consciousness to a subset of what brains do, and is reasonably extended to non-brains that do what brains do, or analogues of what brains do, or merely simulate what brains to.
This leads us to the intermediate example of an advanced computer capable of doing everything a human being does, replete with memory, imagination, the ability to form new associations, identify causes (important), etc. The question of whether that machine is conscious is not contained within the neurological description of human consciousness, or animal consciousness should we classify any non-human animals as conscious. Ultimately, you have to make a choice about what your language means: does your definition of consciousness admit non-living things or not? This is a separable question from the completeness of a neurological description of consciousness.
Which is exactly what I think won’t happen but I’ll suspend disbelief for now.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
Interesting but I wouldn’t go so far. I’d put it in the same box as sight.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
I’m more interested though in whether you understand what this undiscoverable thing from the outside that I’m referring to is. Note though: I haven’t said anything about consciousness that makes it undiscoverable from the outside by definition, though it is true that I have no clue how you would discover it from the outside.
Did the dream analogy work at all at clarifying what I mean?
Quoting Kenosha Kid
Well mine doesn’t require something to be living or inanimate.
Why can’t it be the Holism of the relation that is meaningful? The form represents the intent. The resulting materiality is the degree to which an intent is being manifested.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Matter is always found as part of a process and so is in-formed by some set of constraints. Even an electron is a product of cosmic cooling and the constraints of the electroweak symmetry breaking being able to kick in.
The cosmos is then generally indifferent to the particular position and momentum of those electrons. The distribution is essentially free or random. Unconstrained as material properties. And you might also call that randomness meaningful from the whole system viewpoint.
But actually it would seem to count as part of the back-grounding meaninglessness that could now give particle momentum some meaning if you - as a sub-system of the cosmos - now found some reason to track the whereabouts of some selected electron.
You might want to have the kind of relationship where it is constrained to some flow in a mechanical circuit or something.
Reality is a hierarchical web of constraints given localised form to materiality. This is the opposite of the merological metaphysics you are trying to argue.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
I’m not sure quite what you are thinking. But it is obvious that we don’t construct the entirety of reality through words. A lump of rock has already formed by some natural process before I decide to call it a stone, a boulder or pebble.
Yet if I ask you to bring me a stone and you bring me a pebble, then something has gone wrong. My attempt to constrain your material behaviour in some meaningful way does not yet fit the bill.
You in turn could reply a small rock is as good as a large rock surely? Your belief is that the size difference is pretty immaterial - a matter of vagueness or indifference.
So your argument simply confuses levels of semiosis.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
But that was my point. So you are confirming my position again.
A constraint imposes conditions. It defines the differences that make a difference. In that, it is imposing a generalised sameness.
Yet by the same token, that act of constraint is also ruling on what are the differences that don’t make a difference. It is also defining what can be left free as material accidents.
You might come along and declare those differences are differences that count for you and thus mar the “absolute perfection” in your eyes. if a black dog has a single white hair, it fails your test.
But that is not the same as showing reality ought to have that same Platonic-strength concern. My position is all about avoiding the mistakes of that kind of formal cause idealism.
The Peircean view is founded on tychism or chance. Nature becomes organised by developing continuity or a hierarchy of limitations on its spontaneity. Forms rule because they have evolved to the degree needed to produce a lawful and regulated cosmos.
I am saying that this dualism is always actually a dichotomy, and thus something intrinsically relational.
Hotter is only ever relative to colder. And vice versa. But then a world constructed within that contrast makes possible the new thing of having some particular position on that spectrum of possibilities. You can be a body in an environment where you have this Goldilocks three choices about the temperature you prefer.
Quoting Harry Hindu
The division - the epistemic cut - lies in the fact that life and mind are how we describe systems organised by symbols. They have a coding machinery like genes, neurons or word that can store memories and so impose a self-centred structure of habits on their environments.
It is pretty easy to recognise that difference between an organism and its backdrop inorganic environment surely?
Why ever not? We're talking about the power of social conventions here. Please explain the difficulty?
Quoting apokrisis
But of course, it could be said that some codes do and some don't derive their power from being tied to physics. Those that do we can usefully class as syntax, and implement as automation. For example, nature implements a DNA/protein correlation automatically. The rest is semantics, and requires a degree of social agreement as to what symbols are (to be pretended are) pointed at what objects.
Quoting apokrisis
Yes, if we either use physics to automate it or we agree to pretend.
Quoting apokrisis
Yes, meaning is agreement to pretend this pointing rather than that.
Quoting apokrisis
Oh dang, I thought you had got my drift. My bad. I'm arguing that human reference is quite generally a matter of pretence, no less when asserting unpretended truths than otherwise.
I'm saying there is no difficulty. But then to call it a "pretence" is thus unnecessarilly loaded.
Quoting bongo fury
The codes that could evolve to survive in the physical world would have to be tied to their own material means of existence.
Quoting bongo fury
You are just skipping from one level of semiosis - genes - to another - words - and pretending that says something meaningful here.
It doesn't.
Quoting bongo fury
So to the degree that you are only concerned with linguistic semiosis, you are not engaging with my biosemiosis. And this conversation will remain at cross-purposes.
Remember that I have already specified the four key evolutionary steps in the ascent of biosemiosis - genes, neurons, words, numbers.
These levels equate to biology, neuroscience, culture and technology. And each of them are like a new sphere of life.
The modern educated human mind partakes in all four at the same time, in a moderately well integrated way. But we are dealing with a complex story here.
The form "represents" the intent, but this implies that the intent is prior to the form. The intent might be the cause of existence of the form, but the intent is not itself a form. This is what we see in human relations, society, community, the intent is prior to, and cause of existence of the formal constraints. And, we see that intent resides within the individual who is a willing member of the community. So the individuals, who are the parts, are constrained by the form, but these constraints are derived from the will or intent of the parts, the individuals. Therefore prior to the existence of any constraints, there are the individual entities with the will, or intent to be constrained. The form, which is the constraint itself, is a manifestation of this intent. Meaning, as what is meant, is by definition found in the intent, not in the manifestation of the intent, the form. We might abstract the form, from the material act, but we must look beyond the form, to the intent behind it, to apprehend its meaning.
Quoting apokrisis
OK, but intent, if we are to call it a constraint, is a different sort of constraint than form is. Form is an actual physical constraint, but intent is more of a desire, a motivation to act. As human beings, we have the will power to resist the desire, or motivation to act, so intent does not have the same force of constraint as form has. This is why the will is said to be free, intent (which is rooted in desire and want) does not have the capacity to force us into action. Therefore we must separate form, as actual physical constraint, from intent, which I would prefer not to call a constraint at all. Free will allows that we are not constrained in this way. Aristotle put intent in a different category from formal cause, as final cause. So in relation to your proposition above, it is possible that matter might be free from all formal constraints, yet still be "in-formed" by intent, but "in-formed" implies something other than "formed".
Quoting apokrisis
Yes, that is what I said, it is the opposite of what you propose. But I am only forced into this opposing position because you propose idealistic constraints which are completely unsubstantiated, and not grounded in reality. You are incapable of giving an account of how these constraints come into existence, where they come from, and why. From observations of human experience, I can say that constraints come from intent. But now I have to account for the existence of intent, and this pushes me in the opposite direction from you. You seem to think that intent is somehow inherent within constraint, but this defies observation, as we see that intent creates constraints, but it does not leave itself within the constraints it has created. Therefore we know that there is a separation between formal constraints and intent.
Quoting apokrisis
I think you misunderstood the argument. The argument, as I've argued in this thread, is that it is incorrect to associate meaning with constraints, because meaning as Wittgenstein demonstrates, is prior to constraints. Take your example. You ask me to bring a stone. I misunderstand, so you've failed in your attempt at constraining my behaviour. You created no constraints. Would you not agree that your words still had meaning even though no constraint was created? And we do not need to assume other previously existing constraints amongst other people to justify the assumption that the words have meaning. All we need to do is consider the fact that you wanted something, and asked me to get it. This is all that's required for those words to have meaning and it doesn't matter if anyone else is capable of being constrained by your symbols (understanding them), the fact that you spoke them says that you meant something with them.
