This week I'm reading Richard Wrangham's The Goodness Paradox. You ought to read it too. It tells how as a species, Homo sapiens self-domesticated its...
It’s the other way around. It is the clean separability that grounds the more complex mixing or entangling. In the beginning there is just vagueness -...
This is standard social psychology. Not at all peculiar. How else could it have been? It is hard because it is not taking off dark glasses but re-lear...
Was it merely empirical for Darwin to recognise that evolution is the inevitable shaping hand of nature? This is about recognising that constraint and...
The point here is for the scientist to accept all four of Aristotle's causes and not pretend nature is reducible to just bottom-up construction by loc...
The metaphysics gets more complicated here. Boltzmann was thinking in terms of particles, Jaynes then turned it into statistics, Shannon showed how th...
I haven’t read a word of Dawkins for 40 years. But even then it was clear that in pushing the blind evolutionary algorithm for everything, he was miss...
A carbon tax builds it into the fabric of the economy. We are already set up to be properly governed in this fashion. The problem is big oil can corru...
I meant to add that Peirce defined vagueness logically as that to which the principle of contradiction fails to apply (and then generality as that to ...
Or is it that there is some uncertainty that can’t be constrained? Dictionaries try to constrain the meaning of words so that we must come to share th...
We are organisms. We are in a pragmatic modelling relation with reality. We beat all other known organisms by modelling reality at four levels of orga...
Yep. Theory can only reach as far as the counterfactual. We have to accept that as the pragmatic limit of explanation - or the modelling relation. We ...
A vortex is universal. It is the marriage of the Cosmos fundamental degrees of dynamical freedom - rotation and translation. If you flatten the chaos ...
Searle nailed it even better when he talks about simulated carburettors. You need actual meaningful dissipation to count as being real. If you read my...
Or is it the Second Law’s way of luring us into building more heat-dissipating data farms? Entropy sits out there chortling. Look, I’ve got these litt...
To return you to your own thread, I was only pointing out that Zizek’s “theory of consciousness” looks to be not an externalist/objective discourse bu...
But if my thesis is that life and mind is already entrained by the telos of the Second Law, then source code only amplifies our entropification reach ...
Biosemiosis defines life and mind in relation to the regulation of dissipation. So computers lack that kind of intimate connection to reality. They ca...
Yep. That is how the reductionist ends up with substance dualism. The mind just pops out as a whole new class of property with its own causal story. A...
Did you check @"absoluteaspiration"’s post on his consciousness account? That’s what I commented on. Is it an accurate précis? It doesn’t come across ...
Not as game theory. Ginsberg writes nice lines... But it makes the usual mistake of thinking that it is the mechanical part of the story that is "mons...
Self awareness is socially constructed as I say. That is familiar psychology. Where I would take things forward today - given the emergence of biosemi...
Yep. Hence pansemiosis and not panpsychism. The Peircean view is grounded in the irreducible triadicity of the modelling relation and not the broken d...
Existence is irreducibly complex. So seeking something simpler than that is a fool’s mission. But 1), I’m just going off @"absoluteaspiration"’s OP wh...
The theory seems adequately outlined in the OP of this post. https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/7080/an-outline-of-slavoj-zizeks-theory-on-the-...
Do you really not understand or are you just mucking about? Read this post where I explained it carefully... https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion...
Stop trolling. How can you construe my talking in terms of intentionality as not intending to talk in those terms? I might ask, Banno, have you stoppe...
To repeat myself - as you really don’t get it - the central point of the Free Energy approach is that homeostasis rather than “intent” is the true goa...
I said at the beginning that it fails to be an organism in that it ain’t modelling its world in a proper semiotic fashion. It ain’t reducing the uncer...
Of kind. But of the kind that begins at the level of biophysics, where the question is: how does a molecule function as a message? So it is about the ...
Classical physics – Newtonian mechanics – excludes choice or intent. That is its set-up. Blind determinism rules. But what is under discussion here is...
If you insist on a mechanical understanding of physical causation, then of course you are going to wind up with this kind of half-arsed AP dualism. Ge...
Gestalt psychology, post-Pavlovian orientation response psychology, Hebbian network neuroscience, early cogsci guys like Neisser, any number of cybern...
The deep paradigm shift is from reductionism to holism. A mechanistic and atomistic view of the world is that it is composed of stable bits of stuff. ...
Well put. His achievement is to take the general prediction-based view of “brain processing” and turn it into differential equations. So he gives a ma...
Of course not. That would be like asking house painters what they thought about abstract expressionism. The meta-theory of the biological and neurolog...
Yes, you are being challenged to challenge precisely this. So tell me, how does biosemiosis fail the task? What does it lack or overlook exactly? If D...
Doesn’t fly. Old hat. Biosemiosis fixes things by showing why life and mind are based on this epistemic cut. We now have a testable theory of the mode...
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