Quoting apokrisis
This is all gibberish to me, like you're try to change the subject again, trying to wiggle away. You clearly talked about sameness as "the global condition", and difference as "the local exception to the general rule". So you are positing this Ideal, "same" as the real global condition. What I pointed out is that this Ideal cannot be a real global condition, because the perfection required for that Ideal, "same" cannot be obtained in the physical reality. You seem to be still trying to justify your assumption of the physical reality of this Ideal, "same" by positing "differences that don't make a difference". All you seem to be saying is that if we overlook certain differences, assume that they make no difference, then we can have a true physical reality of this Ideal, "same". But that's illogical, because by allowing some differences you no longer have the Ideal "same". A diluted Ideal is not an Ideal.
Quoting apokrisis
Do you not see that "same" is itself a form? It is the supreme, highest form in the hierarchy. It's often called "One". If you posit this form as the real global condition, then you already assume the highest form as the background. There is no sense in talking about the evolution of forms, when you already assume the physical existence of the highest possible form as the background for your model.
Or it self-organises and so intent and concrete possibility co-arise. The form is simply finality finding its fullest expression. The usual Peircean reply.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Or instead, there is always already some vague or informal understanding in play. And development of that gives it formal expression as some system of laws and rights or freedoms.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Formal and final cause are the diachronic and synchronic view of the same essential thing. In the moment, you can see that there is some structure. In the long run, you can see that was expressing some reason.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
I don't think you listen.
Where does a river get its snaking curves from? From the constraints of a least action principle. It must arrange itself so as to balance the amount of water feeding it and the slope of the land which it must cross. If a straight line is too short to shift enough water in enough time, then it must throw out snaking loops and house the water that way.
So the constraints are all the physical boundary conditions - the volume of water, the slope of the land, the hardness or softness of the terrain. The finality lies in the imperative of least action. The form is found in some degree of sinuosity. The river is the result - constrained within its suitably designed banks. It now seems a stable thing - an object of some kind we can honour with a name.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
If you brought me a pebble, that is a small misunderstanding. If you bring me wombat, at least I can credit you with understanding the notion of "bring me".
It is all a matter of degree as to how obtuse I may judge you to be.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Yeah, even if you gibbered back to me in some weird lingo, I would still have reason to think you were trying to say something in another language.
So you are failing to demonstrate that language could have private meaning. Any meaning I could decode from the situation is relying on some familiarity with a communal habit.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Seems a simple point. If I draw a line in the sand, there are now two sides to the matter.
To be constrained is to be the one thing, and thus not any other thing. The usual negative space story.
And talking of wiggling out of trouble, you've skirted the key issue - that sameness seems singular and difference plural for good systems reason. That was a poor choice of target on your part.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
If you stick your big toe over the line I've drawn in the sand, I might just over-look it. If it's your whole foot, I would start to get peeved.
Between black and white, we can leave as much grey as we like - if we are actually indifferent.
As far as I'm concerned, I can decide you haven't yet done enough to cross my line.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Yes. A form represents singularity for the reasons I set out. If it is a universal, it applies every all at once.
That is how hierarchy theory works.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
But science shows that forms are emergent and so themselves form a developmental hierarchy. There are the most truly general constraints - we call them the laws of physics, or even the principles (like the least action principle). And then there are all the local rules and regulations, such as the strength of gravity on a planet the size of earth.
So if you only ever travel on the surface of the earth, that would seem like the general backdrop constraining all your movements. It just happens to be the highest scale of physical law you pragmatically encounter.
There is no decision being made as we always goes with "just right". Hot and cold are merely informing you that you are no longer in a state of homeostasis, or a state of "just right".
Hot and cold are not relative to each other. They are temperatures relative to the temperature of another body that is neither hot nor cold. A body that has a different temperature will associate different things as hot and cold. If the sun could experience temperature, it would consider lava cold. Is lava hot or cold, or is it simply neither and everything just has a certain amount of kinetic energy?
The question is why is there both types of descriptors for temperature - subjectivity of hot and cold, and the objectivity of kinetic energy?
Quoting apokrisis
Effects are about their causes independent of any mind. A mind is not needed to establish that relationship. It is already there. A mind is just another effect of causes, and a cause for many effects. Minds simply focus on the causal relationships that are useful and ignore the rest. That doesn't mean that causal relationships don't exist except when accessed by some mind. Cause and effect is part of everything, including life and non-life. Again, we're merely talking about degrees of complexity of some causal system.
The relationship between tree rings and the age of a tree isn't in some mind. It is in the causal process of how the tree grows throughout the year, and that relationship exists independent of some mind attending to it.
This self-organization, what you call "the usual Peircian reply", is the illogical part of your perspective which I indicated when I first engaged you in this thread. With this type of holism it is required that the parts already communicate with symbols before the whole, as a system, is created. You insist that there is a "co-arising", but clearly the description of the system necessitates the logical conclusion that the individual parts are in communication with each other prior to the existence of the overall whole. Since the constraints are property of the whole, it is impossible that the global constraints co-arise with the local freedoms. The local freedom is necessarily prior to the global constraint.
It appears like you attempt resolve this issue by positing your global condition of Ideal sameness. This Ideal sameness provides some constraint which is prior to the emergent constraints, which are necessarily posterior to the local freedoms. But this Ideal constraint is unsubstantiated by evidence, and it is just posited for the pragmatic purpose of allowing you to ignore the logical implication of your principles, that individual freedom, and intent, are prior in time to constraints, therefore the assumption of "co-arising" is unsound.
Quoting apokrisis
Formal and final cause cannot be said to be the same thing without a misrepresentation of the nature of time. Each, as a "cause" implies a necessary temporal order. The diachronic nature of formal cause, the constraints of actually existent forms in the past, which impose deterministic restrictions, cannot in any way be identified as the intent which will cause (final cause) the existence of forms in the future. Formal cause is the deterministic effect of actually existing material forms, while final cause, as intent, utilizes immaterial forms to create new material forms in a way which escapes the constraints of existing material forms. If you approach these two from a determinist world view, you will be inclined to reject the reality of final cause, as a true cause (free will), and portray it as formal cause. This is the influence which the modern concept of time holds over us. "Time" as employed in science is based in deterministic principles to enable the theories of physics, but if we accept this representation as the truth about time, we deny ourselves the possibility of understanding final cause.
Quoting apokrisis
To state, and describe the multitude of physical boundary conditions which are evident in the world, is not to "give an account of how these constraints come into existence". It's not that I don't listen, it's that you don't give an acceptable answer. And to say "they emerge", is just another way of saying you do not know.
Quoting apokrisis
The argument is not that language has private meaning, it is that language has meaning regardless of whether it is interpreted or not. There is nothing here to imply that this meaning is necessarily private. Meaning is evident in the act of producing the physical symbols. Therefore your claim that meaning is dependent on the interpretation of the symbols is false. This is a very important aspect of meaning which you don't seem capable of grasping. Meaning is something general, so it can have existence without any specific identity. This refutes your claim that meaning is the property of the constraints which attempt to give it a specific identity. Meaning is actually within the thing that is being constrained not the constraints.
Quoting apokrisis
You're still talking gibberish and avoiding the issue. Your singularity of "sameness" is just an Ideal which has not been substantiated, or sustained by any physical evidence. I say it's a perfection which is physically impossible, for very good reasons, just like Aristotle's eternal circular motion is physically impossible, and like any sort of perpetual motion is physically impossible, for very good reasons. You assume this Ideal sameness, for "good systems reason", but that's just a pragmatic reason, to facilitate the creation of your model. And since this Ideal has in no way been substantiated by physical evidence, and it actually appears to be most likely physically impossible, your good pragmatic reason turns out to be actually a very bad ontological reason.
Quoting apokrisis
In relation to your proposed Ideal "sameness", which is supposed to be "not different", any degree of difference must be respected as a difference or else you are being illogical. You cannot define "same" as "not different", and then turn around and say that there are some differences which you might accept as the same. That is fundamentally illogical.
This is so sad. You propose an Ideal sameness. Then you seem to recognize the impossibility of this perfection, so you allow that it might be diluted by some degree of difference. But of course you want to proceed as if the Ideal sameness you propose has some form of validity. How can you not apprehend the illness here?
Quoting apokrisis
As I said above, to say that forms are "emergent" is simply a way of saying that where they come from, how they come into existence, and why they come into existence, is unknown. So let's be clear here, science does not show that forms are emergent. Science leaves these aspects of the understanding of forms as unknown. Then speculators such as yourself will apply some metaphysical principles, and conclude "forms are emergent". But these speculations completely ignore the well respected metaphysics based in the evidence that final cause, intention, creates forms. Therefore the claim that forms are emergent (where they come from, how they come into existence, and why they come into existence, is unknown) is completely unwarranted, because we already know very well, that intention creates forms.
No, indeed. Fair cop. I am resistant to allowing semantic notions into the analysis of automatic processes - even complex, biological ones. It seems fundamentally confused. Still, inter-faith dialogue, and all that.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Forms can be either emergent (bottom-up) or intentional (top-down). An intentionally-created form is contingent upon a conscious system that perceives the potential form. An emergent form is contingent upon a conditional relation between components, such that the form’s potential is realised. The difference between these two descriptions appears to be the perception of potential. But it isn’t. The difference is the assumption of a self-conscious system that apperceives the form’s potential.
What is consistently overlooked in this discussion of consciousness is an assumption of self-consciousness inherent in top-down explanations. We can only distinguish between conscious and not-conscious, or between potential and actual, from the perspective of a self-conscious system. The properties of consciousness are considered emergent irrespective of a self-conscious system - but this doesn’t necessarily mean that where they come from, how or why they come into existence is unknown. What it means is that this information is understood as relative to the position of the self-conscious system.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
‘Sameness’ refers to absolute, not physical, possibility. It’s an ideal reference to what matters when we remove the assumptions of a self-conscious perspective. It is from our relation to this possibility/impossibility of ‘sameness’ that any potential for difference can be perceived - a binary relation that renders ‘the self’ either non-existent or as existence itself.
But ontology is not limited to physical possibility. Ignorance, isolation or exclusion of information is neither ‘good systems reason’, nor pragmatic in the long term. That proposing an ideal ‘sameness’ is illogical doesn’t give you cause to exclude the possibility as such, in an absolute sense. Illogical or not, it is a necessary part of understanding the system.
I don't accept this bottom-up, top-down distinction. I see no real principles to support it. I do see a distinction to be made, in the Aristotelian tradition, between the material forms of particular things, and immaterial forms, which are abstractions, universals, or concepts. Since abstractions are produced from individual human minds, all forms are bottom-up in creation. The universal Ideal, the One, or Same, "global condition", which apokrisis proposes, and might be used to ground top-down constraints, I find to be nothing other than a bottom-up, intention guided, human idea.
Quoting Possibility
Right, so the supposed top-down forms are really, fundamentally bottom-up. So we hit the Kantian problem, the supposed top-down forms, the independent, intelligible forms, the noumena, are inaccessible to us, as independent. We assume top-down forms, we assume that they are inaccessible, and this makes these supposed top-down forms fundamentally unknowable. In reality though, this assumption is unsubstantiated and unwarranted because all forms are fundamentally bottom-up, and this is what Plato described as apprehending "the good". When all forms are apprehended as bottom-up, we dissolve the division which makes some forms appear to be fundamentally unintelligible. That any forms could be unintelligible is itself a basic contradiction.
Quoting Possibility
This ideal is fundamentally incoherent. To remove the self-conscious perspective from the self-conscious perspective makes no sense. If we could do such a thing, we would not be left with an "ideal", we would be left with a non-ideal. So anything presented as an absolute, as an ideal, produced from removing the self-conscious perspective, is fundamentally wrong. We can see this in your phrase "...what matters when we remove the assumptions of a self-conscious perspective". Clearly, without that self-conscious perspective, nothing matters, therefore there cannot be an ideal here.
Quoting Possibility
The problem is that you come up with the opposite conclusion of what is logical. You cannot render the self-conscious mind as non-existent in a thought experiment, and then use that self-conscious mind which is supposed to not be there, to come up with an ideal which represents existence without the self-conscious mind. That is illogical, as contradictory. Therefore it is just fundamentally illogical to propose the removal of the self-conscious perspective, and we must accept the absolute reality of the self-conscious perspective. If we deny the reality of the self-conscious perspective we rob ourselves of the capacity to access reality.
Quoting Possibility
Yes it does. That something is illogical is very good reason to reject it from the realm of possibility, as impossible. This is fundamental to epistemology, and the only means for obtaining true certainty, the process of eliminating the impossible.
Quoting Possibility
Understanding that if it is illogical, it is therefore impossible, is of the highest priority. This is falsification, it is how we reject falsehood. And, "understanding the system" which has been rejected as false, is what guides us away from falsity in our quest for truth.
I found a quote by the biologist J B S Haldane which makes the point I was trying to get across:
Haldane, J.B.S. (1932) [1927]. Possible Worlds, and Other Essays (reprint ed.). London, UK: Chatto and Windus.:p 286
(incidentally, Haldane, according to the encyclopaedia article on him, was a staunch atheist and humanist and had zero regard for theological arguments.)
This is because, as I said, logical necessity can’t be equated to physical necessity. And this has nothing intrinsically to do with whether it’s a ‘human being figuring it out’ or not - although, as it happens, humans are the only beings we know of who can figure it out. But were some other sentient rational beings to exist somewhere else in the universe, they too would be obligated to recognise logical necessity, and for the same reasons - even if their brains were configured completely differently to our own.
I can introspect myself, but others can't.
That is a good explanation of why Possibilitiy's proposition makes no sense.
Quoting Possibility
We cannot assume in the same proposition, to remove the means by which we understand things, and also still maintain the assumption that there is the means for understanding things. Logic demonstrates itself as the means for understanding, and we have no basis to assume anything else as the means for understanding.
So there is absolutely no sense to the proposition which removes the means for understanding, because it leaves us with absolutely nothing intelligible and no possibility to proceed anywhere from that proposition. Therefore we must turn things around and start with the assumption that the capacity to understand, logic, cannot be removed from reality, thus it is fundamental. This is the assumption which enables us to understand reality, and denies emergence (which posits a reality without logic as the starting point), as an impossibility.
I'm not clear on how this answers the question.
Introspection is the observation of one's own mental processes. Others can claim that they can observe our mental processes as "shivering brains". The question is trying to ask why we have two different views of our own mental processes - an introspective and extrospective view of one's own mental processes.
Doesn't this also presume a homunculus in the brain with an alternate view of mental processes? What does it mean for the mind to view itself? How is it different from viewing your whole self (your body), or is it a simulated view, or maybe even an information feedback loop - of turning the information back on itself of being about itself?
Because the fact that I am bert1 allows me two different perspectives to examine bert1's mental processes: introspection and extropsection. Whereas other people only have extrospection as a way of observing bert1's mental processes (to the extent that the can do so at all).
Is that question equivalent to "Why am I some particular person, rather than no one in particular?"?
Kant’s aesthetics suggest that the noumena does not consist only of independent, intelligible forms but of qualitative relations that transcend logical construction - accessible to us through the ‘free play’ of our faculties of understanding, imagination and judgement in relation to experience.
In my view, the structure of reality has an aspect duality that renders it both bottom-up apprehensible and top-down accessible - so long as we do not arbitrarily limit this accessibility by dismissing the possible existence (and information) of illogical relations. I agree that all consolidation of forms are fundamentally bottom-up, but I would add that all relations are fundamentally top-down, and that their structure prevails over form, regardless of logic. It will require both to render our existence fully intelligible.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
And yet, despite all logic, it remains possible to imagine such an ideal. To clarify, I’m not saying that we should remove the self-conscious perspective itself, only the assumptions that centre it. This was Kant’s aim: to dislodge the anthropocentric perspective, in the same way that Copernicus dislodged the geocentric one. Copernicus didn’t remove our perspective, but rather the assumptions that centred it - he imagined a broader perspective in which ours is moveable, variable, one of - and from there determined a more accurate structure of the solar system. The way I see it, Kant’s own efforts were missing the shift in perspective that Darwin’s work provided - he was trying to effect two consecutive ‘Copernican Turns’ in one.
In a reality filled with variable self-conscious perspectives, everything matters and nothing matters. I recognise that this transcends logic, but it is the possibility of relational structure at the level of reality in which self-conscious entities interact. I’m not suggesting that we take leave of our senses and reside there - only that we acknowledge this incoherent contradiction, the irreducible binary, as fundamental to reality. Logic is one possible relational structure, and its appeal is undeniable. But it will never enable us to understand existence fully at a relational level. Despite our best efforts, we continue to act contrary to logic when it suits us to do so. Reality is not a purely logical structure. It must be understood as inclusive of illogical relations, or we will remain ignorant of its possibilities, and continue to be blindsided by suffering.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Not deny the reality of the self-conscious perspective, but deny its necessity - dislodge its central, immovable position.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
I would have thought my continual reference to existence and understanding, rather than certainty and knowledge, made it clear that my perspective is ontological. You’re referring to logical, not absolute, possibility, here. I understand that what we can know with any true certainty will always be relative to a particular value structure - such as logic. But I also understand that this is not reality. So eliminating the impossible, while it enables us to articulate what we know, deliberately excludes accessible information about reality.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Again, you’re after truth in a logical structure - what you can claim to know with certainty, not what you can understand or relate to. When I talk about ‘understanding the system’, I mean access to information that enables us to improve predictions about future interactions with reality. That includes not just recognising falsehood in order to reject it, but understanding the relational conditions under which such falsehoods arise.
I don't see your distinction between forms and relations. Surely a relation is a form, isn't it?
Quoting Possibility
I really can't see this distinction. A "form" is an arrangement of parts. A "relation" is the way in which one thing is connected to another. The only difference appears to be that "relation" implies distinct things, related to each other, whereas "form" implies that those things which are related to each other compose a whole, a form. So the matter of whether a relation is simply a relation, or whether it is a part of a whole, is just a matter of perspective.
Now, your top-down/bottom-up distinction is just a matter of perspective. If you apprehend the whole (form) which the related things are parts of, it appears as top-down, and if you do not, the relations appear to be bottom-up. But as I explained already, the whole is just an unsubstantiated Ideal, so all such relations are really bottom-up, as the whole which would validate any top-down relations is just an imaginary ideal which cannot actually be found.
Quoting Possibility
Oh yes, quite definitely. It is possible to imagine all sorts of impossible things, but that does not make them possible. But with logic we can assess imagined things, which people might claim as possible, and designate some as impossible, and this is the epistemic basis for certainty.
Quoting Possibility
What I am saying is that this is impossible. The reality is that the self-conscious perspective is central, and placing it anywhere else would be a false premise. Notice that Copernicus did not remove self-consciousness as central, but just found the means to account for the illusions created by this position. These illusions are the false Ideals, "the global position", which lead to the idea of top-down causation. Self-consciousness being at the center of reality is constrained by the forms that surround it, and this creates the illusion of top-down acting constraints, what you call relations. But in reality, all these other constraints are just bottom-up forms produced from other points which are equally the center of reality.
That is the difficult part to grasp, there is not one particular "center of reality", but each point is equally a center of reality, just like each self-conscious being is equally a center of reality. We attempt to build "relations" between these points of self-consciousness, with our intellectual powers, so we assume an overriding whole, the Ideal external world, and model the points with a spatial-temporal reference. But these top-down relations are all artificial, imaginary relations, while the real relations are internal to these points which are each equally the center of reality. This is what the study of genetics indicates, the real relations are internal, and from within these internally related points the bottom up causation is active. Now each point of self-consciousness has its own bottom-up formal structure, and to build a true model of reality requires relating them one to another, each as the center of reality. This is why the principles of physics cannot model the true reality, because it hasn't developed the principles required to relate individual points to each other, when each is the center of the universe. As the center of the universe, they are each the same, but as individual points, they are each different.
Quoting Possibility
There is fault in this line of thinking. Just because we act in ways which are contrary to reason doesn't mean that we ought to act in these ways. What is implied is that our ability to apply logic, and understand, surpasses our capacity to control our actions. Therefore we can figure out what we ought to do, but we cannot necessarily make ourselves do it. Our actions are very much constrained by our physical bodies, but our minds are much freer. So as living creatures, our minds can evolve much quicker than our bodies, apply logic, and determine thing such as the way that we ought to behave, while our bodies might not provide us with the will power to actually do what is logical.
Sure, you might allow that illogical relations are part of your reality, just like when you do something which you know that you ought not do. But the point is that we can, and ought to dismiss these from our epistemology. Illogical things cannot be accepted into any sort of knowledge, so we can dismiss them as bad, just like my actions are bad when I do something which I know I should not.
So "reality" being what is produced by the self-conscious being within, through its judgements (as it is illogical to try and exclude the self-conscious being from reality) must exclude what is illogical. That would not be an acceptable judgement. And when we act in ways which are contrary to reason, this is not the reality of the illogical, it is just a failure of our ability to understand why we act the way that we do. But just because it appears to the rational mind that the actions are illogical, doesn't mean that they are, in an absolute sense. It's really just a matter of not understanding why we act the way we do.
Quoting Possibility
That's the point, the self-conscious perspective is necessarily the central, immovable position. It is the self-conscious being which has the perspective, so it is impossible to assign the perspective of the self-conscious being to something else. That's what gives us the false ontology, assuming that this perspective can be "dislodged". Once we realize that this is the one and only ontological perspective which we have, then we can proceed toward analyzing how the constraints of the real, physical human being, influence, and even taint, the way we understand reality, in ways which we cannot escape, but we can compensate for.
Quoting Possibility
It is reality though. And once you come to realize that there is nothing further beyond this, no other elusive "more real reality" which is outside of, or beyond your own personal perspective, then you can look at every other perspective as equally "reality". Then we might all partake in the same "reality", because we are related from within, in ways we do not yet understand, but a way that gives us each a different perspective. Then there is nothing more to ask ontologically, and we can move on to epistemology.
Quoting Possibility
Once you see that reality is within, you'll see the value of honesty and truth, as fundamentally prior to understanding, and you'll stop talking about trying to relate to, and interact with, some external reality, as if this is the route to understanding.
A ‘form’ is a consolidated arrangement, whereas ‘relation’ refers to the variability in arrangement: the structural potential that informs any consolidation. It is very much a matter of perspective (that is what we’re talking about). Relation does not necessarily imply ‘distinct things’ but the existence of rules and laws that structure consolidation at each dimensional level. While I agree that a consolidation of form would validate top-down relational structure, its insubstantiality does not preclude its possible existence.
How do you think quantum mechanics began, except from mathematical arguments regarding the possible relational structure of insubstantiated ideals?
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
That also doesn’t make them necessarily impossible - only logically so. Don’t get me wrong - what I’m referring to is along the lines of the usefulness of imaginary numbers in mathematics. I’m not arguing for the necessary validation of imaginary, illogical possibilities - only their possible existence and therefore usefulness to us in informing a more accurate understanding of reality.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Your approach is different to mine, but I have no real argument with what you’re saying here. To clarify, by relations, I don’t mean top-down causation or acting constraints. I’m talking about all possible relations existing both between all ‘forms’ and within them, informing their respective consolidation (ie. their bottom-up formal structure) as well as that of any being that consolidates them as such.
My approach is developed partly from Carlo Rovelli’s deconstruction of time, and his resulting description of physical reality not as objects in time, but as ‘correlated events’. As individual points they are each different (and ‘move’ in relation to each other), but when each is the centre of an unfolding universe of spacetime, they are the same.
The main problem that physics has, in my view, is the purely quantitative structure of its relations. It is a self-conscious process that excludes illogical, qualitative relations from what is effectively a five-dimensional model. Even consciousness as the centre of the universe has an unconsolidated, qualitative relation to it.
The problem I see here, is that if "relation" refers to something variable, then a "relation" is inherently indefinite, as a "variabilitiy in arrangement", rather than a definite arrangement. A "form", as "a consolidated arrangement", requires true definability, and therefore cannot be composed of "relations" as you have defined it.
Quoting Possibility
So we need a third thing here, to validate "consolidation". A form cannot consist of relations because relations are variable, and the consolidated structure of a form is invariable. To change, for example, is not to continue existing as the same form, but to have a new form, so invariability is essential to the form. So you propose "the existence of rules and laws". Clearly these rules and laws cannot be derived from the form itself, because they are necessary to create the prerequisite invariability, from the relations which are observed, and described as variable, in order for a form to be created. This is the point I've made numerous times to apokrisis. The form itself cannot be the source of the rules and laws, as these are necessarily prior to the existence of the form, as cause of its existence.
This is where we have to be careful to differentiate the two distinct ways that "form" is used, one referring to our description of the thing, which is posterior to the thing, and the other referring to the creation of the thing, which is prior to the thing. So we have a "formula" or blueprint, by which we create a thing, and a "form" which is a description of a thing, and each is a distinct sense of "form".
Now, our subject of inquiry is the rules or laws which apply to forms being responsible for invariability. In describing a form, the rules are descriptive, in creating a form, the rules are prescriptive. Notice that both refer to what "ought" to be done, therefore the two types are reducible to a single type rule, as prescriptive rules. So the rules and laws, which are responsible for the creation of forms, of both types, are of the prescriptive type, rules of how things ought to be done. "Ought" implies the activity of intention, final cause.
We can apply this back against the dilemma of variable (indefinite) relations, and consolidated (definite) forms. We see that a "relation" implies members, elements, particles, or some form of a multitude, distinct differences which are related in that condition of variability. And, there is some form of "ought" which is applied to these relations which converts the existence from variable to invariable, creating a form. The existence of human beings provides our example of individual members, with intention, acting with final cause. We see that the final cause and intention inheres within the particulars, who produce principles from within their own minds, as rules to act by, each person attempting to constrain one's own acts with personal principles which they adhere to. Therefore from this example, we can see that the invariance required to produce a form comes from within the individual members, as final cause, so that all forms are bottom-up.
Quoting Possibility
You don't seem to understand, logic is necessity. What is logically so is necessarily so. What is logically impossible is necessarily impossible. How can you introduce a form of necessity which is outside of logic? You could appeal to a "need" in the sense of pragmatism, and final cause, as the means to an end, what you call "usefulness", but then your proposed end needs to be justified. This justification is a process of logic. So you say, mathematics is "useful" for understanding, but to use mathematics which produces conclusions which are unintelligible is misunderstanding. That is the position we're in with quantum mechanics. Imaginary numbers, infinities, and such, are used for the sake of prediction, so they are useful, but the result can in no way be described as understanding. If we apply good principles of logic, and rid ourselves pragmatic necessity in favour of logical necessity, we have a true course toward understanding. When your pragmatic end must be justified, on what would you pretend to base any other form of true necessity on, other than logic?
Quoting Possibility
The problem with process philosophy and assuming "events" as fundamental, is that traditionally relations would be inherent within the classical description of an event. An event in the classical sense is a changing of relations between things. Now, as the fundamental element, the "event" is the thing. So we have two new problems. How do we describe what is internal to the fundamental "event", so as to make it consistent with the traditional "event"? What is changing inside that fundamental event to justify calling it an event? And the second problem is on what principles do we relate one event to another, to represent the passing of time. At this point, since we do not have any real understanding of the passing of time, and science turns it into something subjective, the trend is to appeal to panpsychism to justify the apparent continuity of the passing of time.
No. The question is just a different way of framing the hard problem of why there are two very different perspectives of mental processes, but only one type of perspective for everything else, like chairs, mountains and trees.
Where is bert1 relative bert1's mental processes? Where is bert1 relative to bert1's digestive processes? Are you saying that bert1 IS bert1's mental processes?
What are ‘things’? This is where the assumption of a self-conscious system, in recognising concepts or things, distorts the way we understand the structure of reality. If it were not for our temporal relation to the ‘thing’, then there is no other distinction between its description and creation. This ‘thing’ we create is conceptual, in relation to what is real, and so the blueprint is a rendering of relational structure, the limited perception of which consolidates that particular form within the mind. Existentially prior to the ‘thing’ is only a relation to what is real: pure possibility structured by the limited perception of the observer (who consolidates) and the limited expression of the observed.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
And again, this assumption of intentionality in time turns creativity into specific rules of how events ought to be done, rather than a variability in how events can be done, limited by awareness, connection and collaboration. ‘Ought’ implies a priori knowledge, an illusion created by the temporal shift of conscious perception, constrained to a logical structure of time. But the structure of time in reality is relative - so the notion of ‘final cause’ or ‘activity of intention’, and the temporal distinction between descriptive and prescriptive ‘form’, don’t even make sense in relation to reality.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
‘Relation’ does imply difference, but not necessarily existence, so any difference need not be so distinct. This ‘ought’ which converts an assumed existence from variable to invariable is a function of consciousness. The invariance required to describe a ‘thing’ is an internal relation of perceived potentiality, but no such invariance is required to create the ‘thing’ prior to describing its form, and no such existence need be assumed. Creativity derives from a relation to non-existent possibility, limited by awareness, connection and collaboration. It is the perceived variability in this relation that enables creativity, intentionality and the determination of ‘personal principles’.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
You’re assuming that necessity must be logical because it needs to be justified, but I’m not under any illusion that I can justify the necessity of illogical possibility - because I recognise that it is as unnecessary as it is necessary. I’m not saying that mathematics produces conclusions that are unintelligible, but that they make use of imaginary numbers and infinities - allowing for their illogical possibility - to produce intelligible conclusions from what would otherwise remain unintelligible. This is not misunderstanding - rather, it enables understanding unbound by logic. When we apply good principles of logic, we are not ridding ourselves of pragmatic necessity, but exploring beyond its bounds, to enable a more accurate understanding of the ‘rules and laws’ of pragmatism. When we act, we are still bound by pragmatic necessity. And when we communicate (ie. when we attempt to justify), we are still bound by logical necessity. But when we relate, we are bound by neither.
I am limited with time this week, but I hope to get to the rest of your post soon.
The temporality of a thing is its reality. Having temporal extension makes a thing real because there is no such thing as existence which is just an instant (no extension in time). Therefore "our temporal relation to the 'thing'" is our access to the thing's reality.
Quoting Possibility
The blueprint of the thing, which precedes the thing's material existence, is just as much a part of the thing's reality as is the thing's material existence, because it is a necessary part of the thing's existence.
So to remove this part of the thing's existence, as not real, is to make a false representation of the thing's reality.
Quoting Possibility
You are reversing what I said. You had mentioned rules, and I said rules imply "ought". Ought implies intention. But intention does not necessarily imply ought, that's why the will is free. So the person with intent makes a plan to bring about the desired material situation, and this is reality. But whether or not the person ought to do this is another issue altogether. However, if we start with the assumption of rules which one ought to follow, then intention is already implied. So intentionality does not necessarily turn creativity into rules and "ought", that's a misrepresentation which is a reversal of reality.
Quoting Possibility
But this is the difficult point. In order for a thing to be a thing, it must have a form, and this implies invariance. Because we believe that there were things in existence before human intention, we want to remove the intention, which we know to cause invariance by the examples above, so that we can have a real thing which is not dependent on intention. We cannot say that "no such invariance is required to create the 'thing'", because to be a thing implies such invariance. And, we have no principles which will tell us where that invariance could come from other than intention. So where can we go?
Quoting Possibility
When the conclusions contain contradiction, such as the idea that the same energy is transmitted both as a wave and as a particle, this must be classed as misunderstanding. Despite your claim that this might be somehow be "intelligible" it is not. There is no such thing as understanding which is unbound by logic. You should easily see that this is illogical and clearly a misunderstanding. Logic is the means for understanding, so anything outside the bounds of logic cannot be understood.
Good things come to those who wait.
...
Quoting Wayfarer
He's right insofar as the processes themselves don't speak to the truth of a belief they culminate in, as evidenced by the prosperity of untrue beliefs. He's wrong insofar as even a dumb machine can infer accurately. If you believe that your beliefs are true because you believe in them, you have a circularity problem. The precise causes of my beliefs are important, not solely because of the physical mechanisms in the brain that yield them, or the physical configuration that stores them, but because the _external_ causes are not equal. "Because my parents taught me" is not the equal of empiricism, for instance.
If it were the case that we only believe true things, he might be presenting something of a mystery. As it happens, he's not stating anything but his own additional belief about his beliefs, which is, to me, obviously bogus.
The physical processes by which we arrive at and recall beliefs are not separable from the beliefs themselves. Knowing more about how these work sheds light on how we can avoid false beliefs, e.g. due to propaganda, which is the art of exploiting the errors and limitations of brains in forging beliefs and making decisions based on them. The fact that a human and a sentient Martian can both figure out the law of the excluded middle demonstrates the efficacy of a highly evolved brain: it would be of no benefit to have a brain that inferred wrongly most of the time, which is why we build good beliefs on evidence and logic. But having the belief is not what makes it true: rather, we need a brain that handles data accurately in order to form good beliefs. Computers handle data accurately, and its trivial to train one to yield good inferences. It's also trivial to train one to yield bad ones.
Machines infer nothing. They perform calculations, on the basis of which their operators may make inferences.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
:roll:
Quoting Kenosha Kid
How can you say we arrive at beliefs by 'a physical process'? How is the process 'physical' as distinct from cultural, emotional, and so on?
And furthermore how are you to judge whether a physical state of the brain or a computer or a switch or anything else, is reliable, without appealing to reason? And where in the material world is 'reason'? Materialists never tire of telling us that the Universe is devoid of it.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
But you would not know that, unless you knew what the law of the excluded middle meant in the first place. So when you say,
Quoting Kenosha Kid
Does that include the primitive laws of logic, such as the law of the excluded middle? Because if you say that those kinds of propositions are simply a matter of belief, then radical scepticism follows.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
Brains don't 'handle data'. Humans think, reason and infer, 'handling data' is a bad analogy from computer science. Humans have the capacity to reason, to make inferences - that is what makes us the 'rational animal', and what you're doing when you make these arguments.
What Haldane's quote illustrates, is that rational necessity, or logical necessity, is of a different order to physical necessity. If you were compelled to make the arguments you're making purely because your brain was configured in a particular way, then I'm afraid you'd be something you're clearly not, namely, an idiot.
[quote=Rene Descartes]if there were machines that resembled our bodies and if they imitated our actions as much as is morally possible, we would always have two very certain means for recognizing that, none the less, they are not genuinely human. The first is that they would never be able to use speech, or other signs composed by themselves, as we do to express our thoughts to others. For one could easily conceive of a machine that is made in such a way that it utters words, and even that it would utter some words in response to physical actions that cause a change in its organs—for example, if someone touched it in a particular place, it would ask what one wishes to say to it, or if it were touched somewhere else, it would cry out that it was being hurt, and so on. But it could not arrange words in different ways to reply to the meaning of everything that is said in its presence, as even the most unintelligent human beings can do. The second means is that, even if they did many things as well as or, possibly, better than anyone of us, they would infallibly fail in others. Thus one would discover that they did not act on the basis of knowledge, but merely as a result of the disposition of their organs. For whereas reason is a universal instrument that can be used in all kinds of situations, these organs need a specific disposition for every particular action. [/quote]
From Discourse on Method, 1637
Of course, Descartes could not have foreseen neural networks, but it's still surprisingly prescient, and also to the point, which is impressive, considering when it was written. But then, he was a genius.
You can train a neural network to infer, say, the interests of a shopper looking for t-shirts based on similar shoppers who bought t-shirts. The operator infers nothing: they accept the inference, until evidence suggests the neural net is systematically wrong. The error is in assuming that humans do the same thing in a significantly different way.
Quoting Wayfarer
I'm amazed you assume that I think emotion doesn't have a physical basis. Doesn't seem a rational inference.
Quoting Wayfarer
I'm also amazed you think that stating your beliefs would move me in any way. I already know you believe this. Untrue beliefs do prosper, see? Handling data is precisely what brains do, with or without the capacity for reason. Or do you believe that all mammals rationally invert images, whiteshift colours, detect outlines, etc?
Quoting Wayfarer
No, what Haldane's quote illustrates is that Haldane believed in something that is almost certainly untrue. Viz your Descartes quote also, argument as hominem is only as good as the authority, and authority has progressed somewhat.
Are you overlooking the internal causes? Surely things like instinct and genetics ought to be classed as internal causes. And these are evident in the subconscious or unconscious levels, being very influential in our emotions. Since the internal, and external causes are completely different classifications, how could you propose any sort of equality, or a single system of measurement which could account for both?
Quoting Kenosha Kid
In the case of internal causes, the so-called training is what has already occurred, and the results of that training lie deep within the genetic codes and things like that. I suggest that the error is in your assumption that training an already existent "neural network", which is already constrained by a specific physical manifestation, is somehow "the same thing" as the process of self-constructing such a network. Notice that in the self-constructed model, the training is already built in to the physical manifestation. That is why the internal causes cannot be balanced or scaled with the external, being far more important, because of all the training (a huge amount of external influence) which has already gone into the construction of the system which produces them. And, this internal system, which is the product of self-training, determines how the external will affect us. But be careful where you go with this, because we still need to avoid that circularity you referred to.
This is why we posit a "soul" in dualist philosophy. The physical body of a living being is always a manifestation of some prior learning. We need to have something to account for that original learning which resulted in the first physical manifestation of a living being. We cannot allow infinite regress, nor can we allow the circle which panpsychism leads toward. So we posit a soul as prior to the physical body, to account for the fact that the living physical body is the manifestation of prior learning.
Minds don't process binary units. It's a false analogy. I've worked in an AI company, and the system I was documenting didn't 'infer' anything whatever, it responded to queries posed by the designers and users of the system.
I can see that you're so convinced of your physicalism that there is no prospect of me changing your belief, but if I did do that, nothing physical would have passed between us.
It does not follow that they don't process data, which they absolutely do. Analogue data is still data.
Process philosophy is a starting point - I don’t see ‘events’ as fundamental, rather I see the capacity to describe reality in terms of a variability of relations between 4D ‘events’ rather than a changing of relations between 3D ‘objects’ as simply a step towards a more accurate perspective. This term ‘thing’ refers to an indeterminate concept - neither particularly three, four or five-dimensional, rather whatever is being related to.
The unfolding universe is commonly viewed as one all-encompassing event: a temporal duration of changing relations between physical matter, from the ‘Big Bang’ to heat death (or some other predicted future end). But if physics is understood as a set of interrelated events with no universally linear progression of time, then what is fundamental cannot be an ‘event’ in itself, but is more like the concept of a ‘block universe’, in which all energy/entropy is structured according to value/potentiality, as determined from the perspective of a particular event/observer - a moveable 4D relation point within a conceptual block universe.
Don’t get me wrong, though - I’m not subscribing to Eternalism. We also have the capacity to understand reality in terms of a variability of relations between conceptual ‘block universes’ or minds, shifting the fundamental ‘thing’ once again from concepts in a 5D structure of mind to meaningful relations in a 6D structure of possibility.
The issue of subjectivity is nothing new - science just struggles to apply it to itself, is all. Panpsychism is one way to describe this variability of relations between conceptual structures, by consolidating all five-dimensional relations into ‘things with minds’. So the idea is that anything that WE can consolidate into a ‘thing’ (like a rock) must have a ‘mind’. I don’t agree with this - the consolidation of a ‘rock’ is based on our own conceptual structures. A rock has no internal structural consolidation beyond the molecular level - if it breaks in half, the extent to which it may be ‘aware’ of this is confined to individual molecules suddenly relating to oxygen molecules instead, for instance.
I don't see how there could be variability in such relations. An event is something which has occurred in the past, therefore its relations are fixed, invariable, as the facts about the past. There might be variability in our descriptions of these relations, but there is no variability in the actual relations. As for the future, there is no such thing as events in the future, because the future has not occurred yet, so there is only possibilities for events in our understanding of the future.
Quoting Possibility
An event only occurs, or unfolds, at the present, as time passes. It doesn't make sense to speak of past events as occurring or unfolding, because they've already occurred, nor does it make sense to speak of future events as occurring. If we say that the present necessarily has temporal extension, then we can extend the present as far as we want into the past, and say that all time until now is the present, but we can't extend it this way into the future. The future has not materialized yet, so there really is no time on that side of the present. So as much as we can extend the present into the past, by understanding the real fixed relations of real past events, we cannot extend the present into the future this way because there are no real fixed events, only what is imagined, predicted, or inferred.
When you describe an event in the past, this is relative to a fixed point of observation: a relating event in itself. So the ‘actual relations’ you’re referring to as invariable are a relation between these two events, not the relations of the event itself - the variability of which transcends this description.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Right - so describing an ‘event in the future’ is not just a mere possibility, but can more specifically be a calculated probability or potentiality wave that maps changing relations between observables.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Time is bound by materialisation - and events ‘fixed’ - only in relation to a point of observation. So an event can only be observed in matter as time passes, but it exists regardless of the observer’s position as a four-dimensional structure. Time may not be observable on that side of the present, but it is predictable - and our predictions have become increasingly more accurate. This is just as well, because it is not our observations that determine and initiate action, but our predictions.
It is not a fixed point of observation, the present is not fixed. And the present is not an event itself. It is contradictory to call a fixed point an event, as you do here, "event" is incompatible with "fixed point". Clearly, what we are discussing is whether or not it is true that relations are variable, as in your definition.
In my understanding of "event" as something in the past, the relations of any event are necessarily fixed, invariable, so it makes no sense to say that there is a variability which transcends the description. The opposite is the case. There is variability in description, but no variability in what has actually occurred, therefore no variability in the relations between the events which actually occurred.
Quoting Possibility
Talking about an event in the future cannot properly be called a "description" because that refers to observation, there is nothing observed in the future. Talking about a supposed future event is a projection, not a description.
Quoting Possibility
I disagree with this too. Materialization is bound by time. And the point of observation is also bound by time.
Quoting Possibility
An event can only occur as time passes, regardless of observation. The occurrence of an event requires the passing of time, whether or not there is an observer.
You’re missing my point here, which is about describing an event, as opposed to observing it. ‘The present’ is not a universal perspective, but a subjective one. When you describe an event from the past, you are describing it from your position as observer - a ‘present’ that is ‘fixed’ only in that statement. In reality, your position of observation is an ongoing event that changes in relation to the event you describe. So each time you describe that event, it is from a different ‘fixed’ perspective.
But the ‘event’ is not an isolated set of relations - this consolidation is conceptual. There is no line of separation in reality between the relations that constitute an ‘event’ and the variability in relations that enable us to describe it as such. Each description is inclusive of a fixed point of observation, to which we relate as ongoing events. But each ‘event’ consists of four-dimensional relations, not all of which we are aware of from our perspective at any moment of observation, let alone render in our description. So this variability that I’m talking about is in a relation not between two events that have actually occurred in relation to an observation, but between the event and an ongoing observation.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
And yet we describe objects of our imagination - a ‘description’ is just using words to render information, and doesn’t necessitate observation, only perception. But I understand the need to distinguish between imagined possibility, perceived potentiality and observed actuality. I’m not talking about a ‘projection’ as a specifically described event from some future observation point. A description of perceived potentiality is more wave-like: it describes the relational structure between the event and an ongoing observation. In this way it is less definitive, but more accurate.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
I agree with you here. What I was trying to say was that it is only when we describe ‘events’ from a point of observation that they appear ‘fixed’; and only when we try to describe ‘time’ from a point of observation that it appears bound by materialisation. But where an ‘event’ or ‘time’ appears infinite, it is really bound by the perceived potentiality of the conscious observer. And where potential appears infinite, it is bound by imagined possibility.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Time exists as a four-dimensional structure, but passes only in relation to a conscious observer - a point of experience within a five-dimensional conceptualisation. Any event, too, exists as a four-dimensional structure of relations, regardless of the passing of time, but ‘occurs’ only in relation to a conscious observer, and can be ‘described’ only in relation to a point of observation.
The problem is that we seem to disagree on so many fundamental points, that I cannot even get to the place where your "point" might even start to make any sense to me. See, here's another example. I believe a description is just an extension of observation, it is to recount what has been observed. The two are not "opposed".
Quoting Possibility
As you may have noticed, I strongly disagree with this.
Quoting Possibility
How can this make sense to you? If "your position of observation is an ongoing event that changes in relation to the event you describe", then it is contradictory to say that you have a "fixed perspective". What could possibly indicate that your perspective is "fixed" if it is an ongoing change?
Quoting Possibility
So this makes no sense because your description denies that a point of observation is "fixed".
Quoting Possibility
Perhaps I can make sense of this statement. You have posited an ongoing observation which you say is itself an event. Now you say that the variability is not between two events, but between an event and the ongoing observation. The ongoing observation is an event though. See why I can't get anywhere in trying to understand what you are saying?
Quoting Possibility
Actually, we describe the dream, or the imaginary experience, we do not describe the "objects" of our imagination, because we do not think of them as actual objects. So I might describe something which came to me in a dream, or in my imagination, but I describe them as things of my imagination, and that is an observation of something past, as I said. We cannot describe future things because they have not happened and cannot be observed. If I imagine a future scenario, I can describe what came to my imagination, but that is a description of something past, the imagination which came to my mind.
Quoting Possibility
Here again, I have a hard time understanding your use of words. How could something appear to be infinite? I don't think "infinite has any sort of appearance at all, because no one has ever sensed it. I think what we do is designate something as infinite, like the natural numbers. We say something like, let's make the natural number infinite, so that we have the capacity to count any magnitude we come across. But mathematics uses "infinite" in strange ways, so that sometimes when they apply mathematics to a problem, infinity will pop up, and people will say that it appears like the thing referred to is infinite. But that's just faulty mathematics, making the thing which the math is being applied to appear as infinite, when in reality the thing just cannot be understood by those mathematics.
Quoting Possibility
This I completely disagree with. I think that geology demonstrates to us that time was passing before there were conscious observers on earth.
An observation is a process of relating one 4D structure to another; what has been observed is a 4D structure of difference between them.
A description is a linguistic rendering of information, not necessarily confined to what has been observed. It includes linguistic structures, probabilistic patterns of prediction and concepts that enable what has been observed to make sense in a conceptual system.
I realise this seems unnecessarily complicated. If you assume a ‘fixed’ point of conscious observation, then of course what has been observed is all an observation is, and the description simply renders what has been observed. But you’ve already agreed that a point of observation cannot be ‘fixed’ in reality, so an observation is not just what has been observed, but by whom, at what point(s) and under what conditions.
A description that recounts only what has been observed assumes both a ‘fixed’ observer and conceptual system. Someone reading this description needs to be aware of the assumed position of the observer and structure of the conceptual system, in relation to their own perspective of the ‘event’, in order to make sense of the description in relation to reality. In most situations, we can deduce this, or we don’t need to be so precise, so this is being pedantic - but hopefully it illustrates the extent to which we can take for granted the difference between an observation and a description of an event.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Complicated, but not contradictory. Having described an event, your perspective of it may have changed. ‘Half an hour ago, I ate crab sticks over there’ describes an event from a perspective which is ‘fixed’ within the description. You would need to describe that same event differently a week later, because the description has a fixed perspective, but NOT the observer.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Well of course not, if you’re only going to read half the sentence. This is difficult enough to explain without you skim-reading. Yes, the ongoing observation is an event, but not an observed “event that has actually occurred”, as you were arguing.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
You have a definitive approach to language that I find restrictive, but bear with me. Considering that we don’t really sense ‘time’, I don’t think ‘time’ has any sort of appearance, either. What I’m referring to is thinking of ‘time’ as boundless. I used the term ‘infinite’ in reference to Kant’s categories of Quality: as a limitation, or horizon, impossible to measure or quantify. I agree that it’s faulty mathematics, though - in reality it denotes a dimensional shift.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Geology demonstrates to conscious observers that a certain amount of time has passed, but I think it’s a bit like Schrödinger’s cat. I guess it depends on what you understand ‘time’ to be.
We disagree fundamentally here, and I see no route to compromise. I think a description is necessarily confined to something observed, and I see no need for a description to relate one 4d structure to another. You hold the opposite to this.
Quoting Possibility
This doesn't resolve the contradiction. To simply describe the perspective as fixed, when you have already premised that the perspective is changing, means that either your premise that the perspective is changing, or your description which includes a fixed perspective, is false.
Quoting Possibility
But the ongoing observation really is an observed event, because it is this act of observation which is being described. So the relation between the ongoing observation, and the observed event, is a relation between two events and this is being described as observation.
Quoting Possibility
I cannot think of time as "boundless" because I find the essence of time is found in boundaries. The present is the boundary between past and future. It is the beginning of the past, and the end of the future. Further, any period of time has a beginning and an end, which are boundaries, and to name a particular point in time is to mark a boundary between prior and posterior time. I find that there is no way to talk about time except in terms of explicit or implicit boundaries. So the idea of time as boundless seems incoherent to me.
Do you recognise a distinction between observation, perception and apperception? Observation is unconscious sensory interaction, perception is a process of consciousness that integrates sensory information, and apperception is an awareness of this process of consciousness. Surely you’re not suggesting that all of these refer to an act of ‘observation’? When we describe a subjective perception (‘Half an hour ago, I ate crab sticks over there’), we are relating one 4D structure (the act of perceiving) to another (the act of eating crab sticks). There are two temporal structures here.
Yes! The description is false - or at least ambiguous and prone to inaccuracy in relation to reality. Our description of reality is never accurate in itself once described, because it is always relative to a changing perspective. For the most part we understand this, and make adjustments when we interpret descriptions, attempting to reconstruct the conceptual structure in which that description would make sense - like DNA reconstruction.
In my mind you have these two reversed. Perceiving is the simple receiving of the sensory information. It may or may not require consciousness as a necessity, this is debatable. If it does require consciousness it's to a very minimal extend, as we can perceive things in a very limited way, when we are asleep, and these sensations might enter our dreams, or wake us up . Observation is a noticing of what is happening, so this is necessarily consciousness at work. So observation requires apperception as a sort of medium between perceiving and observing. To make our perceptions into observations requires apperception which is the conscious acknowledgement of the act of perceiving. This is why I say that observation is very close to describing. Describing is just one step up from observing, in the conscious mind, as the act of putting what is observed into words.
Quoting Possibility
But don't we have as a goal, to make true descriptions. Why would you say that descriptions are necessarily false, if we have as a goal to make true descriptions?
Language doesn’t lend itself to clarity here. My understanding of ‘observation’ as not requiring consciousness comes from the definition used in physics. Noticing something happening is different to noticing what is happening. So observation often refers to the content as well as the act of observing. The former depends on consciousness, the latter does not.
Perceiving - as in receiving sensory information - is noticing what is happening rather than simply noticing something happening. For me, this requires consciousness - although it doesn’t require one to BE conscious.
To make our perceptions (the received sensory information) into what can be described as ‘observations’ requires self-consciously noticing the process of perceiving: ie. apperception.
I didn’t say necessarily false. The truth of a description is only in its relation to reality.
Sorry Possibility, but I've read this over numerous times and I just can't apprehend the distinction you're trying to make. To me, "noticing" implies necessarily a discernment of "what is happening", even if that discernment might be judged by another as completely wrong.
Now I do not see how you proceed to your conclusion "observation often refers to the content as well as the act of observing". Are you saying that there is a verb "observation" which refers to the act, and there is a noun "observation" which refers to a stated description, "an observation"? If so, how does this relate to the distinction described above? Both, the active "observation", and the noun, "an observation", involve a discernment of "what is happening". If the act of observation requires no such discernment, then you might say that a rock is observing.
And here we reach the real problem in discussions about panpsychism and the quantum nature of consciousness: an understanding of what information is, regardless of consciousness. When consciousness observes, it also perceives: it discerns this difference as temporally differentiated information. With non-conscious observation, however, that difference is integrated by the system - we observe that it notices (or changes in response to) something - but there is no discernment within the observer itself of what the change is, because it cannot temporally differentiate the information. As conscious observers of this non-conscious observer, we can discern what has changed, and this is information for us that the non-conscious observer embodies without discerning themselves. So a rock ‘observes’ surrounding temperature changes at a molecular level without discerning this change as anything different. What differs is how those molecules relate to each other over time.
Separating our conscious observation (what I refer to as perception) from these non-conscious observations of the measuring devices we interpret is tricky, because we don’t often apperceive the process of integrating this information, let alone its temporal aspect. For you, information is always attributed to the conscious observer - but if we can discern that time was ‘passing’ before there were conscious observers, then differences such as molecules relating to each other over time must have been observed non-consciously (ie. integrated into molecular structures) for this temporally differentiated information to be perceived now.
I never expect this to be easy to understand - it’s a paradigm shift in how we talk about information and consciousness - and I certainly don’t think I’m explaining it very well. Our language doesn’t really lend itself to explaining this aspect of reality, because it is structured to account for the shift - and we don’t have a quantifiable structure to help us, like we do with global time. But I keep trying to work through the confusion, because I think it’s vital to how we understand reality.
Obviously, I do not agree with the idea of a non-conscious observer. Nor do I agree with the idea of information which is not dependent on consciousness to exist as information.
Quoting Possibility
I think you only derive this conclusion from a false premise concerning the nature of time, so it doesn;t persuade me at all in changing my mind. The false premise seems to be that if time is passing, observation is necessarily occurring.
“Think of one of the grandest and most obvious phenomena: the diurnal rotation of the skies. It is the most immediate and magnificent characteristic of the universe around us: it turns. But is this turning really a characteristic of the universe? It is not. It took us thousands of years, but in the end we managed to understand the revolving of the heavens: we understood that it is we who turn, not the universe. The rotation of the heavens is a perspective effect due to our particular way of moving on Earth, rather than a mysterious property of the dynamics of the universe.
“Something similar might be true for time’s arrow. The low initial entropy of the universe might be due to the particular way in which we - the physical system that we are part of - interact with it. We are attuned to a very particular subset of aspects of the universe, and it is this that is orientated in time.”
“Kant discusses the nature of space and time in his Critique of Pure Reason, and interprets both space and time as a priori forms of knowledge, that is to say, things that relate not just to the objective world but also to the way in which a subject apprehends it. But he also observes that, whereas space is shaped by our external sense, that is to say, by our way of ordering things that we see in the world outside of us, time is shaped by our internal sense, that is to say, by our way of ordering internal states within ourselves. Once again: the basis of the temporal structure of the world is to be sought in something that closely relates to our way of thinking and perceiving, to our consciousness. This remains true without having to get tangled up in Kantian transcendentalism.”
Time may not be what you think it is. It’s worth reading Rovelli’s book, if only for a clearer explanation of this nature of time as I see it.